TWENTY THREE
“OF COURSE, A VALKYRIE’S NATURAL ELEMENT WAS NEVER THE SNOW…”
Iris and Peggy made their way through the park back to the house. They never thought themselves lucky to avoid getting arrested in the dead of night. Bob in his panda on Christmas Eve had been a shock, but at the time they had been more shocked to see Sam sitting behind him. Their nightly exhibition struck them as something justly beyond the bounds of law and order.
The still-falling snow was gentle on them, and warm because of the whisky. They ought to have drunk vodka, Peggy murmured at one point, to feel that needlepoint warmth brewed for burning flesh free of ice. Its lingering savour might have suited the scene. Vodka rinsing through the body sets up a clatter of sleigh bells, a far-off baying of hounds.
“And what is a Valkyrie’s natural element?” she asked Iris, gripping her arm harder than she needed to. The ground was becoming slippery; the grass was a black pelt matted with slush. And Iris seemed nostalgic tonight, wistful, so that Peggy was reminded of the sea-change her lover had promised.
“Well…” Iris began. “The Valkyries only crept about in snow in the line of duty. Battlefields were often in the far north. With the sun never setting and blood freezing in their veins, armies would battle for long, long hours on the glaciers. The combat was slowed down almost in stop-motion animation. For some reason the men liked to fight that way. Sometimes the glaciers would shake out their bedspreads and freeze the combatants to the spot. Even wounds blossomed gradually in those wars. And the pain of bloodshed was postponed by cold.
“These were the places Valkryies had to visit. But to get there they had to travel back and forth across the North Sea. That iron-grey sky which rides up high, impossibly high, it seems, to meet the horizon, is the natural element of the Valkyries.”
“I see,” said Peggy, who had grown up in North Shields and knew all about the sea there, thank you very much.
She used to take the young Sam to the fish markets on Sunday mornings. Clutching the bundle of Sunday papers, Sam stared into ferocious maws until she told her mam she didn’t want to go any more. Peggy was pleased that at last Sam was expressing an opinion. She didn’t mind stopping the trips. They never bought anything anyway. They went because Sundays at home were just dire; the old man coughing, praying, coughing.
Iris said, “Surveyed from above, those currents seemed a symbol for possibilities. When a Valkyrie looked at the patterns made by the thrashing sea beneath her feet, she could still say to herself, well, anything might happen. The thrill of predestination went through her when she realised that everything was still up in the air.
“But when she came to the bleak fields of snow, the pattern was already set, she could no longer fiddle with the outcome. All she might do then is pick up the pieces. A Valkyrie prefers things in flux.”
They had arrived back in the street.
“I always think,” Iris added, “of snow as a signal that things are virtually settled. As if it were raining plaster of Paris.”
They stopped under a streetlamp, watching with perfect equanimity as a single, exhausted car slewed to a stop outside Tony’s house. As the doors on either side creaked open and its amber lights popped on inside, the ladies saw that Sam had returned.
For a moment, Peggy felt like diving into the nearest hedgerow for cover, but Iris urged them on.
“Let’s see how the plaster hardens,” she said determinedly, bustling onwards to meet Sam and Bob, who was carrying the sleeping Sally.
Peggy didn’t like the sound of this plaster hardening. She could almost sense it inching along her skin, bringing up the gooseflesh. She thought of the slow, cool clasp of plaster dragging over her face. She pictured herself and Iris frozen in their tracks by the hedges, a statue of two linked old dykes. It would make life so much easier simply to adopt one decorous position and hold it for ever.
But Peggy still had the salt and ice of the North Sea in her veins. Coming from a town battered into submission by its exertions, she knew that if she stayed still, she would freeze. So she was determined to keep going, even if it led her into disaster.
“Hullo, dear,” Peggy said. “So the weather was too bad, then?”
Sam looked her mother up and down and rolled her eyes.
Bob said, “We almost got stuck.”
“Let’s get Sally inside,” Iris suggested.
I’M NEVER GOING TO SLEEP AGAIN, MARK WAS THINKING.
Richard lay crooked in his arms, like a baby. Mark lay slumped against the headboard. You couldn’t trust the night these days. It had brought so much unexpected stuff his way recently. Visitations of the worst sort, which he had brought upon himself.
And he thought about the years of taking every night for granted. Despite everything, with Sam he felt safe. With a grim determination, a Lego-building look on her face, she had protected him and Sally from the world. He was learning to give her credit for that. Even reading Tony’s letters, secretly, before he got them, could be seen as part of this protective process now. Furious and with accusations flying, Sam had been protecting Mark nonetheless.
Richard murmured in his sleep, shifting position, seeming to want to roll away and lie by himself. With a twinge of regret Mark let him. It almost feels like betrayal when someone does that, he thought. As if, with sleep, a selfish negligence sets in, and their body can feel free to cast you aside.
Of course you only get that feeling if you lie awake all night, thrumming with tension, like a violin set aside, and alert to signs of anything less than slavish devotion. Mark didn’t expect that from Richard.
How
