Snow Sisters Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Quote

  Dedication

  Part One

  Present

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Present

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Present

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Present

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Present

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Present

  Part Two

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Present

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Present

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Present

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Present

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Present

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Present

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Part Three

  Present

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Present

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Present

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Present

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALSO BY CAROL LOVEKIN

  ABOUT HONNO

  Copyright

  Snow Sisters

  by

  Carol Lovekin

  HONNO MODERN FICTION

  “Sometimes it snows in April”

  ~ Prince

  For

  Janet Thomas

  Mentor

  Part One

  My name is Angharad and I am not mad.

  My heart is made of fragments: of bindweed and despair; thinner than skin and bloodless and my story is as old as the moon. It is one of love and death, as are the stories most women tell. These two things make up the fabric of our lives, although I do not speak of romantic love. I refer to the kind that ought to provide a child with protection and in the end can destroy her.

  The birds saw everything.

  Unconcerned in their courtship and quarrelling, what they witnessed meant less than nothing. And yet, years later, their offspring still circle; continue to observe this place, and my unfinished story.High in the branches of trees, wild crows perch, rooks shout; sparrows flutter, brown and gregarious. And above the house gulls drift like litter.

  However it may have looked, regardless of how the story has since been told, the birds knew what happened was no fault of mine.

  My impressions are little more than a nod to memory. As a record of the truth they may be ambiguous. I may struggle to write them down. No matter. They must suffice until I am braver.

  It wasn’t that I was mad; it was what they did to me that made me that way.

  Present

  Memory is prompted in many ways.

  Mine is triggered by the gulls, exultant; crying and skimming the high chimneys of the house like white gliders. It is April and the lilac is out. Gull House is famous for its lilac.

  The scent is mesmeric. I inhale it, half expecting Allegra to appear, a swathe of blossom across her arm, cigarette smoke and the smell of turpentine trailing behind her. Languid and dazzling, bangles tinkling; the latest barbed comment loitering behind a raised eyebrow. My mother’s beauty was so startling it stopped people in their tracks. They stared at her and forgot how to speak. Not that it mattered. She soon filled in the gaps.

  She had been an artists’ model and then, an artist. She had the look of a stylish gypsy, what with the beads and floating frocks, the ever-present pack of tarot cards. She read them daily, for herself, regardless of the fact she barely understood what the images meant. Allegra made the world to fit her view of it and the spiritual world could take it or leave it. She hurled herself at life and when life fought back, my mother threw a tantrum.

  I have returned to my grandmother’s house. (We called her Nain – the old Welsh name.) Her given name was Mared and she told us she was a witch; told us the sweet things she did for us were good spells and the only kind that counted.

  Preferring to walk up to the house, I’ve left my car on the road. Out on the narrow lane it’s easy to miss the entrance. Elegant iron gates open onto a short, steep drive bounded by feral shrubs.

  Gull House is made from weathered stone the colour of storms, oak beams remembering where they once grew. It tilts into wild, sea-born winds and as children it was easy to believe, on a stormy night the wind might lift the whole thing and blow it away.

  ‘No chance,’ Nain told us. ‘It’smade of sturdy stuff this house; it’ll take more than a bit of wind to shift it.’

  It is a place of nooks and crannies (or as Nain insisted, ‘crooks and nannies’) with unexpected deep cupboards large enough to hide two little girls. And it seemed to us to possess a sense of the past redolent with the murmurs of people from other lives.

  It’s a tall Victorian house and approaching it people are taken aback, expecting grander proportions. Instead it’s neat, secluded and undemanding. To the left, nearest the road, a small tower assumes a space that isn’t there – a decorative affectation straight out of childhood legend and housing only a single room with an attic space above it.

  Meredith called it Rapunzel’s tower.

  The gable end faces the garden, overlooking where it turns in on itself, and disappears towards the wood. Across the stone walls, gnarled branches of wisteria hang in twisted blue ropes. The wisteria has been here as long as the house.

  Nain said the Victorians called it the clinging tree. ‘Long before though, in Japan, where it originated, it symbolised unrequited love and they named it the Wisteria Maiden.’

  She called the one in her blue garden her wistful tree and it wasn’t until I was older that I understood the significance.

  Nain is dead now and so is Allegra, too young, her cracked heart finally breaking like glass carelessly handled. Gull House is mine: mine and my sister’s. Meredith too is gone, although as far as I know she’s still alive. The last time I wrote, to an address in Greece, it was to tell her about Nain’s death. (The last time I saw her, asked what would bring her back, she’d answered, ‘The kind of magic we used to believe in.’)

  My sister never doubted the presence of magic and when she was five years old she told me she could grow flowers from her fingertips. Her solemn conviction was such, I half believed her.

  There is no longer any magic here and I’m not sure there ever was. We were barely in our teens the year we left, the year it happened. And Meredith, my vivid sister, with her genius for being unlike other people, had possessed an imagination uninhibited enough to conjure any manner of fanciful notions. She said the house whispered secrets to her though try as I might I could never quite belie
ve in a sentient building.

  Other than the gulls and a sigh of breeze through the grass there are no other sounds and, as far as I can tell, no ghosts. There is something missing though and I realise it’s the other birds – the sparrows and chaffinches, the curious rooks. I’m standing in a broad and birdless silence, and it is as if I’m being watched.

  The sky is feathered with light, and a vague whiff of the sea filters through the air. Dark stretches of woodland as dense as legend still form a backdrop to the house – the shadows more solid than the trees casting them. They merge in a seamless, interlocking frieze.

  In my bag is a packet of sandwiches and a bunch of keys I haven’t set eyes on for twenty-one years. I have fretted about coming back, still raw in the aftermath of my beloved grandmother’s recent death. Torn between my longing to return to Wales and nervous about what I might find, how it might shape any decision I make about the house.

  Carla says I have to do what my heart tells me.

  ‘Stay safe,’ she said before I left, tracing the long line of my cheek with her finger.

  We are slender, we Pryce women. We have cheekbones, and collarbones curving like bows under our pale skin, and we don’t look strong enough to lift a log. It’s a false impression. My sister and I discovered we could do almost anything we wanted.

  And we have hair; an excess of it: wilful, red haloed hair you wouldn’t be surprised to find a family of robins nesting in.

  ‘Come back, Verity,’ Carla said, ‘and tell me all about it.’

  I kissed her and told her not to worry. There’s nothing for me there, I insisted; there will be nothing to tell.

  Meredith would no doubt have had it otherwise. She believed in ghosts, even though, before it happened, she swore she’d never seen one.

  One

  Meredith Pryce was exactly the kind of child who might be seduced by notions of a ghost.

  It came as no surprise to Verity when her sister decided she was being haunted. Earlier, before Allegra was up, Meredith had announced she was bored, and Verity knew her sister was dangerous when she was bored.

  ‘Find something to do.’

  ‘There isn’t anything to do,’ Meredith said. ‘We live in the back of beyond. It’s nineteen seventy-nine and we’re relics. We may as well be living a hundred years ago. Why doesn’t anything spectacular happen to us? Why don’t we ever go places?’ She frowned. ‘It’s … unpardonable.’

  Verity looked up and pressed her lips together. Meredith regularly dotted her sentences with precocious words. There would be a pause before she produced her newest discovery and while Verity admired her sister’s confidence, she couldn’t always resist the urge to mock. It wasn’t unkindness; Verity was good-natured and generous but her flamboyant younger sister could make her presence known simply by entering a room. Verity relied on small victories.

  ‘Don’t laugh, it isn’t funny.’ Meredith swung her legs back and forth against the leg of the chair. ‘We never go anywhere, we don’t do anything.’

  ‘It could be worse; we could be going to school.’

  If only…

  Verity suppressed the words. The idea of school terrified her sister.

  Only slightly mollified, Meredith agreed. ‘I suppose.’

  Verity wasn’t in the mood for Meredith. ‘Stop kicking the chair, you’ll break it. And your breakfast’s getting cold.’

  Inside, Gull House was as scaled down as its exterior, squeezed into the space it occupied. Hints of the past clung like the cobwebs in the corners. The kitchen was warm and crowded, the windows steamed up and the scent of yesterday’s ashes lay in the iron grate. A tarnished copper warming pan hung on the stone fireplace. In front of the range huddled two low-slung, dilapidated cane chairs draped with rugs. From a wooden rack, tights and socks and blouses trailed like tired bunting. Dirty plates, an opened packet of biscuits, pencils, exercise books and an overflowing ashtray littered the table.

  Meredith slapped her spoon against the despised porridge. ‘Stupid chair’s probably got woodworm anyway. Everything in this house is falling to pieces. And why don’t you ever answer me properly?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask sensible questions?’

  Why do you pretend to be contemptuous of everything when wild horses wouldn’t drag you from Gull House?

  ‘We go places,’ Verity said. ‘We go to the pictures.’

  ‘We go to the pictures if Allegra decides to give us the cash.’

  ‘We go to the beach.’

  ‘Well, get us.’ Slap, slap went the spoon. ‘Boring.’

  ‘The beach isn’t boring.’

  Meredith kicked the chair again, frowning at the bowl.

  ‘Please, Meredith, don’t make a fuss. There’s no other food in the house and until I can persuade Allegra to go shopping it’s the only thing on offer. Those daft chickens have only laid three eggs in a week.’

  ‘It’s revolting. I’d rather starve. And don’t call my chickens daft. You know Legbars are superior and choosy about when they lay.’ Meredith flung her hair over her shoulder: hair like her mother’s – an out of control firework, so red it made her skin look white. Her face was sharp and knowing. One moment her grey eyes were dark as puddles, the next as brilliant as diamonds and flecked with danger.

  The force of Meredith’s anger could shatter windows.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Verity said. She was wary around anger. ‘Do your best.’

  ‘I’ll leave it if you don’t mind.’

  The door from the hall opened and Allegra swept in, swathed in smoke and a fringed, cream shawl splashed with great scarlet poppies worn over a thin dressing gown.

  ‘My God, it’s colder than a day in Bangor.’ She rattled around making coffee. ‘What the hell is that?’ Poking in the porridge saucepan, she grimaced.

  ‘There’s no food,’ Verity said. ‘Someone needs to go shopping.’

  ‘Later, I promise.’ Allegra wound her hair into a knot, fixing it with a pencil she picked out of the clutter on the table.

  Allegra Pryce was a woman without a shred of self-awareness, and a contradiction: one minute dismissive and terse, the next full of extravagant laughing praise and admiration. When her work was going well, she would lavish attention on the girls; the other version of her was to be avoided. Her unedited enthusiasms, and her evaluation of her daughters, ruled their lives.Meredith was her darling. With Verity her compliments nearly always came out as criticisms and, no matter how she smiled when she paid them, her words could hurt. Nothing was ever her fault and both girls were regularly treated to silence, which, when directed at Verity, could go on for days, particularly if she’d pointed out a flaw in her mother.

  ‘And what are you up to this morning, my sweet baby brat?’ she said, setting down her coffee and sidling close to Meredith.

  ‘Nothing, my irritatingly predictable parent.’

  Allegra raised her eyebrows. ‘Darling, no one can be up to nothing. There’s no such thing.’ She pulled her tobacco pouch and a box of matches from the pocket of her dressing gown. Pushing a collection of bangles up her arms she worked a pile of tobacco along a brown cigarette paper and rolled it up. It left a trail and she pinched it off, tucked it into the pouch, lit the cigarette, and inhaled, let out the smoke in a thin stream. A strand of tobacco caught on her lip and she picked it off with a practised gesture.

  ‘You reek.’ Meredith moved her head and wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Sorry, darling.’ Allegra coughed, waved the cigarette behind her shoulder. ‘If you’re bored, go and feed the chickens. You love doing that.’

  ‘I’ve already fed them. I always feed them.’

  ‘I know; you’re such a good girl.’

  Meredith batted away the compliment as if it were a bothersome fly. ‘There’s nothing to eat.’

  ‘You can go shopping with Verity. She said she’d go.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, do what you like, boring people.’ Meredith threw a wide-eyed look acros
s the table. ‘Since there’s no such thing as nothing, I’m off in search of something.’

  Before either Verity or her mother could come up with a suitable reply, Meredith disappeared, letting the door slam behind her.

  ‘Honestly. She’s impossible.’ Allegra leaned back in her chair. ‘Whatever does that mean?’

  Verity said she had no idea. ‘And I don’t care. I can’t ever remember being that annoying.’ She picked up Meredith’s bowl, scraped the remains of porridge into the chicken feed pail and dumped it on top of a pile of unwashed dishes on the draining board. ‘Or such a show-off.’

  ‘She’s just expressing herself. You should try it,’ Allegra said. ‘You take after him of course.’

  If Verity was surprised by this sidewayss mention of her father, she gave no indication. It was as if Idris had never existed. There were no remnants of his life, no pictures or keepsakes (unless you counted the pearl ring Allegra wore on her little finger). Anything that might serve as a clue was missing. Allegra, who must have memories, rationed them, dishing out clues like rare treats.

  Or occasional punishments.

  Neither Verity nor Meredith cared enough to pursue the matter of their father. Even their grandmother, who didn’t have a bad word to say about anyone, couldn’t make him sound worth missing. (‘A well-meaning rogue who vanished into thin air.’)

  Meredith declared this was stupid. If the air people were supposed to vanish into was thin, you’d be able to see them.

  Verity ran water into the sink. ‘Why can’t you do the shopping, Mam? You’re supposed to be the parent.’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t be bourgeois, Verity. How old are you?’

  Lately, her mother’s dislike had developed an edge, as if Verity had been elevated to a new level of contempt.

  ‘You know perfectly well how old I am and if you don’t, I’m not helping you out.’

  ‘Sixteen; and quite old enough to have gained some empathy.’

  Verity could hardly believe her ears.

  Allegra drained her coffee. She slid a black velvet bag out of her other pocket. ‘And being unkind about your little sister doesn’t show you in a good light either. Jealousy’s such an unattractive look.’

  ‘I’m still only fifteen.’ Verity refrained from saying she wasn’t jealous of Meredith. It was an old argument she was unlikely to win. ‘And she’s not so little either. We’re practically twins.’