Page 48 of A Snowfall of Silver

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“I read your play,” I say baldly. “I loved it.”

He stands very still, his lovely tousled hair blowing about his face, and the look that flashes in his eyes then, just for a second, is one that I’ll remember until the day I die.

“Thank you.” His voice is little more than a low rumble.

“Now let me tell you all my thoughts,” I say. “Because I have so many. Starting with how clever I thought that second scene was.” Kit laughs, and we walk, heads close together, him pulling me in to his side as we move and talk, shielding me from some of the cold with his long limbs.

I have only told the truth about Kit’s play. I did love it. It surprised me. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I suppose something quite earnest and worthy. Instead, Kit has written the funniest comedy of errors. I spent most of the night biting down on my knuckles to keep from waking the others with my laughter. It is witty and warm, and clever in its simplicity. There are only five characters – two couples who become increasingly tangled up in misunderstanding, and a narrator, who speaks directly to the audience. Her part is the best, full of wry observations and the occasional stinging critique of the lovers’ ineptitude.

“When I read it, I could see it exactly,” I say to Kit now. “The narrator, suspended slightly above and to one side… She can step into the set at times. Fix herself a drink…” I sketch the scene with my hands.

Kit looks thoughtful. “That could work.”

“It would work,” I say firmly. “She’s amazing. She reminds me a little bit of Nora, but older – cutting, sometimes, but warm with it.”

We’ve been walking back towards the town. I stop suddenly.

“What’s that?” I say. At the top of the cliff, the silhouette of a great building is outlined starkly against the sky.

“Shall we go and have a look?” he asks. “Or are you desperate for something to eat?”

I pat my cloth satchel, into which I placed the pages of his script this morning, alongside several emergency jam sandwiches and a bottle of ginger beer. I knew if it were me, I’d want the first person who read my script to talk about it as soon as possible. “I come prepared. Let’s explore.”

We climb the hill, offering one another the occasional steadying hand. The cliffs above the town are high and steep, and the climb is hard work. Despite the freezing cold I start to feel warm, my cheeks pink with exertion, my breath feathering in little white clouds through the air in front of me. “I’m always scrambling up hilltops at home, but this is a bit of a challenge.”

“You probably don’t do it in such deep snow,” Kit points out, breathing hard.

I stop for a minute and squint out over the view. “I’ve never seen so much snow before!” From here the view towards the beach and the harbour is even more startling. Thin clouds have begun to roll in, draining the sky of that vibrant blue we saw this morning. Now it is a flat, blue-grey, and with the dazzling white of the snowfall, against the slate grey sea makes for a scene curiously bleached of colour. It should be bleak, but the effect is more wild and mysterious.

“Come on,” Kit says. “We’re almost there.”

The last bit of the climb is so steep that I feel my feet sliding from under me several times. On every occasion Kit’s arm is there to catch me, steady, always.

Finally, we crest the hill and I let out an audible gasp. I can tell from Kit’s expression that he’s as startled as I am.

It is the wreck of an old abbey. The scale of the ruin is hard to believe, towering far, far above us, up and into the sky. We walk – the only two people on the planet, it feels like – through the snow and inside what remains of the building.

The remains are skeletal; it is like standing in the belly of a once-great beast. The roof is completely gone, and turning your eyes skywards produces a dizzying feeling of infinity. There are no windows or doors, only enormous spaces where they would once have been. These stone gaps frame the views – across the cliff top, over the water – with all the drama of a magician revealing their trick.

The silence has a quality that I have never known before. A bone-deep kind of peace. In its dilapidated state you can feel even more keenly the scale, the endless work that went into building the abbey.

I’m surprised to find tears blurring my eyes. I don’t know why, only that this place is so beautiful it makes my chest ache. The feeling it gives me is so big, I don’t know what to do with it.

I brush the tears away, the wool of my glove rough against my cheek. I wander off, moving in and around the ruin so that I can look at it from different angles, the gilding of snow only adding to the desolate beauty. Each view is different, revealing new secrets about our surroundings.

Finally, Kit comes to stand beside me. “Beautiful,” he breathes.

“Yes. Yes.”

We find a low wall to perch on and eat our picnic. The heat from the climb has certainly worn off now, and my fingers are cold as I unwrap my sandwich. I quickly realize that a picnic in Yorkshire in December was a trifle optimistic.

“Ginger beer is all very well in the summer,” I grumble through chattering teeth. “But what I wouldn’t give for a nice flask of tea right now.”

“We can’t sit here like this,” Kit says practically. “We’ll freeze.”

“We’ll end up perishing in a tragically beautiful posture, like a pair of doomed lovers,” I agree.