Chapter 7 #7
They crunch through the snow to the door and let themselves in. The cabin is way too cold for comfort – the wood burner long since extinguished – but at least the lights are working again. ‘Electricity!’ Jill exclaims. ‘I’m assuming we can’t use the heater?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Wendy replies, already crouching to re-light the fire.
‘Can I come in with you?’ Jill asks as she kicks off her muddy shoes. ‘Please? Pretty please? Pretty, pretty, pre—’
‘Yes,’ Wendy interrupts. ‘Please do. I’m frozen through to the bone here. But you have to warm my side up first. That’s the deal.’
‘I’m not sure I can warm anything up,’ Jill says, already clambering up the spiral staircase. ‘My feet have turned to ice.’
The next morning, they awaken to a still-cool, shockingly bright cabin. It’s like opening your eyes to find yourself in the chiller cabinet.
Jill is first downstairs so Wendy calls out to put a log on the fire. When she eventually gets downstairs she finds her friend staring out of the big window at the blinding landscape beyond.
‘Have you seen?’ she asks, when Wendy joins her. ‘It’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky that blue.’
‘Wow, that’s a lot of snow,’ Wendy says. ‘That’s not going to make getting the car back any easier.’
‘But it’ll melt, won’t it?’ Jill says. ‘Surely the sun will melt it. Because, don’t forget, I have to get to the airport tomorrow.’
‘I’ve really no idea,’ Wendy says tersely, a bit irritated that Jill’s main concern seems to be for herself. She glances up at the overhanging gutter. ‘Drips. That’s got to be a good sign,’ she says, softening her tone.
They spend a lazy morning drinking coffee and chattering about nothing in particular. Both women have hangovers and between getting the car out of the ditch and getting Jill to the airport Wendy feels overwhelmed. She doesn’t know where to start.
It’s one of those rare occasions where she’d like someone – her father, her husband, a friend – to step in and tell her what to do, or even better, take control and deal with it.
She tells herself off for the un-feminist nature of the thought but acknowledges the truth of it all the same.
Where are the bloody men when you need them?
By lunchtime the snow has compacted to half its previous height and become shiny, but there’s no real sign of it melting.
They eat soup from a carton with long-life bread, and as they’re washing up (in cold water – yet another problem to be solved) Jill says, ‘You know, I do think we need a plan.’
In the end, after some discussion, Wendy trudges off through the snow to pick up the paperwork she has stupidly left in the glove compartment, while Jill is tasked with googling local taxi companies to find out how much a taxi to the airport will cost, and if it’s even doable.
The road, thanks to passing traffic, is walkable even if she does have to step into the snowdrift every time a car passes by.
She puts her thumb out for a lift from the first three cars, but surprisingly they don’t stop.
She’d expected snow to bring out more solidarity in people, but she resigns herself to walking.
It’s gorgeous out here and lord knows she needs the exercise.
The car, when she finally reaches it, is almost invisible beneath the snow.
She scrapes at the snow and yanks the passenger door open, then phones the breakdown number.
They speak English, thankfully, and tell her they’ll be there at 4 p.m. Then, on their advice, as she walks home with the sun on her back, she attempts to phone the car hire company.
She’s transferred so many times that on reaching the cabin she’s still listening to their awful music.
To her surprise, she finds Jill packing so she puts the phone on speaker and, to a background of looped plinky-plonky piano, Jill explains: ‘I’ve booked a hotel at the airport.
The taxis won’t come up this far that early – not with the snow and everything.
He actually asked me if there was snow and I said yes. Perhaps I should have lied, but…’
‘So you’re leaving today and staying near the airport?’ Wendy asks.
‘Yeah. It looks horrible, and I’m sure I’ll get bed bugs or the pox or something, but at least I won’t miss my flight.’
‘God, what a bummer!’ Wendy says, feeling sorry for herself, being left to deal with all the mayhem alone. She wonders if Jill really does have to leave today or whether she just prefers to escape, even peering into her eyes in case the truth of the matter is visible.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Jill asks, looking genuinely embarrassed.
‘No, not at all,’ Wendy lies. ‘It’s really the only way, isn’t it? I’m glad you worked out a solution for yourself.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ Jill says. ‘More bad news, I’m afraid.’
‘Yeah? What now?’
‘The electric’s gone off again.’
Jill’s taxi arrives at three thirty, which at least means it can drop Wendy at the car as it passes by, en route for Nice.
‘Good luck!’ Jill calls, wiggling her fingers through the window of the Tesla as it pulls silently away. ‘I’ll call and see how it’s all going!’
‘That’s generous of you,’ Wendy mumbles through a forced smile, once she’s out of earshot. ‘Don’t put yourself out.’
She watches the car vanish around the bend and tries to work out why she’s feeling so forlorn.
Actually, it’s worse than forlorn. She’s really feeling quite angry.
Because none of this would have happened had Jill not come to visit.
And now Jill has left, leaving her stranded, in snow, without a car.
It makes her think of the parties she and Harry used to host when they were younger, parties that filled the house with guests who would spend the whole night drinking and smoking and slopping stickiness all over the kitchen floor, even occasionally vomiting in inappropriate places.
They’d sleep on chairs, sofas and inflatable mattresses and then in the morning – by which time virtually the entire house needed to be renovated – they’d all be in a hurry to leave, due to baby-sitters or train tickets or work.
She can’t remember any of them ever hanging around long enough to pick up a mop.
She’s getting cold and is feeling a bit silly standing at the roadside, so she sits in the car, but that feels even colder.
She tries starting the engine, but when she turns the key nothing happens, so she returns to the roadside and watches the occupants of sporadic passing cars staring at her as they pass by.
She’ll be the talk of the village by nightfall, she reckons. That mad English woman out in the snow.
Four o’clock comes and goes with no sign of the tow truck.
The sun dips behind a hillock so she starts to pace up and down the road to keep warm, but she’s shivering all the same. The road starts to freeze over again. It’s getting more slippery by the minute.
What am I even doing here? she wonders. Because, lord knows, there are a lot of bad decisions between their lovely warm home in Maidstone and right here, right now, aren’t there? She could cry at the stupidity of it all.
But then, oh joy! A throb and a rumble as a bright red breakdown truck rounds the corner, belching diesel fumes into the pristine mountain air.
It drives past her, just far enough to have her waving her arms and running and shouting and then feeling silly because obviously it was always going to pull up in the siding just along the way.
The cabin door opens jerkily, and then an overweight mechanic clambers down. Without any kind of acknowledgement, he strolls towards her, still rolling and then lighting his cigarette. The sun is almost gone now. The sky behind the truck is shifting to red.
‘Alors !’ he says, on reaching her. He nods at the car-shaped snow sculpture in the ditch and asks, ‘C’est celle-là ?’
‘Oui,’ Wendy says, doing her best to make sure no irony enters her voice. Because which other car could it be? ‘Oui, c’est ca.’
He wrinkles his nose, pouts and shakes his head. ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘… peux pas.’
Wendy feels her life force slipping away. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘… peux pas !’ he says, with a lazy shrug.
This is followed by his rambling incomprehensible mansplaining of all the reasons he can’t.
If he removed the cigarette from his mouth it might make his diction a little bit clearer, but when she gestures for him to do so he misunderstands, generously, unhygienically, offering her a drag on his roll-up.
‘Do you speak any English at all?’ Wendy asks, once she’s refused his kind offer. ‘Parlez Anglais ?’
He laughs at this and says, quite simply, rather dismissively, ‘Non.’
‘But vraiment ? Vous pas pouvez ?’ Wendy asks, dredging the depths of her French and wincing at the subconscious knowledge that her grammar is all wrong.
She’d meant to ask if he really can’t move the car, but he seems to think she’s asked if he really can’t speak English, and this makes him laugh again but in a sour mocking way. ‘Non, je peux vraiment pas,’ he says, followed by something about being a mécano, not a professeur.
‘Mais la voiture !’ Wendy says, miming winching it from the ditch.
He makes a tutting noise and wiggles a finger at her before producing another long cigarettey phrase from which Wendy manages to extract only two words: damage and insurance.
He’s such a sad little archetype, this man, that she feels she knows him, feels she has always known him. The lazy, unfit garage mechanic who starts every day determined to do the minimum with as little joy as possible. In a way, she hated him before she ever met him.
Anyway, it’s over. The man – her supposed knight in shining armour – has already turned, is already slouching his way back to his lorry, flicking his cigarette butt into the snow-covered bushes.
There’s one last moment of hope when he looks out of his window back at her, and Wendy thinks he’s going to reverse and hitch his pulley thing to the car, after all. Instead, he simply beckons to her.