A Winter Book
At this point the squirrel came. A little rustle, a scurrying along the cottage wall, then its claws scraped the window and she saw its watchful face, its snout moving spasmodically with ridiculous little twitches, its eyes like glass balls. For a moment it was really close, then the window was empty again. She started laughing, ‘So you’re still here, you devil…’ Now she needed wind, any kind of wind, no matter what, so long as it stood out from the mainland and the big islands. She tapped the barometer and tried to see whether it was sinking. Her specs weren’t where they usually were; she could never find them, but surely it would say unsettled as it usually did. She must get the weather, the weather report; then she remembered that the batteries in the radio were dead. Never mind, no problem, the squirrel had stayed. She went to the list by the door and added: Squirrel food. What do they eat, oats, macaroni, beans? She could cook oatmeal porridge. The two of them would adjust to each other. But it mustn’t grow tame, at all costs not too tame, she would never try and get it to eat out of her hand, come into the cottage, or come when she called. The squirrel mustn’t become a domestic animal, a responsibility, a conscience – it must be allowed to stay wild. They would each live their own lives and just watch each other and recognise each other, be tolerant and respect each other, and otherwise get on with their own activities in full freedom and independence.
She didn’t give a damn about that dog any more. Dogs are dangerous, they mirror everything, instantly, they’re superficial, compassionate beasts. A squirrel’s better.
They prepared themselves to winter on the island, they got used to one another and developed habits in common. After her morning coffee she would lay out bread on the hill and sit at her window to watch the squirrel eat. She’d decided the animal couldn’t see her through the glass pane and that it probably wasn’t particularly intelligent, but she persisted in moving slowly and had become used to sitting still for long periods, hours even, while she watched the squirrel’s movements and thought about nothing in particular. Sometimes she talked to it but never when it was within hearing. She wrote about it, imagining things and observing things, and drew parallels between the two of them. Occasionally she wrote offensive things about the squirrel; insolent accusations that she regretted later and crossed out.
The unsettled weather grew steadily colder. Every day, immediately after she’d measured the height of the water, she would go up the hill to the place where she kept a great pile of wood. She would pick out several planks, and a section of trunk perhaps, and saw and chop them into firewood, carefully and not without skill. Doing this she was as strong and sure of herself like when she sat in front of the fire at sunrise, ready dressed, still as a statue and without a thought in her head. When she’d finished cutting the wood, she would carry it down to the cottage and arrange it carefully in the fireplace, every chunk and fragment of plank, into compact and elegant triangles and squares, broad and narrow rectangles and semicircles, creating a puzzle, a perfect intarsia. She’d collected the winter firewood herself.
The wind changed constantly. The boat lines had to be lengthened and moored again. Waking in the night she lay listening and worrying about the boat, worrying it might be banging against the hillside. In the end she pulled it up out of the water. But she woke all the same, thinking of high water and storms. She must haul it higher up, on rollers. One morning she went to the lumber-pile and chose a smooth slender trunk to cut rollers from; she took hold of it and pulled. A log fell down on the far side and there was a quick movement as of a living thing; something slipped out and vanished in a lightning movement of fear. She let go of the trunk and stepped back. Of course, this was where it lived. It had made itself a home and now its home had been destroyed. “But I didn’t know,” she argued in her own defence. “How could I have known!”
She let the trunk lie, ran back to the cottage to get some wood-wool and flung back the trapdoor to the cellar, only remembering her pocket torch when she was already down in the darkness, she always forgot it. Jars, cartons, boxes – had she ever had any wood-wool? Perhaps it was glass-wool she’d had and that wouldn’t be any good for a squirrel – glass fibre, if glass-wool is made of glass… She groped along the shelves and felt again that uncertainty which in many ways afflicts everything that exists, a constant stumbling between forgetfulness and knowledge, recollection and ideas, rows and rows of boxes and you never know which are empty… ‘Now I must pull myself together. The box I’m looking for is full of muddle and confusion, things for the motor, a cardboard box under the stairs.’ She found it and began to pull out the mess it contained in long recalcitrant tangles, opposition and darkness becoming an image of the night’s dreams, dreams that she must hurry and that it was almost too late. She tore at the tough hostile material and knew: ‘I’m not going to make it.’
It was no longer just a matter of the squirrel, but of everything that can ever be too late. In the end she took the whole box in her arms and tried to get it up the cellar steps. It was too big. It became wedged in the trapdoor hatch. She pushed with her shoulders and neck, the box broke and the confused tangle fell out over the floor. Now she only had seconds left. She ran up the hill, stumbled and ran on, crept round the woodpile and pushed the tangled waste in everywhere where it would be easy to find and couldn’t get wet. “There you are! Build! Make yourself a home!” Now it was obvious she could do nothing more. Her large body had never felt so heavy; she manoeuvred herself slowly down into a sheltered crevice in the side of the rock, pulled up her legs to sleep and put the squirrel altogether out of her mind. She was safe and private, totally self-contained inside her sweaters, boots and raincoat, cocooned deep in a warm space of damp wool and easy conscience.
After midday it began to rain. She was woken by an awareness that had matured during her sleep, about the winter firewood, the wood she would need every day right through the winter. Constant ant-like expeditions up the hill, to saw and chop her way deeper and deeper down into the pile, an obstinate and implacable enemy getting nearer and nearer and opening new apertures of cold and light around a seduced and accursed squirrel lying in its home of tangled waste.
They must divide the winter firewood between them, that was absolutely clear. One pile for the squirrel and one for her and it must be arranged at once. Her body was stiff after her sleep but entirely calm, because there was only one thing for her to do. She went straight to the woodpile, heavy as a house. She dragged down logs, clutched hold of one and staggered down the hill with it towards the cottage. The hill was slippery, her boots slid on the moss, but she kept going to the bottom and offloaded the log against the wall of the house, turned and went up the hill again. The logs had to be carried, not rolled. A rolling log is an uncontrollable and arbitrary force that crushes everything in its path. The logs must be carried, carefully, to the exact place where they were needed. The person carrying them must herself be like a log: heavy and ungainly but full of strength and potential. ‘Everything must find its place and one must try to understand what it can be used for… I carry more and more steadily now. I breathe in a new way, my sweat is salt.’
Now it was nearly dusk and still raining. Her repeated trek up and down the hill had come to seem unreal in a calm, automatic way, and as she trudged up and down again and again she entered a dizzy state of lifting and carrying and balancing, of throwing timber down against the wall and then going up again, and as she did this she became strong and sure of herself, which smoothed out all her words and clipped them short. Props, boards, planks, logs. She pulled off her sweaters and let them lie in the rain. ‘The result of what I’m doing will be what I want. I’m moving what’s in the wrong place so it will end up in the right place. My legs are tensing in my boots. I could carry rocks. Lever them and roll them with crowbar and pulley, enormous rocks, build a wall round myself in which each rock would have its own place. But maybe it’s pointless to build a wall round an island.’
When it grew dark she felt tired. Her legs began shaking, she let
the heavy logs lie and carried boards. In the end she was reduced to lining up small pieces of wood in rows against the wall of the house. And small, worrying thoughts came to her. Maybe the squirrel didn’t just use the exterior of the woodpile as a shelter but lived right inside it where it was really dry. She’d done the wrong thing. Every time she’d moved a plank, that particular plank might have been the roof of the squirrel’s home. Every time she lifted something, she might have been causing disturbance or destruction. Anyone altering the shape of the woodpile should have calculated carefully how the logs lay, how they balanced against one another, should have considered the matter calmly and judiciously, so as to know whether a deliberate sharp heave would have been best or a cautious bit of patient coaxing.
She listened to the whispering silence lying over the island, to the rain and the night. ‘It’s impossible,’ she thought. ‘I’ll never go there again.’ She went back to the cottage and undressed and lay down. This evening she didn’t light the lamp, a breach of ritual, but it showed the squirrel how little she cared what happened on the island.
Next morning the squirrel didn’t come to eat. She waited a long time but it didn’t come. There was no reason why it should be offended or suspicious. Everything she’d done had been simple, unambiguous and just: she’d divided the woodpile between them and withdrawn. More than just, the squirrel’s woodpile was many times bigger than hers. If the animal had the slightest personal confidence in her, if it was capable of understanding that she was a living creature and well disposed, then surely it must have grasped that from start to finish all she had done was try to help.
She sat down at the table, sharpened her pencil and set out the paper in front of her, at right angles and parallel with the edge of the table; this always helped her to understand the squirrel better.
So if now, despite everything, the squirrel saw her merely as something that moved, an object, something trivial and unimportant, then it might be equally unlikely to consider her an enemy. She tried to concentrate, she made a serious attempt to understand how the squirrel might perceive her and in what way the scare at the woodpile might have changed its attitude to her. Perhaps it had been on the point of forming an attachment to her only to be gripped by distrust at the crucial moment. If on the other hand it thought her of no importance, just a part of the island, a part of everything that was withering and marking autumn’s progress towards winter, then, as we’ve seen, it would be unlikely to consider the episode at the woodpile an aggressive act, but more a sort of storm, a change that — She felt tired and began to draw squares and triangles on the paper, as she did so, understanding the squirrel less and less. She drew long twisting lines to connect the squares and triangles, and tiny leaves growing out in all directions. The rain had stopped. The sea was swollen and shiny; what endless nonsense people talked about the sea being beautiful. And then she saw the boat.
It was far off but moving, approaching, a black inorganic form that was neither gull nor stone nor navigation buoy. The boat was coming straight for the island, and there was nowhere else for it to come. Boats seen from the side are harmless, passing by in the shipping lanes, but this one was coming straight on, black as fly shit.
She clawed at her papers. Some fluttered to the floor: she tried to gather them up into the drawer but they crumpled and wouldn’t go in, and anyway it was wrong, completely wrong, to hide them. They should stay in view, discouraging and protecting. She pulled them out again and smoothed them down. Who was this coming, daring to come? It was them, the others, now they’d found her. She ran about the room moving chairs and other objects and then moved them back again because the room must remain as it was. The black spot had come nearer. She grabbed the edge of the table with both hands, stood still and listened for the sound of a motor. There was no way round it, they were coming. They were coming, straight at her.
When the sound of the motor was very near, she threw open the window at the back of the cottage, jumped out and ran. It was too late to launch the boat. She crouched and ran onwards to the far side of the island, where she slid down into a crevice near the water. From here the motor was inaudible – you could only hear the slow movement of the sea against the rocks. ‘What if they come ashore? They can see my boat here. If they find the cottage empty, they’ll begin wondering, they’ll go up into the island and find me. Crouching here. That won’t do. It won’t do at all, I must go back.’ She began to crawl, more slowly, towards the crest of the island. The motor had been switched off; they’d landed. She lay full length in the wet grass, edged forward a few metres and raised herself on her elbows to look.
The boat had anchored in the shallows off the island, and the people in it were getting down to some fly-fishing. Three square men sitting with their lines and drinking coffee from a Thermos. They may have been talking a bit; now and then they pulled a line in; perhaps they were catching some fish. Her neck was tired and she let her head sink onto her arms. She didn’t care about squirrels, or fly-fishermen, or anyone, but just let herself slip down into a great disappointment and admit she was disappointed. ‘How can this be possible?’ she thought frankly. ‘How can I be so angry that they’ve come at all and then so dreadfully disappointed that they haven’t landed?’
Next day she decided not to get out of bed, a melancholy and admirable decision. She thought no further than: ‘I shall never get up again.’ It was raining, with an even, calm rain that might continue indefinitely. ‘Good, I like rain. Curtains and draperies and endless rain going on and on, pattering, rustling, spattering on the roof, not like the challenge of sunshine that moves hour by hour through the room, over the window-ledge and the carpet, marking afternoon on the rocking-chair and finally vanishing on the chimney breast, red as an indictment. Today’s a respectable and straightforward grey day, an anonymous day outside time; it doesn’t count.’
She made a warm hollow for her heavy body and pulled the quilt over her head. Through the little airhole left for her nose, she could see two pink roses on the wallpaper; nothing could reach her. Slowly she drifted into sleep again. She’d taught herself to spend more and more time asleep. She loved sleep.
The rainy weather was darkening into evening when she woke feeling hungry. It was very cold in the room. She pulled the quilt round her and went down into the cellar for a can of food. She’d forgotten her torch and picked up a can at random in the darkness, then stood listening, uneasy, can in hand. The squirrel was somewhere in the cellar. She heard a tiny scurrying sound, then silence. But she knew it was there. It would live in her cellar all winter and its nest might be anywhere. The hole must stay open, it mustn’t be allowed to get snowed up again. All the cans of food, everything she needed, must be taken up into the house. And even so she’d never be sure whether the squirrel was living in the cellar or the woodpile.
She came up and closed the trapdoor after her. The can she was holding was meat with dill and she didn’t like meat with dill. A belt of clear sky had opened on the horizon, a narrow glowing band of sunset. The islands lay like coal-black streaks and lumps on a blazing sea, burning right up to the shore where the swell was surging and gliding over and over again in the same curve round the promontory against the slippery November hill. She ate slowly and watched the red deepen over sky and sea, an unbelievably violent red, till it suddenly went out and everything was violet, shading slowly into grey and early night.
She was very much awake now. She dressed and lit the lamp and all the candles she could find, then lit the fire and laid her shining torch beside the window. Finally she hung the paper lantern outside the door, where it shone clear and still in the peaceful night. Then she took what was left of the Madeira and set the bottle on the table beside the glass. She went out onto the hill, leaving the door open. The shining house was beautiful and as full of secrets as an illuminated window on an unknown boat. She went further, right out to the end of the promontory and began to circle the island, very slowly, at the very edge of the water, constantly turni
ng her face towards the wide-open darkness of the sea.
It was only when she’d gone round the whole island and come back to the promontory that she would allow herself to turn and look at her radiant house, and when she’d done that she would go straight back into the warmth, shut the door behind her and be at home. When she came into her house the squirrel was sitting on the table. It panicked and knocked over the bottle, which started rolling; she threw herself forward too late and the bottle fell and smashed on the floor, leaving broken glass between her fingers and the carpet quickly darkening with wine.
She raised her head and looked at the squirrel. It was sitting among her books as if fixed to the wall, its legs apart in a heraldic pose, motionless. She got up and took a step towards it, then another step; when it didn’t move, she stretched out her hand and came nearer, very slowly, and the squirrel bit her like lightning, sharp as slicing scissors. She screamed and screamed with anger in the empty room, then stumbled across the fragments of glass and out onto the hill, where she stood and roared at the squirrel. Never had anyone ever forfeited her trust or abused an unspoken understanding with her to the extent the squirrel had. She wasn’t sure whether she’d reached out her hand to the animal to stroke it or to throttle it. It made no difference – she had simply reached out her hand. She went in and swept up the broken glass, extinguished all the lights and built up the fire. Then she burned everything she’d written about the squirrel.
In the time that followed, their rituals didn’t change. She put out food on the hill and the squirrel came and ate. She didn’t know where it was living and didn’t want to know; to show her contempt, an indifference that didn’t condescend to revenge, she no longer went near the cellar or the woodpile on the hill. But, this apart, she moved violently about the island, rushing out of the cottage and slamming the door after her, clattering and stamping, and in the end she took to running. She would stand still a very long time, entirely motionless, before setting off over the hill, backwards and forwards across the island, puffing and blowing as she ran, waving her arms and screaming. She didn’t give a damn whether the squirrel saw her or not.