Sleight of Snow

The Last Light on the Moor

Snow is the only editor that cuts everything, and keeps no rushes.

I had been watching it work for the better part of an hour, filling in the wheel-ruts behind me as fast as the Austin laid them down, so that the road I had come by simply ceased to exist a few yards back. No continuity. No establishing shot to return to. Just the bonnet of the car, the two cones of failing yellow light, and the white coming sideways out of the dark like something flung.

Then the engine coughed, and caught, and coughed again, and what it did the third time was not a cough at all but a small mechanical clearing of the throat, the sound a thing makes when it has decided. The lights browned. The wipers, which had been losing anyway, gave up the pretence. The Austin rolled perhaps its own length down the slope and stopped, and the moor took the noise of it the way blotting paper takes ink.

I sat. I am good at sitting. In my trade you spend whole days waiting for the light to be right, or the cloud to clear the sun, and you learn to be still inside a stillness without letting it get into you. I told myself the cold was not yet serious. I told myself a great many sensible things, and the snow went on undoing the world outside the glass, and after a while I noticed I could no longer feel the tips of my fingers inside my gloves.

Behind me, in the boot, my father's toolbox shifted as the car settled. I heard it go — the particular slither and clunk of chisels and gut and the heavy bottle-jack he would never let anyone else carry. Albert Wren's toolbox. Thirty-one years he had hauled it up the iron stairs of every theatre between Glasgow and the Strand, and four months now it had ridden in the boot of my car while I drove away from anywhere it might have belonged, and I had not once opened it. I knew exactly what was in it. That was the trouble. Open the lid and the smell would come up — beeswax and machine oil and the cold-iron smell of his hands — and I had not the slightest intention of letting that happen on a public road in the dark.

It is a strange thing to be furious with a dead man and to miss him in the same breath. We had not been speaking, at the end. He had wanted me to take the workshop, the trade, the name over the door. Wren & Daughter, Stage Machinists. I had wanted, with a violence I am not proud of, never to smell size and sawdust again as long as I lived. I had got my wish. He had died on a Tuesday in August with the quarrel still standing between us like a flat that nobody had struck, and I had been editing pain out of my life ever since with a steady professional hand. Cut the tender bits. Cut the bits that lose the light. Keep the picture moving.

The picture had stopped moving on a moor in the high Pennines, which served me right.

Out beyond the windscreen there was nothing. And then there was not nothing.

Up the dale, where the valley closed to a dead end and the moor heaved itself toward the sky, a single light hung in the murk. Not a star — too low, too warm, too steady. A window. One lit window, miles past the last farm I had passed an age ago, at the blind head of a valley I had no business being in. I had taken the north road out of habit and grief and a wish to keep moving, and the north road, it seemed, had taken me here.

There is a moment, on a film floor, when the director says we go now or we lose it — when the choice is made by the failing light and not by anyone in the room. The storm made mine. Stay and freeze in a tin box, or walk to the one light on the moor. I have always disliked being told what to do, even by weather. I got out anyway.

The cold was not a temperature. It was a hand. It took me by the face and went straight through the wool of my coat as though the coat were a polite suggestion, and the wind drove the snow flat into my eyes so that I walked the way you walk in a blackout, one arm up, feet finding the road by faith. The toolbox I left where it was. There are things you carry and things you cannot, and I had got rather good at telling them apart.

I do not know how long the walk took. Long enough that my thoughts went smooth and stupid and I caught myself composing a continuity note — Miss Wren, exterior, night: coat dark to the shoulder with snow, scarf lost between shots, expression to be supplied — which is what my mind does when it would rather not feel the rest of me. Long enough that the light, when at last it stopped retreating and began to grow, came as a genuine surprise, swimming up out of the white into the shape of gateposts, and a drive, and a house.

A tall house. Victorian-Gothic, all gable and finial, black against the snow-glow, with too many windows and most of them dark. But the front of it, where the light was — the front of it caught me and held me, and for one disordered second I thought there were two houses, then four, then a whole receding street of them. Glass. The ground floor was faced in mirror, great pier-glasses set between the windows, so that the snow and the one lit window and a small soaked stranger in a ruined coat were all thrown back at me, doubled and doubled again, an audience of myself coming up the drive.

I had grown up in the wings of theatres. I knew dressed glass when I saw it. Somebody had built this house to be looked at, and to look back.

I found a bell-pull and hauled on it, and somewhere deep inside a bell answered, and then for a long time nothing. The snow filled the collar of my coat. I had lifted my hand to the iron again when the door opened — not wide; a careful foot of it — and an old man stood in the gap with a lamp held high and his body square in the way, the way you stand when you are deciding whether to let a thing in or keep it out.

He was past seventy, broad once and now gone spare, with a long North-country face and hands that had clearly built things; one of them, around the lamp, was missing the top of a finger. His eyes went over me without hurry. Coat, face, the dark behind me where there was no car and no companion and no sense.

"There's no road up tonight," he said, as though I might have brought one with me.

"There's no road anywhere," I said. My voice came out cracked. "My car's dead, a mile or two down. I'm sorry. I saw your light."

He did not move at once. Behind him I could see warmth, a flagged hall, the gold edge of a fire somewhere off to the side, and I wanted it the way you want air. But he stood there in the gap and weighed me, and what crossed his face was not suspicion exactly. It was reluctance. A deep, tired reluctance, as if I were one more weight on a day already carrying too many.

"Master's got guests enough," he said, half to himself. Then something in him gave — not warmth, but decency, which is sometimes better — and he stepped back and let the door swing. "Come in out of it, lass, before you're no use to anybody. I'll not turn a dog out in this, whatever's in the house."

Whatever's in the house. I filed it without meaning to. We file everything, in my line; you never know which detail the cutting room will want.

Inside, the cold let go of me all at once and left me shaking, which is worse. The old man set his lamp on a side table and the side table threw back two lamps, two old men, two shivering women, because of course the wall was glass here too. The whole hall was glass and dark wood, a corridor of reflections going off in every direction, and I stood in the middle of it doubling and trebling and not knowing, for a giddy second, which of the women was me.

"Tolley," he said, when I gave him my name and thanks and the half-sentence of explanation I could manage. "Bram Tolley. I keep the place." He took my sodden coat from my shoulders with the brisk impersonal care of a man used to handling things that mattered to other people, and hung it where it would drip on stone and not on a rug, and all the while I was looking past him, because I could not help it. It is a professional disease. You walk into a room and your eye starts taking inventory of everything that is wrong with the shot.

A great deal was wrong with this one.

The clocks, first. There were clocks everywhere — a long-case in the hall, a carriage clock on the side table, a little gilt thing on a bracket — and no two of them told the same time, and not one of them was ticking. The long-case stood at twenty past four. The carriage clock said five minutes to nine. The gilt one had stopped, with a sort of malice, at midnight, both hands straight up like a man surrendering. Dead clocks, set deliberately to different hours. I had seen a wall like that before, once, in a conjuror's dressing-room, and the conjuror had laughed when he caught me staring and said time's a trick like any other, my dear, and I'll not have it bossing me in my own house.

Then the shapes. Down the hall, in the unlit rooms whose doors stood open, there were shapes under dust-sheets, and I knew them the way you know your own alphabet. That long low one was a cabinet of some kind — a sword-box, perhaps, or worse. That tall narrow one, draped to the floor, had the unmistakable hips of a Proteus cabinet. There was the ghost of a great wheel against one wall. Apparatus. Stage apparatus, shrouded and put away, a whole career of it sleeping under linen in the dark, and the linen rising and falling very slightly in the draught as though the things beneath were breathing.

And at the turn of the hall, where the stair went up, one shape larger than the rest: a tall rectangle on the wall under a dust-sheet of its own, hung properly, the way you hang a thing you mean to keep but cannot bear to look at. A picture. A big one. Veiled.

"You'll want to dry off," Tolley said, and there was something in how he said it, a hurrying, that told me he had seen me seeing. "But there's no time for much. They'll be going in."

"Going in?"

"To dinner." He said the word the way you might say to surgery. "Master keeps it late." He picked the lamp up again, and the lamplight slid across the pier-glass and lit, for half a second, his face from beneath — old, and grieved, and braced. "I'll tell you plain, since you've a right to know what you've walked into. The road's gone and the wire with it. The telephone line came down on the moor before dark; I heard it go. We're shut up here, the lot of us, till the thaw, and that's days off if it's an hour. There's no fetching anyone and no sending word." He paused. "The master has guests enough, and trouble among them, more than enough. But he'll not put a soul out into that, and neither will I."

"What sort of trouble?"

He looked at me then with something almost like pity, an old man's pity for a young one who has asked a question she would have done better to leave alone.

"Old trouble," he said. "The worst sort. Come a long way to be settled, and tonight's the night for the settling, God help us all." He turned away before I could press it. "This way. Quick, now."

I should have asked more. I have asked myself since why I did not, and the honest answer is that I was cold to the marrow and shaking and not entirely in command of myself, and that some part of me, the part trained to wait for the scene to play before judging it, simply wanted to see. We are watchers, in my trade. It is our sin and our use.

Somewhere ahead a gong sounded — a real gong, struck once and let to shimmer away into the wood and the glass — and the sound of it did something to the house. A door opened upstairs. Voices started, low, the particular murmur of people who have been keeping silence in separate rooms and must now be civil in one. A woman laughed, a brittle society laugh with no joy under it at all. A man's voice rose and was hushed.

Tolley took me by the elbow, not unkindly, and steered me down the hall, past the breathing sheets, past the stopped clocks, past my own face flying along beside me in the dark glass — wet hair, white face, eyes too wide, a stranger I would not have cast as anyone calm. We turned at the foot of the stair, under the veiled picture, and I felt it over me as we passed, the way you feel someone's eyes on the back of your neck in an empty room.

At the end of the hall stood a door, half open, and beyond it candlelight — real candlelight, gold and unsteady — and the gleam of a long table, and faces. Seven or eight of them, turned now toward the disturbance at the door, toward the soaked uninvited woman the caretaker was delivering up to them. I had time to see that not one of those faces was glad. Wary, every one. Watching. Holding still in the way that people hold still when they are each, privately, afraid of something in the room and trying very hard not to show it.

Tolley let go my elbow. He did not announce me. Perhaps he had not the words; perhaps there was no etiquette for what I was. He simply stood back, and the candlelight fell on me, and I dripped on the threshold of a room full of strangers who had been expecting, plainly, anything but this.

I had not been introduced. I did not know their names, or their quarrels, or the dead man among them who was not yet dead. I knew only what the doorway showed me, and what eight years of standing just out of shot had taught me to read: that a story was already running here, well into its reel, with the stakes set and the lighting hung and every player in position, and that I had blundered through the wrong door of it like a passer-by walking into the back of a take.

I had walked, dripping, into the middle of someone else's last act, and the curtain was already up.

Seven at Table

There were seven faces at that table, and the black glass behind them made fourteen.

The dining room of Coldharbour had two long windows, uncurtained, and the blizzard had turned them to mirrors. Beyond was nothing — no moor, no sky, only the white static of snow against the dark — so the glass gave back the room: the candles in their tarnished branches, the cloth gone grey with washing, and seven people doubled out into the night as if a second, fainter dinner party sat just outside the wall, eating with us in the cold. Behind me, a pier-glass the height of a man tripled the lot again. I had walked into a house that could not stop showing you yourself.

I am paid to notice when a scene does not match itself. Continuity, they call it on the floor — the woman with the clipboard who remembers that the cigarette was half-smoked in the master shot and must therefore be half-smoked in the close-up, that the door stood open, that the light came from the left. You learn to hold a room in your head the way other people hold a tune. And the first thing my head told me, dripping in the doorway with my hair flattened to my skull, was that this room had been laid for seven and was now, against its plain wish, accommodating an eighth.

The footman — except he was no footman; he was an old man in a coat too good and too old for him, with hands like root vegetables — set my place himself, without being asked. He did it the way a stagehand strikes a prop: no fuss, no flourish, the chair drawn and squared, the soup spoon turned the right way round. When he straightened he looked at me a moment longer than a servant should.

"Tolley," said the woman at the foot of the table. "Miss Wren will want the fire built up. She's half drowned." Her voice was low and even, a voice for managing rooms. "You poor creature. Sit. Sit by Sebastian, where it's warmest. Sebastian — make room for our castaway."

The man at the head of the table had been watching me since I came in, and watching, I think, is too small a word for what he did with his face. He performed the watching. He turned it on me like a lamp.

"A castaway." He had a voice you could have heard from the gods of any house in the country, and it had not weakened with whatever was killing him, though everything else had. He was a tall ruin. The fine bones were all still there under skin gone the colour of candle-tallow, and his hands, laid on the cloth, trembled with a fine constant tremor, like a struck wire that will not quite still. "Out of the storm, on this night of all nights. Do you know, I had begun to fear no one would come who hadn't been summoned." He smiled. "And here is the one guest in England who wasn't. Welcome, my dear, to Coldharbour. I am Sebastian Vane."

The name meant nothing to me then and a great deal to the table. I felt the small shift go round it — the way an audience settles when the lights go down.

"You'll have heard of him," said the young man on my other side, not bothering to look up from his glass, "as the Great Sebastiano. Everyone's heard of him. He'll tell you so himself, if you give him an hour." He was perhaps twenty-five and already wearing his disappointments like a tailored thing. The decanter sat by his elbow as if it lived there.

"Julian," said the woman at the foot of the table.

"Mother."

She let it go. She let a great many things go, I would come to learn, and each one cost her exactly nothing on the surface and something underneath that never showed.

I had them placed by the time the soup came. It is a habit of the trade, and I cannot break it; I make my notes whether anyone wants them made or not.

Vane, head of table. Host, dying, lit from within by something more than illness.

Cordelia Vane, his wife, at the foot. Fifty-odd, handsome the way a well-kept house is handsome, every hair where she had put it. She wore a wedding ring she turned with her thumb when her hands were idle, which was seldom; her hands were rarely idle. Twice in the first ten minutes she leaned, without seeming to interrupt herself, and moved her husband's wineglass an inch from his fingers. The second time she said, lightly, "Not before your draught, dear heart," and there was iron folded inside the lightness, the way there is steel inside a fan.

Julian, the son. Sullen, sodden, mine.

Down the right: Gideon Marsh, a soft, glossy man of sixty-odd in a suit a year out of fashion and a year too tight, who laughed before the jokes arrived and shot his cuffs whenever he said anything he did not believe, which was often. He was the sort of man who calls everyone old boy to save the trouble of names.

Beside him Dr. Pike, small, fussy, ringless, who arranged and rearranged his cutlery into parade order and dabbed his lip with his napkin between sentences as though words left a residue. He said sub rosa once and in vino veritas once and looked frightened both times, as men do who hide behind Latin because the English is too near the bone.

Across from them, alone on his side of the table like a man who had asked to be: Theodore Castellan. Seventy if a day, a great theatrical wreck of a man with a mane gone the white of a stage storm and eyebrows you could have swept a floor with. He ate as if eating were beneath him and watched Vane as if Vane were a meal.

And at the far corner, half out of the candlelight, the secretary. Verity Lane, Cordelia had called her, when she called her anything. Young — younger than me — quiet in a way that was not shyness but economy, as though she had decided long ago to spend nothing she did not have to. She kept one hand, much of the evening, at her throat, where something hung under the high collar of her grey dress. A locket, by the chain. She was the only one at the table who did not once look at me, and that, in its way, was its own kind of looking.

Seven of them. Eight of us. And in the corner, on a side table, a wireless set murmured to itself under the talk, the announcer's voice rising and falling like a tide a long way off. ...His Majesty's Government... the constitutional position... should His Majesty determine... Nobody listened and nobody turned it off. It was the kind of week when you left the wireless on the way you leave a light burning in a sickroom.

"You've come a long way to be nowhere," said Vane to me, delighted. "Tell us. What brings a young woman alone onto Glasdale moor in a motorcar in December?"

"Bad map-reading," I said, "and worse luck. I'm in the pictures. I was driving north to a location and the road and the weather conspired against me. Your light was the only one for nine miles."

"The pictures." He said it the way another man might say the colonies — far off, faintly disreputable, fascinating. "And what do you do, in the pictures?"

"Continuity. I watch."

"You watch." Something behind his eyes came properly awake. "And what, my dear, do you watch for?"

"For the moment a thing stops matching itself," I said. "An actress crosses the room with a letter in her left hand and comes back in the next shot with it in her right. A clock that read ten past in the morning's work and twenty past after lunch. The little lies a scene tells when nobody's minding it. I catch them before the camera does."

A silence went round the table, and it was not an idle silence. I had said something, and I did not yet know what. Down at the corner the secretary's hand left her throat and lay flat on the cloth, and across from her Castellan set down his fork with the care of a man setting down a weapon.

"How extraordinary," said Vane softly. "A professional witness. Of all the doors on all the moors in England." He laughed, and the laugh turned into the cough that was waiting behind everything he did, and Cordelia was already half-risen, the green bottle and the little spoon coming out of nowhere, the way a good assistant produces what is wanted before the audience knows it has been palmed. He waved her off. "Not yet, Cordelia. Not yet. Let me have my evening."

"Sebastian needs his rest," she said, to the table, smoothing the moment flat. "He has tired himself this week."

"This week," said Castellan, and the two words came out of him like a stone dropped down a well. "Ah, yes. This week. Let us by all means speak of why we are all of us here, in this draughty mausoleum, at the end of the world, in the worst storm in forty years." He looked round at them, theatrical contempt curling his lip. "Castellan does not believe in coincidence. Castellan received a letter. Did we not all of us receive a letter?"

Nobody answered, which was an answer.

"Mine said," Castellan went on, and he had the table now, he knew how to take a table, "Come to Coldharbour and learn the truth at last about 'The Tempest.'" He let it ring. "Word for word, I'll wager, as yours. Marsh? Yours said the same. Pike? You've gone the colour of your own sago. The doctor's letter said the same. They all said the same. We have each of us been summoned — like witnesses. Like the accused." His great brows came down. "Sebastian Vane has called us here to talk, after thirty years, about the night Esme Sharpe walked into a cabinet in front of two thousand people and never walked out."

The name went through the room like a draught through a candle. The flames all leaned.

I did not know the name. I made the note anyway. Esme Sharpe — 1909 — "The Tempest" — vanished. I have learned to write down the thing the room flinches at, even when I cannot read it yet.

"Theodore." Vane's voice had gone very gentle. "You always did know how to come in on your cue."

"It was never your trick," said Castellan, and now the contempt was bare. "The Tempest. The illusion that made the Great Sebastiano. It was never yours, Sebastian, and there is one person in three counties knows it was never yours, and he is sitting at the foot of your own table mixing your medicine." He did not look at Cordelia when he said it. He looked at the old servant, Tolley, who had stopped, very still, with the gravy boat in his hands, by the sideboard.

"You'll take more wine, Mr. Castellan," said Tolley, in a flat North-country voice, and it was not a question, and it ended the subject the way a lid ends a pot.

Marsh rushed into the gap with both soft hands. "Now, now, old boy, we're all friends here, we're all family, near enough — eh, Sebastian? — water under the bridge, water under a great deal of bridge —" He shot his cuffs. "Marvellous soup, Cordelia. Marvellous. You always did keep a marvellous table."

"It's mock turtle," said Julian, into his glass. "It's always mock turtle. Everything in this house is mock something." He lifted the glass an inch towards the wall, in a small, sour, private toast. "Even the portraits."

And there it was — the thing I had been not-seeing all evening, the way you don't see the boom in the shot until someone points and then you can never not-see it again.

On the long wall between the windows, where a house like this would hang the master of it in his pride, there was a picture covered with a dust-sheet. A tall frame, shrouded. Somebody had draped it carefully, edges squared, the way you tuck a thing in or the way you cover a face. And every eye at that table, all evening, had been cutting to it and away — Marsh's flick and flinch, Pike's quick wet glance, Cordelia's flat refusal to let her eyes go there at all, which is its own kind of going. Even Vane. Especially Vane. The room was arranged around that sheet the way a film is arranged around the thing it will not show you yet.

"What's behind the sheet?" I asked. I am, I have been told, too direct for drawing rooms. It is the one useful thing the cutting room taught me: ask the question the scene is built to avoid.

The wireless, in its corner, chose that moment to swell — ...renunciation of the throne... for himself and for his descendants... — and under it, into the hush, the secretary spoke for the first time all night. She had a clear, low voice, and she did not raise it, and it carried like a struck glass.

"It's a portrait of Esme Sharpe," said Verity Lane. Her hand had gone back to the locket at her throat. "It's been covered since before I came. Hasn't it, Mr. Vane. Twenty years it's hung there with its face turned to the wall."

Vane looked at her down the length of the table, and something passed over his ruined face that I could not read and badly wanted to — grief, or fear, or a kind of terrible relief, the look of a man who has at last heard the word he has been dreading and finds the dread was the worst of it.

"Take the sheet off, Tolley," he said.

"Sebastian —" Cordelia's hand closed on his sleeve. "It's late. You're tired. The Black Room can wait, the whole of it can wait until you're stronger, there's no need tonight —"

"There is every need tonight," said Sebastian Vane, and he set his trembling hands flat on the cloth and pushed himself, with effort, to his feet.

He stood swaying a little at the head of the table, lit from below by the candles so the shadows ran upward and made a younger, fiercer face of the old one, and for a moment I saw what two thousand people in a gallery had once seen and gone home unable to forget.

"You came for the truth about 'The Tempest,'" he said. "You shall have it. Not tonight — tonight I haven't the breath, and a thing thirty years buried deserves daylight to be dug up in. But tomorrow." His eyes went round us, one by one, and they came to rest, last and longest, on the shrouded frame. "Tomorrow I am going to tell you the whole of it. Every word. What was done on the night Esme Sharpe vanished, and by whom, and why. I am going to give a dead woman the name that was always hers and that I —" the cough caught him; he rode it down — "that I stole. And I have asked Marsh to bring the papers, because tomorrow, before all of you as witnesses, I am signing a new will."

Nobody breathed. Even the wireless seemed to drop its voice.

"You will none of you like it," said Vane, almost tenderly. "But it is thirty years late, and I find I cannot die a liar. Goodnight."

He let Cordelia take his arm at last. And every face at that table changed at once, each in its own way, each in the space of a single drawn breath — and I, who am paid to watch faces, made a note of each.