Snow Mesmerism

He had heard nothing, nothing since he had dropped her at Windermere Railway Station back when it was winter. He had watched her walk up the platform under the canopy with its cast iron pillars running alongside the single track as the snow gently fell.

When he had been a boy, there had been four tracks and four platforms to the station. He wondered how long what was left would stay. She had not looked back. He remembered the drive back to the farm, the suddenly so empty farmhouse with its tin bath hanging in the kitchen. The so empty bed.

She had not been a girl to mind the cuddy splatter or owt like that in the farmyard or at the gate. He thought she had taken to the fells like born to it: so different from Mary, all those years back.

Driving, Willet remembered the Black Sabbath track on the radio, 'Lying snowblind in the sun, will my ice age ever come?' He had felt so bad. Even now, even with spring... though the sun and the sight of flowers certainly lifted the heart somewhat, he still felt like that. He sang to himself,

The hillside was a patchwork quilt

Neatly stitched with tidy hedge

And crumbling grey stone wall

Yes, indeed, the hillside below him with its grey stone walls was a picture as the sun and shadow of clouds moved across the land. He was nearly home now. Nearly at his lonely farmhouse.

New born lambs that sweetly played

Speckled eggs all newly laid

But for you I would have stayed

I think I must have caught a glimpse of heaven

And there she was. There was no mistaking who. By the old wooden gate to his farm a girl was sitting next to a rucksack. Eleanor Ann Mavis Summers.

She had come back.

Willet stood high on the hillside watching the rockets soar into the black starlit sky above the town, watching a firework display from above, a display to celebrate the Millennium. The nineteen nineties were over. It was two thousand now! Beside him Eleanor, well wrapped as she had been all those years ago, and with her arm about him. Down at the town their children, well hardly children now, were with their friends out celebrating.

Eleanor had not come back because she was pregnant. It had crossed his mind as he had stepped from the Land Rover - the very same Land Rover still sitting in front of the farmhouse, albeit with a different engine - but that had not been the reason for her return. The reason had been him, the farm and the fells. She had come back for him.

As the days and weeks had passed, after she had returned home, Eleanor had found her life in the city to be less and less satisfying. She had split with her boyfriend and gradually realised where her thoughts were again and again taking her - northwards to a farm high in the Cumbrian fells and to a particular man.

She had come, back to the railway station, taken the bus from Windermere as far as she could and climbed the fells and waited.

Willet remembered how, of a moment, the old kitchen had become warmer and it was as if the old farmhouse had become alive again. Willet saw the girl look around and her eye fall on the old tin bath and stayed looking for a long moment. He turned to put the kettle on and knew things were, so out of the blue, going to be all right.

They had been 'all right' now for over two decades. It was likely they would be for many more. The couple turned and walked down the hillside.

"You know, Will, with the children out I, um, fancy a bath - in the kitchen."

Willet smiled and squeezed her hand. The farmhouse might now have modern amenities including a proper bathroom but there was nothing quite like a bath in front of an open fire - or sex with Eleanor Ann Mavis Dodd.