The Silent Land

12

The following evening the power failed again. They were in the lobby of the hotel when the lights flickered and went out. The lights went out over the entire village.

It had happened before, and the power had come back on after a short while. They had some candles which they lit and set on the reception desk, and waited. After an hour the power hadn’t resumed so they went outside, where they could see better by the snow-charged moonlight.

The shops and restaurants were now in universal darkness. As they passed them, the individual stores had a different, sullen look to them. Snow and moonlight reflected from the dark plate glass of the shopfronts in an eerie soft blue glow.

‘The power has never been off this long. What do you think it means?’ Zoe asked.

Jake didn’t reply and the unanswered question congealed in the cold air, following them as they trudged down the deserted main street. Their boots squeaked on the compacted snow. They had no plan: they had walked out with the expectation of the power returning at any moment. But when they reached the other end of the village, where the buildings stopped and gave way to an open tract of land that itself was swallowed up by dark woodland, the lights still hadn’t come back on.

‘A letter to the mayor of the village required,’ Jake said, but Zoe had lost her humour. They turned and retraced their steps in silence.

Halfway back the lights flickered on all over the village and they both released an involuntary cheer. There also came the sound of generators and turbines powering up somewhere, maybe for the ski lifts they’d left switched on.

They found a wine bar and raided the banks of bottles and turned up the music system. Zoe put on ‘Winter’ by Tori Amos because Jake had once said that it made him want to cry but he would never allow himself to; and she asked him if he remembered where they’d first heard it.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Think.’

‘Nope. Nothin’ coming.’

So she told him. It was on one of their first ski holidays together. They’d heard it in a bar and Jake had walked up to the barman and demanded to know who had recorded the song.

‘I don’t remember that either.’

So she told him which holiday it was, and where, and who they were with, and who they had met.

‘No, it’s all a blank.’

‘You must remember! Surely you do! You have to! How can you not?’

‘No, I don’t.’

So she described the rooms they had stayed in, where there was an old woman who had to get wood from the outhouse to feed the stove that heated the water for a bath; and how every evening she pressed her hand into her back and grimaced and shuffled out to get more wood as if the request to take a shower or a bath after a day’s skiing was an unreasonable one. And she told him about how their dour martinet of a ski instructor had taken them down sheets of polished ice.

He just couldn’t recall any of that.

It was true that they had taken many skiing holidays together and after so many it did become difficult to distinguish some of them; but it disturbed her that he couldn’t remember any of it.

‘Where has it gone, that holiday?’ he said. ‘How come I can remember others but not that one? I mean, it’s not like my memory is a DVD that fell behind the cupboard. It’s just gone.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said.

‘It damn well does matter. What are we if we’re not the sum of our memories?’

‘You’re forgetting about what we might become. Isn’t that more important?’

He grimaced and ran a couple of fingers through his hair, as if he were trying to locate and massage the lost holiday snaps somewhere under his skull.

‘Well, you haven’t forgotten this song,’ she pointed out.

‘No. There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away.’

‘And a lot you forget.’

‘Oh yes. A lot you forget.’

They stayed in the bar a while, playing music and chasing memories. Neither felt like eating so they wound their way back to their hotel, arm in arm. When they entered the reception Jake noticed something had changed.

‘The candles we lit have burned down. While we were out.’

‘Are they still burning down?’

‘I’m not going to stand here and watch them to find out, but I wonder if they are. I mean, that would be strange, wouldn’t it? If the candles were only burning down when the power was out? That would be odd, wouldn’t it?’

‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I just can’t try to figure out the answer to it any more. It’s driving me mad. We just have to go with the flow sometimes.’

‘That would be too easy.’

‘Come on. Bed,’ she said.

Zoe woke up in the night feeling cold. The rooms tended to overheat, so they always left a window ajar, even though Zoe was the only one who experienced fluctuations in the temperature. She got out of bed and closed it, but as she looked out she saw that the power had gone off yet again. The lights were off all over the village. She shivered and crawled back under the duvet.

She couldn’t get back to sleep. She thought about waking Jake to tell him the power had gone off again, but decided to let him sleep on. After all, there was nothing he could to do about the situation. She lay awake, her eyes open, looking up into the darkness. Maybe her restlessness pulled him out of his sleep, because she heard him whisper.

‘You awake?’

She turned to look at him. His eyes were oily black pools in the darkness. ‘Yes. The power is out again.’

‘How long?’

‘Don’t know. At least an hour. I was cold. I had to close the window. Are you cold?’

‘Come here. Snuggle up. Try to go back to sleep.’

In the morning they woke to learn that the power had not returned during the night. Zoe said she felt a difference in temperature: that the normally overheated hotel had cooled in the night. Jake said he couldn’t feel any difference, but they were forced to discuss what might happen if the lack of power became permanent. They called it the ‘energy crisis’. They discussed food supplies. The freezers in their own hotel and the super market and presumably all the other hotels were stocked with frozen food so they’d never had to think about where they might take food from. But if the freezers stopped working, all those supplies would rot within a few days. Unless of course they took it all outside and buried it under snow.

The hotel had a large fireplace in the lobby area. They would have to burn wood to stay warm, they decided. There was plenty of it. Jake said they could even burn the other hotels timber by timber if they ran short. Zoe put her hand on her belly. She feared the future in this place.

They went down to the lobby to check out the fireplace. The scorch marks in the hearth indicated that it was a functioning fireplace, not a decorative one, even though it didn’t seem to have been used in a while. Jake proposed they go outside and look for log piles that they could drag into the reception.

It was he who noticed that the candles they had lit and placed on the reception desk had burned right down. White wax had spilled across the polished beechwood. ‘Remember those eternal flames?’ he said. ‘They’re not eternal any more.’

‘It frightens me,’ she said. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means the rules here are changing all the time. Come on, let’s get some wood.’

About a hundred metres from the hotel was an ancient dwelling constructed from blue-grey stone with timber balconies and shutters. It might have been one of the village’s original farm buildings from the days before leisure skiing changed everything. Its weathered timbers were of great age, split and greyed and grained, and there was a precarious wooden lean-to propped at the side of the house. Beneath the lean-to was a supply of neatly stacked logs under a tarpaulin. Jake spread the tarp on the ground and they began heaping logs on it so they could drag them back to the hotel.

‘Such a neat pile of logs. We ought to thank whoever lived here for all their hard work.’

Zoe stopped moving logs. ‘I want to look inside.’

Jake continued to heap logs onto the tarp. ‘I’m not sure about that.’

‘What difference can it make?’

While they had raided any available hotel, store, wine bar or restaurant they felt like, they had hitherto kept away from all private dwellings. Perhaps it was a mark of respect. Perhaps they were keeping alive a foolish hope that one day someone might come back to these houses, that the village might sometime be repopulated. Whatever it was, it had not occurred to them that they might enter a private family home.

‘I want to know who lived here,’ Zoe said.

Jake filled his arms with logs while she made her way around the back of the house.

The back door was not locked. Zoe turned the handle and stepped inside. She resisted the temptation to call out, to announce herself.

The interior of the house was quite dark. The door opened onto a kitchen, which itself expanded into a neat dining room, with old chairs drawn up around a table. To the right was a further room, which she took to be some kind of workshop. The house was cold, and there was a smell of damp plaster and another odour that she took to be the naphthalene of mothballs.

The room had an open fireplace with a mantelpiece and above the mantelpiece a mirror. Brass candlesticks with new candles still in cellophane stood at either end of the mantelpiece. There were matches, so Zoe stripped the cellophane from the candles and lit them. She looked at her face in the mirror.

The silver amalgam on the mirror had misted and peeled in places and rusted in pinprick holes. The mirror must have hung there for over a hundred years. The light gave her a jaundiced look, and the rusting mirror loaned her some freckles. It was unflattering. She looked rather gaunt. The fireplace beneath the mantelpiece was full of ash. She bent down to touch it, looking for warmth, but it was damp and cold.

There were two old leather armchairs drawn up on either side of the fire, with lace doilies thrown across the back of them. The doilies had a shadow where heads had rested against them over the years. She could almost smell the sebum of the chairs’ occupants.

Framed photographs from two or three generations hung on the wall, the heavy wooden frames of the traditional photographic studies at odds with the chrome and plastic framed smaller pictures offering almost careless modern snapshots. Zoe could guess at the familial relationships, with a few 1970s colour shots—their photochemicals unfixing and fading—unable to compete with the vivid modern colour pictures of children.

It occurred to her that some of the people in the photos were the dead and some were the living and yet she felt equally divided from all of them.

A clock with its pendulum visible behind a glass case hung on the wall, its hands arrested at 8.50 a.m., which Zoe calculated could have been the exact time of the avalanche. She opened the case and swung the pendulum to reactivate the clock. The pendulum swayed back and forth several times with a sequence of reassuring clicks, but it died off. She tried again, but it died off again. She looked for a key, to wind the clock. It seemed important to her for a moment. Then she gave up.

She drifted from the kitchen to the workshop at the side of the house. There was a pleasing smell of wood shavings. She saw an orderly row of woodworking tools—chisels, planes, saws. Then she saw what the craftsman had been working on.

It was a coffin. The wood was still in its natural form—worked and precisely jointed, planed to a smooth finish but unveneered, waiting to be lined on the inside, dressed with handles outside and closed with a lid. She was fascinated and horrified. She stepped over to the coffin, half-expecting it to contain an embalmed corpse, but it was empty.

She heard someone come into the house. She turned smartly, and there was Jake framed in the doorway between the workshop and the living room. His face was in shadow but his eyes were swimming.

‘He was a coffin maker. The man who lived here. That was his trade.’

He peered into the coffin. ‘It’s about my size.’ Jake swung a leg up onto the workbench.

‘Don’t!’

He ignored her, stepping into the coffin and lowering himself to lie in it.

‘I’m going out,’ Zoe said and she rushed outside, leaving him to his morbid game.

Outside she waited by the tarpaulin with its load of logs. He was a long time, but she wouldn’t go back inside after him. Finally he came out and without a word he grabbed a corner of the tarp and began to drag it.

Zoe took another corner of the tarp. ‘That wasn’t funny.’

He snorted. ‘Yes it was. Was and is. It’s funny.’

‘No, it’s not. You think you’re being funny but you’re not.’

‘But it is funny. It’s very funny.’

‘No it’s not.’

‘Yes it is.’ And he let go a peal of unforced laughter, to show her how funny it was; and the ricochet of his laughter hung in the freezing air like a cruel spectre.

Zoe compressed her lips.

When they got back to the hotel, they found that the power had returned. But within ten minutes it went off again.

‘You have to laugh sometimes,’ Jake said in the darkness. ‘Remember my dad? You just have to. Laugh, I mean.’