The Snow Geese by William Fiennes Read Free Book Online Page A

glass tortoises, like raindrops with limbs; and tortoises carved from hard, dark woods, with grid patterns seared into their shells by red-hot pointed tools. One of the tortoises had a smaller, baby tortoise crawling up over its shell, and one was a jelly mould made of lightweight metal.
    ‘My mother gave me my first one,’ Eleanor said, taking a medium-sized grey ceramic tortoise from the middle of the parade. ‘After that I looked out for tortoises. Antique stores, markets, bazaars. If I go away, I always try to find a tortoise.’
    To enter the walnut-panelled corridor that led from the living-room to the bedrooms, you had to pass through swinging walnut doors, slatted like Old West saloon doors.
    ‘This is you,’ Eleanor said, showing me into the small guest bedroom. ‘I’ll leave you for a minute.’
    A birdcage on the chest-of-drawers: an elegant antique birdcage of thick brass wires that curved together at the top, forming a dome, with a rod for perching and a brass ring for hanging the cage at the zenith, and everything in the room subordinate to the cage, the clean, bright wires enclosing the not-here of the bird inside it. I put my bags down and contemplated the room: the same glade atmosphere, with wood on the walls and underfoot, the floorboards part-covered by a needlepoint rug in bold dahlia colours, Eleanor’s handiwork. I unzipped my bag, took out my bird books and binoculars, and put them on the chest-of-drawers, next to the empty birdcage.
    I took it all in, this new place: its colours and textures, its different lights, its things. Above the bed hung a drawing of a cowboy, riding a horse at a rodeo. The horse was executing a buck, poised on its hind legs, head and neck angling downwards, front legs about to hammer the ground. The cowboy was airborne, bounced a foot from the saddle. One hand held the reins; the other was held out over the horse’s head. You could see that when those front legs hit the ground, the cowboy would slam back into the saddle and lose his balance, jolted, but for now all was poised and beautiful – the rider’s flaring leather chaps, adorned with rosettes; his saddle’s horn, skirt, cantle and bucking rolls; the tapaderos on the stirrups; the leather fenders. A small patch of shadow on the rider’s Stetson indicated the depression where his fingers would grip to lift the hat to a lady.
    ‘Would you like some tea?’ Eleanor asked, peering into the room.
    We passed back through the swinging saloon doors like gunslingers. I followed Eleanor into the kitchen, and watched as she put some water on to boil, a spiral glowing orange on the electric hob. She didn’t have a kettle. She had two cast-iron skillets, one six inches across and one nine and a half inches across, and used these to boil water for tea, the smaller skillet holding just enough water for a single mug, the larger just enough for two. She handled the skillets using one of two quilted oven pads, a black sheep and a white sheep, their fleeces browned and singed through by burns. Her birdlike lightness and the rugged iron heft of the pans seemed imagined by two radically different minds.
    ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this,’ she said, watching the water in the skillet. ‘I love being a part of this adventure.’
    ‘Good!’
    ‘I just read
The Snow Goose
. I wanted to have an idea of what set you off on this I don’t know what you’d call it. And it’s so sad!’
    She was holding the skillet’s handle with the black sheep, watching the water.
    ‘Sometimes I think it’s amazing that water boils,’ she said. ‘All those little bubbles suddenly appear. What tea would you like?’
    She opened a cupboard to the right of the cooker: it was crammed with boxes of loose leaf teas and tea bags – black teas, green teas, exotic herbal infusions and improving, medicinal tisanes, their bouquet wafting from the open cupboard.
    ‘There’s no shortage of teas,’ she said.
    We both chose peppermint. Eleanor