The laces baffled her and for once she wished for Ida. Such a challenge would have raised her spirits, but today she was alone. The dull grey ice lay across the lake, with a sharp wind around her face.The ice seemed bleak enough to attempt. Compromise she told herself, compromise and pushed out stiffly on her left leg, the right following shyly and then again and again and she then she was in the middle of the lake, alone. The chill muffled the sounds of the lake side and Katherine felt some deep heaving below the ice, as if some chesty creature was awakening. A figure near the cafe waved a thickly gloved hand at two children who were dragging at their sled. The taller child pushed at the other and both screamed words lost in this swaddling wind. Was that the right word? Swaddling? Kat, you are becoming too sentimental, too loose with your expression; you need more outside, more air like this, free of your incumbents. She stopped slowly. For that was what they were, incumbents. Just like her journal’s snails under the leaf, suffocated with the weight of their dutiful care.
Her lace had come undone too and she bent awkwardly trying to catch at it through her old wool glove. The effort made her sweat and then her tremble with exhaustion. She blew into her scarf trying to rally enough energy to capture the black lace, that flailed indifferently about her left boot. Her left boot as usual. Her world had dwindled to this. A stick pin woman with nowhere to get to, lost in the middle of a grey French lake.
It would be a scenic place to haemorrhage; nice splattered crimson on a dull grey background. ‘Writer dies untidily far from home.’ Wherever that might be of course. Today, this moment, here, she could admit that home and her incumbents were of the past. If a medical Merlin with a wand had appeared and swept out this creeping illness that made her weak and dependent, then she would have thrown the lot of them overboard. She doubted she would have even offered them a life belt.
She could even drown here. Blood or water, her choice.
But for once, she was wrong. She was not alone. A sudden shower of ice flew across her head and face and a low French voice began asking if Madame was quite alright. The shock of rough wool across her forehead and the voice repeated the question. Was madame alright? Was this gentle teasing; a gift of irony for a blighted patient? Perhaps. A murmur of gardenia found her nose and then a pair of the darkest eyes came level with her own. No ‘madame’ this time – just a curious look and then an arm under hers, as this woman( for the eyes told her so) pulled firmly at the stray lace and checked the other boot. Still with an arm under hers, the now silent figure began skating them firmly across the ice towards the shore; more gardenia, muscle, soft flesh and then, safety. Boots together and their journey’s end in a gentle flurry of snow, for yes, it had started to snow and now the woman was bent again at Katherine’s boots and was preparing her for loneliness once more.
The invalid blinked, concentrated upon the feeling of the woman’s head against her exhausted legs and imagined another time, another encounter, where she would have had some reply to the tender spontaneity of this strange ice-knight, clothed in fawn.
A long strand of burnished gold hair escaped the woman’s hat and lay sleeping against Katherine’s thigh. There was a long moment and then the operation was over and they must, would part. The woman straightened herself up and glanced away.
But this was a story that Kat had not written, not even yet. Not ever.
Coffee for Madame. A tilt of the head. Reviving and they make such terribly, delicious coffee here that it would be a sin to leave just now, Madame. And this time a laugh tinged with fireworks and just( so Katherine believed) a little touch of heaven.