Chapter Eighteen: Snow in April

It began to snow at ten past eleven in the morning on the third of April, which was not supposed to happen.

The forecast had promised a clear, cold, pale-blue day. Clara had checked it every hour for a week. She stood now in the porch of the small stone church of St Aldhelm's, eight miles from Larkhill, in a long ivory coat with a wreath of white hellebores in her hair, and watched the first flakes spin down out of a sky the colour of pewter. They fell onto the yew trees and the old grey headstones and the black roof of the lych-gate. They settled on her sleeve.

"Oh," said Clara.

Poppy was standing beside her in a hat. It was not a good hat. Imogen had insisted on it. It was a dark green felt thing with a small stiff brim, and it sat on Poppy's head like a pie someone had dropped, and Imogen had assured her, in the voice of a woman who had never once been wrong about hats, that it was exactly right for a church.

"It's snowing," said Poppy.

"I can see it's snowing."

"I'm so sorry."

"It's April," said Clara, and began, quite suddenly, to laugh. It was a rich, helpless peal, and it went on so long that the organist inside lifted his head. "It's the third of April and it's snowing on my wedding. Poppy, I've been planning this for eleven months. I've had spreadsheets. I made Rory sign a document about napkins." She wiped her eyes. "And it's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I wouldn't have it any other way."

Behind them, in the cold stone gloom of the porch, a figure stirred. Theo had been standing very still against the wall for ten minutes, in a dark morning coat that didn't quite fit, holding a single sprig of white blossom in his fist like a man who had been told to keep it safe. He was pale. He had been pale all morning. He had said, at breakfast, that he thought he would be fine, and then had put a boiled egg in his pocket and walked into the garden for twenty minutes.

"Theo," said Clara. "Come here."

He came. She straightened his tie. She looked at him for a moment with great tenderness, and then, without a word, she put both arms around his neck and held on, hard, with the snow coming down behind them, and Poppy looked away to give them the porch to themselves.

---

The church was small and cold and full of candles. It had a stone floor worn into hollows by seven hundred years of boots. It smelled of beeswax and damp wool and white hyacinths, and every pew was packed with people in hats, and over the arch of the chancel, painted on the plaster in faded red and blue, a stern archangel held a pair of scales.

Poppy sat in the second row between Imogen and Winston. Imogen, in a pale-lavender coat, with a very small bag, had said that morning that she would be perfectly composed. Winston, in a pressed suit, wearing a carnation, had brought four handkerchiefs and was already using the first. Behind them sat Barbara in a hat the size of a dinner plate, with a slim, faded photograph of a man with a moustache tucked into her handbag where only she could see it. Dame Eleanor had a pew to herself, upright as a flagpole, in a hat so magnificent that a child in the row behind had asked its mother if it was alive.

The organ began.

There is a moment in every wedding that people always say they will remember, and it is never the one they expect. Poppy had thought it would be the bride. It was Theo.

He came up the aisle with Clara on his arm, at the pace of a slow walk, with the snow-light pouring white through the stained glass. He was not looking at the altar. He was not looking at anybody. He was looking, with a kind of grave, astonished concentration, straight ahead, as if walking in a straight line were the most difficult thing he had ever been asked to do. And he was crying. He wasn't making any sound. The tears simply ran down his face, steadily, one after another, and he did not wipe them, and he did not seem to know they were there.

"Oh," breathed Imogen.

"I know," said Winston thickly.

Poppy put her hand over her mouth. She had been told, by Clara, in the car, in a voice of absolute command, that she must not cry. If you start, I'll start, and then I'll have to be re-done, and it took the woman an hour. She had said she wouldn't. She sat with her jaw clenched and her nails in her palm, and she looked at the stern archangel with his scales, and she did not cry, and she knew quite precisely that she was lying to herself.

He gave Clara's hand to Rory at the chancel step. He said the words in a voice that did not shake until the very last one, and then it broke, and he turned, with his face wet, and walked back down the aisle, and slid into the pew beside Poppy and sat down with his hands between his knees.

"Dad would have been so proud," he whispered.

She took his hand. It was freezing. She held it, in both of hers, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing that needed saying, and for the whole of the rest of the service they sat there in the candlelight with the cold coming up through the stone, hand in hand, like two people on a bench.

---

The reception was at Larkhill, in the marquee, which was still standing, with its banners and its heaters and the pale ghost of a screen at one end. Dame Eleanor had insisted. She said a tent that had been paid for ought to be used twice, and she would hear no argument. The snow lay an inch thick on the lawn by two o'clock and by five it was coming down in great slow flakes, and the gardeners had lit braziers along the path, so that the guests, in their finery, walked up from the cars through a glimmering storm of orange sparks and white.

It was a wonderful party. There was no other word. There was a ceilidh band, because Rory's family was from the Borders and had stipulated it. There was a three-tier cake that leaned slightly. There was a very old man in a kilt who danced the Dashing White Sergeant with Barbara and had to be revived with brandy. Samir did a bit of a dance of his own. Meera, who had been invited as the family's friend of design and had come in a green jumpsuit and a crown of ivy, sat for an hour at a table with Imogen, saying very little, and then was discovered, quite happily, with her shoes off, teaching Winston the rudiments of a jig.

It was in the middle of all of this, at a quarter to four, that Sir Hugh Aldridge came in.

He had been expected. He was Theo's godfather. He stood in the entrance with the snow on his shoulders, large and white-haired and a little out of breath, in a long dark overcoat, and he looked about him at the music and the lights with a kind of tired benevolence. Behind him, brushing the snow from his sleeves, with the pleased air of a man who has found himself at a very nice party by accident, was Dominic Hale.

"Theo, my boy," said Hugh, taking both his hands. "Forgive us. We were in the neighbourhood. Dominic was good enough to drive. I hope you don't mind."

"Of course not," said Theo, in the voice of a man who very much did.

"Dominic Hale," said Hale to Clara, and took her hand, and bowed, a little, over it. "Congratulations. Forgive the intrusion, but I couldn't resist coming to wish you joy. I've heard so much about the family. I think it's a wonderful thing, a family business, in this day and age. Your brother, if I may say so, is a man of real vision."

"Thank you," said Clara.

"The snow," said Hale, glancing up at the canvas with an expression of delight. "Isn't it marvellous? It's like a Christmas card."

"It's April," said Clara. "It's supposed to be warm."

"I love that," said Hale.

She watched him go, with her head a little on one side. Then she came over to Poppy, in the corner by the cake, and said, very quietly, "I don't like that man."

"Why?"

"I said it was a ridiculous time of year for snow, and he agreed with me about the weather." She took a glass of champagne from a passing tray and drained it. "Nobody agrees with me about the weather. It's the one thing in the world I'm always wrong about."

---

The first dance was at nine.

It was a waltz, and it was bad. Rory, who was six foot three and had the footwork of a man falling off a ladder, trod on Clara's hem and trod on her foot and was forgiven, and the whole marquee cheered. Then the band began something slower, and the dance floor filled up, and Theo came across the straw-coloured boards through the crowd, with his tie loose and his hair on end and a flush in his cheeks, and held out his hand.

"I'm not very good," he said.

"I've watched you with a bicycle," said Poppy. "I'm braced."

He was not good. He was, in fact, a very serious and rather stiff dancer, with a way of looking down at his feet. But he held her with great care, as if she might break. After a while she put her head against his shoulder, and she felt him let out a breath, long and slow, and loosen.

"Can I tell you something?" he said into her hair.

"Always."

"I asked Samir to do something. Yesterday. He's very good. It took him four minutes." His voice was low. "The all-hands chat. Lumen All Hands. I've had it renamed. From Monday it'll be called Right Chat, Right Person."

She lifted her head. "Theo."

"I know it's silly. I know it's the sort of thing that I'm supposed to put to the board. But I thought—" He stopped. He was looking at her with the steady, naked, serious look that had undone her in a stairwell. "You sent a message to the wrong place, one night in October, and it was the best mistake anyone has ever made at that company. I want it to be a place where people can send things to the right person. Where nothing's a mistake. And I want you to know something." He took a breath. "Whatever you send me, I'll read it. Whatever it is. Always. At any hour. I'll always, always read it."

It was a very small promise. It was a promise about a phone. She would think about it, afterwards, a great many times.

"I know you will," said Poppy, and put her head down again, and the band played on, and the snow came down through the lights of the marquee in slow white spirals, like something falling out of a dream.

---

She went outside at twenty to one.

It wasn't a decision. She was too warm. Her feet hurt. The party had thinned into that loose, golden, drowsy part of the night when the band has stopped and a man with a banjo is still playing in a corner, and somebody has fallen asleep under a table. She slipped out through the flap at the back of the tent and stood in the dark with her arms round herself, breathing the cold.

The snow had stopped. The sky had cleared, and the stars were out above the black beeches, sharp as pinpoints. The lawn lay white and perfectly smooth, trampled only by the line of the gardeners' braziers, which still glowed at intervals like little red eyes. She walked slowly along the side of the marquee in her ruined shoes, with the felt hat pushed to the back of her head.

He was at the far end, in the shadow of the stable arch. She almost didn't see him. He was standing with his back to the wall in his shirtsleeves, his coat over his arm, with a telephone to his ear, and the light from the stable lamp fell down on him, yellow, across the snow. His breath smoked.

She stopped, because she could not help it, and she heard.

"—No. I understand. It's the thirty-first. Exclusivity until the thirty-first. You have my word." A pause. His voice was low and exact, a voice she had not heard before, the one he must use in boardrooms. "Not before the board. Yes. I told Hugh the same. — I know what's at stake, Dominic. I'm very well aware what's at stake."

A long silence. He bent his head. He put the heel of his hand to his eye.

"Goodnight," said Theo.

He lowered the phone. He stood a moment longer, looking at nothing, at the stars, with the particular expression of a man who has just put something heavy down and knows he will have to pick it up again in the morning. Then he pushed himself off the wall, and turned, and walked back along the far side of the tent toward the light, and did not see her at all.

Poppy stood in the dark.

She was aware of a great many things. The cold. The faint thin music, far away. The wetness of the snow in her shoes. A small gold fleck of ash from a brazier, lit on her sleeve and going out. She was aware that it was twenty to one in the morning, and that the man she loved had a secret, and that she had known it, in some part of herself, since the thirtieth of January.

She was aware, above all, that he had told her only a few hours ago that he would always, always read whatever she sent.

It had not occurred to her until that moment that she hadn't asked what she should send.

She went back through the flap and along the side of the marquee and into the grand, cold, marble-floored cloakroom of Larkhill House, where the coats hung in long dark rows and a single lamp burned over the visitors' book. She sat on a bench. She took the new black notebook out of her handbag, the one her mother had given her, and the stub of a pencil that had been left in the visitors' book on a string. She turned to the first page. 12 March. Nothing yet. I hope it stays that way.

She wrote underneath it, in her small neat hand, slowly, because her fingers were stiff:

3 April. 12:40 a.m. T on phone in the snow. "Exclusivity until the thirty-first. You have my word. Not before the board." Didn't tell me.

She looked at it for a long time. The ink, she thought, was slippery. The pencil was not.

Then she put the book away, and took off the ugly hat, and went back to the party, and danced with Winston, and kissed the bride, and smiled until her face ached. It was, she thought, in the small hours, as the snow began again outside, the best mistake she had ever made.

She had no idea yet that it wasn't finished.