No Room at the Little Cornish Inn by Nancy Barone

Author:Nancy Barone [Barone, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838938048
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2020-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

*

After lunch, with the pretext that I’m looking pale and need some fresh air, Mitchell drags me outside to the huge field north of the inn where he and Danny are making a snowman with last night’s freak snowstorm. A snowman. Mitchell, the official Grinch who hates Christmas, has taken it upon himself to play with my son. Whereas Danny’s own dad has buggered off, presumably disappeared off the face of the earth. I sniff, pretending my eyes are stung by the cold. How can I not be touched by this? It’s much more than we’ve ever had. Immensely more than we ever expected from a stranger whose life I was sent to destroy.

Although everything around us is covered in white, the sky is a clear blue and the sun is shining once again. There is no trace of pollution, nor litter, nor tyre-marked snowbanks. The grit doesn’t settle on the crisp top layer of snow, turning everything to a faded grey like in the city where black and white means mostly black. Here, it’s all quiet, pure and clean.

So, like one of Danny’s playmates (I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow my inner child), I hunker down next to them and start packing the snow around the base to stabilise the legless, round-tummied character slowly taking shape. Mitchell and Danny are mirror images of red-cheeked, happy concentration, exhaling the cold air that seems to act like laughing gas on us. I must be losing it. Last night I was desperate, and now I have no idea how I feel. All I want to do is forget. And laugh, like I haven’t done in years. And out here, in the cold, with Mitchell and Danny, there’s no time for thinking. Just… being.

It’s been a long time since Danny and I have had this kind of quality time, out in the open. I sit back on my haunches and take in the scenery. Above us, the trees are bare, glistening happily in the crystal-like snow bathed in the feeble sunlight. God, I wish these fairy-tale moments could last forever. Expand until they take a proper place in time and our memories, and not just fleeting flashes that are gone before I can frame them like little pictures in my heart. Which I can’t. But I can at least take photos of this memorable, wonderful moment in our lives. One that, I just know, Danny will remember forever.

Just looking at him, rolling and patting snow with his little hands in the shadow of such a great man like Mitchell Fitzpatrick, makes me wish I could retrieve and flesh out these pictures and bring them to life on a crappy day at work and say to Danny, Remember when we were in Cornwall? You were about to turn eight, and it snowed? And we were happy. I wish that I could offer my little man more than just the Remember Whens.

I know Danny is easily content with the simple life I can barely afford

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