Too Cold For Snow

everywhere, desperately shouting for attention despite his ruptured larynx. Mumph! Mumph! He’d cried as he ran up the lane and out towards the old milking parlour. Then he found the dogs, yapping around the stonework.
    What is love? What is longing? Love is an old man with two broken tibias lying in a well where, in spring, old people would come to tie ribbons on the twigs surrounding it; visual echoes of a pagan past. And him a deacon and all. And in love, too, for five whole days in a life.

Estuarine
     
     
    Jerry Lee lit a cigarette and surveyed the river as it cut across the marsh. A magnesium sky brightened up an expanse of reens and ditches, edging the layers of cloud with halos of lemon. He was happy and excited as his love was on her way.  
    As he dragged in the tobacco smoke, a green sandpiper rose from a pool full of silage, its bottle-green back vividly radiant against the whiteness of its tail. Wheeooo! Wheeooo! It was like the briefest snatch of a Vaughan Williams melody.  
    His smoke mixed with the vista. Hereabouts, the houses are classic Dutch gables, built by hydrologists and engineers with names such as Cuyp and Hooek, who came here in gangs two hundred years ago to canalise and drain all three estuaries. They connected the grips, the smallest gullies, with the field ditches which then ran into the reens and finally into the rivers. The houses and reclaimed land were protected from the seeping wateriness of the estuary by the Bank O’ Lords, an earth embankment that runs dead straight, north to south, from the main road to the dank forestry plantations set on the dunes.  
    In the nearest of the three houses to the main road, in the lee of the bank, Jerry Lee is getting ready for a date. He had arranged for Bella to come to see him, a woman his mother described as ‘that Jezebel from Burry Port’ and that’s when she’s feeling kindly. At other times, she’d slurred her dismissively as the ‘prostitute’, or, archaically, as that ‘fallen woman’, which sounds more comical than lacerating, especially in his mother’s budgie voice. Why Jezebel? Because Bella is an unmarried mother and his mother has a sense of moral outrage powered by Old Testament lightning.  
    Bella, or Bee comes to see him every Friday and she is all he can think about during all the days in between. Her teasing presence worries him like a cat playing with a captured sparrow. The marshmallow skin. The extraordinary, high cheekbones. The tide wrack aroma of her intimacy.  
    Jerry Lee’s mother, of course, stays well away at weekends. She loves her son. At home she suppurates with rage and spite, spluttering like soup on a hot ring.  
    Bella is due at half seven. At six o’clock Jerry is still lying on the bed recovering from his labours. He had picked an acre of root vegetables by hand and chopped a formidable pile of wood. He’d been tempted to use the chainsaw to save time but as his mother often joked, the exercise makes you limber. He also repaired three lengths of wire around the horse paddock.  
    He wanted to take a hot bath, to allow the salts to seep into his weary muscles, but he didn’t have the energy to get up. Jerry stared at the repeated motif on the wallpaper above his head. It was a very British trio: a Guardsman in red tunic with a bearskin on his head next to a smiling Pickwickian figure astride a penny farthing and a young chimney sweep with huge teeth. The sort of wallpaper his parents would have actually spent a good deal of time shopping for. They were effortlessly eccentric. His father, Gren, designed fireworks and had adapted one homemade rocket so successfully that it was still in use as a safety flare by the coastguard service. He was the one who had insisted that his son be named after Jerry Lee Lewis, the hellfire rock ’n’ roller who would sometimes set his piano on fire. His dad loved the guy, his flamboyance and heavy-handed playing style. Not that Gren listened to very much modern music. But he’d loved Jerry’s flair.  
    His mother was famous, at least within the tight, concentric ring of her poetry readers, for having adapted the keys of her typewriter, so that when she typed, the words would have little tails and curlicues. A manuscript of her poetry looked like pressed ferns. Her publishers had to copy her volumes by lithograph rather than have them typeset. The words were beautiful to look at and to understand.  
    Jerry read a few pages of one of the books next to