Too Cold For Snow

reckoned they’d cross bred it with a cassowary. Bee offered to help him carry it to his car. As they struggled through the doors of the church hall he noticed her green eyes again and surveyed her extraordinary physiognomy, and the faintly Japanese way she’d applied mascara.  
    He couldn’t remember how she’d invited herself back, a ruse about teaching him to baste the bird, but when they got to the house she proffered a half bottle of Italian red from her handbag, saying she’s squirreled it away for special occasions.  
    She was all adventure. That night she offered to dress up as a nurse, but Jerry had too many associations connected to his mother’s time in hospital: cardboard urine trays, the snap of surgical gloves going on. But she stayed nevertheless, and it was the first time in his life that he greeted the dawn with a wide-awake woman at his side, and one rolling a post-coital spliff at that. He needed his post-coital asthma inhaler. On the marshes, roosting wigeon sent out the occasional whistling cry, nervous of foxes and falcons.  
    During the next few weeks he felt he was on a sexual wurlitzer and he really was in fear for his heart. After all, his grandfather had suffered from a dodgy ticker. And he worried about his mother turning up unannounced, to find Bella performing a come-on in shrink-wrap latex, or that outfit with the leather straps.  
    The days tested his patience, with time slowed down so that the afternoons unwound before him like pizza dough. He hated the waiting game, but Bee insisted that they should keep some sort of distance, even though she admitted that she really delighted in her time with him and stressed the appeal wasn’t just the pneumatic sex. She’d sent him a garland of gardenias to thank him for the garlic chicken he’d made for her the previous Saturday. They had arranged a new adventure for the next weekend. From bed to the sea-bed, as he cryptically put it.  
    ‘There is nothing – I repeat nothing – that can compare with being out in the bay at night.’  
    Jerry was lowering the sea kayak into the water, as tiny foamy waves lapped at his boots. ‘You can, well, commune with nature. Is that life jacket comfortable or do you need me to loosen the strap?’  
    Bee thought of other dates she’d had with men and none compared with this moment – the fullness of the moon lighting up glistening sandbanks and this muscular man with the unusual name holding the kayak steady as she ventured in. She hadn’t told him she couldn’t swim as he made her feel as if she could do anything. As she sat down he sealed her in the sleek craft with a rubber coverlet and then got in himself. He took out the oars and soon he had struck up a purposeful rhythm and was taking them out towards the hump of land beyond which lay Rhossili and the Worm’s Head.  
    On the surface of the water there was an unexpected phosphorescence but he explained that it was actually quite common. It was just that very few people ever ventured out to sea at night, other than some stalwart mackerel fishermen. He chatted away, pointing out items of interest, although most of the features on land were really only outlines in different shades of black. From time to time she lost what he was saying because of the wind and when that really seemed to be picking up she asked him whether it was time they turned back. He assented, realising much too late that the sea was choppier now and he cursed himself for being so besotted by this woman that he forgot the rules of basic safety.  
    Bee kept mum and tried to enjoy the moment and live in it. Jerry had found a strong rhythm now and was taking them away from choppy waves to a patch of millpond stillness, where he said you could hear pirates from a long sunk galleon. And indeed, as they scythed through water like icing glass there was an inexplicable sound, unearthly and fit to take one’s breath away. And then he saw what it was and whispered to her, he whispered to her with all the amazement of a child finding its voice for the very first time.  
    ‘It’s a whale!’  
    She saw the drifting hulk and then heard an ethereal song, which must be able to carry to the end of the sky, so perfect was its register. And then she saw the smaller shape in the water, breaching almost silkily and moving close in to its mother. And in a tiny gasp, it started to answer her song, with a little plaintive cry of its own. It was a moment of all magic, a complete