Winter: A Novel - Hardcover

ALI SMITH was born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962 and lives in Cambridge, England. She is the author of Autumn, How to be both, There but for the, Artful, Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and other stories, The Whole Story and other stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and other stories. Hotel World and The Accidental were both short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

On a late summer day in 1981 two young women are standing outside a typical ironmonger’s on the high street of a southern English town. There is a sign above the door in the shape of a door key, on it the words KEYS CUT. There’ll be a high smell of creosote, oil, paraffin, lawn treatment stuff. There’ll be brushheads with handles, brushheads without handles, handles by themselves, for sale. What else? Rakes, spades, forks, a garden roller, a wall of stepladders, a tin bath full of bags of compost. Calor gas bottles, saucepans, frying pans, mopheads, charcoal, folding stools made of wood, a plastic bucket of plungers, stacked packs of sandpaper, sacks of sand in a wheelbarrow, metal doormats, axes, hammers, a camping stove or two, hessian carpet mats, stuff for curtains, stuff for curtain rails, stuff for screwing curtain rails to walls and pelmets, pliers, screwdrivers, bulbs, lamps, pails, pegs, laundry baskets. Saws, of all sizes. EVERYTHING FOR THE HOME.
 
But it’s the flowers, lobelia, alyssum, and the racks of the bright coloured seed packets the women will remember most when they talk about it afterwards.
 
They say hello to the man behind the counter. They stand by the rolls of chains of different widths. They compare the price per yard. They calculate. One of them pulls a length of slim chain; it unrolls and clinks against itself, and the other stands in front of her pretending to look at something else while she passes the chain around her hips and measures it against herself.
 
They look at each other and shrug. They’ve no idea how long or short.
 
So they check how much money they’ve got. Under £10. They consider padlocks. They’ll need to buy four. If they buy the smaller cheaper type of padlock it’ll leave enough money for roughly three yards of it.
 
The ironmonger cuts the lengths for them. They pay him. The bell above the door will have clanged behind them. They’ll have stepped back out into the town in its long English shadows, its summer languor.
 
Nobody looks at them. Nobody on the sleepy sunny street even gives them a second glance. They stand on the kerb. This town’s high street seems unusually wide now. Was it this wide before they went into the shop, and they just didn’t notice?
 
They don’t dare to laugh till they’re out of the town and back on the road walking the miles towards the others, and then they do. Then they laugh like anything.
 
Imagine them arm-in-arm in the warmth, one swinging the bag jangling the lengths of chain in it and singing to make the other laugh, jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way, the other with the padlocks complete with their miniature keys in her pockets, and the grasses in the verges on both sides of the road they’re on summer-yellow and shot through with the weeds, the wildflowers.