Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare Page A

steered him by the hand to a three-storey building covered in green tiles of which many were cracked or missing.
    â€œAll you have to do is raise your eyes and you’ll see traces from all over the world, but no-one looks up. They look down and walk along – just like you,” and her face was no longer grave but had a mocking smile.
    â€œYou should be on commission for the city.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    â€œWell, you seem to know a lot.”
    â€œAh, this is what I want to show you,” ignoring him.
    It was the entrance to a once grand house, its facade now layered with the same coloured filth – the grey of Rodney’s anchovy paste – as the buildings on either side. Over the doorway was the ceramic of a man naked save for a fur cape. In different panels the figure had on a fur hat, fur boots, a fur stole, a pair of gloves and a muff.
    â€œYou like fur, don’t you?”
    â€œOh, yes. Muffs are my favourite.”
    She couldn’t have been aware of what connotations the word might have for him. Nor did she fear his judgment. A moment before she had seemed regretful, solemn, officious. Now she had the confidence of the old city. He felt drawn to her in a way he never had with Anita.
    â€œMy grandfather was a furrier,” and gestured at the neglected, begrimed door. “He began here.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. “Look!” Under the dull grey paint, a red scratch-mark. She licked a finger and rubbed at the mark, her spittle deepening the colour. “It’s the original porphyry. They try to copy this by painting the windows red, but it doesn’t work.” Even this trivial gesture moved him.
    â€œBy the way, my name is Peter Hithersay.”
    â€œI am boring you.” She began to button her coat.
    â€œAnd you?”
    â€œI have to go,” she decided.
    â€œYou mean, I don’t get to know your name?”
    She smiled her mocking smile. “Why should you want to know, you who go away in a day or two?”
    â€œAll right, all right,” he said. “Then, what does your mother call you?”
    Her mouth hung open and her face had a look of uncertainty.
    â€œMy mother’s dead. My grandmother calls me Snjólaug.”
    â€œSnowleg?”
    She corrected his pronunciation. “Snjólaug. It’s Icelandic.”
    He uttered the name slowly as if it was an object in his mouth. It still sounded like Snowleg.
    â€œWhy does she call you that?” searching for a way to delay her.
    â€œYou’re right. It’s not interesting.”
    He couldn’t believe he was asking, but he knew he must. In the same voice that he adopted when urging his grandfather to speak, he said: “No, please. I’d like to hear. Why are you called Snowleg?”
    The name, she told Peter, had belonged to a Canadian woman, a friend of her grandfather. She had never met her grandfather – he had died in the Second World War – but her grandmother, with whom she lived during the week, had spoken of him incessantly. As a child she believed she only had to rub the glass eyes of the stuffed muskrat that had been his prized possession and he would materialise before her, soft-voiced and bent and with a cigar roaming under his nut-brown hat.
    â€œI knew him only as a photograph.” From the cherry-wood table beside her grandmother’s bed, he looked back at her through the veil of tobacco smoke in the way she imagined he examined his pelts, with the gaze of someone not afraid to blow the fur apart and scrutinise the leather and mutter aloud: “Dyed skin!”
    As a young man he had worked at 71 Brühl for a Jew from Brody, but he served his most valuable apprenticeship during two years he spent in Canada. In 1925, with the low price of squirrel in Leipzig, a limited quantity of rats were shipped from Rainy Lake on a gas-schooner. “There was a berth vacant on the return