Red rose and banner tattoo on thigh

The pass shut on Tuesday, so I am writing this at a table in the Crowfoot Inn with eleven carters, a cattle buyer who snores like a saw, and a post girl who cries every time the wind changes its mind. Mrs Abernethy keeps the range going with peat her husband cut the summer before he died. At six she strikes the little brass triangle hung above the bar, and the whole room stops talking until the note has finished, as if it would be rude to speak over it.

It is a clockmaker's sign, Walter's own work. A circle sits in the middle of the triangle with a single hand pointing up at nothing, and she says he never got the mechanism to keep time, only to keep the sign swinging. Above the front door there is a painted banner reading Until the very end, and beneath it, in the window box, a red rose she grows in a jam jar because the frost keeps taking the bush. She has been watering it all week with warm kettle water, which is more devotion than I have shown anything since I left home.

Last night I asked her about the words. She laughed and said they were a bargain, not a promise, and that the very end had come early for Walter, on a frozen beck, with his coat still buttoned. Then she wound the clock inside the circle with a key from her apron, and the hand lurched forward a quarter turn. She cried a little and said that was enough for one winter.

The road is due to be cleared by Friday. Keep the kettle warm for me, and tell Dad I have finally learnt how to wait.

Ruth