Snow Geese: A Story of Home - William Fiennes - Hardcover - 1ST US

Chapter 1 The Snow Goose We had no idea the hotel would be the venue for a ladies' professional golf tournament. Each morning, before breakfast, competitors gathered at the practice tees to loosen up their swings. The women wore bright polo shirts, baggy tartan and gingham shorts, white socks, and neat cleated shoes that clacked on the paved walkways of the country club. Their hair was furled in chignons that poked through openings at the rear of baseball caps; their sleek, tanned calves resembled fresh tench attached to the backs of their shins. Caddies stood beside hefty leather golf bags at the edge of the teeing ground, and the women drew clubs from the bags with the nonchalance of archers. Soon, rinsed golf balls were flying out from the tees, soaring high above the lollipop signs that marked each fifty yards down the fairway. In addition to the golf course, heated swimming pool, and two tennis courts, hotel guests had at their disposal a peach-walled library, lit by standard lamps. White lace antimacassars lent fussy distinction to the dark red sofa and matching armchairs. Between the bookcases, in a simple gilt-wood frame, a colour print showed a suspension bridge, rigged like a harp, with staunch arched piers and high support towers lifting the curve of the main cables. Gold-tooled green and brown leatherbound books occupied the shelves alongside more modest clothbound volumes, the dye faded on their spines where light had reached it. The books were not for reading. Their purpose was to impart the atmosphere of an imperial-era country house. What the designer wished to say was, This is a place to which gentlemen may retire with cigars. The shelves held arcane titles in strange conjunctions: an Anglo-Burmese dictionary next to a set of Sully's memoirs; G. Maranon's La Evolucion de la Sexualidad e los Estados Intersexuales alongside Praeger's Wagner as I Knew Him; Carl Stormer's De L'Espace a L'Atome between J. R. Partington's Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students and the second volume of Charles Mills's History of Chivalry. An entire shelf was devoted to editions of the Dublin Review from the 1860s, containing such essays as "Father de Hummelauer and the Hexateuch," "Maritime Canals," "The Benedictines in Western Australia," and "Shakespeare as an Economist." One morning, after watching the golfers at the practice tees, I found a familiar book, a thin fawn volume almost invisible among the antique tomes. When I pulled The Snow Goose from the shelf, the books either side of it leaned together like hands in prayer. I settled back into an armchair and began to read, remembering how I had first heard this story, aged ten or eleven, in a classroom with high windows, sitting at an old-fashioned sloping desk with a groove along the top of the slope for pens and pencils to rest in, initials and odd glyphs gouged deep in the wood grain. Our teacher, Mr. Faulkner, was a tall man with scant hair, flat red cheeks, and teeth pitched at eccentric angles. He wore silk paisley neckerchiefs and cardigans darned with wrong-coloured wools, and he kept his sunglasses on indoors for genuine optometric reasons. He was approaching retirement and liked to finish term with a story. One of the stories he read us was Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose. I could feel, on the back of my head, the starched filigree imprint of the antimacassar. The library had no windows. Hotel staff wearing bold name badges walked briskly past the open door. I stopped noticing them. I imagined an Essex coastal marsh, an abandoned lighthouse at a river mouth, and a dark-bearded hunchback named Rhayader, a painter of landscapes and wildlife, his arm "thin and bent at the wrist like the claw of a bird." Fifteen years had passed since I'd listened to Mr. Faulkner reading this story,Fiennes, William is the author of 'Snow Geese: A Story of Home - William Fiennes - Hardcover - 1ST US' with ISBN 9780375507298 and ISBN 0375507299.