The snow is still coming down, but the daylight is waning and the children are bad-tempered with inactivity, so Sam wraps them up and sends them to play in the garden. In blessed silence she finishes the washing-up from lunch and breakfast, and eats a couple squares from her precious private store of chocolate, then goes to peek through the curtains. Robin is on his back in a drift, pretending he's swimming, and Miranda is doggedly shoring up the base of a snowman. Sam lets the curtain fall, looks towards the closet where the broom and the carpet-sweeper wait for her, and then runs upstairs to change into trousers. She takes the biggest celluloid buttons from her button jar, and pulls her MTC cap from the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe.
They're both at her the minute she comes outside with Mummy, look, Mummy! and help me make the head, Mummy! She applauds Robin's snow angels and makes a little pile of snowballs for him to throw at the hedge to keep him busy while she helps Miranda lift the snowman's head into place. Lately he's liked nothing better than watching things go to bits when he kicks them, and if he destroys something of Miranda's it's even odds whether she'll cling to her four years' superiority and remain graciously unmoved, or fly into a fury.
Miranda makes a wide, glittering smile out of the buttons, and sets the MTC cap at a jaunty angle. Robin howls when snow creeps into the space between his mitten and his cuff. Sam admires and soothes and thinks she ought to have started the potatoes boiling before she came out. Perhaps she can go in first and not call the children until she has some cocoa made.
A snowball bursts on the side of the house. "Surprise attack!" Andrew shouts as he charges through the gate. He easily deflects Robin's snowball with his briefcase, then stops short when he sees Miranda's snowman. Robin crashes into his legs, but Andrew just sets a hand on his shoulder.
"Do you like it, Dad?" Miranda asks.
"Hold my case, please, son," he says to Robin, and gives him the briefcase. He pulls off his snow-caked gloves, tucks them under one arm, and then takes the MTC cap and runs a hand around the inner band. "Miranda, where'd you get this?"
'I brought it out with the buttons," Sam explains. "A snowman needs a hat, and I didn't want to get a good one wet."
Andrew's eyes go far away, and he fingers the brim. "A good one," he says, under his breath. "Sam. It's your uniform."
"It's not as if I'd been in the Forces." She shrugs.
"Isn't it?" He steps closer to tug off the woolly tam she's wearing, and then sets the cap in its place. "It is to me." His gaze should melt the snow around them; it leaves Sam breathless.
"Do you like it, Dad?" Miranda repeats.
"Oh! Yes, it's a very fine snowman, but I think…" He puts his own homburg where Sam's cap had been. "There! Now it's perfect."
"Andrew," Sam protests.
"It'll dry."
"You're getting snowed on," she points out, and indeed, the flakes are like stars in his dark hair. He grins and puts on her tam, pulling it down over his ears. "Andrew!" she says again, but she can't keep from laughing.