Stitch in Snow

I had to trace back the progress of this sweater. 'I did start the front on the plane from Philadelphia. Were you on the Pittsburgh flight?'

He nodded, as pleased as I was with the recognition. He leaned forward then, extending his hand. 'I'll have to confess: we have never been formally introduced. We seem to have had the same itinerary.'

With relief I shook his hand, my memory now dredging up a tall, faintly familiar man going through the Milwaukee security check just ahead of me.

'I don't think you saw me out of Philadelphia. You were, as usual, knitting. I had the aisle seat in front of you. You were ahead of me going through the security arch in Chicago. Remember? They held you up for the knitting needles.'

'Yes, but what they expected me to be smuggling along with my knitting, I can't guess. Explosives don't come…' and I held up my hands a needle-length apart.

'You don't look the type to be knitting either,' he said unexpectedly. 'Sweetening up the husband with a hand-knit?'

'No husband.'

'Boyfriend?'

'At my age? Unlikely!'

He gave me a mock-wicked smirk. 'No lover?'

I laughed at his incorrigibility. 'No, I do it for commercial reasons only. Knitting, I mean.' At my hurried qualifier, for he had a devilish quick mind and a quicker gleam of humour, he laughed again. Someone trying to nap across the aisle from us grumbled and irritably shifted position.

'No, I knit,' I said in a firm no-nonsense tone, 'because I enjoy working with my hands. I've a friend who runs a small boutique in Enniskerry. She buys anything I'll make for her. Knitting's like a tranquilliser. The RAF pilots were encouraged to knit argyle socks during the War, you know, to relax.'

'I didn't know.' He wasn't teasing me. His attention was focused on my hands because I'd picked up all the dropped stitches and progressed further in the pattern. 'How do you remember when to switch?'

I glanced down at the row. 'The pattern has a simple progression in each stitch.'

'Do you always work the same pattern?'

This was a rather absurd conversation for two intelligent people to be having, when one of them is a man, but it would pass the time in a snowbound airport lounge.

'Rarely. That's one of the joys of knitting Arran: the combinations are infinite.'

I was cabling just then, knitting into the back to twist which isn't as difficult as it looks.

'You must have eyes in your fingers,' he said with exasperation. 'What's this pattern?'

'Lobster claw. This is the Tree of Life: that zigzag is sort of the ups and downs of marriage…' The subtle alteration of his mouth and the slight narrowing of his eyes suggested to me that his marriage was probably in stress just then. 'The real Arran sweater tells a tale: in the west country each family had a distinctive pattern. One way to identify drowned fishermen was by the sweater pattern.'

'Grisly!' He affected a shudder.

I agreed. 'Some patterns are for good luck, too.'

'How many of them were dragged up from the deep six?'

I shrugged and kept on working the pattern, glancing up at the windows against which the snow kept beating as the wind lashed and swirled outside. We'd been grounded for close to two hours and the earlier hysteria of the stranded passengers had now been replaced with resignation. I was in no bind - as yet - because my next lecture date, in Portland, Oregon, was three days away. I had planned to check into the motel in Vancouver, Washington and just rest up because I'd be pretty pushed by the engagements on the West Coast until Easter weekend.

I could just as well lounge around Denver as Vancouver. And it was reasonably obvious that I'd be staying at least overnight in Denver. Since the airlines would have to foot the hotel bill, I couldn't object.

My fellow-traveller and I sat in companionable silence while I worked nine rows, finishing that side of the neck. Then he caught my hand as I turned the sweater to start the right side. I spread the work out and he grinned as he traced the various patterns.

'No mistakes,' he said, teasing me with a mock condescending tone.

'I do make 'em,'

'How do you hide 'em?'

'I don't as a rule. I rip out the work…'

He looked dismayed.

'Oh, once in a while, like in this moss stitch, an irregularity won' t be too noticeable. And sometimes I catch the error in the next row and just drop and redo that stitch…'

The p.a. system gave a high-hum burp and the disembodied voice announced with insincere regret the cancellation of all flights. Would on-going passengers please come to the accommodation desks of their respective airlines?

'I'd expected that,' he said.' Were you going on?'

'Yes, but I've a three-day leeway which I'd intended to take in Portland!'

'With friends?'

'No. I just wanted to be by myself for a bit. Too much talk and rich food, too many parties and too many drinks.'

'Too many faces you can't remember names for?' His eyes twinkled.

'That's unfair. We never were introduced. Which reminds me, I still don't have your name?'

He chuckled, a dirty low-down chuckle. 'I didn't give it!' And he knew perfectly well he hadn't.

I began to get irritated then. After all, he had initiated the conversation, I hadn't.

'Call me Dan…'

'Dan, Dan, the Mystery Man?' I said, laughing to cover my start of surprise. He couldn't know my name: I didn't even have initials on my attache case.

'I don' t know your name.'

'True, you don't, 'and grinned at him, hesitating as he had done but with an honest reason. If I told him my first name, he might well think I was putting him on. I gave myself a mental kick in the pants. One of the fringe liabilities of these lecture tours is that you can acquire an inflated and unreal opinion of yourself, 'fame' and 'public'. Granted my books for children are well known, and considering his twinge at the marriage zig-zag, he might have children who read my books. I was so fed up with being a Visiting Celebrity that I wanted to preserve my anonymity. I gave him my middle name. 'I'm Jane.'

'Jane? Plain Jane? Me Tarzan, you Jane…' He screwed up his face in comic rejection of both cliches. 'No, you're not plain Jane, or Tarzan Jane. I don't even believe you are a Jane. You don't look the type. I'll call you Jenny! On your feet, Jenny.'

I swung my wool Clodagh cloak to my shoulders with a practiced twist of the wrist which he admired with a grin, 'Attache case, yes: knitting bag, no. And neither really go with that cloak… shopping basket more like, little green Riding Hood.'

'You fail to see the subterfuge,' I told him, mock haughty. 'The cloak hides the knitting bag so no one knows my vice.'

'Since when are knitting bags subversive?'

'Since women's lib,' I said in a stage whisper, glancing about as if fearful of being overheard.

'Ah, so!'

As we made our way towards the United Airlines desk, he scowled at the blizzard outside.

'I hope we make it to the hotel,' he said.

'Is it far?'

'Fortunately no, but I'd had half a mind to try to get into town. I've friends here and… someone I want to see…' He shrugged, a combination of irritation,' frustration and worry, and then gave me a smile. 'Best laid plans, huh?'

We joined the line of stranded passengers, most of whom were by now resigned. One grandmotherly type was hand-wringing over progeny waiting for her in Portland, but the clerk soothed her by saying that the airlines would phone her son and explain the case: in the meantime, here was a voucher for the hotel and she'd be called as soon as there was any change in the weather. At the moment the Rockies were in the thrall of a massive cold front and blizzard conditions were covering the north western States.

The man directly in front of me was not so cooperative. In fact I was embarrassed by the harangue he was giving the girl about the thousands of dollars of commissions he was losing, and modern aircraft ought to be safe the way the government was throwing money and his tax dollars into research.