The snow began at four, while the light was still there to see it by, and by half past the cutting was white and the rails were two dark lines going away into it and then not going anywhere at all.

Ivy watched it from the signal box. The box was on the up side of the line, a mile from the village, a tall wooden room on a brick base with windows all round and thirty-two levers in a row along the front of it, red and black and yellow and blue, each one polished pale at the top by a century of hands. She had been the signaller there for seven years. Before her it had been a man called Dunning for thirty, and before him somebody whose name was on a brass plate that nobody could read any more. The box had a stove and a kettle and a clock and a train register and a bell, and it did not have much else, and it did not need much else.

She wrote in the register. Four o’clock. Snow commenced. Heavy.

The four-fifteen came through on time, which was the last time anything would that day. She heard it belled through from the box down the line, two beats and a pause, and answered, and pulled off the signals for it, and stood at the window and watched it come, a two-carriage train with its lights on already and its windows fogged, going slowly, going carefully, snow streaming off the roof. The driver lifted a hand. She lifted hers. Then it was past and into the white, and she put the signals back, and belled it on, and wrote the time.

After that, nothing.

The snow came on. It came across the cutting in long slow slants and sat on the rails and on the ballast and on the point rodding and on the arms of the signals, until the whole scene was one thing, white, with the box in the middle of it and the light in the box the only colour for a mile.

At five the phone rang. It was Control, a woman with a Yorkshire voice that Ivy liked, saying the five-forty was cancelled and the seven-ten was cancelled and probably everything was cancelled, and could Ivy stay put till they rang again, because the relief could not get up the lane and nor could anyone else.

“I can stay put,” said Ivy.

“You’ve a stove?”

“I’ve a stove.”

“Then you’re better off than me, love,” said Control, and rang off.

Ivy put more coal on. The stove was a small black thing in the corner with a chimney that went up through the roof, and when it was going properly it made the box the warmest room in the county, and she had it going properly. The kettle sat on it and did its slow thinking. The clock ticked. The levers stood in their row with their little brass plates and did nothing, because nothing was coming, and the snow filled the windows one at a time, from the bottom up.

She was not worried. It was a signal box. It had stood there a hundred and twelve years and it had seen more snow than this.

At ten to six there was a knock at the bottom of the stairs.

She knew it was Frank before she had the door open, because nobody else knocked at a signal box, and because nobody else would have walked a mile up a lane in a foot of snow to do it. He came up the stairs stamping and shaking, with snow on his hat and snow on his shoulders and his coat done up wrong, and a bag over his shoulder, and his face pink.

“Thought you might want your tea,” he said.

“You walked.”

“Couldn’t get the car out of the drive.”

“Frank.”

“It’s a nice walk.”

She took his coat and hung it by the stove, where it began at once to steam, and took his hat and did the same, and put her hands on either side of his cold face for a second, which was not something either of them made anything of, and then she put the kettle back on, because that was what you did when somebody had walked a mile in the snow to bring you your tea.

In the bag there was a flask of soup, and bread, and two apples, and the end of a fruit cake, and a blanket, folded small, and a paperback he was halfway through, and a pack of cards.

“You’re planning to stop, then,” she said.

“I’m planning to see what happens.”

The soup was leek and potato and he had made it that afternoon, and they ate it out of the flask cup and the box’s own chipped mug, sitting on the two stools by the stove with their knees nearly touching, and it was very good, and Ivy said so, and Frank said it was only soup, and she said that was what made it good.

Outside, the snow kept on.

The box was built for looking out of, and there was a great deal to look at, even now, even with nothing coming. The signals stood in the cutting like patient men with their arms held out, each with a lamp on it, red on the near side, and the red lamps were the only things in the whole white world that were not white, and the snow drifted through the light of them and went pink for a moment and then went on. A rabbit came out from under the platform edge, considered the situation, and went back. The telegraph wires along the top of the cutting had a line of snow along each one, like a row of shelves.

“Do you still have to do anything?” said Frank.

“Wait for the phone.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Sounds like my sort of job.”

She gave him the register to look at, because he liked looking at the register. Every train that had ever passed the box was in there, or in one of the ones like it stacked in the cupboard going back and back, times and numbers and the weather in a neat column, in her hand and Dunning’s hand and the hands of people whose names were gone. Frank turned the pages slowly. Four o’clock. Snow commenced. Heavy.

“You’ve lovely writing,” he said.

“It’s a register.”

“Still.”

They played cards. It was a game they had been playing for years and had long since stopped keeping score of, and Frank cheated at it, mildly, and Ivy let him, mildly, and the stove ticked and the clock ticked and the light in the windows went blue and then went dark, and the box became what it always became at night, a lit room in the middle of nowhere, with its own small weather and nothing outside but the cold and the quiet.

At eight the phone rang. Control. The line was closed for the night. Nobody would move till the plough had been through, and the plough would not come till first light. Was Ivy all right up there?

Ivy looked at Frank, who was putting coal on the stove in his socks.

“I’m all right up here,” she said.

“Someone with you?”

“My husband walked up.”

“In this?”

“In this.”

“Well,” said Control, after a moment, “you keep hold of that one,” and rang off.

Ivy wrote it in the register. Eight o’clock. Line closed. Stove lit. Husband present. Then she looked at the last two words for a moment, and let them stand.

They made up the night in the box the way you make up a night anywhere, with what you have. Frank spread the blanket over the two stools pushed together, which was not a bed, and folded his coat for a pillow, which was not a pillow. Ivy had the signaller’s chair, which was old and wooden and tipped back, and she had sat in it seven years and knew every way it would go. She turned the main light off and left the small lamp over the desk, so the room was gold in one corner and the rest of it was the snow-light coming in at the windows, faint and blue and even, the way snow-light is.

Frank read his paperback for a bit. Ivy watched the cutting.

There was nothing to watch, and she watched it anyway, because that was the job, and because it was beautiful. The signals with their red lamps. The wires with their shelves of snow. The two rails going away into the dark, dark themselves, the only dark lines in a white world, going to the next box and the next and the next, all the way to places with lights and stations and people asleep in houses, all of them held together by the wire and the bell and rooms like this one, with somebody awake in them.

“You’re not sleeping,” said Frank, from the stools.

“I will.”

“You’re watching it.”

“I am.”

He put the book down and came and stood beside the chair and looked out with her. His hand on the back of her neck, warm from the stove. Neither of them said anything for a while.

The snow was thinner now. You could see it going past the lamps in single flakes, taking their time, as if the sky were nearly done and was letting the last ones down gently. Beyond the cutting, on the far side, there was a hedge and then a field and then the sky, and the sky was beginning, very faintly, to have stars in it.

“It’s stopping,” said Ivy.

“Good.”

“Plough will be through by six.”

“Then we’ve till six.”

He went back to his stools. She heard him settle, the coat under his head, the blanket pulled up, the small sigh a person gives when they have decided to be comfortable somewhere they are not.

“Ivy,” he said.

“What.”

“Lovely walk, that.”

“Go to sleep, Frank.”

He went to sleep. He always could. She sat on in the chair with the lamp gold in the corner and the stove ticking down and the thirty-two levers standing in their row in the half-dark with their brass plates catching the last of the light, red and black and yellow and blue, each of them waiting, none of them needed.

The clock said eleven. Then it said midnight.

Somewhere down the line, miles off, another box like this one had its own lamp on, and somebody in it, and between them the rails ran white and empty and safe under the snow, and would stay that way till morning.

Ivy tipped the chair back. The register lay open on the desk. Stove lit. Husband present.

The last flake came down past the red lamp, and went pink, and went on.

And the box stood in the cutting with its light on, keeping watch over nothing, all night, in the snow.