A Place Called Winter (20 page)

While Petra hurried grim-faced to the farmhouse to change into something more feminine than her overalls, Paul turned to Harry and said, ‘Will you do me the honour?’

It took Harry a moment to understand him, and then, assuming he was joking, he just laughed and fetched them all drinks because the dusty journey had left him parched. When he returned from the bar, which had been set up at one side of the barn, he saw brother and sister dancing a waltz. They had no sooner finished than Petra was claimed for a polka by a short man who whirled her off as a boy might a beribboned tombola prize.

Paul found Harry and drank Petra’s drink as well as his own. ‘Thirsty,’ he explained. ‘You’ll have to rescue her or she’ll be worn out.’

The only woman not dancing was a white-haired matriarch, who had made someone bring her out a chair so she could preside without participating. There were even children dancing, pigtails flying as they concentrated on the serious matter of not being crushed by partners large as bears. And still, throughout the little gathering, men were dancing with men.

Paul saw him watching.

‘Strange sight,’ Harry said, feeling he must say something, and worrying lest his stifled excitement was coming out as a deep blush.

‘Well, it’s just numbers, if you think about it. If we all had to wait for a woman to partner us, there’d be a big crowd watching and very few dancers, and the poor women would be worn to a ravelling and would have to stay until dawn to work their way through everyone.’

The polka finished and a Dashing White Sergeant was announced – a sensible choice, since it paired each woman with two men. Petra hurried to their side, face flushed and eyes bright.

‘Rescue me,’ she hissed

‘Would you like a drink?’ Harry said. ‘Some fresh air? A jelly?’

‘I want to dance,’ she said. ‘With a couple of humans,’ and she took their hands and led them both out so they could join a set.

As they progressed around the crowded little dance floor, they met and danced with several all-male trios, each of whom gave a little cheer when they encountered Petra, as though celebrating her femininity, and Harry wondered how it must make her feel.

When the dance finished and they had all clapped one another, Paul was claimed by a stately young woman from church and Harry insisted Petra take a break for a drink. They stood to one side, watching Paul become hopelessly muddled in a reel.

‘It is hard,’ she admitted, ‘with so many male couples. Dresses give one a sort of signpost as to which shoulder to turn.’ In some remote communities, she had heard, where there were no women settlers at all yet, but where people could not forgo the pleasures of a dance, men who elected to dance as women would wear an apron or a knotted kerchief to facilitate tidy choreography.

As they watched, first one man, then another, both quite handsome, approached Petra to book her for the two next dances. She grinned at Harry. ‘I should have brought something to use as a dance card,’ she said.

‘And there was I thinking you regarded this as a grim duty to be got through.’

‘Oh but I love dancing.’

‘I thought you scorned romance and the marriage market.’

‘This is quite unromantic,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s good exercise and a great deal more amusing than baking muffins on a hot day. But yes, I suppose it’s pleasant to be needed.’

Her next partner was loitering, evidently anxious that Harry might be about to claim her. Harry took a turnaround in the dusk. For all the rusticity of the music and the even greater rusticity of the dancers’ feet thumping in the improvised ballroom, there was a kind of charm to the scene, with the lanterns and brightly coloured bunting rocking in the warm air sent up by the merrymakers. The big horizon, which could seem oppressive by day, took on a charm by night, and he had yet to cease marvelling at the wonder of prairie starlight, undiluted by the man-made glare of town.

For a while he shamelessly held himself outside, enjoying the scents and darkness, but then he startled an old man making his way back from relieving himself behind a hedge and returned to the party. Suddenly unable to find a familiar face, he was assailed by shyness. Had he not been there with others, he would have left. Yet more revellers had arrived – he had heard their horses on the track minutes earlier – and he would not be missed. But then he spotted Petra, dancing with the second of her suitors, and soon saw Paul, watching him in turn from across the space. Paul stepped back into the crowd then shortly appeared at his elbow, gently nudging Harry to let him know he was there.

‘She’s enjoying herself,’ Harry said.

Paul watched too for a while. ‘Oh, she’s hating every minute,’ he said. ‘A martyr to social duty and the tyranny of men, can’t you tell?’ He sipped his drink. ‘I’m so deeply in her debt that sometimes I . . .’ He let his sentence drift. Such a low thing could not be heard above the din of dancing, but Harry could see from the slow rise and fall of his shoulders that he had let out one of his ursine sighs.

‘You’re in her debt?’ he asked.

‘She gave up everything to come with me,’ Paul explained. ‘I wouldn’t have coped well without her. Well. I’d have managed . . .’

‘But without thriving.’

Paul smiled and nodded. The dance ended. Harry was just raising a hand to catch Petra’s attention when the first of her two recent partners claimed her for a second dance. Seeing her glance around for him, Harry bent his knees slightly so as to be hidden from view behind her brother’s bulk.

‘Ever the gentleman,’ Paul said.

Harry laughed. ‘Hardly. My father dealt in horseshit.’

The next dance started up. A slow waltz.

‘Come, sir,’ Paul said, attempting an English accent. ‘I will be denied no longer.’ And before Harry could resist, he seized his hands and tugged him on to the dance floor. There were so many couples, most of them male and rather drunk, many of them taller, that Harry knew he wasn’t conspicuous, but he felt as if there was a spotlight on them. ‘I hope you can dance backwards,’ Paul said. ‘Because I have to lead.’

‘Oh. I was often the girl at school,’ Harry blurted.

‘Indeed?’

‘I mean . . .’ But he couldn’t explain that he meant in long-ago dance classes at his first boarding school, and besides, Paul wasn’t interested. Harry stifled the urge to chat or laugh, in his nerves, and let Paul steer him in slow circles around the floor. He breathed in the scent of him, which brought back the night of his rescue in the rain. At times, there were so many people, so close about them, that Paul’s big chest bumped into his or their thighs brushed. The music was hardly audible above the shuffling of boots, but was being supplemented by several people singing along to it as they circled. Petra was nowhere to be seen.

Cheeks burning, Harry fought the reflex to look into Paul’s eyes and instead kept his gaze lowered as though monitoring the distance between them. When the dance finished, he made to step away, but Paul said, ‘Not so fast, coward,’ held his hand tight in his and, by wordless agreement, claimed another male partner on his other side for the Britannia Two-Step, another dance for circulating threesomes. Throughout the dance floor, women were taking the place usually danced by a man, with a man to either side of them. When they shortly passed by Petra, who now had two new partners to hand, brother and sister laughed as though showing off booty.

The dancing broke up for a pot-luck supper, after which Harry was careful to withdraw lest his inappropriate happiness be noticed by others. He took himself off to the Slaymakers’ cart, and sat there enjoying the sound of horses snorting to one another in the semi-darkness and feeling his soaring spirits sink back into something like realism. Paul was already dancing with one of the younger women, a bright-smiled, confident thing with flaxen hair wound round her head like a victor’s wreath. Harry could not imagine such a man would be single for long, especially one whose homestead was established and who came ready domesticated by a pleasant, intelligent sister.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The next day was the last where he needed Paul’s help on the house, and his neighbour seemed uncharacteristically quiet, sullen even, as they worked. Perhaps some girl at the dance had disappointed him, perhaps he was simply feeling the effects of too much beer, but it was the first time Harry had found his company oppressive. Here, at last, was the flaw he had sought in his attempts to cure himself, and it was with a guiltily light heart that he shook Paul’s hand and thanked him as he saw him off at the afternoon’s end. He made sure he repeated his insistence that Paul call on him for help in the coming harvest. Paul’s response was something like a shrug, as though to imply he’d be of more help to Harry than the other way around.

The little exchange left a sourness, and he hid from the Slaymakers that Sunday when they came calling to drive him to church, and again when Petra rode by during the week with the eggs, butter and milk she had taken to trading with him for firewood.

He gained a rich satisfaction from finishing the house on his own and worked on it hard and fast, aware that his modest wheat crop was nearly ready for harvesting, just as Paul’s was, and that he had a long list of other neglected farm tasks awaiting his attention. The finer points of the house’s interior could wait, he calculated, for the short days of autumn, but it was with high spirits that he could finally take down his little tent and move the stove and his camp bed to their new home on higher, drier ground.

He could not hide indefinitely, and Petra found him easily enough one morning by following his fence and the sound of sledgehammer on post. He had barely greeted her when she started talking, lifting off her hat and fiddling nervously with its straps in a way that told him she had been rehearsing what to say as she walked.

‘Whatever’s wrong between you,’ she blurted, ‘I hope you sort it out soon, because there aren’t enough people to go round for neighbours to fall out like this.’

‘We haven’t fallen out,’ he protested.

‘So why is he going around with a face like a bag of knives?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harry said, leaning the sledgehammer against his legs, and he saw she doubted him. She would make a most effective schoolmistress.

‘And why’ve you been hiding from us?’

‘I wasn’t hiding,’ he said, filleting a lie with the truth. ‘I was busy.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well that’s my mind set at rest.’ She turned abruptly to go, as though embarrassed, but then turned just as abruptly back to face him as though there were now a weight of words that could not go unaired. ‘It’s the only way, apart from his colouring, in which he takes after our mother, unfortunately. He gets these . . . enthusiasms for people. Out of the blue. And then he goes too far.’

‘I’m sorry, Petra,’ Harry began. ‘I don’t—’

She held up a hand for silence. Apparently if he started speaking, she would never haul the difficult words to the surface. ‘I was watching the other night,’ she said, ‘at that stupid bachelors’ ball, and I worried it had started again and he’d . . .’ She broke off, turning aside, turning back, refastening the bonnet ribbons she had nervously yanked loose. ‘Has it started again?’ she demanded. ‘Am I going to have to . . . ? I’m not sure I could face moving all over again.’

‘Why on earth should you?’ He had never seen her upset like this. ‘Come where you can sit in the shade and I’ll fetch you a glass of water.’

‘I don’t need goddamned water. Don’t be so English!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. I shouldn’t. Forgive me.’

‘Petra!’

‘I’ll leave you to your work. Goodbye, Harry. I’m so sorry.’ She left, hurrying away, smacking grasses aside, and moments later he heard her urging on the pony she must have tethered to the fence.

He made a point of seeking Paul out that afternoon. He was as open and friendly as he knew how to be, reiterating his thanks for Paul’s help with the house-building and asking his opinion about when the harvest should begin and whether he would do better to throw a housewarming now, or after the grain was in.

Paul seemed pleased to see him, showed no trace of the brooding he had displayed on their last day together. He patiently explained the harvest process. He had a binder, which needed one person to drive and one or two more to gather together the bound sheaves it left behind. They then had to rely on a continuation of the fine weather and wait for the fairly expensive and unpredictable services of a travelling team with a steam-powered separator.

‘Thought I’d made you cross,’ he muttered just as Harry was leaving him.

‘No? Why ever should that be?’ Harry asked, and the matter was dropped.

Harry took Petra’s sly advice and threw his housewarming before the little place was quite finished. Beer and lemonade were easy – he had a delivery sent down the line from a place at Unity – but he had worried about how to feed the guests until she pointed out that everyone would assume him an incapable bachelor and would bring pies and tarts for the spread. The vicar made an announcement before the Sunday service. After the service several people asked for directions. And that was that.

Aside from his wedding reception, which arguably had been Mrs Wells’s party and not his, it was the first party he had ever thrown. People came, which surprised him, and asked a lot of impertinent questions, which didn’t. They enjoyed entering rooms and peering out of windows they would never enter or peer out of again. They left behind a quantity of cheeses, pickles and jams and even a side of bacon.

‘There,’ Petra said, when they had waved off the last of them. ‘Now they know you’re just like them, with no more mystery to you than anyone else, and you’ll be left alone.’

The house possessed no furniture yet except two hard chairs, a table and a camp bed, but the array of jams and pickles on the shelf and the bacon hanging from a hook made it look lived in.

Harvesting was parching, dusty work. Petra joined them, unrecognisable in her denim overalls, thick gauntlets and a battered broad-brimmed straw hat. They began the day merrily at first, with quips and commentary, but the novelty soon wore off and heat, flies and dust silenced them. Paul and two horses drove the binder, which cut the wheat close to the ground and whose clattering wheel, like a watermill’s, ingeniously bound it into small sheaves with a knot of twine. Harry and Petra fetched the sheaves and stacked them together in regular stooks a few yards apart to await the visit of the threshing team. Sometimes Paul would wait for them, if he had twine to replace or needed to water the horses. More often they’d have to work hard to catch up with his continued progress through the wheat. His team and binder could only come within their own length of the fences, so when he had done all he could in a field, Harry would then walk around it cutting the fringes with a scythe, while Petra followed him painstakingly raking up and binding the wheat stalks by hand, in the old, pre-mechanical manner. The two youngest Jørgensen girls had done the same, and Harry was struck afresh by how this work of scraping together, binding and stacking was immeasurably dustier, scratchier and sweatier than Hogarth’s calm paintings made it look. On the Jørgensen farm they’d been a team of six. Doing the same work with half the people felt markedly less festive. As with any farming task, though, Harry found the trick was not to look up at the enormity of the work ahead, but simply to focus on the ground and task immediately before him.

He had thought himself now reasonably strong and fit, hardened by regular labour and long since recovered from the effects of fever. Certainly his hands were well callused after his time at Moose Jaw. Harvesting involved repetitive bending and lifting, however, of a sort hardly done through the rest of the year, and the end of their first day saw him so stiff and tired he found he could barely wind his alarm clock before falling on to his bed. On the second day, he felt able to accept Petra’s invitation to join them for wordless stew before his horses, no more lively than he, took him home. On the third, when the sun was sinking and Petra had led the horses aside for their evening oats and water, Paul turned to him as though it were the most normal thing in the world, and they were not all three dead on their feet with exhaustion, and mumbled, ‘Come for a swim?’

‘I’ve no costume,’ he said.

‘Well that hardly matters way out here,’ Petra said, and Paul added, ‘You’re not in Kensington now.’

‘Are you coming too?’ Harry asked her.

‘Oh, I like my feet to touch the bottom,’ she said. ‘I’ve too active an imagination. At the worst moment I always think a pair of fairy hands is going to take a firm grip on my ankles. You boys have fun. I’ll go in and be heating up more of the same.’

On Harry’s land the sloughs were broad but fairly shallow, ideal for the trout-like fish he was learning to catch, but on the Slaymakers’ property there was one far deeper one, in the lee of the little wooded hillock of such significance to the Cree women. In fact it was the Cree children who had shown Paul how good this was for swimming in.

Harry was not a naturally good swimmer – a paddler not a plunger – having quite missed out on whatever tuition others seemed to acquire in boyhood. He could swim a sort of breaststroke he had taught himself from watching others and from reading a delightfully illustrated pamphlet, but never for long. That there should be any disparity in their techniques seemed not to have occurred to Paul, who marched down to the water and began stripping his clothes off in a way that left Harry short of breath, but the idea of total immersion after another day of broiling labour was as attractive as the near-perfect circle of water in its private fringe of green.

He began unlacing his boots, making an effort not to look at Paul, who he could tell from the articles tossed on the grass beside them was now quite naked.

‘It’ll be cold,’ Paul said. ‘Even in this weather, as it’s deep and the sun hardly reaches it except around midday. The trick is not to paddle in but to jump. Like this.’

Harry looked up from his unlacing just in time to see Paul’s big body, arms comically tanned like evening gloves, as he guessed his own must be, flying through the air before crashing into the water. He hurried to undress too, wheat-numbed fingers fumbling with his shirt and trouser buttons.

Paul surfaced, hair and beard rendered sleek, swam a few strokes, then turned, treading water and watching. ‘Great to wash the dust off,’ he said.

Harry found he was hesitating to pull off his underwear.

‘No mystery there,’ Paul called out. ‘We nursed you through a fever, remember!’

Feeling even more self-conscious now, Harry tugged the sweaty garment off and stepped into the water’s edge. He flinched at the cold.

‘No paddling!’ Paul shouted. ‘Take a run-up and jump. You’ll be fine.’

Assailed by memories of countless sports-field humiliations around bigger, fitter boys, Harry took a few steps away, then ran towards the water and jumped. It felt even colder than he had expected, because his body was so hot from working in the unshadowed sun all day. The slough was very deep. He plunged so far in that he could look up and see Paul’s slowly thrashing legs white against the water’s green, and even so, Harry’s toes made no contact with weeds or mud. He was gasping for air as he surfaced.

‘So deep!’ he exclaimed, and thinking he was struggling, Paul touched him on the shoulder, which made him more breathless yet. The pressure of his hand was warm in the water’s spangled chill.

‘The Cree children say it’s bottomless. Are you all right?’

‘Cold. Not sure how. Long I can. Stay in.’

‘You’re too thin, man. Their mothers think swimming here aids fertility.’

‘You’d think it would have the opposite effect. Don’t you find it terribly cold?’

‘I’m an otter,’ Paul said with a grin, and letting go of Harry’s shoulder, he struck out backwards, briefly pressing the soles of both feet against Harry’s chest to push off. He seemed to have shucked off a layer of maturity with his clothes.

For all that he was rapidly growing numb in his extremities, Harry felt relieved of constraint, as though the mysterious pool and the privacy offered by the trees and bushes around it had somehow transformed them into other men, in another, easier time. For a few seconds he felt able to hold Paul’s gaze without shame as Paul drifted slowly backwards, big legs lazily kicking at the water just enough to hold his body on the surface. Watching him in turn, Paul smiled like a small boy about to demonstrate a magic trick, then executed an athletic backwards flip and disappeared into the depths.

There were too many reflections and floating leaves for Harry to see more than a couple of feet beneath the surface, so he was startled when Paul came up close behind him, tickling his back with his beard as he rose. Harry splashed around to look at him. Paul wasn’t smiling now, but seemed grave.

‘There’s . . .’ he said. ‘Let me just . . .’ And he reached out to remove a strand of weed from Harry’s hair. ‘You’re really cold, aren’t you?’ he said.

Harry nodded, teeth chattering.

‘I’ll be out in a moment. The best place to dry off is that rock over there.’ Paul gestured towards a high outcrop catching the last of the sun, then dived again.

Harry churned his way to the water’s muddy fringe and clambered out. He held the dusty bundle of his discarded clothes in front of him and made his way around and up. After the cool softness of leaf mould, the stone was warm underfoot, giving back the heat it had absorbed through the day. He began to pull his undershorts back on, but realised he was still far too wet. Instead he sat, then tried lying back, using his clothes as a pillow, but felt self-conscious so turned around and lay on his belly. That way he could enjoy the sight of Paul swimming around the pool in a steady circle. He swam strongly, in a way Harry had never mastered. Harry marvelled that he could find the energy necessary, then reflected with a touch of asperity, as many harvesters must, that Paul had been riding the binder all day, not ceaselessly cutting, bending and stacking in its dusty wake.

As if reading his mind, Paul chose that moment to roll over on to his back. By now Harry’s head was over the edge of the rock and he had no time to withdraw it. Paul floated there, hair fanning in the water, and stared directly back at him. Then he turned again and swam decisively for shore. He bundled his clothes in turn but did not carry them prudishly before him as Harry had done.