A Place Called Winter (3 page)

‘Look but don’t touch,’ Bruno said behind him. ‘Gideon took him on when he bit a girl’s finger clean in two. We all have our unspeakable pasts here . . .’ And she made him a kind of salute with her fingertips before striding down the steps and off through the grounds with the air of one taking a constitutional.

There was a piercing whistle from across the valley and he saw the steam from a train making its way through the trees and caught a flash of its paintwork. The sight sent a painful shudder through him which he felt briefly distort his face. A cuckoo clock, surely chosen in irony, was chirping ten in the hall as their host stepped out to find him.

‘This way, Harry,’ he said.

For all the informality, Gideon had not eaten breakfast with them. Perhaps, despite his socialism, he found the maintenance of a certain distance useful? He led the way through the library, where several residents were reading or writing, out into a sort of conservatory and into his consulting room on the far side, which stuck out from one corner of the house so as to command a fine view of the river.

He stood with Harry admiring the swirling waters for a minute.

‘The mighty Athabasca,’ he said.

‘Does it ever flood?’ Harry asked.

‘Oh, yes. I lost my dog to it last winter.’

‘How upsetting.’

‘There was a hole in the ice and the silly thing was fascinated by the way the water repeatedly splashed out of it. He wouldn’t stop going over there, so I kept him tied up. But then some kind person let him off and he fell through and drowned before we could cut him out.’

‘Have you forgiven them yet?’

The doctor smiled. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I forgave the resident right away – she was so upset. Forgiving the river may take a while longer.’

They sat on either side of his mahogany desk, on which he had an open file.

‘So, Harry. Welcome to Bethel. How was breakfast?’

‘Delicious, thank you.’

‘Good. This isn’t an asylum, although everyone here is what my colleagues at Essondale – where you were – would call mentally ill. All of you have displayed behaviour or declared opinions that have caused people to want you put out of the way.

‘I happen to be making some of those behaviours my particular study. I depart from my colleagues in regarding them not as pathological but as intrinsic to a personality type. And I have won the state’s trust sufficiently to have been allowed to bring some of you here to help me with my research. You are not under lock and key. You are at liberty to walk in the gardens, to follow the trails in the woods and even to go into Hinton, should you wish. All I ask is that nobody leave the immediate grounds unaccompanied and that you always let me know your whereabouts by signing yourselves out in the register on the hall table.

‘I also ask that you respect one another’s privacy; we all have stories but I prefer those stories to emerge voluntarily, not through interrogation.

‘I ask that you respect one another’s differences, too. You may already have seen – you almost certainly will see – behaviour you might regard as odd or even wrong. But remember that, in the eyes of the attendants at Essondale, or wherever, your behaviour has been odd or wrong as well.

‘Here endeth the homily. Do you have any questions, Harry?’

‘Only . . .’ Harry began. ‘It’s so different here. Like a private house.’

‘It is a private house.’ Gideon smiled. ‘It’s my house.’

‘Do we pay fees?’

‘You are all here as my guests. When you leave, if you choose to send a donation for the furthering of my work, I won’t stop you. I inherited a certain amount from my father and it pleases me to spend it this way.’

Harry sensed the good doctor and his father had not been in sympathy.

‘So. I need to ask you a few things before we start . . .’

He rattled off a series of questions. What was Harry’s name and birth date, where did he live, who was the king, who was the prime minister, how would he react to a slug beneath his shoe, a cat being tormented by small boys, a naked woman in a public place. Harry avoided crushing the slug, chased off the boys and covered the woman with a blanket.

‘So,’ Gideon said. ‘In the crudest terms, we have established that you are not insane or dangerous. You are, however, suffering from a trauma, a trauma not unlike that which we’ve seen in all too many men returning from Flanders with battle scars to the mind. Harry, I plan to use hypnosis to help your mind open the doors it is so desperately holding closed. Has anyone ever hypnotised you before?’

‘No.’

‘No need to look apprehensive. You will be aware throughout, and if I find you are becoming upset, I will bring the procedure to an end. Agreed?’

Harry nodded.

‘Hard to take your eyes off the river, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good. I want you to sit over here in the armchair. That’s it. Sit back. Take a few deep breaths. Relax. Why do you laugh?’

‘Sorry. You just reminded me of someone I used to know.’

‘Happy memories, I hope.’

‘Yes,’ Harry told him, surprised by a memory of lying on a narrow bed, listening to the sounds of a Jermyn Street afternoon through an open window. ‘From this distance, I believe they are.’

‘So. Deep breaths. That’s it. Relax. And keep your eyes on the river. Find a point in its middle, where the current is strong. Imagine the current is flowing through you. It’s sweeping through your mind, sweeping all thoughts away. Your mind is just a chamber. An empty chamber, quite white, utterly peaceful. There are no rules here. You can speak your thoughts and nobody will know. Nobody will judge you. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me who you love.’

STRAWBERRY VALE

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

E. M. Forster,
Maurice

Chapter Two

Harry Cane’s father had died of boredom. The medical diagnosis had been apoplexy, its unofficial translation a surfeit of rich foods and alcohol. The root cause, though, Harry felt sure, was leisure, and the boredom it engendered. Harry’s father had in the past lived for work and had not known how to fill his time from the moment he sold his business and stepped sideways into the dubious luxury of idleness.

For most of his twenty-eight years, Harry’s life had been largely, complacently male. And he had the good fortune not to have to work for a living. His father had done very well setting up one of the first horse-drawn omnibus services south of the river, which he had expanded to a small empire serving four busy routes, before he was one of the wily ones, along with Tilley’s and Widow Birch, to sell out late to the LGOC.

Rich, and no longer tainted by direct contact with horse sweat and the streets, Cane Senior married for love, but wisely too. Her family’s money was older, rinsed by time. They had met, before he was quite so wealthy, because it was dung purchased cheaply but in great quantity from Cane’s stables in Greenwich, Brixton and Sydenham that enriched her father’s fields and orchards in Kent. Her family disapproved, but not so very hard – she was the youngest of six and had both a stutter and a heart defect. When she died – of the heart – being delivered of Harry’s younger brother Jack, it was found she had left her own money to Harry so that he might be raised a gentleman.

Some widowers took consolation in their children, but Harry and Jack’s father discovered he could not bear to look upon his; they only reminded him of what he had won and lost. Jack was still a baby, of course, but at four, Harry was already his mother’s child, with the same high brow and candid curiosity of expression. Neither child had a weak heart but Harry stuttered when nervous, just as his mother had, and, like all the men in her family, pronounced his Rs as Ws, which made it particularly irritating that he had not been christened Thomas or William.

Mr Cane entrusted the boys to a wet nurse and nursery maid respectively and, as each turned five, to a bracing preparatory school on the Kent coast, where they boarded in the holidays as well as term time. He, meanwhile, pursued discreet consolation on the Continent. He was an assiduous, if stern, letter-writer and he sent presents at intervals: cricket bats, penknives and such.

Once Jack joined Harry at school, the brothers were devoted to one another, and protective. They were in effect a family of two, and were by no means objects of pity. Each had classmates whose parents had sent them ‘home’ from brief, idyllically filthy infancies in India or Africa for the indefinite future, concern that they should grow up English trumping any weak parental pangs.

In time, the boys were moved on to Harrow. The school had been picked by their late mother, apparently, because it was smart without being overly intellectual. It would, she believed, make them useful metropolitan contacts while lying reassuringly beyond the reach of their father’s former bus routes. Word of how their bills were paid leaked out, however, perhaps via some spiteful teacher, perhaps from Jack’s unguarded, trusting chatter.

Although he was the younger, and thus fell naturally under Harry’s protection, Jack had always been the stronger and more confident of the two. He faced the world openly, with a sunny faith in others that won everyone’s favour in turn. His most habitual phrase was ‘It’s simple.’ Life for him was as straightforward as a boys’ adventure story: people were either good or bad, the right course of action was clear, and good would always triumph. God, being English, meant everything for the best, and the life He gave us was full of rewards if only we buckled under and did our bit. Jack was handsome, good at games, decent, and thus a constant source of worry to Harry, who was sure that at any moment something would happen to shatter his cheerful outlook.

Perhaps because he had been old enough at their mother’s death to suffer by it, to have known the pillowy welcome of the boudoir from which he was abruptly banished ever after, Harry was as unlike Jack as their mother had been to their father: wary, fearful, given to brooding. He was not proud, but teasing left him with a horror of humiliation on the playing field and elsewhere, so his defence was to withdraw. He was not a scholar – his brain seemed too sluggish or too dreamy to grasp the things demanded of it – but he was never happier than when left alone among books, and would spend hours turning the pages of atlases, novels or tales from history, alive to the alternative versions of himself they seemed to proffer. He lacked the knack of forging easy friendships but grew habituated to benefiting from the ones Jack was forever striking up.

Jack would never accept defeat in the face of his brother’s shyness; it was so alien to his nature that he could not understand it, could not imagine how shyness might feel. As they grew into young men, the younger became as solicitous of the older as the older had been of him when they were boys, so that it was a reflex in him to make room for Harry in any social engagement, in any pleasure or outing. As often as not, his friends would have a retiring sibling in their turn, and so Harry would form not-quite friendships, friendships at one remove, which remained dependent on the generous impulses of his brother. When Jack joined the Harrow cadet force, as was expected of them all, Harry took to terrible fantasies that his brother would sign up for some distant war and be lost to him.

Their mother had left enough money to educate them through university, but Harry could not see the point. The only future he dreamt of – born of visits to friends of Jack’s or relatives of their mother – was to live somewhere surrounded by his own land, to have an estate or just a farm.

Jack, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted. Ironically, he had always been obsessed with horses. He drew them with increasing expertise and knowledge in the margins of his exercise books, read about them, and, like Harry, rose early every morning to ride. They both loved riding, but when they accompanied their father to his cavernous south London stables, it was Jack who reached out to horses, talked to them, and asked questions of the grooms. He swiftly ascertained that horses needed vets and that vets made money, good money. He studied hard and so intently – compared to Harry, who studied with no end in view – that he soon won a place to study at the Royal Veterinary College.

Jack joined Harry at his bachelor lodgings in town. While Jack pursued his course, and came home bright-eyed with the excitement of it all, bringing the faint scent of formaldehyde with him and occasionally a rowdy gang of friends, Harry slipped into a daily pattern of gentlemanly idleness that might have lasted for years. A brisk routine with Indian clubs, a shave at his barber’s, a vigorous walk around a park, a visit to the club in which their grandfather had enrolled him – involving the newspapers, a quiet lunch, a digestive read in the library – and then a call on the London and Provincial Turkish baths in Jermyn Street for a bath and massage. Then he would call back to his club for tea before walking back to their lodgings, where he would dine with Jack.

Unless Jack had other plans, their evenings were quiet, so Jack could study, and their nights early. Their lives were careful, temperate and, on Harry’s part, quite chaste, in marked contrast to those of their neighbours. The apartment they rented was in a fashionable building of bachelor lodgings to the north of Piccadilly. The wholesome routine of their habits was overseen by Mrs Allardyce, the same respectable housekeeper their father had first taken on as their nursery maid, who travelled in from Lambeth every day to cook and clean for them.

Their absentee father’s death, announced by a visit from the family solicitor, who in turn had been contacted by a lawyer in Nice, was more troubling to Harry than to Jack. Jack had never really known the man, except through his formulaic and unrevealing letters (
I am glad to hear of your excellent exam results 
. . . 
I approve your choice of lodgings
 . . .), so the death felt no more a cause for grief than the news of failure in a distant mine in which one had briefly considered investing. Naturally Jack looked to Harry for his cue as to how he should feel and behave. They adopted black suits for a year, of course, but Harry would not hear of Jack falling behind in his studies for the observance of form, although they did have a week away to attend their father’s burial in Nice’s English cemetery.

The funeral was a strange, chilly affair. (It was a revelation to Harry that the South of France had bad weather.) Besides the two of them and the local Church of England parson, the weather-beaten consul was in attendance, as were two plump Frenchwomen in veils, one of whom had to support the other when grief overcame her at the graveside. They melted away into the drizzle before Harry could introduce himself, and the consul was either discreet or genuinely at a loss as to who they were.

Harry could not pretend to be grief-stricken. If he mourned anything, it was the lack of anything to mourn. His memories of his father were so scant and so distant that they had become rigid to the point where he could no longer trust them. He remembered, or thought he remembered, walking alongside him on a shingle beach, but it was the difficulty of walking on shingle while holding an adult’s hand that informed the memory, not any paternal warmth. He remembered a luxuriant beard a little like the king’s, and a tang of limes and something sweeter from some manly preparation or other, a beard oil or a shaving water. He had absolutely no memory of his voice, and realised that he had come, with time, to supply a voice, as he read his father’s letters, that belonged to a disliked master at Harrow and not to his father at all. His principal feeling on losing this second parent was to miss his mother with something like fresh grief and to feel a powerful yearning for nothing more complicated than feminine company.

They had no women in their life beyond Mrs Allardyce, and she was not precisely
in
it, and was better at sustaining a pie crust than a conversation. Their building was designed to accommodate only bachelors, but neighbours upstairs and down would entertain more or less respectable women by day and occasionally Harry would coincide with these visitors on the stairs or in the entrance hall. Feminine conversation, exotic in the building’s habitual quiet, would peter out as he opened a door or rounded a staircase corner. He would lift his hat in greeting and be met with a greeting in return, or demurely downcast eyes, and then the conversation would start up again behind his back, leaving him with torn rags of sentences and no less tantalising wafts of violets, perfume or soap.

In the theatres, or in shops, or on his daily walks, Harry observed women as one did wild birds, noted the elegance or occasional strangeness of their fashions and the way their behaviours changed depending on whether they were alone or in company, with a man or with other women. But there was no woman he counted as a friend, none he could truly say he knew. He had known Mrs Allardyce all his life, but she was the soul of decorum and released personal information so rarely that on the occasions when she let slip that there had been a Mr Allardyce but that he had died fighting the Boer, or that she shared a house in Lambeth with her four unmarried brothers so was
quite used to the ways of men
, he found himself chewing over the gobbets of information days later in a way that hardly seemed decent.

Had they a sister or mother still living, or even friends with sisters, none of this would have been so and women might have become normal, even uninteresting to him. Their mother’s parents used to make a point of inviting them to visit in the country every summer and, now they were adults, would surely have set about making suitable introductions. The boys’ grandfather had long since died, however, and his widow become senile, and their uncles and cousins, who had always regarded their existence as a piece of social awkwardness, had let all communication wither.

Harry looked around him, especially at his club or in the Jermyn Street hammam, at the men who had never married – one seemed to gather by osmosis which they were – and thought their lives did not seem so very disastrous. Provided one had a Mrs Allardyce to keep one fed and clean, and the services of a tailor and a barber to keep one presentable, the single manly life was apparently not so bad. He noticed that these men reached a point, perhaps over some tacitly understood age limit, when they began to be called
confirmed bachelors
, which implied they had passed (or failed) some test, or even, kindly, that their single state was of their own choosing and not a cruelty of fate.

After their father’s death, Harry was made aware of where the money that had always materialised so reassuringly in his bank account came from. Apparently under the impression that he was a species of cosseted imbecile, the family solicitor talked him through it with such pedantic slowness that his brain did indeed begin to feel barely able to retain all the facts. Most of his father’s estate was tied up in property – terraces in Brixton and, indeed, Mrs Allardyce’s Lambeth, whose rent was raised by agents. As part of the bargain struck when he sold off the omnibus company, he had acquired stock in the LGOC and a portfolio of shares in affiliated railway companies. At some point – presumably during his sojourn on the Continent – he had obtained a considerable interest in a German armament company, which had performed extremely well, and in a ballet company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. The residue of Harry’s mother’s legacy had been used to buy a row of houses in Kensington.

A property in Nice was to be left to a Madame Grassert. Harry remembered the woman at the graveside, how her veil had become caught in her mouth, how firmly her little black-gloved hands had grasped at her friend’s arm. Had she, he wondered, been led to expect more?

The solicitor carefully avoided Harry’s eye but, staring at the Frenchwoman’s name on the paper before him, said, ‘Your father’s French bank account was frozen at the time of his death, naturally, once his notary had settled all outstanding accounts. It might be possible, if you like, to have him pursue the matter to see if any, er, substantial sums had been transferred to . . . another French account, but I fear these could not be recovered. Should you wish to contest this bequest, however, we could certainly—’