A Place Called Winter (5 page)

Mrs Wells greeted their return with a tray of lemonade and cake, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to have entrusted a pretty daughter to a complete stranger for half an hour. ‘Pattie expressed a wish to come down and sing to you all. Pattie is my next youngest girl, Mr Cane. She fancies herself an artiste. Don’t fret,’ she went on in response to Winnie’s heavy sigh. ‘I told her perhaps another time. Encouragement of talent is all very well, but it doesn’t do to go too far. Ah. And here come the athletes!’

Jack had a young boy’s instinct for sniffing out sweet things. ‘If I’m not hungry,’ he told them, ‘I’m either ill or asleep.’

He had encouraged his companion to replace her hat so as to avoid a scolding. Shaded by its straw brim and blue ribbons, she looked almost demure.

‘It’s been a delightful afternoon,’ Harry told Mrs Wells.

‘Well I hope you’ll come again,’ she said, offering him a dry little hand. ‘Perhaps next time you’ll come for dinner, so you can meet my boys?’ She pulled a comical face. ‘Though we’ll all have to be on our best behaviour for Robert.’

‘That would be splendid,’ Jack said.

Harry tried to catch Winifred’s eye but she had dropped her glance to the crumbs on the cake plates. He supposed that, being shy, she regarded dinners as a necessary evil.

‘Miss Wells,’ he said.

She looked up, gave one of her sad little smiles and offered him her hand. ‘Mr Cane,’ she said.

George mocked their formality by dropping Jack a deep curtsey, at which everyone laughed.

Chapter Four

A second invitation came from Mrs Wells, summoning them both to dinner, where they met two of the three brothers.

Robert, the eldest, who was possibly good-looking behind a fulsome beard, suffered from the pompous, hectoring manner of a stupid man who believed himself clever.

Frank, his younger by some six years, had successfully insisted on being made senior partner on their father’s death. He was softly spoken, observant, utterly lacking in social skills and really rather frightening. Winifred had already warned Harry he was very clever. Certainly he seemed to regard the family he had been born into with scornful dismay. Harry was glad to be screened from him at table by a parson’s amiable wife.

On his other hand, his left, he had Mrs Wells, who was full of kind curiosity about his mother’s family and evidently a little alarmed by the subject of his father. By oversight or mischief, she had placed Winifred so he could admire but could not speak to her. Mrs Wells was, he began to realise, something of a manipulator.

‘You come from a small family, Mrs Wells was telling me,’ said the parson’s wife.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s just my brother and myself.’

‘I was an only,’ she said. ‘The functioning of large families remains a mystery to people like us. There are currents and influences we cannot always read correctly. And then, of course, we have to beware of clinging too tightly.’

‘To what?’

‘Why, to those we love! People from large families crave freedom and privacy above all else. I know; my Benedict’s father was a Mr Quiverful.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A character from Trollope with a great many children. I tease Benedict that he should have joined a silent order and he teases me back that he might just yet. Oh! We’re off already and I’ve barely begun to scratch your interesting surface!’

Taking her cue from their hostess, she stood, as of course did he, and she made him a little smiling bob and followed the ladies from the room. The five gentlemen were left briefly speechless, as feminine laughter and conversation flared in the hall, then were enclosed in the drawing room. Harry thought cigars tasted of something meaty and long dead, and port invariably gave him a headache because nerves and politeness made him drink it like water. Not for the first time in his life, he felt a craven impulse to create a sensation by hurrying out in the ladies’ wake.

He found the courage to wave aside the cigar Robert offered him and was about to pour, as a lesser evil, a small glass of port, thinking he might simply not then touch it and so avoid drinking too much, when Frank said, ‘Or perhaps you’ll join me in a Scotch? Port always gives me filthy headaches. Evil drink, I say. Like drinking wine gone bad. You know where you stand with whisky.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I will. Thanks,’ managing not to stammer on the W in his relief, and he passed the port on to Robert, who snorted disapproval. Perhaps whisky was more expensive? Harry had no idea.

‘It’s good to meet the famous Brothers Cane finally,’ Robert said. ‘The girls have talked of little else.’

‘How very dull for you all,’ Harry said. At least, he began to, but Robert was putting him in mind of a particularly cruel Harrow bully he had managed, until then, to forget, so all that came out was ‘How-how-how . . .’

Well trained, Jack came to his rescue. ‘How very relieved you must be to find us both so ordinary. Excellent cigar,’ he added. ‘Are they Cuban? Harry won’t let me smoke them at home.’ He knew that playing on Harry’s compulsion to correct an unjust or inaccurate statement was one of the surest ways of helping him out.

‘Only because, on a student vet’s income, you have no business buying such luxuries,’ Harry said, with no trace of a stammer.

‘It’s touching that you look to your younger brother’s welfare so,’ the parson said. He had accepted both port and cigar with alacrity but seemed to be saving his cigar for later. ‘Jack has been telling me you’ve been like a father to him.’

‘Well, sir, as I’m sure our host can attest, the eldest has certain responsibilities.’

‘Huh,’ Robert Wells said.

‘Forgive me, but I’m always intrigued by cases like yours. My wife says I should have made a novelist but I fear I lack the necessary lightness. If you were so busy keeping Jack out of scrapes as you were growing up, who looked after you?’

Harry liked the parson, as he had liked his wife; there was nothing of the prefect about him and he had a kind, plain face. ‘Why, Jack, of course,’ he told him, at which they both laughed.

‘Harry takes quite some looking after,’ Jack added.

Robert Wells was one of those men who could not leave a question unanswered, or a subject abandoned. ‘They’re from Africa,’ he abruptly told Jack. ‘Our brother Barrington sends them. Taste like Cuban but a fraction of the cost and Empire-grown.’

Harry became uncomfortably aware that Frank was about to say something personal.

‘Have you always stuttered like that?’ Frank asked quietly.

‘Absolutely,’ said Harry, instinctively avoiding an answer that began with a consonant. ‘It comes and it goes. Unfortunately it’s worse with strangers.’ He could imagine Frank tormenting caged birds in a spirit of scientific enquiry.

‘Funny. Winnie didn’t mention it.’

‘She didn’t make me nervous,’ Harry said, which made Robert guffaw.

‘He got you there, Frank. She probably didn’t say how rude her brothers were either, eh?’ Someone began to play a piano across the hall and Robert sighed weightily. ‘I fear that’s our cue for further delights.’

‘Can’t miss my god-daughter,’ said the parson, folding his napkin as he rose. ‘I made a solemn vow.’

‘Is Winifred your god-daughter?’ Harry asked.

‘No, no. Patricia is. I believe she asked to be allowed downstairs especially to entertain us.’

‘She needs no encouragement,’ Frank said as cigars were regretfully tapped out and they all stood.

‘I don’t think we’ve met Patricia,’ Harry said.

‘Oh, everyone meets Pattie before too long,’ Robert told him. ‘What is it Mam’zelle Vance says?’

‘Mees Pattie av a powerfool pairsonality,’ Frank said.

As they crossed the hall, there was the clatter of plates being stacked in the distant kitchen and the familiar sound of giggling from the shadows on the landing above. Harry saw Robert glare up, mock furious, but then grin and pretend to fire a gun towards his hidden sisters. To find oneself head of such a household in one’s late twenties, or however old he had been when Robert Wells Senior died, was enough to make a premature ogre of any man. Pomposity. Severity. Snobbery. They were all masks for various sorts of fear. And to find himself supplanted by a younger, cleverer brother in the powerfully symbolic role of senior partner could not have been easy. Harry resolved to judge him less harshly in future.

After the relative sobriety of the dining room, with its expanses of polished mahogany, dark walls, and impenetrably varnished paintings, the drawing room seemed as frothily feminine as a gown beside a tailcoat – all lace, flowers and looking glasses. Mrs Wells was nose to nose with the parson’s wife on one sofa. George was picking through sheet music on another. A plump-shouldered girl with dark hair cascading down her back sat playing at the piano. Harry noticed, as he had not on their previous visit, a long line of little framed children’s portraits along the white marble mantelshelf: a gallery of Mrs Wells’s fecundity. A tenth infant portrait, he saw, had a black velvet bow looped through its frame.

Winifred had apparently been watching for them from the veranda, where she had perhaps been cooling herself, for the room had become as hot and airless as a palm house. She came back inside as they entered and unsmilingly served them coffee in pretty little cups. Jack joined George on her sofa, the parson went to admire his god-daughter at the piano and the Wells boys, apparently now relieved of any responsibility to entertain, headed out to the veranda, where they soon relit their cigars.

Harry remained standing by Winifred, who was indeed a little flushed but smelling deliciously of roses.

‘Are you going to sing for us?’ he asked. The piano playing had come to an end and there was some conference about songs.

‘Oh no. I’m quite unmusical. Pattie is the performer. Ssh. Here she goes.’

He turned to see that George had moved to the piano stool and the girl whose back had been turned to him as he came in had moved to lean in the piano’s curving hip, with one arm artfully stretched along the instrument’s side.

Where George was handsome and Winifred was pretty, Pattie, he saw at once, was spectacular, with huge green eyes, lips the colour of lush fruit and a figure that, in a hungrier family, might have been used to sell anything from corsets to soap. He forgot the song, some nonsense about convent walls and soft footfalls, but, for its duration, could hardly bring himself even to glance elsewhere in the room.

She had a tremendous magnetic quality, like a panther’s. When she was old enough to wear her hair up, which would surely be in mere months, she would carry herself like a queen. It was quite understandable that her childless godfather was so besotted and her mother so anxious to pack her off to the nuns.

When the song had finished and they had all applauded and she had curtseyed and gone to sit obediently on a footstool at her mother’s knee, he turned back to Winifred and surprised a look of undisguised sorrow on her kind face. She brushed it swiftly aside, as a maid might a cobweb, but he resolved there and then to do everything in his power to make her happy.

Chapter Five

Breakfast was one of his favourite things about their little house in Herne Bay. There was a conservatory on one side of the house with a view directly over the sea. Winnie had placed a few ferns and palms in there and, half jokingly, called it the Winter Garden. Even in the colder months it was a delightful place from which to greet the day, so they had a table set up for breakfast in there every morning. Winnie was bad-tempered on waking, although she would never admit it. This suited him, however, because he had acquired the habit of early-morning silence. (One of several ways in which they had discovered they were well suited was their ability to keep one another company without either taking offence that the other wasn’t talking, or misinterpreting their wordlessness as pique.)

Like all keen letter-writers, she received a great deal of post in return. She would read this over breakfast, having methodically opened each envelope first with a knife not yet buttery, and would retire to her little desk for an hour or two after breakfast to reply while her answering thoughts were still fresh in her mind.

He, too, had taken to writing, but only to Jack. The two brothers, however, could hardly generate more than a letter a week in either direction. So usually all the housemaid set out at Harry’s side of the table was his newspaper.

This morning Winnie was down before him, which surprised him, as there had been some commotion in the night on account of the baby’s refusal to sleep again once woken by teething pains, and he had assumed she would grant herself an extra hour in bed and even send for her breakfast up there.

‘Morning, darling,’ he said, and kissed the hand she held up in greeting as she read the latest letter from Pattie in Liège.

There was a letter for him on top of his paper, addressed in a hand he didn’t recognise. He opened it as the housemaid brought his kipper and toast. It was from Winnie’s brother, Frank the Bloodless, as Jack had christened him behind his back, scandalising George, who, despite herself, was rather in awe of Frank’s brain. Frank had written on Chambers notepaper and the contents were as startling as they were terse.

I must speak with you on a matter of urgency. I will arrive at Herne Bay soon after eleven this morning. Not a word to Winifred, please. I shall return to town immediately afterwards.

Harry slid the letter beneath his newspaper but Winifred had already seen the handwriting.

‘Is Frank well?’ she asked.

‘Oh. You know. Frank never says. Boring money stuff.’

Winifred’s relief at passing from a household where most of the tension arose from money being constantly on everybody’s mind, but forbidden as a topic of conversation, to one where the subject simply never arose was still strong, so he knew he could count on her flinching away from it now. She merely said, ‘Oh,’ and reached for another piece of toast, with which she prettily covered her mouth as she suppressed a little yawn. Seeing he had caught her in the gesture, she wrinkled her eyes at him with amusement.

‘Poor darling,’ he said. ‘That was quite a night you had of it.’

‘All my fault,’ she said. ‘I should let Nurse see to her – that’s what she’s there for – but once I’m awake and I can hear her crying, I have to go to her. Later Nurse can take her out for a nice tiring outing along the front.’

Winifred had wanted to live by the sea, which was convenient as it was far cheaper than the centre of town. After several excursions with one or another sister or her mother in tow to advise, they settled on Herne Bay, where they took a house. There followed what felt like an orgy of shopping. Money might have been something one never discussed, but he seemed never to have thought about it so much as he did now that it was leaving his hands so swiftly.

They had been married in Twickenham by the parson he had met at that first of many supper parties. Winnie insisted on making her own wedding dress, for she was, it emerged, an amateur dressmaker of exquisite taste and ability and made most of her own and her sisters’ clothes.

They had spent their honeymoon in Venice, where they made assiduous use of their Baedeker guide and saw more churches and paintings in three weeks than in both their lives to date. But they did much sitting, too, for she was a studious watercolourist. The place was so preposterously, exotically beautiful, the natives so attractive, so frankly sensuous, that it should, by rights, have proved the perfect setting for a feast of love.

From the moment Winnie’s family waved them noisily off on the boat train from Victoria, however, Jack running alongside their window shouting cheeky encouragement, and they found themselves finally entirely alone together, there was a tension between them. Whenever he reached for her, she shrank in on herself, accepting his kisses but so clearly dying within that he was discouraged, assuming he revolted her in some way. He hated to see her unhappy, and hated even more to feel himself the cause of it.

Outside, in the piazzas, on the bridges, along the winding alleys, she slipped her arm through his or even held his hand. She leant her head on his shoulder as they had their photograph taken among the pigeons outside St Mark’s. Out and about she seemed quite contented; it was when they were alone that the dark cloud descended on her and he felt obscurely to blame.

Then they had a particularly good day. It was the first one when they dared to do no sightseeing whatsoever. The breeze had dropped and the temperature became too sultry for walking, so they spent the entire day beside their hotel on the Lido, bathing, reading, observing the couples and family groups around them, talking quietly about nothing dramatic and being brought regular little treats by their avuncular waiter. She drank more than her usual single glass of wine at supper and suddenly came out with it.

Put simply, she was in love with another man: Tom Whitacre. He was a school friend of Robert and Frank’s and had been a regular caller at the house as she was growing up, almost a brother really. Only not. And she had been forbidden from marrying him. The brothers didn’t think him good enough. His money came from a department store bearing his name, making him too nakedly in trade.

‘But my money’s from trade,’ Harry insisted, hardly crediting they were having this conversation in a hotel dining room with people chatting and laughing on every side. ‘How does a horse-drawn bus differ from a department store? I’d have thought it was worse.’

It was quite different, apparently, because Harry’s father was dead and the buses, unlike the shop, did not have the family name on them. Besides, the perceived taint on the man’s money was only a pretext, she had come to understand; the real ban had come from her mother, who, while content enough to be amused by Tom Whitacre on a sofa, knew enough of the
scrapes
from which her sons had repeatedly rescued him to see that he was rather too like her late husband – a tyrant in the making and possibly a gambling philanderer as well.

‘And now I’ve ruined everything by telling you,’ said Winnie, almost laughing in her relief at finally unburdening her conscience. ‘You can pack me off home on the first train tomorrow morning and be grateful for what you’ve been spared.’

‘Don’t you love me at all?’ he asked, after the waiter had brought them each a little sorbet in a hollowed-out lemon skin.

‘Of course,’ she said, visibly shocked. ‘I love you very much. It’s just that I . . . I loved him first and, well, differently.’

‘More?’

‘No.’

‘But?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But. Aren’t you furious? Most men would be furious. I was told never, ever to tell you.’

But Harry examined his feelings and found he wasn’t furious, simply sorry for her, sorry that she had been thus constrained, and darkly amused that her upstanding family had, in effect, so practised upon him.

She gave herself to him that night at last, a little drunk, perhaps, but relieved too at having been honest with him. He was utterly inexperienced, unlike Jack, he suspected, and certainly unlike his mysteriously potent rival, Tom Whitacre, but he found it easier than he had been fearing. Clumsy at first, they went to it with something like abandon in the days that followed. Baedeker was left out on the balcony and not retrieved. He doubted he succeeded in erasing all thoughts of Tom Whitacre, who would surely forever hold the appeal of forbidden fruit, but he made her blush and gasp and giggle, and found she was smiling without quite the sadness he had so naively taken as her natural expression when they were courting.

Before they set out for home, he bought her a choker of pearls, and felt far more married to her fastening them about her pretty neck in private than he had done sliding a ring on her finger before witnesses. She was expecting by the time their train returned to Victoria, and told him the happy news once their new doctor in Herne Bay had confirmed it.

Winifred thrived in a home of her own, unoppressed by noise and constant company. She loved the sea. She read. She walked. She painted. They lived fairly simply, with only the housemaid and nursery maid living in. The cook came in each day, as did a girl
to do the rough
. They were befriended by the doctor and his wife, who taught them bridge. They went to church, though not to excess.

Harry created a version of his bachelor life in the brisk, new setting, reading, walking, visiting the library and taking long rides. The one lack was the Jermyn Street baths. He had visited the local spa baths, where similar services were on offer, but the sound of women’s chatter carried constantly from the female half of the building, and it lacked the London establishment’s exotic charm and shadowy glamour.

On his rides – which were often for as long as three hours, heading a considerable distance inland – he came to know the local farms and found he was developing his agricultural fantasy. The fresh-air routines and simple obligations of farming appealed intensely, but he had no idea how to begin. He assumed one had to be born to it. His maternal grandfather was born to land, of course, but born
to
it, not on it; he had done nothing to maintain his acres, trusting that to managers, agents and tenants.

Harry began to feel useless. Walking up and down the small town’s promenades, to the clock tower or out along the pier, however smartly, he fancied the passing glances of men and women skated over him as if he were some kind of invalid. Herne Bay was peculiarly popular for the raising of children, to the point where it was jokingly referred to as Baby Bay, and his passage along South Parade by day was always through a crowd of nannies and nursery maids pushing prams or overseeing the unsteady walking of small persons in their charge. The cries of children at play on the shingled shore below often seemed to carry an edge of mockery.
There goes the idle man! The useless one!

He sat in the conservatory, methodically reading the newspaper, while Winnie retreated to her desk and the maid cleared away breakfast, then he walked briskly from one end of the seafront to the other before making his way to the station. He was early, as was his habit. As he waited for the London train to pull in, he realised it was with something like brotherly affection.

He had never warmed to Robert, and had yet to meet the mysterious Barrington, but over the months he had surprised himself by becoming almost fond of Frank. Frank the Bloodless. Frank would have been mortified to know it, but Harry felt sorry for him. Being surrounded by people so much less clever than he was, he must have felt like a member of a different race, a different species even. What Harry had first taken for coldness, he had come to see was an odd mixture of patience, incomprehension and extreme discomfort. Frank could decline any number of Greek verbs and rattle off a sequence of prime numbers, but he could never anticipate the illogical choices of ordinary humans so was forever being made to feel odd by comparison, a situation little aided by his inability to dissemble when politeness required it, or to talk of unimportant matters simply to put others at their ease. Harry was shy but Frank was awkward, which Harry considered gave them a kind of kinship.

Frank would seem to have recognised this, and warmed to Harry in turn. In his odd, prickly way. A couple of weeks into his engagement to Winnie, Harry had been summoned to Frank’s chambers, ostensibly for lunch without Robert, who was off visiting clients in the country, but actually for a bewilderingly candid discussion about money.

Tipped off by a friend in the City, Frank had details of a company about to be floated that he knew for a fact was a sure thing. He was investing a parcel of Mrs Wells’s less lively savings in it and did not want Harry to miss out. Harry didn’t feel he could sell any of his property holdings, but much of his capital was invested in bonds and shares he could easily trade in. At Frank’s urging he did just that, sinking a third of his capital in the new share issue.

‘You won’t be sorry,’ Frank told him. ‘If I had half your money, I’d do the same. Within six months you’ll have doubled your investment and you can take half out again and reinvest if you’re feeling cautious.’

Frank did not need to do this. It was a kindness, coolly delivered but a kindness nonetheless. The shares had performed just as well as promised.

With the candour that being married enabled, he and Winnie had often discussed her brothers’ marriage prospects. Robert, they both suspected, modelled himself on his late father, and probably the King, and had a weakness for actresses. Barrington was a mystery, although it was an open secret that morals and manners were more relaxed in the remoter outposts of empire, so it was quite possible he had come to some unofficial, even tribal, arrangement that could never be acknowledged at home. But Frank was the greatest challenge.

His sisters, rather meanly, had confected the ideal girl for him, who was an utterly humourless suffragette type called Elfine. They would amuse themselves at parties by competing as to who could first spot a girl in glasses – the thicker-lensed the better – and cry, ‘Oh do look. It’s Elfine!’

Harry feared the truth would be sadder and involve a misalliance. The Franks of this world rarely had the sense or self-knowledge to choose themselves an Elfine, but would impulsively throw their heart at a conventional beauty, some Dulcie or Clarabel, whose prettiness would pall almost as swiftly as her girlish lack of education would madden. He had discreetly taken to looking around for Elfines for his brother-in-law.