A Spell of Winter (11 page)

‘Ah, here we are. Tea!’ said Mr Bullivant. The girl placed the tray in front of him and set out the cups. They were big, shallow, white china cups with a rice-grain pattern in them.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he apologized. ‘I can’t bear fiddling with dolls’ cups.’

‘No, I like them.’

He smiled. ‘I rather thought you would. You don’t strike me as a fiddly person.’

‘What are the sandwiches?’

He pointed. ‘Egg and anchovy – my passion. Don’t feel you have to share it. Cucumber. I thought we ought to have cucumber. And potted beef for Rob.’

There were almond tarts too, and a dense, nearly black fruitcake with its top covered in glazed cherries, angelica and walnuts. There were the muffins he had promised.

‘Would you cut me some of that?’ asked Mr Bullivant. ‘Another weakness, I’m afraid; I eat it with Wiltshire cheese. Look the other way if you like.’

I cut a big wad of the cake and a piece of the crumbly cheese and watched him pack them together and eat them. The tea was pale gold and fragrant. I thought of Kate’s black tea. Without its kick in her stomach she’d never keep working from dawn to midnight, she said. The heat of food and fire spread down to my finger-ends. I sighed.

‘Have you had enough? What about more of these sandwiches – they’re very good.’

I took a piece of the fruitcake. It was moist and shiny, and much lighter than it looked. I bit into a piece of crystallized ginger.

‘We’ll fetch Rob in a while,’ said Mr Bullivant. ‘No need to drag him away from the horses. We’ll have fresh tea later. Come on, we’ll have a look around. There’s a room finished you haven’t seen. My study.’

My idea of a study was a dark-brown, leathery, smoky room, with light flattened by half-curtained windows. Grandfather had such a study, though it was an affectation: he was much too restless to read. But I was ready to be polite. Everything would be new, at least, and I loved the smell of new leather. We went down a half-finished corridor. The floorboards had just been laid. Everything in this wing had been rotten, he said, it had all had to be torn up. But there was no dry rot, thank God.

‘Though of course you can smell that as soon as you step over the threshold. I would never have bought the place.’

‘Mmm.’ I thought vaguely of the smell in certain parts of our house. Was that dry rot? If so Mr Bullivant would certainly have diagnosed it. Better not ask.

‘Here.’ There was no door handle, but a piece of rope wound round the door kept it from closing. The rope was pale, like ship’s rope. He pulled down a switch and the room sprang into light. It came on in a soft flood and there were pictures everywhere, bathed and glowing. There was no harsh central light, no glare. The walls were a warm, living white. A very pale, slightly worn rug lay on the floor. Tiny unicorns ran on a background which was the colour of woods in April as tree after tree lights into leaf. In front of the long windows there was a chair, quite small and finely made. No rows of books, no tobacco smoke, no studded leather.

But there were the pictures. They were so alive that they seemed to vibrate on the walls. You could not have had books and heaps of paper in here, because the pictures would have cancelled them out and made them look like dead things. And you couldn’t turn your back on pictures like these to stare at a desk. The wall on my left had two enormous paintings on it. One was taller than the other, almost from floor to ceiling. It was a painting of a wood in winter: at least, I thought it was that. But not a wood like our woods: the light was quite different. The bright leafless trees shone as if they had been polished. The strokes that made up the painting were thick and very noticeable: it looked as if you were meant to be able to see how the paint had been put on. I was used to paint which blended immaculately under shiny varnish, so that it would look as real as possible. This painter had had a different idea of reality. The sky was so pale it dazzled, and behind the wood there was a heap of hills, purple as damsons. The other painting was square. It was painted as if from high above a town, in the burning heat of July or August. There were almost no shadows; it must have been not long after noon. The sun was so intense it had bleached out much of the colour from the tiled roofs and deep crooked streets that ran between them. The roofs tipped against one another, irregularly shaped, like dominoes toppling crazily. The houses were pale as squares of harvest wheat.

‘Who painted them?’ I asked.

‘A man called Richard Tandy.’

‘I’ve never seen pictures like these.’

‘No. Not many people have.’

‘It’s not England, is it?’

‘No. It’s in the Pyrenees, in the forest above Pau. That one’s Italy, where I live.’

‘Is your villa in it?’ I asked, stepping close to the picture. He laughed.

‘No. That’s the town, where the market is. My villa is about four miles outside the town.’

‘Do you know him, then? Richard Tandy?’

‘Yes, I’ve known him a long time. I’ve been buying his pictures for years. He doesn’t sell many, you know. People don’t want them.’

‘Don’t they?’ I asked. In a way I could see why. You could not have these paintings in a room and get on with eating and drinking or quarrelling, as if they were not there. I could understand why there was nothing but the carpet and chair in Mr Bullivant’s study. The paintings disturbed the air. It was more than a vibration: the colours were as exultant as angels. I thought of the trite sweetness of the few flower studies we had, or the relentlessly detailed portraits of dying animals which had come with the house. Richard Tandy was painting in a different language.

‘I like this room much better than your drawing-room.’

‘Do you?’ He was looking at me attentively, warmly. ‘Yes, you’re right, of course. I am happier in here than anywhere else. My place in Italy is like this. Nothing on the walls except pictures. The plaster’s a bit irregular, you know; you could look at it for ever. You can see how it’s been put on. And then the floors are tiled. Tiny black-and-white tiles; quite cold in winter. But it’s never winter for long.’

‘Why don’t you make Ash Court like that then, if you prefer it?’

‘Oh, you couldn’t do that here. The climate’s against it.’ He stared at the pictures. His face was heavy from this angle, set. I wondered if the climate was the only thing that was against him, here. I turned back to the pictures. I re-entered the wood in winter and the burning town. He had turned too, and we stood together for a long time, not speaking. There was the faint sound of our breathing. I drew closer to the painting of the roofs. I wanted to touch them, feel the brushstrokes. Even the shadows looked as if they would give off heat. I traced the dense terracotta line of a roof, my fingers not quite touching the canvas.

‘Touch it,’ he said.

I touched. The ridges and grooves of the paint felt familiar, like the whorls on my own fingers. I was in that baking heat, in that pure, acrid smell of sun.

‘Come back,’ said Mr Bullivant. I turned and smiled at him.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said.

‘No. Not quite.’

‘I’m glad you like them. I thought you would.’ He pointed to a small lozenge of dull, deep red. ‘There’s a colour that would suit you.’

‘It’s exactly the same colour as dried blood,’ I said.

‘All the same, it’d suit you.’

I turned aside, letting the sunburn of his look rest on my cheek.

‘You are very like your mother,’ he said suddenly, as if surprised.

‘How do you mean? How would you know?’

‘I’ve met her.’

I stared at him. ‘You can’t have done. She’d left long before you moved here.’

‘Not here. In France.’

‘But you don’t live in France. You live in Italy,’ I said stupidly. He sighed, ‘I don’t know her, Catherine, not really. I’ve met her, that’s all. In Antibes one winter. She’s quite a figure there …’

‘Quite a figure – what do you mean?’

‘People know who she is. She’s very – remarkable,’ he answered, thoughtfully, as if he’d only just now realized what my mother was.

‘She can’t be all that remarkable. After all, she’s forty.’

He smiled. ‘Oh yes, she’s got grey hair. That kind of hair goes grey early. You’ve the same hair yourself. But she seemed quite happy with it.’

I couldn’t even begin to picture it. ‘Did you talk to her?’

‘Not for long. Half an hour perhaps.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh – other people, I think. She made a lot of jokes. Good ones, too. There were people we both knew.’

There were people we both knew.
He talked about her as if she was in the next room. She made jokes, she knew people, she was remarkable. She simply couldn’t be related to the beautiful figure of guilt and silence we’d grown up with. There were so many things I wanted to ask that they silenced me. And I was angry, too. He had talked to her when we had not. My own mother.

‘Why did you never say?’

‘You don’t talk about her, do you?’

‘That’s no reason. We don’t talk because there’s nothing to say.’

‘I should have thought there was a lot to say. Too much, perhaps.’ He was watching me carefully.

‘Well, what did
she
say then? Did she talk about us?’

‘No. I told her I’d bought Ash Court and she said she knew the house.’

‘I don’t suppose anyone even knows she has children.’

‘If they don’t, it’s not because she’s trying to hide anything. She’s not that kind of person,’ he said.

His confidence enraged me. ‘How would you know? You’ve only spent half an hour with her.’

‘You’ve spent half an hour in front of these pictures,’ he said, ‘and you know they’re different from anything you’ve seen before. You know
them
.’

‘So she pretends she hasn’t got children.’

‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘if it’s anything, it’s that she doesn’t want to make an easy story out of you. Plenty of people would be glad to hear it, I’m sure.’

He had liked her, I could hear it in his voice. And I didn’t want him to have liked her. I wanted him to be on my side, seeing the past as we saw it.

‘I can’t imagine how she ever lived here at all,’ said Mr Bullivant, as if to himself, as if he had forgotten me. ‘I simply can’t picture it.’

‘She might have been happy, how would you know?’

‘She might, I suppose. But I don’t think so.’

‘And is she happy now?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I would say that she seemed happy.’

‘You see. We’re nothing to her any more.’

‘You don’t believe that, Catherine. I should say that there isn’t a day when she doesn’t suffer because of you.’

‘You can’t know that, from half an hour.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you’re right. I went back. You’ve always been told, I suppose, how she left you and no mother who loved her children could ever have done it.’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘But when you meet her – when you know her – you begin to see that there could be other reasons. That it could have been like ripping herself in half, but she had to do it.’

‘Did
she
say that?’

‘No. She said nothing about you at all.’

She said nothing about you at all.
The colours in front of me vibrated faster and faster. The room was cracking open like an egg. There were possibilities I’d never dreamed of, stories I’d never been told and had never told to myself.

‘I must go,’ I said.

‘We’ll go down,’ he said at once. His voice was quick and warm. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to upset you.’

I said nothing. I was fairly sure that he’d done what he meant to do.

‘Rob will be wondering where we are. He’ll be wanting his tea,’ said Mr Bullivant, and he flicked off the lights, extinguishing the pictures.

But Rob wasn’t waiting for us. He’d be with the horse, still, I knew, talking to it, helping groom it, as absorbed as we had been in the painted landscapes. Mr Bullivant rang the bell for fresh tea and a message to be sent to the stables. I knew Rob wouldn’t want to be brought in, and when he stood in the doorway he was frowning, stunned by passing from the drowsy animal warmth of the stable to the iciness of the yard. He brushed past me, carrying a sheath of winter air around him, then he stood by the fire to warm his hands.

‘We’ll have to be off soon, Cathy,’ he said. ‘There’s more snow on its way. I felt the first flakes.’ He glanced round the silky room, critical and impatient. But Mr Bullivant looked at the window and said, ‘It won’t come yet. Sit down and have your tea.’

Rob sat beside me on the little sofa. He was usually so right in every movement, but in here he was awkward. He sat forward, as if he were in a waiting-room.

‘Potted beef?’ offered Mr Bullivant.

Rob took four sandwiches and piled them on the delicate plate. He spread his knees out and grinned, showing his teeth. He posted the sandwiches into his mouth one after the other, then sluiced the tea down, sucking slightly at his teeth. They might have been the cheese doorsteps and the metal flask of Kate’s boilings which he took for a day’s shooting. I saw that where Rob had been indifferent to Mr Bullivant, he was now hostile. It was the horse, I told myself. The sight of Starcrossed in Mr Bullivant’s stable had been too much for Rob.

‘More tea?’ asked Mr Bullivant.

‘No,’ I said, ‘Rob’s right, we ought to go. It’s a long walk.’

‘Someone can drive you.’

‘I’d rather walk,’ I said, looking down at my boots planted on the carpet. They were sturdy and sensible. I needed to put some time between this house and our own. It was too beautiful; it made me uneasy, prickling me like the scent of narcissi and making me hungry for things I hadn’t got. No, it was even more disturbing. It was like the drifting scent of flowers in a room where there are no flowers. It set me searching. I didn’t care so much about the Chinese silks or the looking-glasses and china. I was on the wrong scale for them, and clumsy. But I couldn’t forget the room with the pictures. I could see how I might belong there.

Rob shot me a small, approving smile when I said I’d walk. He thought I was choosing between him and Mr Bullivant: that was the way Rob thought. It was always like that in our house. If you were not on one side then you were on the other.