A Spell of Winter (17 page)

I cowered under the blankets. They were hot and scratchy and I had no sheets: it was a punishment for wetting my bed. I heard the squeak and shuffling begin. They were coming, peeling off the wall, dropping lightly to the bed, scampering across the floor. Then there was a thud, a cry. Silence. A long pause.

‘Rob?’ I did not dare peep out of the blankets.

‘It’s all right.’ His voice, curt and muffled. ‘I’ve got him. But he’s done my arm.’

‘Can I come out?’

‘Yes. He’s dead.’

He was dead and gone. Rob sat on his bed, rather pale, holding his arm.

‘Ouch! Don’t touch it, Cathy. That’s where he hit me with his nightstick. If I hadn’t been quick he’d have done worse.’

I stared respectfully at Rob’s nightshirted arm where he clutched it.

‘You won’t wet the bed any more,’ Rob told me. ‘Kate will put your sheets back.’

I listened for the boy in the wallpaper, but his teasing voice was silent. He had gone, and the wallpaper was only wallpaper.

No, Miss Gallagher was not the boy in the wallpaper. Footsteps tapped down the corridor and we sprang apart.

‘Has that one gone yet?’ demanded Kate. ‘I’m late with your grandfather’s coffee for keeping out of her way, and now he’s raging. Why he can’t drink tea in the afternoon like a Christian soul, I can’t think.’

‘Nothing very Christian about tea … nothing very Christian about Miss Gallagher, come to that. Kate, you’d know – is she a witch?’

‘I’d know, would I? Well, as it happens, I can tell you. She’s much too stupid to make a witch. Any broomstick she had would never get off the ground. Now out of the way and let me see to this.’

She knelt, building a wigwam of kindling. Somewhere a bell rang furiously.

‘He wants his coffee, the old devil,’ she muttered as if to herself.

‘I’ll do that,’ said Rob.

‘You will not. You make a terrible fire.’

‘We can’t sit here like a pair of stuffed owls while you do everything.’

‘Why not? Isn’t that what you’re for?’

‘Touché.’

‘Too-shay yourself. Do you think I don’t know French? At least push the damper in after a quarter of an hour.
If
you remember, with all you’ve got on your mind.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She looked at him with her long bright eyes and shrugged. ‘You don’t usually stop talking when I come into the room.’

‘No more we do. Sorry, Kate.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining. Just observing. I’ve enough to do making all these fires up and putting clean linen on your beds.’ She gave another long oblique look that included us both, lifted the basket of kindling, kicked open the door with her heel and was gone.

‘Yes, she’s got to go,’ said Rob, as if we hadn’t been interrupted.

‘It’s all right saying that, but how?’

‘I’ll think about it. And you do too. My best ideas come in the middle of the night, I find.’ He grinned at me and the burden lifted. It was all play.

But he didn’t come to my room that night and I lay awake, alone. I didn’t think of Miss Gallagher. I thought of my father and how they had taken him. Had they grappled his arms behind him, pinioned him, made him walk between two indifferent men who’d been brought in knowing nothing but that there was trouble? Had they been rough with him? Or had he crumbled already, compliant as he’d been in the hospital?

If he’d been himself he’d have stung that doctor into silence. Instead he’d sat there with his glass of milk in front of him, and reached out his hand to lift it obediently to his lips. But Rob had taken the glass and poured the milk in a long arc to the ground.

My father had stumbled in and out of the rose garden, looking for us. There would have been thorns in his hands. They had been able to take him and do what they liked with him. ‘A moral idiot’. The flesh had hung from his face, slack and heavy. He was fatter than he had been, stripped of house and wife and children and gun. I wished he had still had his gun. He would never have hurt anybody.

‘When I’m out of sorts, a day’s shooting soon puts me right.’ Had he said that, or was I imagining what I wanted to remember? The beads of moisture on his shooting jacket. The battered cap he always wore. The way a hare or a pair of rabbits would swing from his hand. And the cold touch of the skin, the warm flesh beneath, the smell of rain and tobacco and cologne when he swung me up and kissed me.

‘Moral idiocy,’ her doll-like voice tapped at me. I twisted in my bed. How I hated her.

Twelve

In the middle of the night I gave up trying to sleep, sat up, wrapped the counterpane round my shoulders and settled to wait for morning. The house creaked like someone turning over in their sleep. How quickly I’d got used to Rob’s warmth beside me, and the strawlike smell of the bed we shared. Kate had put on clean sheets and there was nothing left but a bland smell of soap.

I hadn’t forgotten. The memory of it was in my body, not in my mind.

Soap flannels my ears. Water runs in and blocks them so that Kate’s voice booms like a deep-sea diver’s. I shake my head, trying to get rid of the sound.

‘Stand still, Cathy. My God, you could grow a crop of potatoes in here. Stand
still
, will you, you’re not going out with your father looking like that.’

Kate seizes my head and crams it between her knees. She’s in a bad mood today, cuffing me about as she gets me ready. Where is Rob? I don’t know and I don’t think of him. My whole imagination is set on the expedition with Father and I hold out one leg and then the other, indifferent as a doll, while Kate garters my woollen stockings. She rakes my hair with the comb and begins to plait. I don’t know how long it is since Father promised me this day with him. I have taken it to bed with me, shaped it in the dark. I am hungry for it but it is a satisfying hunger, as if I can already smell the meal that has been prepared for me. Father never takes me out on my own. It is always Rob on his left hand and me on his right. We call these hands our hands. Rob must not touch mine and I must not touch his. I swing Father’s right hand possessively, and sometimes I put my face against it, quickly so he will not see, and turn it over to kiss his palm. I do it very lightly and he never notices it is me.

Today I’ll have both hands if I want. We are going to walk over to Silence Farm because there is a horse we might buy for ploughing. It’s not really called Silence Farm, but we’ve called it that for so long I can’t remember the proper name any more. At Silence Farm they’ll give me black tea, and a nip of something stronger for Father. The darker and more bitter the tea, the prouder I am to drink it. My tea comes in a china bowl with bands of flowers on it, not in a cup.

‘There,’ says Kate, tipping me off her lap, ‘that’s you done for today. Mind you don’t go over the top of your boots in the mud.’

It’s been raining for weeks but today is fine. There is a wind and the ground’s drying fast, but there are big, mud-slopped puddles too. I always go in puddles. I start at the edge and shuffle in very slowly, watching the skin of the water lap my boots. Sometimes I get right to the middle, sometimes there is a snatch and a slap and I am whisked up and dumped back on the dry earth.

‘And don’t go raising the dead with those boots outside your mother’s room. She has a headache.’

‘No, I won’t,’ I say, but half-way down the corridor I notice that my boots make a much more satisfactory noise now that they have been away to town and had little steel tips put on at sole and heel. I click my heels like a pony and shy at my mother’s closed door, tossing my head. But the next minute Kate whisks out of the night nursery, sweeps me up and whooshes me to the top of the stairs. She kneels down in front of me and hisses into my face,

‘Now get yourself downstairs and no more noise out of you. You’ll be late and he won’t take you.’

Her long eyes sparkle danger. I don’t always know with Kate whether it is real or not, so I put my lips tight together and nod obediently.

‘Good girl.’

She’s right, Father is waiting for me in his cap and jacket. But he makes me swallow a plateful of toast first, his own toast with thick marmalade on it, cut into triangles. We are never allowed toast, only porridge, but today I’d rather go with an empty stomach and be sure we were on our way, out of the house and together. On the other hand it would be nice if Rob was there to see me eating the toast. I keep my eyes on Father all the time to make sure he doesn’t suddenly remember something he has to do. And then, just as I’ve bitten a little door in the last piece of toast, he does.

‘Wait here, Cathy, I must go and say goodbye to your mother.’

‘Kate says she has a headache. She wants to sleep. She said no one was to go in her bedroom in case it hurt her eyes.’ I go on, inventing feverishly. I know all about my mother’s headaches. I would tell him she was dead if I thought it would keep him down here with me, but I am pretty sure it would not. ‘Oh.’ He hesitates. ‘One of her sick headaches?’

‘Yes. Kate said so.’

‘Better not go in then. She might be asleep. I’d hate to wake her …’ he says quietly, as if to himself. I think of my mother’s white, shut face in her cloud of pillows, and how she always turns her head away towards the window when one of us creeps in through the door.

‘She said not to wake her,’ I repeat.

‘Oh well, in that case … we’d better cut along. Finished that toast?’

I crunch the last triangle and lick butter off my fingers. ‘Finished, Father,’ I echo obediently. I am sleek with virtue and butter.

Father is taking a gun. I like its dull shine, a bit like the gleam of the range. It is a shotgun. I would like to stroke it, but I’m not allowed to touch. Touching a gun is the one thing that will make Father shout and slap me. He doesn’t care at all about puddles. But the backs of my legs itch, remembering the sting they got when I put out my finger to the gun barrel where the sun was licking it. Lucy’s puppy races at Father’s side. As we walk the puppy skids to a splay-footed halt, runs back, snaps at his shadow, races to catch up with us again. He runs three times farther than he needs. He’s going to make a useless gun-dog, John says, but when I say this Father tells me, ‘He’s young, Cathy,’ and slaps his side to make the puppy come.

The stubble is wet, the soil heavy. My boots clod up with mud and they are heavy to lift.

‘Don’t drag at my hand,’ says Father, and I let go and hop over the caked ruts in the field path. My skirt is dirty already. I might as well go in lots of puddles on the way home. Father is walking fast, with the puppy dancing effortlessly at his side. I must keep up. I stumble and grab at whatever’s there, but it’s a hoop of sharp-clawed bramble and it tears my palms through my gloves. As long as I keep my gloves on I won’t see the blood. Father’s even more ahead now. The sunlight bounces off his hair and the cotton-wool swathes of old man’s beard which loop the hedges. I was going to collect some to make tiny eiderdowns but there’s no time.

‘Come on, Cathy!’ he shouts back. I pick up the sides of my skirt and jump a puddle. The mud is over the top of my boots now, and squeezing down into them. It spatters up into my face. Father has stopped, looking back for me, and next moment a big white handkerchief is scrubbing at my face. It smells of cologne. I am going to smell the same as Father.

‘Try and keep to the dry side up by the hedge.’

I stare round. Is there a dry side? It all looks the same to me. But Father’s boots aren’t even splashed. We are coming to the top of the field. I know the way from here – through the field gate, straight across the next field down to the lane, then all the way along the lane to Silence Farm. No one else lives here. The lane is full of birds and rabbits that don’t bother to run until you are nearly up to them. I always try to catch one with my bare hands, creeping up on them softly and talking to them.

I know the way, but Father seems to have forgotten. At the top of the field he leans on the gate, waiting. But I’m already here, and Lucy’s puppy is squirming under the lowest bar of the gate. Father ought not to let the puppy loose here, because there are sheep. But he doesn’t seem to notice. I pull very gently at his sleeve.

‘Father, the sheep.’

He looks at me as if I’m another person. His eyes are empty.

‘Oh. Yes. The sheep.’ He reaches down, grabs the puppy’s collar and holds it. The puppy strains its soft neck against the collar. Its eyes stretch as it tries to butt its way free into the air. Father gets a leather leash out of his pocket and ties it on to the collar. The puppy runs to the end of it, jerks hard, falls back. It runs again, falls back and whimpers. Father is quite still, looking away over the gate, while the puppy keeps throwing itself against the air. But he must be holding the leash very tightly because his hand is bunched on it and the knuckles are white. The puppy yaps and whines loudly. Suddenly, as it begins its run again, Father pulls the leash up sharp with both hands. The puppy paddles in the air, caught by its throat. The noise changes. The puppy’s face hangs by mine, and I shrink back. I don’t know what Father is doing. He always knows what to do with puppies and dogs. Father jerks hard again then drops the puppy. It sprawls on the ground, coughing, and its legs go all ways. Father rummages in his pockets and gets out a white paper bag.

‘Like a humbug, Cathy?’

Father likes humbugs, and so do I. But I look at him doubtfully and don’t take the sweet. The puppy is making a funny noise, as if it can’t breathe properly.

‘Here, take two,’ says Father, shaking them loose in the bag. They always stick together. I pick a humbug out of the stripey mass, put it in my mouth and suck hard. The puppy is getting up. I’m sure he’s all right now. But I wish we could go on to Silence Farm. This journey is too long, and I need to go and there’s nowhere here. If I was with Rob we’d both go on the path, seeing how big a puddle we could make together. Father takes my hand and swings the gate open. He ignores the puppy, but it creeps along behind us, close to the ground. I wonder why it still wants to be with us, but perhaps it can’t think of anywhere else to go.

We are in the middle of the field when Father stops. His hand holding mine is suddenly wet and I want to pull mine away, but I think of the puppy and I don’t. Father looks back the way we’ve come, then quickly ahead. His hand tightens on me. ‘Quick, Cathy. See how fast we can run to the hedge.’ His voice sounds as if he’s pretending it’s a game, but I know it isn’t. He runs with his head down, dragging me stumbling over tussocks of grass, scattering the sheep. In the shelter of the hedge he crouches down panting. His face is all covered with sweat. I am standing between his knees and he is holding both my hands. Far back across the field I hear the frightened whine of Lucy’s puppy. He can’t find us.