A Spell of Winter (8 page)

Nobody told us. There has been an accident, Grandfather said, his face crumpled. He looked even worse than he’d done when our mother had left. An accident with a horse. Father had lived for two hours and then he had died. We didn’t go to the funeral.

‘You had chickenpox, Cathy!’ said Rob. I remembered the itch of the pox, like wool next to my skin in summer, and the way Kate dabbed calamine all over me while I lay bare on a white sheet. Powdery dust of calamine came off on the sheets, and Kate said she would tie my hands if I didn’t leave the scabs alone. But I was sure that was later.

‘You did. It must have been then, or we would have gone. You know Grandfather. He would have made us,’ Rob insisted.

But I knew I’d been well when my father died. For a while I forgot his face but I still felt his hand as he pushed back my hair which was like my mother’s hair, flaring up to the brush like hers. I smelled medicine and roses. I was back in that day when I took Rob’s hand and we walked away from our father, leaving him on the path with Miss Gallagher. We did not turn round even when we heard the little whining noise he made in his throat.

I had seen him so often in my dreams, as often as I saw the dead man with his white-rooted arm bouncing down the stairs. Once I dreamed that white violets grew out of his arm and I picked them to give my grandfather. I felt the hairiness of violet stems between my fingers. But the mark of the hoof was in my father’s flesh. It was embedded in his forehead and it moved when he smiled at me. ‘Tuesday, perhaps?’ asked Mr Bullivant. ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t mind seeing the plans for his cherry orchard, if Rob would come too. I would make him. The long white table glittered and flashed. All down it people were lifting their silver knives and peeling their fruit. Our fine William pears had been unwrapped from the brown paper which let them sweeten without rotting, and now they fell into grainy yellow slices on the plates while the juice ran down on to the napkins. Only a silver knife would cut the fruit without browning it. Each golden pool of sweet white wine shuddered in a crystal glass. Voices tapped and rang and I saw Livvy’s beautiful shoulders arch above the white satin that looked greenish under the candelabra, as if she had water pouring from her.

‘Yes,’ I said again, ‘I’d like to see them,’ and Grandfather tumbled another handful of cracked nuts into my hand. They tasted like white meat. Grandfather and Mr Bullivant smiled at one another, but their smile was about me; it did not include me. In the next room band music dipped and swooped excitedly, waiting for us to open the double doors of the dining-room and stream out in our couples, our hands warm and sweating from the wine we’d drunk and our bodies looser than they had been, ready to mould to one another. They were playing ‘Solitude’ again. Before I could sleep there would be hours of dancing.

‘More kidneys?’ Rob asked, lifting curls of bacon and tonging them on to plates. Coffee smoked against the light. There had been a hard white frost again and the skin of ice on the lake was thickening. If this went on we would be skating by the end of the week. I wanted to go down and test the ice to find out how it was bearing, but I would wait until the house was empty or I’d have a crowd of them, eager and red-faced in the frost, streaming out of the house behind me like hounds, talking of skating-parties and ice-picnics. It was ten-thirty and our guests were still coming downstairs, their faces small and wan in the daylight. The men looked as if they had just dipped their heads in buckets of water to get the wine out of them. They jostled politely by the sideboard, spearing kidneys and sausages. Kate came in and out, slapping down pots and stirring the porridge where skin had formed. She put down a jug of thick yellow cream, wrinkling her nose as if to say, ‘You can eat it. I wouldn’t.’ She stood there, fresh and strong, with her arms folded, looking as if she were laughing at them all. I longed for them to be gone and us to be alone again, the way we were.

‘Cheer up,’ Rob whispered, ‘they’ll all be gone by the 12.40.’

They were leaving already. Grandfather had ordered the station fly and John was coming round with the trap. A group of the young men had volunteered to walk across the field paths, while their bags went in the fly. The ground was so hard they could have walked in their evening shoes without spoiling them. Grandfather organized everyone, telling the girls to wrap their furs close, offering rugs for their knees and brandy for hip flasks. He was buoyant, in his element, his desire to have his house to himself again sheathed in an elaborate display of courtesy. An apple-wood fire flared in the hall as the door swung open and shut, and the sharp smell of apple-wood smoke blew out on to the icy terrace. We might not often open our house like this, but when we did there would be extravagant flames and flowers and hours of dancing. None of them would suspect the coldness at the heart of it as my grandfather waved to the girls’ rosy faces, turning to the house, misted by plumes of horses’ breath. I longed to have the house empty. Mr Bullivant had slept on the leather sofa in the library for a few hours and ridden home at first light. I half-envied him.

‘Where’s Livvy?’ I asked Rob.

‘I haven’t seen her,’ he said briefly. I wondered if the night had been a success for him. I’d seen her revolving in his arms, dance after dance – or, at least, for exactly as many dances as was correct, because that was Livvy’s way. But she was the kind of girl who could have her breasts touching a man’s shirt front and his hand on her waist and seem farther from him than ever. I thought how she might leave an ache in Rob, like the ache in your arm from stretching up to touch fruit just out of reach.

‘She’s tired from dancing, I expect,’ I said, with a false reassurance in my voice that went against the grain of the more complicated things I felt about Livvy, and Rob and Livvy.

‘Tired!’ he said. ‘She’s always tired, whenever –’

He would have tried to kiss her. Maybe in the conservatory where he thought the heavy perfume from the hyacinth tubs and the half-dark would soften her. I knew just how she’d say it, ‘Oh Rob, I’m tired. I must go and say good-night to your grandfather. Didn’t I see Catherine go up half an hour ago?’ The words would have dropped like small, cold pebbles, not the fountain spray Rob dreamed of when he thought of Livvy. He wanted to bathe himself in her so he would come out dripping and newborn, the way Kate said a man could feel after he’d been with a Woman. I didn’t know what Kate knew, but I guessed there was rock in Livvy under all that pearliness, and Rob would break himself on it before he really knew it was there.

‘You’ve got to come to Mr Bullivant’s with me,’ I said.

‘Why? What is it this time?’

‘He wants to show me the plan for his cherry orchard.’ Rob laughed. ‘You ought to take Miss Gallagher. She’d soon scare him off for you.’

‘Say you’ll come. I told him we’d come tomorrow. He’ll give us lunch.’ No one we knew had food like Mr Bullivant’s. He had a cook from Italy who made pasta like kid-gloves, slippery with meat juice. Some people laughed at his food but I loved it. In the summer Angelo made a lemon ice so tart it was like biting into a plump ripe lemon and getting the spray of zest in your mouth.

‘But you’ve no idea what it tastes like when Angelo makes it from lemons which were growing on the tree an hour before,’ said Mr Bullivant. The lemons hung lamp-like behind flickering dark leaves, in the lemon house of Mr Bullivant’s villa in Italy. The earth was dry and in the winter there was the smell of the oil stoves which kept the frost from burning the lemon trees. The people there sent his lemons to England, packed in tissue paper in long wooden boxes. I had seen them and helped to force out the nails that held the lids shut on the fruit.

‘I’ll come,’ said Rob.

‘And you’re not to go off and leave us, the way you did last time when Mr Bullivant was showing us the wine cellars.’

‘The way you rushed on, there wasn’t time for a fellow to look at anything.’

‘Because you kept stopping to taste the wine.’

‘He said I could. Why do you think he had that tray with the glasses brought down, and the wine biscuits?’

‘You should have seen your eyes when you came up the cellar steps into the light. Black and swimming, like frogs’ eyes. And then you nearly fell up the last step.’

‘If you call
that
drinking –’ said Rob scornfully. He always had that card to play. I’d been nowhere and seen nothing.

‘We’ll go at ten. If it’s like this, we’ll walk,’ I said. I wanted to stride out across the field paths, not trundle along the lanes in the trap. I would wear my thick-soled new boots, and feel the swing of my heavy coat and the strong beat of my blood. I would hook my arm through Rob’s and lengthen my step to his. On the path the mud would be packed and frozen flat.

Six

When they had all gone the fire in the hall died down. Ash blew across the rugs as doors banged open and shut. Grandfather had gone out and Kate, Elsie and Annie whisked about the house, tidying and polishing and moving back the furniture which had been taken out of the drawing-room for the dancing. The Semple boys came up from the village to move the piano and the heavy chairs. Little icy draughts teased my skin. My eyes stung from tiredness as I emptied flower vases and piled up heliotrope and white lilac for the compost heap. The flowers had wilted overnight, from the heat of our bodies and the fires. And then they’d been forced. Forced flowers never live long. They put on a show to deceive you. But there was a vase of early Lent lilies just opening. I touched the petals: they were cold, veined purple and green. I knew where they grew in the garden. If it snowed they would bud under its blanket, hidden, then with the thaw the flowers would stretch wide to the sun as if it stunned them.

Rob had his jacket off and was heaving at the piano with the rest of them. They were all laughing, their teeth white. How red their mouths were. Where was Livvy now? I wished she could see Rob laughing as he hauled at the piano, not thinking of her.

‘Steady on! She’s tilting. Let her swing round.’

A dull jangle came from the piano.

‘This ’ull want tuning,’ said Theodore, slapping its deep-polished side the way he would slap a girl behind a barn or in the warm sweet-breathing dusk of the milking parlour. Their chapel-going soon peeled off those boys, once they were out of their father’s sight.

‘Tickle ’er up and tune her,’ George joined in. ‘ ’Cos she won’t make her sweet sounds ’less you treat her right.’

They all laughed, their faces red and shiny with sweat. Rob laughed like the rest of them. They hadn’t seen I was there.

I walked away, into the conservatory. Outside the day was thickening to a dull yellowish twilight. Three o’clock. The dead stillness of frost had eased and I saw a flicker of wind cross the tops of the elms. It would be like this to the end of winter. The dark coming a little later each night, and the stubborn pushing of bulbs at the soil. My mother was walking on a long bright promenade by a purple sea. She did not write to us. Was her hair turning grey now? Was age putting a check on her blitheness? Did anybody love her any more? I saw her wind her hair in a white silk scarf, and then the breeze from the sea unwound it, coil by coil. She would stand and face the water: there would be a frigate, far out and lit up. The air would smell of salt and orange blossom. She would never come back to dig Lent lilies out of the snow and drag her skirts in the ash that blew across our hall.

Now there was a figure standing beside my mother, dark and upright. He took her arm, turned her to him, gently fastened the scarf about her hair while she smiled past him.

‘My angel!’

‘Rodney …’ But she spoke absently. Rodney; no, the name was wrong. The sky faded. It was all rubbish, anyway. She only wore the scarf so that the loose skin of her throat was hidden. Soon the flesh under her chin would begin to wobble. In a year or two she would start to wear palest pink, never white, and she’d always sit with her back to sunlit windows. I’d got to grow out of seeing her as I’d last seen her, always victorious and sweet-scented, always going somewhere else and leaving people behind as if that was part of her triumph. They were just a man and a woman, two insects squeaking to one another in front of the long mouth of the sea, where foam showed like teeth. She was a fool, a fool who ruined other fools. That was what Grandfather said when he sat drinking after my father’s funeral. He looked at me as if he hated me and told Kate to plait back my hair and not let it fall in my face like a street child’s.

‘Tight! Tighter than that! Can’t you make the child look decent, even in mourning?’

There was something about my eyes that was wrong, and the way my hair grew. I had eyes that were put in with a dirty finger, Kate said. I should have had eyes like Livvy’s, clear and pale like collected water. I was too like my mother. My face made people think of the things men and women did together in the dark.

When my mother left I saw Father cry. It was because a dress she had had altered came back to the house in a long flat brown-paper parcel, addressed to her. He tore it open and the grey folds of the dress blew round his face like cobwebs. It was an evening chiffon which we called her ghost dress. He scrubbed the fabric against his face, snuffing up the smell of it, which was the smell of her body. I watched him and knew exactly what he was smelling, because whenever I went past her bedroom door I tried the handle. Usually it was locked but sometimes I got in. It was just as if she was coming back any minute. I climbed into her wardrobe and rubbed my face against her skirts: the slither of satin, rasping wool, fine cotton lawn. All round me there was the smell of her body, bringing me home. It made me cry, so I knew why Father cried.

Grandfather came into the hall.

‘Charlie,’ he said, seeing Father, but Father didn’t seem to hear him, or anyone. Grandfather went over to him and drew the dress out of his hands. He put his arm round my father. I had never seen him so gentle. They were like that for a long time, my father sitting with his head down and his arms hanging loose at his sides, my grandfather bent over him. I wished I was one of them. My grandfather kicked the grey chiffon under the bench with his boot, and I never saw it again, though I looked everywhere. I did not dare take anything out of my mother’s wardrobe, but the chiffon, perhaps, I could have had, since nobody wanted it. I’d take it to bed with me and wind it round me in the darkness.