Winter Solstice (54 page)

“I am left without words.”

“And all this time, I told myself it was my little painting that would be my insurance and keep me out of the poor-house. But instead, my true treasure was my clock. Isn’t it a lucky thing that nobody nicked it off the mantelpiece at Poulton’s Row?”

“I might put it more strongly than that. Especially as you never locked your front door. It was always a lovely thing to own. You aren’t thinking of selling it? You mustn’t sell it.”

“Oh, Oscar, for goodness’ sake, of course I’m going to sell it. Don’t you see, with that money we can really transform Billicliffe Villa into the most desirable of residences. Build a conservatory. Fling out a ballroom wing….”

“Elfrida.”

“… And buy a microwave.”

“Elfrida, listen. That money, if you sell the clock, belongs to you.”

“Oscar, listen. It belongs to us. And we’ll end our days in a charming little cottage filled with sunlight, just the way this house always is. And we shall grow potatoes, and leeks, if you want, and we shall have Rose Miller for a neighbour, and a four-star country hotel in the garden. Who could ask for more? It’s so exciting. Isn’t it tremendously, wonderfully exciting?”

“Of course it is. But, dear girl, we must be practical. We must be sensible.”

“I hate being sensible! I want to go out and dance in the street. Shout our good news from the rooftops.”

Oscar considered this, as though it were a perfectly viable suggestion. And then he said, “No.”

“No?”

“Just for the moment, what I would like is for nothing to be said about anything until I’ve had a chance to get Sam on his own and explain the situation. He must know that we are thinking of selling up here, because I am certain that he will want first refusal. Not having to start searching for another property will be a great weight off his mind. He has, at the moment, quite enough to think about without wondering where, he’s going to live. He’s not going to be with us forever, so we should put him in the picture before he leaves us and we don’t see him again. He may need time to think it all through; perhaps raise the cash. We don’t know. But I feel he must be our first consideration.”

“Yes. You’re absolutely right. When will you tell him?”

“I shall take him down to the pub this evening.”

“And the others? Carrie and Lucy?”

“After I’ve spoken to Sam.”

“What if Billicliffe’s house proves to be a total disaster?”

“Then we shall have to think again.”

“I can’t wait to go and look at it. You and I. But we can’t go this afternoon because of the snow. The roads are horribly skiddy. And we can’t go tomorrow because of the party.”

“Sunday?”

“Christmas Eve.”

“As good a day as any. Sunday morning.”

“All right. We’ll go on Sunday morning. Perhaps we should ask Sam to drive us in his car. That should preclude us ending up in a ditch.” She thought about this, and then came up with an even brighter idea.

“I know. We’ll all go. Carrie and Lucy too.”

Oscar was wary.

“That will entail five different people all coming up with then-own opinions and ideas.”

“All the better. I’m sure Sam will be wonderfully practical. He’ll talk about things like soffits, and rap walls, and be knowledgeable about rising damp. And I’ve had another brilliant idea. If we went to Corrydale in the morning, and it wasn’t raining or snowing, we could take a lunch picnic. A winter picnic. I shall make a pot of my garbage soup. Oscar, have we got a key for Major Billicliffe’s house?”

Oscar had not thought about a key.

“No.”

“Then how shall we get in?”

“Rose Miller will have one. Or know some person who has. I have to ring her anyway, to let her know that the old boy has died, though she’s probably heard by now. And I must call Peter Kennedy.”

They drove to Buckly by way of the narrow back road that wound along the coast. The prospects about them could not have been more wintry-white hills and grey skies running with clouds, driven on a wind that blew from the north, from the Arctic seas, and across great tracts of snowcovered moors. The car crested a shallow hill, and Carrie saw, below them the sea loch at half-tide, the dark conifer forests on the farther shore, and the huddle of white cottages above a disused and ruined pier.

She had never been this way before.

“What is the loch called?” she asked.

He told her.

“Loch Fhada. It’s a bird sanctuary.”

They turned along the shore road. The beach was rocky and inhospitable. The sea, racing in on the flood, was as grey as the skies above and flecked with spray. Far out, on a sandbank, a number of seals rested, and as she watched, a flight of ducks moved in from the east, to land on an isolated pool not yet drowned by the running tide.

At the far end of the loch, a road bridge spanned the water, and beyond this was wild country, a glen of scrub and bracken and dead water, edging up into the hills. At the main road they turned north, and the gritters had been out, and the snow was dirtied by traffic and by the mud thrown up by lorries and tractors. Between the road and the sea lay farmland; sheep huddled in the lee of dry stone dikes, and small farmsteads sported bravely smoking chimney-pots reeking of peat. A tractor was crossing a field trailing a bogey laden with hay, and a woman emerged from a door to throw crusts to her flock of gobbling geese. Farther on, they came upon a man trudging along the side of the road, a solitary figure walking head-down against the weather; he held a long crook and his sheepdog ran at his heels. As they approached, he paused to let them by and raised a mittened hand in greeting.

“He looks,” said Carrie, “as though he had been painted by Breughel.”

She remembered farms in the south of England, so bosky and green. And her father’s small holding in Cornwall, where the milk cows grazed out of doors all winter. She said, “I can’t imagine working a farm in weather like this. It seems a question of survival rather than anything else.”

“They’re always prepared for bad weather. Winters have always been harsh. And they’re a tough breed.”

“They’d need to be.”

They were on their way to view the woollen mill which was to be Sam Howard’s future. Now, Carrie wished that she had never come up with that suggestion, so casually made. I should like to see your mill, she had said, with no idea that he would be so enthusiastic about the prospect of showing her around. And that had been before all that happened later; and this morning, of course, it was too late to back out, to make some excuse, to pretend that she wasn’t particularly interested after all.

Too late. Too late to blot out that outburst of passionate honesty, the truth that she had been so careful to keep to herself, concealed and hopefully unsuspected. She told herself that she couldn’t conceive how it had all come about, knowing perfectly well what had precipitated the breakdown of defenses, the opening up of her own unhappy heart.

It was Corrydale. The place. The sunlit snow, the aromatic scent of pine trees, the dark-blue skies, the mountains on the far side of the glittering firth. The warmth of the low sun seeping through the padding of her jacket; the crunch of fresh snow underfoot; the dazzle, the pleasure of breathing pure cold air down into her lungs. Austria. Oberbeuren. And Andreas. The place and the man; indivisible. Andreas, here. Now. Walking beside her, talking incessantly, his voice always with that undertone of laughter. Andreas. Making plans, making love. So strong was the illusion that she thought she could smell the cool, fresh, lemony scent of his aftershave. And even as she felt his presence so strongly, she had known that it was simply a figment of her own heightened imagination. Because Andreas was gone. Back to Inga and his children, leaving Carrie with such a devastating sense of pain and loss that all at once it was no longer possible to remain cool and rational.

Sam, talking about his wife, his broken marriage and the end of his job in New York, had simply compounded her misery, and when he had come out with that horrible word “rejected,” she had turned on him in the sort of rage that she had never believed she was capable of, the furious words had broken free, and it was only tears that stemmed the outburst. A flood of tears that left her ashamed and humiliated, and when she had tried to run away from her own humiliation, Sam had pulled her back, taken her into his arms and held her close, as he might have held an inconsolable child.

She thought now, that in a book, in a film, that moment would have been the end. The final embrace, after reels of antagonism and misunderstanding. The camera after backing off into a long shot, panning up to the sky, to a skein of home-flying geese or some other meaningful symbol. Throbbing theme music, and the credits rolling, and the good sensation of a happy ending.

But life didn’t stop at the end of the story. It just moved on. Sam’s embrace, his arms around her, the physical contact, the closeness had comforted, but not melted her own coldness. She was not changed. She was still Carrie, thirty years old, and with the love of her life gone forever. Perhaps that was the way she wanted to be, with a heart frozen like the winter landscape all about them. Perhaps that was the way she wanted to stay.

Elfrida had said, so sadly, The world is full of married men. It was better not to get too close to another person. The closer you got, the more likely you were to get hurt.

The mill stood on the outskirts of the small town, set back from the road behind a stone wall and an imposing wrought-iron double gateway. This was wide enough to allow the passage of a horse and cart, and overhead curved a decorative archway crowned by an ornate device vaguely heraldic in appearance.

The gate, this morning, stood open, and beyond was a spacious area set about with circular raised flower-beds contained by walls of cobble-stones. All lay under snow, and the flower-beds were empty, but Carrie guessed that in summertime there would be a fine show of geraniums, lobelia, aubrietia, and other municipally approved plantings.

The snow was virgin, unmarked by footprints or tyre tracks. They were, it was clear, the first and only visitors of the day. Passing beneath the gateway, Carrie had, through the windscreen, her first sighting of the mill, and could at once perfectly understand why the environmental authorities had deemed it worthy of being listed. There was an industrial chimney, of course, rearing up beyond the pitched roof, and other, more utilitarian sheds and storehouses set about, but the main building was both impressive and good-looking.

Built of local stone, its fa9ade was long and pleasingly symmetrical. A central pediment was topped by a clock tower. Beneath this, a single window on the first floor, and then, below again, an important double door over which arched an elegant glass fanlight.

On either side of the pediment, the two wings were set with a double row of windows, all formally fenestrated. The sloping roof was slate, pierced by skylights, and here and there the stonework was softened by the dark and glossy green of climbing ivy.

Sam drew up in front of the big door, and they stepped down into the snow. Carrie stood for a moment looking around, and Sam came to stand at her side, his hands deep in the pockets of his Barbour.

After a bit, “What do you think?” he asked.

“I think it’s very handsome.”

“I told you. No question of bulldozing the lot and starting anew.”

“I was expecting a dark, Satanic mill. Or a factory. This looks more like a well-established public school. All that’s missing are a few playing fields with goal-posts.”

“The original null buildings are round at the back, nearer to the river. This block was put up in 1865, so it’s relatively new. It was conceived as a form of window-dressing. Offices, sale-rooms, conference rooms; that sort of thing. There was even a reading room for the employees, a good example of Victorian paternalism. On the first floor, the space was for finished goods, and, above again, in the lofts, wool stores. You have to remember that the business has been going since the middle of the eighteenth century. The river, of course, was the reason that the original mill was sited in this particular spot.”

Carrie said, “It all looks in such good order. Hard to believe it’s suffered a fatal flood.”

“Well, brace yourself. You’re in for a shock.”

He produced, from his pocket, a considerable key, fitted this into the brass lock, turned it, and pushed the door open. He stood aside, and Carrie went past him and into a square, high-ceilinged reception hallway.

And devastation.

It was empty. The high-tide mark of the floodwater reached to nearly five feet. Above this, handsome flock wallpaper had survived, but, below, all colour had been soaked away, and it peeled from the wall in ruined tatters. The floor, too, bare boards, was much damaged: old planks rotted and broken; gaping holes revealing original joists and the dark cavities of deep foundations. There hung, over all, the pervading and depressing smell of mould and damp.

“… This was the reception area. For visitors, or new customers; an important first impression. I believe it was all furnished and carpeted in some style, and with portraits of various McTaggart founders glowering down from the walls. You can see that the plaster cornice survived, but the flood rendered everything else beyond repair and it all had to be jettisoned.”

“How long did it take for the water to go down?”

“About a week. As soon as possible, industrial blowers were installed to try to dry things out, but too late to save anything in here.”

“Has the river ever flooded before?”

“Once. About fifty years ago. After that a dam and a sluice were constructed in order to control the level of the water. But this time the rain was relentless, and to make matters worse, there was a very high tide, and the river simply burst its banks.”

“It’s almost impossible to imagine.”

“I know. Come and see. Careful where you walk. I don’t want you falling through the floorboards.”

Another door stood at the back of the hallway. Sam opened this, Carrie followed, and it was a bit like going through the green baize door of a large house with servants’ quarters. For it led into a stone-floored space as big as a warehouse and glass-roofed for light. It was empty, echoing, and piercingly cold. Here and there were evidences of past industry, like the mountings set into the flags where once had stood the weaving looms, and at the far side an open-treaded wooden stair led to an upper gallery.