Winterking (1987)

by Paul Hazel

  with the unconscious morality of children, knowing herself

  naked, began to put on her dress.

  3.

  In the books they had read together, books which for the

  most part Wykeham had given him, the women were

  pushed off until the end, a reward presumably. But here,

  Harwood thought, they were, his wife and his daughter,

  inconveniently in the middle. The Duke, of course, could

  come and go as he pleased. Holmes was married. All the

  same, Harwood did not think it greatly impeded him. Doctors’ wives, he was certain, were accustomed to having their husbands called away unaccountably.

  Harwood thumbed through his wallet, counting the few

  notes, and threw them all down on the table. “Twenty

  pounds,’’ he said unhappily, realizing that His Grace would

  have to pick up his share of expenses.

  “We can look after ourselves,” his wife said with dignity.

  The girl, playing on the floor before the woman’s feet, had

  not lifted her eyes to look at him.

  “Just a few days,” he said in despair.

  The woman let herself be kissed. Behind her the little

  kitchen was hung with laundry. She had washed his one good

  shirt, straight from his back, when he had come home that

  morning. It lay starched and expertly folded in the bottom of

  his suitcase. She had packed it herself with his underwear

  and his second pair of trousers.

  “I would like to wear it again,” he explained and she

  nodded, distracted. Through the open window, hours before,

  when he had only just arrived, she had caught a glimpse of

  the old gentleman climbing into the limousine. If he were

  anyone important, her husband had not mentioned it.

  “I cannot say what will come of this,” he had told her.

  He lifted out the shirt she had folded carefully, put his thick

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  arms into' it. “But the details have to be the same, I think. Or

  nearly so.”

  He was taking the overcoat.

  “What do you want with that?” she asked.

  She had the uneasy feeling that he was already gone.

  “It’s summer,” she put in scornfully.

  Harwood looked past her.

  “That first night I had it,” he said.

  It had also been April— or March. He had forgotten

  which and wondered now if it mattered.

  “I must be going,” he said, gently, and stepped out the

  door.

  She watched him go down the walk. She did not know

  how long she stood by the curtain. It was not until she had

  turned back that she saw the suitcase open on the table.

  Harwood went along the High Street and through the

  park, as he had come before, without luggage. As he crossed

  the intersection, cars with stone-faced chauffeurs hooted

  imperiously. Let out from shops and offices, men and women

  pressed into buses or, retracing familiar routes, melted

  anonymously into pubs and houses. Harwood trudged on

  doggedly. His Grace had been prepared to drive them all,

  Holmes included, out by the river road to Greenchurch, but

  Harwood had protested.

  “You and I must start at the station,” he had told him.

  “Please understand.”

  But he had not. “And Holmes?” he had asked.

  “I must get on at Bristol, Your Grace.”

  The Duke had sat with his back to them, overlooking the

  city. During the night it had seemed clearer; but now, the

  whisky deserting him, he had not been able to think.

  “How will you get there?” he had asked.

  In fact, Holmes had taken a taxi.

  “It seems a foolish expense,” the Duke said, meeting

  Harwood by the information booth. Under the great dome of

  the waiting room his voice did not sound angry but humiliated. But he was not thinking of the money or, indeed, of Holmes. A daughter, he thought. It seemed impossible that

  Wykeham had not told him.

  Except for the one secret, he had been told everything.

  He had earned that trust. He had worked indefatigably. It

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  was he who had always been summoned to deal with lawyers,

  with loose ends, with death. But the one thing that counted,

  a child, the passing on of the inheritance, had, until the very

  end, been kept from him. It wrung him to think of it.

  He walked stiffly beside Harwood. Because the evening

  was mild, the doors to the platform had been left open. They

  could both see the train.

  As they neared the gate, Harwood stopped, shocked by

  the clarity of his recollection. His eye crept along the line of

  car windows.

  “There ought to be a woman,” he said.

  The crowd of passengers, already boarding, were finding

  their seats. No face peered down at him.

  He had not wanted to look this far ahead, to visualize

  anything too completely, as if all their lives had been plotted.

  But at bottom he had kept a list; he was checking against it.

  “She was staring out of the train,” he said, almost

  desperately.

  For the first time the Duke noticed that Harwood was

  carrying the overcoat.

  “There were two women,” he reminded him. But Harwood

  had forgotten the other.

  It depended, the Duke realized, on who had been

  watching.

  And three men, he thought. Four, if he counted himself.

  But he did not think he should be added; there had been

  nobody watching him. Harwood, he remembered, had walked

  ahead but he had stayed where he was. There had been no

  part for him. The Trust, even his office in the bank, had been

  given to Houseman.

  The Duke was looking up at the train.

  The sky, because it was summer, was tranquil; its lingering

  brightness glowed a soft reddish gold. In the cars the lights

  had been turned on. The faces of the passengers, illuminated

  in equal measures by the sky and the lamps, shied first one

  way, then another, nervously.

  The engine expelled a cloud of white steam. From

  behind it came the bark of horns, the sound, almost lost

  under them, of ships’ bells in the harbor. In the first car, by

  the window, a man took his seat.

  Harwood looked and saw nothing. He glanced sharply

  around.

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  “Perhaps I was wrong after all,” he admitted. “We could

  just as well have driven.” He paused, looking back at the

  station. “I thought that if we could just repeat everything,

  one thing after another, as it happened, something would

  change. But it hasn’t.” Dejected, he walked away. “Are you

  coming, Your Grace?” he asked.

  The Duke’s eyes were fixed beyond him.

  The face staring from the car window was printed indelibly on his mind: the thatch of dark hair and the high forehead, the deep hard eyes watching.

  The man was looking out at the evening.

  “At the light that was fading,” the Duke told Harwood

  afterward. “Regarding it contemplatively,” he said later, “as if

  it were something important, to be gravely considered.”
>
  It had only been for a moment; the head turned.

  “We must hurry,” the Duke said. Taking hold of Harwood’s

  arm by the elbow, he pressed forward.

  The train crawled past shipyards, past the tight-packed

  roofs of the slums, following the river. The Duke sat up in his

  seat. It was his second night without sleep but he was no

  longer tired. “He did not see us,” he said in a rapid, low

  voice, his eyes shining. “He was not looking for anyone. He

  would not have expected anyone.” His own face beamed.

  "But he was seen.”

  The sun’s rays had disappeared. The plain of the river

  had become a cavernous darkness. Harwood did not care to

  look at it.

  “Why should you be the one?” he grumbled.

  The conductor had come through, collecting the tickets.

  The Duke paid both fares.

  “Compensation,” he said cheerfully. “You must admit I

  was owed something. It was my decision which sent him to

  his death. I felt the pain of it. It comes down to that, I think.

  Payment for sorrow.”

  Harwood frowned. The dead man, sitting no more than a

  dozen rows ahead, did not look very dead. Yet from the back

  it was difficult to make judgments.

  “I could walk up front,” Harwood suggested, “to the

  lavatory.”

  “What would you see?” the Duke objected. “He was no

  one you knew.”

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  “I could see if he looks like a man.”

  “He does,” the Duke said flatly.

  “I could see for myself.”

  “Isn't it enough that I told you?"

  “You!” Harwood nearly shouted. “Why you?”

  Beyond everything it was this which had troubled him.

  If the world had changed, if this was an instance of its

  changing, why had he been excluded?

  He looked around miserably. “Why should it be you who

  noticed?” he asked.

  But His Grace had already given his answer. “Perhaps it

  only happens in pieces,” he added sympathetically.

  “W hat?”

  “Just a bit at a time,” the duke said. “Only changing

  things that he thought should be different.”

  “That who thought?”

  The Duke looked at him doubtfully. "Wykeham,” he said.

  Harwood shook his head. It was the same argument they

  had had in the bank; he was still adamant.

  “Not Wykeham. Not pieces either,” he said.

  He was remembering the woodcut that hung over his

  desk. The pattern, he recalled, once altered, changed

  incrementally from one tessellation to the next. Yet, looking

  back, he had never been able to tell just where the change in

  the pattern had started. A hundred times he had tried to find

  the place but always there were shadows, glimmerings, a

  place farther off for every place he looked.

  “No,” he said fiercely. For an instant he looked straight

  at the Duke.

  “There are differences," he said. “But they had always to

  have been there. Or to seem so, afterward.” In his excitement, he leaned forward.

  A lock of his ginger hair had fallen into his eyes. He

  pushed it back with his fingers. He said, “What changes one

  thing, I’m afraid, Your Grace, changes everything.”

  “But it was William,” the Duke persisted. “Or at least it

  was Joseph.”

  “What makes you think,” Harwood asked, “that only he

  could be the cause of it?”

  “Cupheag,” the conductor called sharply, announcing

  the station.

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  “Metichanwon,” he said later.

  But when he should have shouted out Bristol, he did

  not.

  The train slowed. The conductor came into the car and

  then left it. Three or four times the Duke noticed him in the

  passage between the car and the engine, speaking to someone up front. Each time he came back into the car he was frowning. The Duke wished the man would stay in one place.

  The movement along the aisle was annoying and he was

  trying to think.

  “Your pardon,” he said the next time the man passed

  him.

  “There’s been a delay,” the conductor replied curtly.

  “How long?”

  The man shrugged.

  It grew late. The Duke let his forehead rest on the

  window. The sound of the wheels came softly through the

  floor, a faint, even throbbing that made the sound almost

  tender. He glanced up. Houseman, to his relief, was still

  there.

  For a moment he felt safe again.

  He had listened to Harwood, had tried to think honestly

  what the younger man had meant. He knew that something

  had gone terribly wrong and equally that it had been put

  right again. A man was dead. Over and over he had tried to

  grapple with the shifting tides of that responsibility but he

  had felt himself being pulled under. Now Wykeham had

  changed it. “There is a place to stand again,” he might have

  said. He had been beginning to drown.

  “Christ Almighty!” exclaimed Harwood.

  The Duke dragged himself up.

  The passengers rumbled awake, their sleep-slackened

  faces jostled into alarm.

  The river was burning. Across the water-meadows and

  the marshes on the outskirts of Bristol they saw the bright

  sheet of flame: a thousand tongues of light, not upon the

  water but within it, gleaming balefully. It grew bigger and

  brighter. But it was itself without height. Without heat.

  Without sound.

  “Like a reflection,” Harwood whispered.

  He looked up. Even in the glare of the burning, his face

  grew pale.

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  “It’s the city,” he gasped.

  “But how— ?”

  His Grace was staring.

  The train crossed a small bridge. After a few hundred

  yards there was another. The sound of the wheels, rocking,

  echoed softly. Then the track, following the long curve of the

  bank, straightened. Suddenly the station was ahead of them.

  In the bright distance behind it the roofs of Bristol were

  engulfed in flame.

  At the front of the car the door opened. The conductor

  walked through. He closed the door, locked it. The stricken

  faces of the passengers watched, unmoving..

  “You must stay in your seats,” he said evenly. “We will

  take only as many as we can. There is no need for panic.

  There are police on the platform. Everything has been

  arranged.”

  “What has happened?” someone cried.

  “Fires,” he said stiffly and went down the aisle and

  through the next door into the car behind.

  The Duke did not watch him.

  All around him was the confusion of the yard. Acres of

  track were sliding by him; odd little sheds and old carbarns

  flickered past. Usually untidy and blackened, they were now

  curiously enlivened. Touched with fire-gold and copper, they

  bloomed. The engine gave a small moan. The car bumped.

  Along the narrow platform, marshaled behind gates and highr />
  railings, crowds of people gathered by tens and by hundreds.

  The Duke did not feel their stares. His body did not seem to

  belong to him but to be floating above them, as the car

  passed, slowly, out of darkness, into light, again into darkness. ..

  In the car the lamps were switched on once more.

  He did not feel the blast of heated air as the outer doors

  opened. All but unnoticed, Dr. Holmes, pushing his way

  through the men scrambling down the aisle, threw himself,

  exhausted, into the seat beside His Grace.

  “I had fallen asleep,” the Duke said afterward, as if that

  justified it.

  But now he was strangely awake. His eyes ran down the

  rows of new passengers. More than a score had to stand,

  awkwardly, holding on to whatever they could find. He could

  not see Houseman. But he was there. The Duke was certain

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  of that. The car was noisy with questions; he pushed his face

  next to Holmes’s.

  “Your wife?’’ he asked, almost shouting.

  “I got her away this morning,” Holmes answered. “With

  the children. Off to Cambridge." He was very nearly shouting

  himself. Yet some dread that had been in him relaxed a little.

  Still, his eyes did not soften. He said, “As far as anyone can

  tell, it is only this valley.”

  “It’s only here, isn’t it?” Harwood said. “Surely not in New

  Awanux.” He had just remembered his wife and his daughter.

  Holmes shook his head. “There were rumors this morning,” he said. “When I came into the house, everyone was talking. We had time.”

  “We heard nothing.”

  “Then perhaps in the south there was nothing.”

  Harwood had to hunch forward to hear. “We were in

  New Awanux until evening,” he cried. “No one sa id .. .”

  Holmes's voice, raised above the voices nearest him, had

  at least the sound of honesty. “No one knew. There were only

  rumors at first. It was hours before anyone saw them and

  then they were so few. We just looked at them. Everyone

  went out into the streets. We all stood around on the steps of

  the houses, looking up.”

  His color was high, but it seemed less anger or resentment than a kind of sad embarrassment, as if he had seen what should have been hidden. He turned, not meeting their