Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘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.

  ‘Or,’ said Mr Bullivant, ‘you could stay. It’s very cold out. I can get a message to your grandfather.’ He had a telephone. He could arrange for a telegram to be sent. It would be no trouble. Everything could be found for us.

  ‘A hot bath first? And then dinner. I’ve a claret you might like, Rob. And perhaps you’d take Starcrossed for a hack along the lanes for me in the morning. He wants exercise.’

  ‘I want my exercise now, I’m afraid,’ Rob said smoothly, ‘and a telegram would alarm our grandfather.’ He wasn’t boyish any more, he was an adversary. I wondered if Mr Bullivant saw that as clearly as I did, and understood why it was so.

  There might never be another time. This was perfect: the snow, the night closing in on us. The bathwater would be hot, deep and scented. There’d be no question of rationing because Kate could only carry so much hot water up the stairs, and Rob hadn’t had his bath yet. No shivering in a shallow skim of water that was lukewarm by the time it was poured. And the sheets on his beds might be silk. What a pity it was impossible to ask. Or if not silk, then linen so thick and glassy that getting into bed was like slithering into a cream-laid envelope. But Rob would spoil it. There was no point staying if I was on edge all the time, waiting for what he might do or say. I remembered how he’d struck our father with the branch. I’d always wanted Rob to be with me so much more than I’d believed he could want to be with me. Now I hardly recognized the new sensation of wanting Rob not to be here at all.

  ‘So I can’t tempt you,’ said Mr Bullivant. ‘Well, at least let me lend you a lantern, so I can think of you having some light on your way back.’

  Thinking of people when they’re not there – it’s one of life’s great pleasures, isn’t it?

  He stood up, looking down at us. Most of the sandwiches were uneaten, in spite of Rob. They’d be thrown away, along with the dinner we might have had. Suddenly I knew that he would have ordered it to be prepared, just in case. The waste of it, Kate harped in my head. But nothing was less important than money in this house. For a moment the thing that might have happened was as clear and real as the thing that was going to happen, then we got up from the sofa.

  Eight

  Rob stopped on the path. I’d been treading in his footsteps, using the shelter of his body like a coat. Walking had become dreamlike, one foot after another. Mr Bullivant was in my mind. George Bullivant. I saw him reach up to sweep a layer of snow off Diana’s arm, then I saw him pouring out for me a thin golden stream of tea, and buttering a muffin to put on my plate. He had seen my mother, stood beside her and talked to her. I could have gone on walking all night, not feeling the cold, letting pictures rise in my mind. I have always loved journeys, because they absolve me from action. But Rob stopped and we were nearly home.

  ‘Let’s not go back yet,’ he said. His voice was eager, conspiratorial. It was the voice of our childhood and here in the snow it was time out of time. Rob was in the same dream as I was. I wondered who came rising up into his mind, over and over. The lantern made blunt gold splashes on the snow in front of us. The wind was getting up and it blew piled snow off the branches on to our coats. I looked at the footsteps behind us and the blank page ahead. No one had come this way but ourselves.

  We were just a couple of hundred yards from the house. We had walked back between the shelter of the hedges, our boots squeaking, our lantern light filling the hollow of the lane. We were the only creatures out in the night. The birds were roosting, fluffed up behind ramparts of snow. I peered through the hedgerows as we passed, half expecting to see stoats changed to ermine, and the white-tipped tail of a fox, but there was nothing. The cold air sighed around us, stinging my cheeks.

  We were by the orchard. On our left was the close lacework of the trees, their branches striped black and white like the skunks’ tails in Rob’s Picture Almanack of the World. Just here was the place where the wall had collapsed into a pile of soft yellow stone years back. This was the oldest part of the orchard, where a thicket of burly apple trees grew close together, unpruned, bearing fruit on their highest branches. We used to scramble through the gap in the wall to fill a sack with the big, winey apples, easily bruised. They never kept. They were always furred white before we could eat them all. We dared each other to dig our fingers into their rottenness.

  These trees were not picked any more. It wasn’t worth a man’s time, with the business of setting up the ladders. Leaves and branches fell where they would, and fruit clung on through autumn until the frosts. Even now, in the middle of winter, finches fed on a few wrinkled yellow apples.

  The orchard lay still in its sheath of white. Rob’s breath puffed towards me and clouded the glass of the lantern.

  ‘Come on, let’s go this way,’ said Rob. His face glistened as he pointed into the trees.

  ‘It’s not a path. It doesn’t go anywhere,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it does. Come on. We’re going to make a snow-house. This snow’s perfect for it – we’ll never get it like this again.’

  I remembered. Years ago there had been three warm winters. The first one began just after the terrible summer when we went to see Father. Everywhere we went in the house, doors squeaked shut against us. The house was restless with the lies we were telling our neighbours. Grandfather led the campaign, and Miss Gallagher was enlisted to add her voice to the rise and fall we could hear from the cold halls and passages. We were barred and left outside to swallow whatever story we were given. But if they knew how to talk, we knew how to listen. We would find out what had happened.

  Rain spattered against the windows like a disappointment, and there was an epidemic of whooping cough in the village so we were forbidden to go there. On our own day after day we lolled in the window seats and longed for snow. We planned what we’d do when it came, a
s it was sure to come. We’d harness Jess to our sledge and ride her to the North Pole. We’d take supplies: dried meat, stoned raisins, cocoa. And when we got there we’d build a snow-house and stay until spring came. Rob had a book about Eskimos with coloured illustrations that showed small squat men, faceless in fur hoods, cutting blocks of packed snow and laying them together like bricks, circle over circle, closing to a small round hole at the top to let the smoke out. The next picture showed an Eskimo family. The wife was chewing sealskin to soften it so she could stitch it into shoes. The baby lay in a papoose, wound tight as baby Jesus in his swaddling clothes at Christmas. Outside, in the breathless silence of Arctic nights, the husband crouched by an ice-hole, spearing fish. We stared at their lives, so purposeful and so different from our own.

  ‘That’s what you’d have to do, Cathy,’ said Rob, reading the text, ‘chew off the blubber.’

  ‘What’s blubber?’

  ‘Pure fat,’ said Rob, knowing I cut away every shred of fat from my meat. If Kate was in a bad mood he would eat it for me. ‘It says here it’s the same colour as candle wax. Think of that, Cathy, thick strips of yellow blubber to chew whenever you feel hungry. I wonder what it tastes like.’

  I made drawings of our snow-house. They were neat plans, showing where we would eat, where we would sleep, where we could carve out the space for our entrance tunnel. We never called the house an igloo, because it would have removed it too far. Igloos were distant and exotic and no longer our own, but a snow-house sounded possible.

  ‘A green winter makes a full churchyard,’ everyone said. The sky stayed dull. We stopped hoping as warm rain leaked out of the overfull clouds, day after day. In the night a hushed splatter against our windows masked the voices downstairs.