Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts. I worked in an office for a while, selling insurance.’

  ‘Insurance!’

  ‘Good God, Cathy, don’t sound so surprised about everything all the time. Yes, I sold insurance.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d go to Canada to sell insurance, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a big thing there. All the farmers need it. They pay into policies against drought and so on.’

  I wasn’t convinced. It came out too easily, as if it were something he’d read about rather than done.

  ‘Were you doing well?’

  ‘Pretty well, I suppose. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

  ‘You don’t have to be asked.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  He stood there, his eyes uneasy but insistent. I kept looking at his hands. They had touched me: for nearly four years I hadn’t thought of how they’d touched me. But he was like another person in another skin, paler and softer than it had ever been. The slightly ill-fitting smartness of his black clothes, and the hat pushed jauntily to the back of his head, were stranger than Canada. He was here but it was too sudden and in my mind he was still far off in that little snow-buried town.

  ‘Come in then,’ I said, ‘but we won’t tell Grandfather yet.’

  ‘Why? Is he ill?’

  ‘No, not really ill. But you’ll see a difference.’

  It was like the dreams I hadn’t let myself dream. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Mrs Blazer took away his cup and filled it before he had finished drinking. Dark patches flared in her cheeks and her hands flustered, eager to be doing but not sure what to do.

  ‘Is there any cake?’ asked Rob, sure that there was and it was only a question of which tin he should choose from. Pound cake or seed cake or gingerbread cut into squares with an almond sitting glossily in the centre of each piece. Once he’d known the rhythm of her baking and now he was going to pick it up again like dropped stitches.

  ‘There’s no cake,’ said Mrs Blazer. I saw her fingers yearn to feed him. ‘But we’ve some oat biscuits.’ She pushed the warm tray across to him and he took one, bit into it, laid the biscuit down again.

  ‘Try it with a bit of goat’s cheese,’ she urged him, but he crumbled the biscuit away between his fingers.

  ‘We can’t get the ingredients,’ I said, ‘with the war.’

  ‘Count ourselves lucky we don’t live in town. They’re queueing for margarine there, nasty stuff that it is,’ said Mrs Blazer, ‘and jam with wood chips in it for strawberries. Least what we’ve got here is clean.’ Rob got up and ran his knuckle down the row of pale green enamelled tins where she’d kept her baking. The little tin for shortbread, the big square one that was meant for weddings and christenings. They rang with an empty music under his hands.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘Things are different in Canada, I dessay,’ said Mrs Blazer, allowing a hint of criticism into her voice. ‘Shops full to bursting.’

  ‘With tallow and beaver skins and dried bear meat,’ said Rob, ‘but I’m here now.’

  Are you, I thought. Under the table I nipped the pale flesh of my fore-arm and made a little sting. It hurt. Rob smiled at Mrs Blazer as he ran a finger under his collar, loosening it. It was a cheap collar, shiny where it shouldn’t be, but clean. It would have been washed over and over. I remembered Rob spoiling his starched white collars and chucking them on the floor while Kate chided him for his extravagance. He took other people’s time for granted then. Something had gone wrong; badly wrong. He was anxiously clean in his dark suit, and all the bloom of confidence had been knocked off him.

  ‘You’ll be hungry,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring you some hot water and you can wash while I go and tell Grandfather you’re here. He’ll need a little while to get used to it before he sees you.’

  It was late. We’d dined together, Grandfather and Rob and I, becalmed around the table. Grandfather’s hands shook a little more than usual, but that was the only sign. I saw the effort of will he made to stop them trembling while he poured the wine. The first thing Rob had said to him, forestalling him, was, ‘I’m on my way to France. I’ll be gone tomorrow.’

  ‘What, dressed like that?’

  ‘Of course not. I’ve got to be trained first. Artillery.’ But he said it at random, as he had said insurance, as if it might not be true.

  ‘Are you really going?’ I asked him later, when we were alone in the hall, with the fire at our faces and the cold at our backs. Grandfather had gone to bed no later than usual, saying good night as if Rob had been gone for days, not years. I knew he would lie awake for hours, watching the laurels push at the window, listening for voices.

  ‘Yes, I’m going.’

  ‘But it wasn’t true about artillery, was it? You just said it.’

  He stretched. ‘Where’s the sense of a commission? Might as well go in as a private. It’s all the same once I’m in the machine.’

  ‘But you can’t bear people telling you what to do. You wouldn’t be pushed around as much if you’re an officer.’

  He shifted restlessly. ‘Everyone gets told what to do. Doesn’t make much difference who’s telling you.’

  ‘You could have stayed in Canada. No one would have known where you were.’

  ‘Oh well. It seemed to be the thing to do.’

  ‘That never bothered you before. Not when you went off with Kate.’

  He looked at me. ‘Don’t go for a fellow, Cathy.’

  I took the poker and stirred up the fire. ‘I cut these logs,’ I said, ‘and brought them in.’

  ‘It’ll be yours, of course, this place. Don’t think I don’t know that. I haven’t come back to take it away from you. Is that what you think?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He leaned forward and thrust the poker deep in the fire to heat. His hair was dry at the ends, badly cut and shabby brown.

  ‘Why did you come back then?’ I asked.

  ‘To see you, of course,’ he said, and took out the poker. Its end glowed red and then dulled over. He wrote his initials on one of the logs that was drying in the hearth. The first downstroke burnt deep but the rest scarcely charred the wood. ‘I wanted to see you before I went to France.’

  ‘You might not get sent to France,’ I said. It was too easy, all this. All he had to say was the word France and we would melt before him, forgetting or not daring to mention what he’d done. ‘They don’t take everyone.’

  He looked round, his eyes blank with surprise. ‘Of course they’ll take me.’ He sounded like a man who’d walked for days to the edge of a cliff, bracing himself to look down, only to find the drop no more than a few feet which a child could jump. For a moment we were together, looking into the chasm of what he wanted. Not to think, not to decide, just to go blindly with a force as impersonal as the wind.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t think you’re well. You look awful. Livvy’s father is on the Tribunal, he’ll fix something up for you. You could get a staff job.’

  ‘Livvy’s father! He won’t have any great love for me.’

  ‘She’s married.’

  ‘Everyone’s married. Kate, Livvy … What about you?’

  ‘You know I’m not,’ I said. Suddenly I noticed how my feet were planted firmly apart, warming themselves at the fire. I’d got out of the habit of noticing how I stood or sat. And my face was weathering too. Soon outdoor work in the winter would make the colour on my cheeks break into thread veins.

  ‘Funny thing, I always thought George Bullivant would have you. What became of him?’

  ‘He’s an orderly on a hospital ship.’

  ‘Good God. Who’d have thought it?’

  Rob was silent, dipping the poker in and out of the flames.

  ‘He didn’t have to go, he’s over age,’ I said.

  ‘Very commendable, then,’ said Rob.

  ‘Don’t talk like that!’

>   ‘Like what? Why?’

  ‘You sound … I don’t know. Sour. As if nothing matters to you. Don’t be like that.’

  ‘You’ve certainly changed,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You see things.’ He spoke dismissively, as if what I had been was better than what I now was.

  ‘I’ve had to keep things going.’ It didn’t sound like much when I heard it through his ears. Others could go to Canada or fight in France: I would keep things going.

  ‘I can see that.’

  He sat heavily, gazing straight ahead. I was longing to go to bed; every fibre in me ached for sleep. But there was a look on him I’d never seen before, like a disappointment.

  ‘Did you really go to Canada?’ I asked suddenly, before I knew I was going to ask it. He swung round sharply.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Cathy. How on earth else could I have sent you those letters?’

  ‘You could have got Kate to post them for you.’

  ‘You don’t know Kate if you think she’d do that for me.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. She did worse.’

  ‘She went away, that’s all. She never said she was going to stay here for ever.’

  He talked as if ‘here’ was as unimportant as the Canada I no longer believed in. Where had he really been? Perhaps he’d sailed with Kate, then come back and struggled as a clerk in some city, London or Manchester, in lodgings where the landladies liked him for his voice and his manners until he ran short of money.

  ‘Aren’t you tired? I’ve made up your bed.’

  ‘No, I’m not tired. Besides, I don’t seem to sleep very well – it must be all this travelling –’ He shot me a look, half-teasing, then he asked, ‘Will you stay up with me, Cathy? I don’t like sitting alone.’

  ‘What do you do when you’re not here?’

  ‘Oh, there’s usually a chap to have a drink with,’ he said evasively. I seemed to see a small room with furniture that smelled of new varnish, and my brother sitting on the edge of his bed, absolutely still, frowning at his boots. Suddenly, decisively, he got up and walked straight out of the door without looking back. In the public house there would be a couple of chaps who half-knew him by name.

  ‘We could play cards,’ I suggested.

  ‘No. Let’s talk. You can tell me everything that’s happened.’

  ‘That won’t take long,’ I said. I had always let him look into my life through my eyes, but now there were things I had to keep from him. The long, mostly silent evenings with my grandfather had made a confidence between us which would not survive my talking about it to Rob. And there were a thousand details that could mean nothing to anyone else: the tar-washing of the apple trees; the way the Victoria plum had broken its branches with fruit last summer and we had scoured the countryside for sugar to bottle them … There were two bottles left, the big oval plums swimming in transparent syrup in a dark cupboard … The night the fox got into the hens and the morning a heron rose from its nest not fifteen feet from me while I fished in Mr Bullivant’s lake … The tasteless bony flesh of the carp … The day I had roped myself to the chimney and let myself down to look at the place where the tiles had come off in the gale. The rope had dug in tight to my waist and the world swung under me as I lost my balance, caught it again, hauled myself back up to the attic window, hand over hand … He hadn’t been there.

  ‘I’ll tell you something. I met the brother – Dodie. Kate’s uncle. The one who helped carry Joseph down the stairs.’

  ‘Did you!’

  ‘Yes, he’s still there, in this little house in Dublin. He has the table scrubbed white and he drinks half a pint of porter every afternoon. Just half a pint. He still never goes out, you know. God knows what he lives on. There’s a neighbour who brings a dish round in a cloth at midday. He went upstairs when he saw me, but he talked to Kate.’

  ‘So you saw the stairs where the arm –’

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t help looking at the floor, in case there was a mark.’

  ‘Was there?’

  ‘Of course not. Kate says he scrubs the flags every day. Can’t bear anything dirty near him. I suppose that started after all the business with Joseph.’

  ‘Fancy you actually seeing him …’

  ‘Mm. It was a bit odd.’

  ‘Theodore’s dead,’ I said abruptly, ‘and George.’

  ‘I know. I heard it in the village.’

  ‘Did you stop there first? I thought you’d come straight here.’

  ‘There was no one around. I should think I know more people in France than here, these days, dead or alive.’

  He stood up and looked restlessly round the hall.

  ‘Remember how we danced?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Those orange trees still going?’

  ‘No, they died last winter. We couldn’t spare the fuel to heat the conservatory, and the frost caught them. I cut them hard back but the stems were brown all through. Don’t tell Grandfather.’

  ‘He must have noticed, surely?’

  ‘He might have done. But he might have forgotten again,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t seem gone in the head at dinner.’

  ‘He isn’t. It’s hard to explain.’ I thought of how the baby he’d reared by hand was more real to Grandfather now than the woman who was somewhere in France or her son who sat, a shadow, opposite him at the dinner table. And yet Grandfather and I had swum into focus for one another, when for years we’d been shadows to one another, feared or ignored.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Rob. ‘Listen, Cathy, I’m going to give this as my address. Is that all right?’

  ‘Of course it is. This is your home. You’ll come back here when you get leave.’

  He touched my wrist. I looked down at the fingers which seemed to insinuate themselves into my flesh as if they belonged there. If I wanted he would come upstairs with me and sleep with me as if he had never been away. He wanted things not to have changed, because something had hurt him when he’d been out in the world, killing the glow that had been on him like the glow of a child that has always been loved. But he hadn’t always been loved, except by me.

  I thought of the Canada I’d made for him in my mind: the house set in long swells of corn which beat like surf to the threshold, and Kate sitting on a patch of grass, a zinc bath on a stand in front of her, and a plump, wriggling child on her lap. It was always a boy. Kate scooped out a handful of water and splashed the child until he screamed in ecstasy. The warm wind blew over them, drying the child, lifting Kate’s hair, rustling the corn. Now Rob wanted to come back to me as if none of that had happened. And none of that had happened.

  ‘You’re right, I suppose I have changed. We’ve all had to. Things have been so different with the war,’ I said, and I watched his fingers, just perceptibly, lift. His face was still close to mine and I saw the familiar way the line ran from the corner of his mouth to his nose. Yes, it was already deeper, just a little. He reminded me of someone, or something that had happened before. Suddenly I had it. I saw my father lying under the sheets in The Sanctuary, so close I could have touched him, with that same hurt shadow in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said again, almost against my will, as if it were something I had to say. But he was quick. His gaze moved against mine and he knew that I no longer wanted what he wanted. He’d never ask again. The home he’d come back to didn’t exist, any more than the house in the cornfields.

  He smiled and stretched as if he were ready for sleep, and said, ‘Oh, I have to go – I’m ruined for home. Isn’t that what they say?’

  Twenty-two

  ‘I still think we should fetch Harry,’ said Mrs Blazer.

  I stood up and peered again into my grandfather’s face. It looked no different to me.

  ‘Listen to him breathe.’ I listened. There was a rasp in it, louder than before perhaps, but then his breathing had been harsh and hoarse for days. He’d been caught in a sudden slash of cold April rain: a few
moments later the sun was out, making the drops glitter like knives. But it wasn’t enough to warm him.

  ‘See his colour now. There’s been a change,’ Mrs Blazer urged. There was duskiness gathering on his face. Round his lips and nostrils the skin was as dark as a plum. She’d wanted to fetch Harry Shiner since yesterday; Harry, she called him now, though to me he was the wizard. And we’d had Dr Milmain out twice, though how we were going to pay his bill I couldn’t imagine. But I could imagine his anger if he found out we’d let Harry Shiner near my grandfather. Old-wives’ tales and cottage cures and superstition. They’d still be hanging witches if we let ’em.

  ‘All right. But no one’s to know he’s been here. Tell him that.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll say nothing. He’s the soul of silence,’ said Mrs Blazer proudly, as if the wizard were her belonging.

  My Grandfather’s head jerked sideways as if someone had slapped him. He lay so still he seemed to have stopped breathing, then just as I got up, panicky, the bubbling creak began again in his chest.

  ‘That’s congestion,’ said Mrs Blazer. ‘It’s lying on his lungs.’

  ‘All right. Go and fetch him. Get him to come quickly.’

  If he died, I thought, I wouldn’t even remember the last thing we’d said to one another. Something about beef-tea or bed-bottles, it would have been. Then he’d lapsed back into the sleep that stuck to him like glue. While Mrs Blazer was out, perhaps I could open the window. She wouldn’t have it opened, not a crack, because it would be the death of him. But it was May and the air was so tender that there were birds singing even in Grandfather’s laurel tree. I’d been in the room so long I couldn’t smell his sickness any more, but my head ached with it. I crossed to the window. I was only going to open it an inch, but as the sash started to move and new air blew in I pushed it up with all my strength and the dirty glass gave way to a panel of clean, sparkling air. A bumblebee droned close, swerved at the invisible barrier, lifted itself into the laurel’s yellow-green fresh leaves.