The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  My father had moved out of the turretted red-brick house in Ste-Anne which was the only home I had ever known. We were now positioned on the hill in a brashly new and to my eyes pompous structure, as yet unshielded by trees and landscaped only with the cloying mud the builders had left behind. Visiting friends was hardly easy. I had to beg lifts or trudge three miles into town and three miles back. By the time my bicycle made it through the drive and out onto the narrow road, it was so caked in mud, that the wheels refused to turn.

  Worse than that. Ensconced in the glaring house, like the mistress of the manor, was my equally glaring stepmother of two years. She had a piercing laugh and blonde bouffant hair and spectacles winged with rhinestone. She only wore bright red or equally bright pink and her nails always matched. Her conversation did too. It was as loud and inane as it was endless.

  I couldn’t understand how my father could so quickly have forgotten my mother. Nor could I understand how he could have replaced her with this contemptible woman. My mother had been beautiful, her voice and hands always gentle with understanding, her hair as dark and sleek as a crow’s wing, her bearing, even in that last long year of her illness, always graceful and proud.

  I couldn’t forgive my father.

  To get away from my invasive stepmother, I spent as much time as I could locked in the room designated as mine, but in which the only familiar objects were my books. I read and I stared out the window and dreamt until an excess of energy propelled me out of doors.

  The woods behind the house were splendid - I had to give my father that - and I roamed their length and breadth, my boots thick with mud. Late one afternoon, I was at their highest point when I heard a crackle behind me and turned to see a boy swinging from a branch. He leapt and landed on the ground with a laugh and a thud.

  ‘B’jour,’ he greeted me. He was wearing a thick oversized lumberjacket and one of those peaked brown hats with ear flaps and as he came up to me, I noted that he was a smaller than myself. But I was used to that. I was tall for my age and a boy of whatever size was a welcome relief.

  ‘You live around here?’

  I pointed down hill.

  ‘Oh ya? Great. Where d’you go to school?’

  ‘Jean Brébeuf. In Montréal,’ I said self-importantly.

  The boy whistled.

  We walked side by side for a few minutes and then he asked, ‘D’you like music? Cause we could go and hear some.’ He gestured towards the other side of the hill. ‘Come on, they’re probably rehearsing now.’ He started to run, swerve in and out of trees, leap over fallen branches, as if he knew the whereabouts of each twig by heart.

  I followed more slowly and concentrated on my feet. I had no clear idea where we were until I heard the rush of the river swollen with the winter’s ice. At its edge and bordering the old highway, stood a whitewashed inn with a big neon sign. It was already flashing out the pink and purple letters of its name into the gathering dusk. Point Ste-Anne.

  My new friend put a finger to his lips. His posture took on stealth, his face an intrigue which locked us in daring complicity. We slipped silently between the cars in the open lot and stole behind the building. Crates of empty beer bottles loomed high amidst old tires and junked furniture. From an open door came a whiff of frying onions and moist burgers. We clambered up a fence and leapt onto sodden grass.

  As if to announce our landing, drums set up a whir and rumble. Electric guitars whined and twanged. A keyboard picked out a melody. By the time we had perched on the slope and brought our knees up to our chests for warmth, the very walls of the inn, the ground itself, had begun to vibrate with sound. His face striped with the colours of the neon, my new friend beamed. ‘Wait. Just wait until they really get going.’

  I don’t know how long we sat there, lost in amplified sound and an acute sense of the forbidden. The bar, of course, was closed to children. We wouldn’t have been allowed indoors. But out here, as night fell, we had free and privileged seats. We rocked and swayed and crooned along with the band until in a pause between numbers, my friend peeled back a mitten and suddenly sprung up. ‘Jeez, it’s late. Got to get back. Come on.’

  In a flash, he vaulted the fence and was running up the hill, pausing only for a second to urge me along. Half way up, he stopped. I was panting and shamed to see him hardly breathless.

  ‘D’you know your way back?’ he asked.

  I nodded, despite my uncertainty.

  ‘See you round, then.’

  He was off before I could wave.

  I blundered along, unsure of my direction until I saw the house approach me from an unexpected angle. I snuck in, deaf to my father’s roar, until it occurred to me that I was starving and the prospect of a night without food was a worse fate than his anger.

  The next day was Saturday and we were scheduled to go to the seasonal recital at the seminary in Ste-Anne. It was a ghastly event with performances by recalcitrant boys and graceless girls, many of them tone deaf, all of them wishing they were out chasing a hockey puck rather than sitting in the comfortless hall under the vigilant eyes of nuns and priests. I knew it all too well and from the inside. Up until my move to Jean Brébeuf in Montreal, I was one of the performers, my half-hearted renditions of Bach or Mozart enough to make even the most doting parent squirm.

  My ingenious excuses had no effect on my father, already disgruntled by my behaviour. I had to don a white shirt and blue blazer grown too small. I had to listen to my step-mother’s mindless chatter in the car and in the hall, the withering hypocrisies of local acquaintances about my strides into manhood.

  The hard seats near the raised stage - pride of place for Monsieur le Notaire and his family - came as a relief. I stared at the slightly smeared mimeographed programme and watched the blue ink form blobs on my sweaty hands. It was hot in the room, that sudden heat of spring which catches us unawares so that we don’t remember to take off the coats that a day before were essential. I shed mine, then stared at the crucifix above the stage and wondered whether Christ’s writhing had anything to do with the shrieks of the violins which had just begun.

  Quartets were followed by solos, violins by piano by cello, all of them interspersed by clapping so violently enthusiastic that I imagined even Glenn Gould would have been flattered.

  It was the turn of the dancers next. Four little girls in white tutus padded onto the stage. Bewildered eyes gazed out at the crowd in search of familiar faces. Pink-shoed feet missed a beat, then the bravest one started a plump-legged twirl, brushed against her neighbour, woke her from her daze and suddenly they were all leaping and twirling and rushing about the stage and waving surreptitiously at dewey eyed mothers and fathers. The applause which met this display was deafening. One of the girls was so entranced by it that she forgot to leave the stage and had to be fetched by an embarrassed teacher.

  And so it went on, up through the ages and colours of tutus.

  Towards the end, despite my new big-city boy’s contempt, my attention was rivetted. I had rarely been so close to girls of my own age, let alone girls showing such an expanse of bare flesh. One of them, in a blue leotard and tutu, moved with particular grace, her long legs arching, her leaps as light and effortless as a gazelle’s. Her skin was honey-gold and flawless and as my gaze moved up her curved arms towards neck and face, I realised I was sitting at the very edge of my chair and tilting precariously. I sat back with a scrape.

  From the end of the row I caught my former father confessor’s eyes on me. I flushed painfully but my attention flew back to the girl. She was almost directly in front of me now, her face raised in a dreamy expression towards some distant heaven. I could make out the separate strands of thick, tawny hair which sculpted her profile, the pins which kept her top knot in place. There was something about that face which made my spine prickle in discomfort.

  For a moment, my thoughts winged to the centrefold in the prohibited magazine one of my friends at Brébeuf had snuck into the dorm. I was glad the applause drowned the
remembered snickers of my mates, less glad when I felt Père Xavier’s eyes on my neck again. He had always been able to read my mind.

  I didn’t watch the next number. I stared at the floor instead. And then the music changed. A stronger beat took hold of the room. There was a clacking and tapping of feet above and I looked up to see a figure in tophat and tails, a diminutive Fred Astaire crossing the stage in an easy rhythmic lope. Beneath the hat, I suddenly recognised the face and this time my flush was so hot that I thought it must be visible across the hall.

  The figure in the tophat, the girl in the blue tutu, were both my friend of the previous evening - the boy I had sat with outside the inn.

  In the vaulted dining-hall next to the auditorium, the ritual post-recital drinks and cakes were laid out. I shuffled along the far edge of the room, hiding from my embarrassment as much as from the crowd. But there was no corner dark enough to shield me from my father. His hand firmly on my shoulder, he prodded me into the fray.

  ‘There’s someone I particularly want you to meet,’ he said, leading me towards a cluster of people amongst whom I could already hear my stepmother’s raised voice. ‘Thérèse,’ he shushed her and urged me forth. ‘Pierre, I want you to introduce our new neighbours, Mme Tremblay and her granddaughter, Madeleine.’

  I raised my eyes from my shoes. A sombrely dressed woman, her hair pulled back in a tight bun like a schoolteacher’s, was stretching out her hand to me.

  ‘Hello, Pierre.’

  I mumbled something. I was acutely aware of the smaller figure at her side, whose hand was now similarly outstretched.

  ‘Hello Pierre,’ she echoed.

  I noticed white stockings, the slight flare of a kilted skirt and then I was looking into heavily fringed eyes, vast and tawny-yellow against smooth skin. One of them winked at me roguishly, right there under Père Xavier’s gaze.

  Was it then, as I guaged the reality of that wink and tried to find a voice adequate to a ‘hello’, that I first began to love Madeleine?

  The next day we went to Mme Tremblay’s house for tea. It was not a meal I had ever heard of. Nor had I ever visited a house that was at once as ramshackle and inviting as Mme Tremblay’s. We sat in front of the fire while she poured steaming milky liquid into our cups from a slightly chipped china pot decorated with birds and flowers. She passed around hot buttered cakes she called scones and urged me to smother them in the cream and jam on Madeleine’s tray - something I just managed to do without upsetting tea and tray alike.

  Mme Tremblay spoke French to us and had a French name, but I realised from what my father had said that she was in fact English. I had never met anyone English in the town before. The only English people I had any contact with were Montrealers who worked in the stores on Côte-des-Neiges not far from my school.

  I could speak English of course. Speak it more or less. From the age of eight, I had been taught. But not taught well enough, according to our English teacher, who wasn’t a Jesuit like the others, but who managed to tweak our ears just as assiduously when we made mistakes. And like all of my generation, I had sat glued in front of American television and imbibed Howdy Doody and Disney Time and Father Knows Best with my mother’s milk - alongside the homegrown pablum of La Famille Plouffe.

  The oddity of Mme Tremblay, her careful French and her careful manners intrigued me, though it didn’t altogether allay my suspicions. Like a superstitious believer in the creed of stereotype, I watched for signs of contempt and distaste, for any gesture which might reveal that she secretly despised these lowlife Frenchies - these ‘pea soups’ or ‘Mae Wests’, the junk foods common knowledge had it we had been reduced to by the English elite and from which we acquired our slang names.

  But even the prickly, over-sensitive teenager that I was could find nothing to fault in Mme Tremblay’s manners. And towards my father, at least, she showed genuine warmth, inquiring about the new house, asking after my older brother who had been away in Rome for some time training to be a Jesuit. The fact that she knew this surprised me. It seemed to imply that my father was an older friend than I had surmised.

  Strangely enough, I didn’t even begin to think of Madeleine in terms of the great Anglo-French divide. I had met her in French after all, even if in a different sex.

  The fact was I was so acutely aware of her presence, that I tried very hard not to think of her at all.

  Only when my stepmother started in on her ‘oh how cute’ this or other bit of china was, did Mrs Tremblay evince the slightest shudder of distaste. I could hardly blame her here and I almost shouted my approval when she cut her in mid-flow and asked Madeleine whether she might like to perform for their guests, provide a little entertainment.

  Madeleine had none of the hesitation I would have had. She neither hemmed nor hawed nor pretended not to have heard. Instead, with a mysterious little smile, she said, ‘What do you think Mémère, a little Shakespeare?’

  ‘Why not? Though perhaps the language…’ Mme Tremblay turned towards my father who waved away her hesitation with a ‘No, no. It will do Pierre good.’

  Madeleine stood in front of the window, a beam of late afternoon light playing over her long, loosened hair. In a dutiful little girl’s voice she explained to us that she was going to do a speech from a play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the queen of the fairies, Titania at war with her tyrannical husband, Oberon, speaks of the havoc his jealousy has caused.

  I have to admit that I found all this talk of fairies faintly ridiculous. Nor had Shakespeare ever troubled my intelligence. I had just about heard the name. But there was something in the way Madeleine then turned her back on us, the growing silence in the room, that forced my attention.

  When Madeleine confronted us again, I was startled to find that she was no longer altogether Madeleine. Her shoulders thrown back, her head high, she paced the makeshift area of the stage with a regal air, her hands busy with some flowing gown we could feel, if not see. The voice which came out of her was deeper, no longer a girl’s voice, but a woman’s, and it seemed to taste the words which came out of her throat.

  After the first taut exclamation of ‘These are the forgeries of jealousy’, I followed few of them. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter. I could touch the anger that had filled the room, sense discord and disappointment, and I was enthralled by the gestures and expressions of this Madeleine who was not Madeleine. So much so, that I forgot to clap until my father poked an urgent finger into my back.

  By this time Madeleine was a girl again and was asking her grandmother whether she mightn’t now take me to visit her pony. A moment later, we were outside, and she was laughing gleefully.

  ‘Your mother hated that, didn’t she?’ She set up a flapping of jowls and hair and looked like nothing so much as an irritated pekinese. It was a startling imitation of Thérèse.

  ‘She’s not my mother,’ I grumbled. My mother’s dead.’

  ‘Oh.’ Madeleine stopped in mid-gesture. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘No.’

  We walked in silence towards the barn. ‘And your mother?’ I asked still irritated.

  ‘Not dead, no.’ She flashed me an odd, angry look, then started to run. ‘Mémère’s my best mother,’ I heard her call, her voice trailing, distorted in the wind.

  I turn over in the sagging bed and unsure whether I am awake or asleep, hear that voice again, like a keening in the air.

  Pale, milky light casts a faint strip across the room. It does nothing to dispell the sound. I stumble over to the window and throw open two sets of panes. The cold attacks me, forces me into wakefulness. But the wail has only grown louder, buffeting against the sides of the house, rising from the snow. I shiver and then, with a start, pull on shirt and trousers and rush from my room.

  I pause at the door of Mme Tremblay’s, but the sound isn’t coming from there. I hurry to the end of the long corridor and with only a second’s trepidation push open the door to Madeleine’s room.

  Mme T
remblay is standing at the open window. She rocks back and forth, clasping herself with her hands. Lank hair falls over shoulders covered with a knitted shawl. Under the length of her nightgown, her feet are bare.

  I put my arm round her, try to turn her away from the window, try to blot out the sound which issues from her lips and the sight of the barn in the distance with its circle of flapping tapes.

  ‘Please,’ I whisper. ‘You’ll make yourself ill.’

  I pull the window to and suddenly she stops. The face she turns on me is haggard, streaked with tears, more fragile with its years than I could ever have imagined. She doesn’t seem to recognize me.

  At last she says in a strange little voice, ‘Madeleine spoke to me. Yes. Spoke.’

  I try to stop the shudder which has taken me over. ‘Come,’ I urge her away from the window. ‘You must get dressed. You’ll catch cold.’

  ‘I tell you she spoke to me.’ Her tone is firmer and she resists my direction.

  I cannot think what to say. I have never known Mme Tremblay to be superstitious, to commune with her dead. Even her Catholicism seemed to have a tersely matter-of-fact puritan cast, unadorned by ritual objects or Marys-full-of-grace. But now she is staring at me with the raised eyes of a New Age convert, insisting on an impossible communion.

  ‘She told me she was in pain. Great pain.’ Her red-rimmed eyes are wide and gaze through the door into the middle distance.

  What I feel with sudden acuteness is Mme Tremblay’s pain. It sits on top of my own like a great juddering bird.

  ‘We must make amends. She told me. She cannot rest. We must extract vengeance.’

  Despite myself, I shudder. The intended soothing sound turns into a gasp as it issues from my dry throat. I steer Mme Tremblay from Madeleine’s room towards her own. ‘You get dressed now and I’ll make some coffee. Alright?’

  She focusses on me directly for the first time.

  ‘I’m not mad, Pierre,’ she says and then blurts out. ‘Children should not die before their grandparents. It turns the world topsy turvy.’