The Winter Children

by Lulu Taylor

  But she’s never really understood what changed his mind when he’d been so entrenched against the idea.

  The steaks are ready now, oozing red-tinged, fat-blobbed liquid on their resting plate. The potatoes are fried into hot, crisp little dice, speckled with garlic and parsley, and the broccoli is glossy from the steamer, scattered with snippets of spiky brownness.

  ‘Dan!’ she calls, dropping cutlery on the kitchen table. ‘It’s ready.’

  He comes through, bleary-eyed from the television. ‘Mmm, smells fantastic.’ He sits down, gazing appreciatively at the table as she moves the steaks to the plates. ‘Wow. My favourite.’

  ‘Of course.’ She sits down opposite.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ he says, and looks at her tenderly. ‘Is there anything you can’t do? You’re an incredible mother, a magical gardener and writer, and a fantastic cook. You must have had some pretty good fairies at your christening.’

  ‘Don’t forget the bedroom fairy,’ she says with a coquettish smile.

  ‘How could I?’ He smiles back, and they remember their interrupted lovemaking of the previous weekend. They never got back to it. They both know that tonight – after the sumptuous meal and the blood-warming red wine – they will make up for the long wait. They are close again now, emotionally and physically, and she has done her best to forget that steely, unbending, cold-hearted Dan who, at their darkest moments, repelled her. The arrival of the twins decontaminated their relationship and renewed it, and she has pushed away the doubts she had about him.

  ‘Aren’t you glad Francesca isn’t coming?’ she says with a laugh. ‘I mean, we can hardly stop her, and she’s bound to turn up occasionally. But somehow I never expected her to be staying with us, not with the enormous house at her disposal.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Dan is engrossed in cutting his steak, revealing the pinkness within. ‘We forgot to take into account the fact that it isn’t habitable.’

  ‘Yes. Of course, Francesca is lovely company and she clearly adores the children . . .’ Olivia eats a tiny hot cube of potato, then says, ‘and I was wondering if we ought to make her a godmother.’

  He glances up at her quickly and says, ‘I thought we didn’t want godparents.’

  ‘I don’t – not godparents. I’m not a churchy person, you know that. But she seemed so . . . into the twins. Didn’t you notice? She could hardly keep her hands off them. It was kind of sweet. It crossed my mind that it could be a nice gesture to ask her. Besides . . .’ Olivia laughs a little sheepishly. ‘I think she’d be pretty good at birthdays and Christmas and all of that. She already spoils them with presents. In a very material way, it would be rather nice for them to have a rich godmother. It’s not just that, of course – she’ll love them and they’ll love her.’

  Dan says nothing but chews slowly on his food, still staring at his plate.

  Olivia sips her wine, and looks at him. Eventually she says, ‘Well?’

  Dan swallows and sits back. ‘I can see what you’re saying. But I would say no. We decided on no godparents. We’ll only offend all the people we haven’t asked if we ask one person. And I reckon Francesca will always be generous, godmother or not.’ He frowns, hesitates and says, ‘I’m not sure I want her to be in the twins’ lives all that much anyway.’

  ‘Really?’ Olivia is surprised. ‘Why not?’

  He shrugs, making a face. ‘Dunno. No real reason. Just . . . that part of her life is over now, you know? I don’t want her deciding she wants to do it all again with our two.’

  ‘What?’ Olivia laughs disbelievingly. ‘Why should she want to do that? I think it’s sweet, how much she loves being around them. I expect that now her two are grumpy teenagers, she rather likes being around toddlers.’

  ‘Yeah. But still . . .’ Dan leans back in to his plate, cutting another chunk of steak. ‘I don’t think we should get too settled in here. We’re at her mercy. I don’t want her taking over, that’s all. The less we see of her, the better.’ He puts the steak in his mouth.

  Olivia is puzzled, but there is, she supposes, a certain logic to what he says.

  Perhaps it wounds his pride a little to be accepting Francesca’s generosity like this. It makes us look a bit like the poor relations, I suppose. But I’m in no hurry to move on. I feel we’re really settling in. I can see us belonging here – for a little while longer at least.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Francesca finds the delay of her journey back to Renniston only whets her appetite for the twins. The fact she can’t take a morning flight out on Monday is deeply frustrating and for a moment she considers chartering a private plane to fly her back to England, but dismisses that as over the top. It would be hard to explain to Walt why she felt such a desperate need to get to a house she doesn’t like all that much. As it is, she can rearrange most of her appointments but Mr Howard can only do the Monday before she gets there, so she sends an email to Olivia asking her to show him whatever he needs to see in the house.

  The children arrive home in a flurry of overnight bags and chatter, and she comes down to greet them with hugs and kisses. These days, they change subtly every time she sees them: another centimetre of growth, or a different way of styling their hair. As she embraces them and asks about their journey and how school is, she feels a strange foggy distance between her and them, but the children don’t seem to notice. They’re happy to be home, even though it seems like they only just left after the Easter holidays.

  The disconnected feeling continues all evening, throughout the family dinner in the restaurant in town. Francesca eats with her usual restraint and measured carefulness, and says almost nothing. While Fred talks ebulliently in his suddenly much deeper voice, Francesca is half back in the garden at Renniston, with Bea tottering towards her, her eyes wide, her soft hair lifted in the wind. Olympia picks at her food, one eye on her phone, on which she taps out messages every now and then. Walt fills in any gap with his stream of questions about lessons, friends and boarding houses.

  ‘This term is less fun,’ says Fred. ‘It’s always more boring when there’s no skiing.’

  ‘All the more time to spend on your academic goals,’ Walt replies gravely. ‘You’ve got exams coming up, young man. I don’t want to see you flunk them in favour of a couple more hours on the mountain. Olympia knows how I feel about that. She’s got a lot of catching up to do and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you, Fred. These exams really matter.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Fred says respectfully, cutting his pizza into slices while Olympia rolls her eyes at her father’s stuffy attitude.

  Francesca feels even more remote from her little family. She cannot ski as well as they can, having come late to it, and she doesn’t have their devotion to the sport. In fact, she doesn’t like sport at all. She blinks at each of them in turn. Who are these people? What am I doing with them?

  She feels displaced, as though she ought to be reading a bedtime story to Bea but has been wrenched through space to this other version of her existence.

  ‘And what about you, young lady?’ asks Walt, turning to Olympia. ‘How is the school work going?’

  ‘We’ve got new house parents,’ she announces, deftly sidestepping the question of her academic progress.

  ‘Really? This late in the year?’ Walt is eating Wiener Schnitzel with a mountain of well-dressed salad and he takes a bite, frowning. ‘That’s unusual. Don’t they tend to see out the last term?’

  They talk on, Francesca drifting on the outskirts of their conversation as her imagination takes her back to the house in England and the children there, living at the edge of the great hall. She thinks of the cottage as a beating heart of warmth and life in the middle of a huge, cold body. In fact, it is not just the rest of the house that’s so dead and uninviting, it is the whole of the rest of the world.

  She catches herself up at this thought, half appalled, and tries to remind herself of what else matters. She looks at Fred, her son. Her boy. His arrival began to heal h
er properly. She adored him. Now she can see the man he will be – a softer, taller version of Walt with all the polish his boarding school can provide – and she understands that the most intense part of their relationship is over. He is already gone from her side; he belongs more to the world than he does to her. She looks over at Olympia, still so young, so absorbed in the intensity of her small universe and the relationships within it; her daughter is discovering all the many ways to judge and evaluate herself, already believing she is a competitor in some intense and never-ending race. She has so much already. She has no idea of how lucky she is. If only she can think enough of herself in time. If only she can avoid what happened to me.

  Francesca gazes at her daughter’s unselfconscious beauty. They’re both so beautiful, they don’t know how marvellous and forgiving youth is. She’s stabbed by grief for her own younger self, who tried so hard to be worthy of love, and almost . . . almost succeeded.

  The memory takes her back to Renniston and the little people there. They are a healing gift. They make everything right. They are . . . recompense.

  She looks at Frederick and Olympia as they talk and eat, perfectly confident in the security of their world.

  Forgive me, darling children. You don’t need me so much anymore. I have to be with the others now. You’ll understand one day. Everyone will.

  After everyone has gone to bed, she stays up in the snug, an old black and white film playing on the huge television screen mounted on the wall, hoping it will block out the pictures spooling through her mind and help her relax.

  Her phone rings, startling her, and she picks it up. The screen displays the caller name: Renniston Cottage. She quickly pauses the film and presses the phone to her ear, anxious in case it is news of the children, in case something is wrong. ‘Hello? Olivia?’

  ‘No. It’s Dan.’

  ‘Is everything okay? Are the twins all right?’ Her heart is racing, her palms clammy with fear. Already she is imagining what might have gone wrong.

  ‘They’re fine. They’re asleep. And so is Olivia.’

  ‘Oh. Thank goodness for that.’ She smiles down the line, enjoying the sensation of relief. ‘You frightened me for a minute.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here.’

  ‘Well? What is it? Everyone’s asleep here too.’ There’s a moment of cosy complicity: the two of them, alone in their respective homes, joined by this secret telephone call.

  ‘Cheska, I’m going to come straight to the point. I don’t want you to stay here.’

  ‘What? Why not?’ She wonders if the children are ill after all, with something infectious perhaps.

  ‘I don’t think it’s right. Stay nearby, by all means, if you need to visit the house. But I’m not comfortable with you being in the cottage.’

  She lets this sink in, her skin prickling as she realises what he is saying. She had half expected something like this, but not so soon. He’s making a defensive move, trying to keep her away from the children in case, somehow, the secret should slip out. Or more likely that he’ll be forced to think all the time about what he’s done. My presence won’t let him forget. She answers softly. ‘I don’t think you really mean that, Dan.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I do, Cheska. You and I both know that it’s not a good idea for you to spend too much time around the twins. I’m trying to protect you as much as anything, because you might not be able to help yourself becoming too involved.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you, Dan, but you don’t have to worry, honestly.’

  ‘Even so.’ She hears his voice take on the steely tone he uses when he’s made his mind up. ‘I think you should call Olivia tomorrow and tell her you’ve decided not to stay here.’

  He thinks I’ll do as he says. He thinks that all he has to do is twitch my strings and I’ll perform just the way he wants. But it’s not like that anymore. I’m not the obedient little Cheska I used to be. And I hold his whole family in my hand. But she doesn’t want to destroy anything. She just wants to be happy, to be close to Dan and to the children. She laughs lightly and presses her mouth a little closer to the phone.

  ‘Now, Dan. Let’s get something clear. You’re living in my house. I don’t think you’re in a position to stop me visiting if I want to. I don’t mean any harm, you need to understand that. But I don’t expect you to stand in my way. I want to know the children – know them properly. And you’re not going to stop me. So let’s not argue about it anymore, all right? Now, I’ll see you on Monday. Night, darling.’

  She clicks off the call with a delicious tremor at the sense of her own power. For the first time, she senses that the tables have turned.

  After all this time, now he has to listen to me. He has to do what I want.

  Chapter Twenty

  The weather takes a turn for the colder, the blue skies turning a wintery grey and a chill wind blowing up. The spring blossoms look exposed and shivery, daffodils drooping away from a murky sun and blossom trembling in the icy gusts. In the fields near the house, the sheep sit, looking like fat cushions, their lambs nestled in beside them, slender legs tucked up underneath.

  Dan is working in the little downstairs room he’s commandeered as a study, so Olivia bundles the children up in their coats and scarves, looking out the woolly hats she thought had been put away for a while, and takes the children for a walk. They leave the grounds by the side gate that gives the best access to their part of the house, where they park the car Dan picked up second-hand from an advertisement in a local paper, and come out on a lane. They’ve already explored a little way along this lane, which leads past some pretty cottages and down to a farm, then onwards to open fields, where they’ve made some excursions. But it will be cold on the exposed brow of the hill, she thinks. Besides, it’s quite a long walk and as she’s on her own, she won’t be able to carry both children if they get tired.

  ‘Let’s go the other way,’ she says to Stan and Bea. The children don’t mind one way or another, although Bea says, ‘Baa baa sheep?’ as those are what she most likes seeing.

  ‘There might be. We’ll have to see. It’s a new walk, isn’t it?’

  They wander out in the other direction, but progress is slow. The children are distracted by puddles and mud, and both stop to pick up sticks that take their fancy. Olivia keeps up a constant stream of chat as they walk along: ‘Oh, what a lovely stick, Bea, that’s a splendid one. No, don’t hit the puddle with it, you’re splashing Stan with all the muddy water. Oh dear, now his coat is dirty, we’ll have to put that in the wash when we get back, won’t we. That’s a bit of a bore. Luckily I think we have another one just in case, the old jacket Aunty Charlotte gave us that she had left over from the cousins. Stan, don’t go up that bank, there are nettles there that sting you. Don’t go there! Please come back. Listen to me, Stan, when I talk to you. You won’t like stings, they hurt. They’re ouch, Stan, remember ouch? That’s right, now come and hold my hand for a bit while we go along here.’

  She is absorbed with them, just as she has been for two years now, ever since they were born. Her world revolves around them and their needs, and the task of filling their universe with experiences, words, explanations and knowledge. It is a task she intends to fulfil to the very best of her ability; it cost so much, in every way, to get here and she takes her parental duties very seriously – not because she wants to glorify herself through the children, shining in the reflected light of their intelligence and achievements, but because she feels she owes it to them. They’ve been summoned into existence at her command and she must ensure that existence is as rewarding as possible.

  They are walking beside a high hedge that borders the front of the house, which seems to go on forever. She’s already considering turning back, as it will take even longer to retrace their steps as the twins get tired. They’re chattering and babbling away, but lunchtime isn’t far off and soon they’ll start moaning and she remembers that she hasn’t brought a
ny rice cakes with her. Then, suddenly they are at a gate: high, black, wrought iron with elaborate twists and turns and gilded leaves at the top. Behind the gate, which is about two metres wide, is the house. Renniston Hall, in all its glory. Olivia stares, trying to take it in. She hardly ever sees the house from this perspective. Usually she catches glimpses of bits of it, from windows and from the garden, and she saw the impressive picture on the front of the brochure that time when Francesca showed it to them in the flat. When they were deciding whether to live here, she scrolled through pictures on the internet, from old engravings to bright colour tourist-information photographs, and, of course, it looked magnificent. But now it is real. She half whistles as she looks at it. The house is not set back from the road – there’s no tree-lined avenue through miles of parkland, and she has the sense that at one point, there was more land with the house that’s now no longer part of it. The short drive feels truncated. In front of the house is a large gravelled circle, a grassed roundel with a fountain on it in the centre. And then, a broad expanse of honey-coloured stone, with a dozen huge windows set in it, and a magnificent stone portico, carved and ornamented, set over the huge oak front door. This place is enormous. Their little cottage must take up just a tiny part of it.

  Francesca owns this! Well, she and Walt.

  Olivia only has a hazy idea of Walt. They’ve met a few times – he was at their wedding and some of the occasions that have brought them all together over the years – but if she hadn’t met him, she could almost believe that Francesca had made him up. He is her invisible partner, the husband who is never there. His work, whatever it is, takes him all over the world and his wealth keeps him in Geneva, where he parts with as little of it as possible. He must live in Switzerland for tax reasons, she supposes, which is a position she rather despises, although she has always liked Walt when she’s met him. He radiates good humour and tolerance, and laughs in a loud, unselfconscious way at his own off-colour jokes, though she can imagine he’s less fun in a boardroom or a business confrontation. He makes an odd partner to the slim, polished Cheska with her vague air that somewhere, something is clenched.