A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  We went half-heartedly to the woods and built a dam instead, but Rob smashed it before it was done. I remember how sad I was that year when the first celandines opened flat to the sun and I knew winter was nearly over. It was hard to believe it would ever come back.

  Father would never come back. He had consumption. He went to a sanatorium but it was too late. All the doctors in the world couldn’t do anything for him. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men … that was one story. We gagged on it as we’d have gagged on yellow blubber.

  I knew about the stories we told to other people, and the stories we knew. My father had held me close in the rose garden, and kissed me. He had cried and a doctor had told him to drink milk as if he were a little boy. Rob had hit our father with a broken branch and made the side of his head bleed. It didn’t need to be talked about to be remembered. If I told that to a girl like Livvy, how would she ever understand it?

  In the end we agreed that the snow would never come. Our life was dull, like the sky. ‘You live in the past,’ Kate said. ‘You live in your grandfather’s time.’ But she was wrong. The past was not something we could live in, because it had nothing to do with life. It was something we lugged about, as heavy as a sack of rotting apples.

  ‘We’ll have to use our hands,’ said Rob.

  We floundered over the wall. My coat skirt was heavy, its braid clogged with snow. ‘You know where there’s the little clearing?’ I said. We held the lantern high and shadows flared and ran backwards into the hollows under the trees.

  ‘Just here,’ said Rob. He reached up and hung the lantern from a branch. Light steamed up faintly from the white ground.

  ‘We’ll have to stamp the snow down flat first,’ I said, remembering the book. We paced out a circle and began to tramp the ground with our boots, crushing the bramble stems, grass, dried Michaelmas daisies and cow-parsley stalks which had made tents of snow for themselves. We swept up armfuls of snow and scattered them, then packed it all down to make a level, icy floor. It took so much snow.

  ‘We’ll never be able to make the walls,’ I said. ‘Look how much it takes just to cover the floor, once it’s packed.’ We’d never achieve that glassy, perfect brickwork.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Rob. ‘We can build up the walls with branches. There’s all this fallen stuff we can use.’

  We uprooted fallen branches and brushwood from their sockets in the snow. Snow showered in my face. It stung for a second but I was hot with the work, so hot that I peeled off my gloves and dug out the branches with my bare hands. Rob was laying down the first outline of the walls, branch on top of branch, brushwood stuffed in between the layers, snow packed in the crevices.

  ‘If there’s another fall, it’ll cover all the gaps,’ he said. He banged down stakes of wood into the frozen earth to support the horizontal branches. The thud and shock echoed out into the frozen night. I was working as hard as him and my body felt light and invincible, as if I could dig for ever, find anything under the snow, build all night long. I wasn’t even out of breath.

  ‘Look, Cathy, the moon,’ said Rob. He sat back on his haunches and looked up at it. It was pale and unclear, surrounded by flakes of cloud, but the night sky was breaking up and its light would grow stronger. The coming storm must have blown out before it reached us.

  ‘We shan’t get our snow.’ The swollen half-circle of moon shrugged off cloud as we watched. Soon it was riding high, bright edged. Our lantern shone less clearly and the whole orchard began to swim into focus in the moonlight.

  ‘Doesn’t it look as if something’s just going to happen,’ I said.

  ‘It always does,’ said Rob slowly. ‘Then you wait … and nothing happens.’ He turned back to packing the snow with his hands, plastering it against the thatch of twigs. We had ruined the smooth white of the orchard floor. Moonlight dragged on its rough surface.

  ‘There,’ said Rob, standing up. He clapped his gloves together and snow flew off. The walls were nearly waist high, and vertical. ‘Now all we have to do is lay more branches across the top, for a roof.’

  All we have to do is … I smiled. How often I’d heard Rob say that when we were making bows and arrows out of holly wood, or climbing over the roof lashed together with washing-line, or building a tree house, or shooting squirrels, or taming wild kittens. All we have to do is …

  ‘You go first,’ said Rob. I crouched down and peered inside. When I had imagined the snow-house I had thought of entering it through a tunnel of ice, with blue light glowing through the walls, but this house was dark inside, and it smelled of earth and rotting wood. I bunched up my skirts and coat and crawled through the gap. The floor was freezing. Surely it was much colder in here than outside: a dull cold that worked through my clothes and made me shiver.

  ‘Are you in? What’s it like?’

  ‘It’s dark. Pass me the lantern.’

  But there was no waxy glimmer of ice, even when Rob gave me the lantern. We had plastered our house with snow on the outside, but inside there was the rough surface of branches and twigs. There was mould on the branches where they had lain on the earth. The smell was mushroomy. Rob’s head and shoulders filled the entrance.

  ‘Move over, Cathy, I’m coming in.’

  I moved aside, tucking up my legs. There was just room for us both. Rob turned like a dog turning in its basket and faced me. The lantern shone on his face. His nose wrinkled.

  ‘Smells a bit, doesn’t it? Must’ve been foxes in among that fallen wood.’

  ‘I think it’s just the mould … but isn’t it freezing?’

  We stared at each other. For a moment mutual deception held us with its old grip. Ten years ago we’d have kept it up, never let one another know how disappointed we were. It had been a point of honour never to say that the messes we cooked over camp fires were burnt to glue, or that our bows and arrows wouldn’t shoot straight, in spite of a day’s patient whittling with Rob’s pocket-knife. But we were grown-up now. Rob looked at me and his face quivered with laughter.

  ‘In fact, it’s pretty disgusting in here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps if we had something warm to put on the floor – How do you think Eskimos can bear to sit on the ice?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they don’t, not really. How we used to think all that stuff in the book was gospel, though!’

  He was wriggling out of his coat. ‘There you are. Sit on that. If you move up, there’ll be room for both of us.’

  ‘You’ll freeze –’

  ‘No, all that digging’s made me warm.’

  But I opened my coat. There were yards of material in it; it would nearly wrap around both of us. Rob shuffled up close to me, and a spasm of shivering ran through my whole body.

  ‘It’s a good thing you don’t still get your chests,’ he said. ‘Kate would kill me for having you here. Come here, I’ll warm you up.’

  I felt his voice rather than heard it, like a vibration passing straight from his body into mine. He drew the coat tight around us both, putting his arm round my shoulder and pulling me close. The warm, familiar smell of his skin drowned the dankness of our snow cave.

  ‘It’s getting warmer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s quite nice in here, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Are you glad we didn’t go home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His arm was tight on my shoulder. I could feel each separate finger, and its pressure. ‘Cathy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What was he talking to you about all that time?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘He must have been. All that time I was with Starcrossed, you were with him. I came in once but there was nobody in the room. Just the tea things, so I went back out to the stables.’

  ‘We were only looking at his paintings. It didn’t take long.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have left you alone with him.’

  ‘I didn’t mind.’

  ‘Yes you did.
You asked me not to.’

  ‘I know, but that was before.’

  Rob was silent for a moment. Then, ‘Before what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing special. Only, I know him better now.’

  ‘Better? Just today?’

  ‘Well, you know how you get to know people. A day can change things. Like it did with you and Livvy, last summer.’

  I needled him, seeing how far I could go. His breathing changed.

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Livvy’s your age. And she’s a girl. Bullivant must be – what? Nearly forty.’

  ‘He’d need to be, to have made all that money,’ I agreed maliciously.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do. And I can’t think why you’re being so pompous.’

  ‘You’re my sister. I don’t want to see some Bullivant making a fool of you.’

  ‘It’s not like that. Did you know, his name’s George? George Bullivant.’

  ‘It would be. Just the sort of name he would have.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Rob.’

  I thought of Rob dancing with Livvy, dancing with Kate. Now I was dancing. But when he next spoke Rob’s voice was different.

  ‘It’s not so bad after all, this little house. Are you warm enough now?’

  The tickle of his breath was on the side of my neck. I was warm enough now, and the ends of my fingers were tingling.

  ‘You know, Cathy, we oughtn’t to marry.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of marrying.’

  ‘Yes, but you will. Someone’ll ask you, and then you’ll think of it. Some brute of a Bullivant.’

  ‘Oh, Rob.’ I smiled to myself in the dark. For once I felt immeasurably older and wiser than my brother.

  ‘Yes, but you do see, don’t you? Why we oughtn’t to?’

  ‘No, I don’t. No more than anyone else.’

  ‘Because of our children. Look at their grandparents. One mad and one bad.’

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘Why not? Why not say it? It’s true, isn’t it? Is that what you’d want for your children?’

  ‘Rob, is any of this, any of what we’ve had, what anyone would want for their children?’ I was angry. My words spurted out as if they’d been waiting years to be said. There was more, I knew it, a hot angry jet of it. What were we doing? What sort of life had we? And now here we were playing some ridiculous game in the snow in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, when I could have slept in one of Mr Bullivant’s silken beds. Did other people have this insane drive to destroy what was best for them, and cherish what was worst? Was that what our father had given us?

  ‘I hate him,’ I said. It was one of those things you say before you know you are going to say them, then find as soon as they are said that they are true.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Father.’

  My anger and hatred boiled in me. If it could take shape it would be a fire that would melt the snow-house to a puddle.

  ‘Why did he have to do it? Why did he have to leave us with all this – mess and greyness? Grandfather and Miss Gallagher. If he hadn’t gone – if he hadn’t done it – just because Mother left –’

  The back of my throat ached with tears. I was gagging on what hadn’t been said. ‘She wasn’t worth it!’

  The beautiful phantom I had made of her shrivelled like a pricked toy balloon. Her hair was grey, her white skin raddled. Her lovers were bored with her, glancing at their watches as she told stories of her past. The lukewarm Mediterranean slopped at her feet. She had given us up for this smell of cigars and mimosa, for a voice at her ear and someone to put her wrap around her when the night breeze strengthened. She was a spoiled, stupid, pettish woman who thought less of her children than the cat does. I would not listen to what Mr Bullivant thought of her. I would hug her to me like a disappointment.

  ‘She just couldn’t stay, that’s all,’ said Rob. ‘There’s no right and wrong about it.’

  His voice was cold and sad. The story of my parents shrank away under the touch of it. They’d loved one another, but not very much and not for very long. There wasn’t enough there to make a tragedy.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Rob. ‘Don’t think about them. They’re not what matters. But we mustn’t make that kind of mistake.’

  His finger curled behind my ear, stroking and searching. ‘It’s all right, Cathy,’ he said, to the rhythm of it. ‘It’s all right.’

  I’d seen a baby in the village whose mother had died of fever four days after it was born. A neighbour was trying to feed it on sops of milk and sugar, but it wouldn’t take them. Old Semple came up to the house to ask my father if he could obtain a proper feeding bottle for it from the town. The baby was crumpled and puny and it cried all the time, a thin, creaking cry. One old woman said in its hearing that she didn’t think it would live. It shrieked and deep round creases sprang from its mouth to its eyes. Its skin flushed purple and the scream rattled in its throat. The woman holding it touched its cheek and it turned blindly to her, its mouth rooting in air, its eyes squeezed tight over tiny shaken drops of real tears. It was silent for a second, rooting for the touch of its mother’s nipple. Then it broke down again into desolate screaming.

  My mouth was like that baby’s as I turned to Rob. I didn’t know what I was feeling for. The smell and touch of it were beyond my imagination. It was like looking for the memory of a happiness I might have experienced once.

  We met with our wet, searching, open lips. Everything I had seen a thousand times I now learned by touch. The graze of his skin against my cheeks because he hadn’t shaved since morning. The taste of his saliva, the shape of his mouth arching to meet mine.

  The smell of the walls. Mould, damp and penetrating iciness. The smell that Rob said was fox but which might have been the seeping juice of a three-days-dead rabbit. The cold rough plaiting of branches at my back.

  ‘It’s like a grave,’ I thought as Rob let go of me. We couldn’t move away from one another because there was no room, but he was suddenly as far from me as he’d been close a few seconds before, his mouth straining on mine, his teeth biting my lip as I cried out. As for what had happened between our bodies, I hadn’t got the words for it. My legs ached where he had forced them up and apart. But something else had happened too. In the middle of it I’d felt myself give way, warm and liquid, opening my legs wider and wider so that he could plunge into me again and again, each stroke making me shiver. That was after the first panic when he was forcing himself against me and I was small and tight and dry and he couldn’t get inside me, and I panicked more, hearing his desperate breath in my ear. If we hadn’t been in the cage of the snow-house I’d have bitten and fought and shoved him off. I’d have run. He wasn’t Rob then, he could have been anyone. And the words he used had nothing to do with me, nor had the frantic kisses and snatching at my breasts and my hair. He couldn’t get near my breasts anyway, they were so well wadded in my stays and my thick winter bodice. It was easier to drag my skirt up. But when he was inside me he was Rob again, my brother, remembering who I was. We’d gone too far then to do any pretending.

  ‘Cath – Cathy, Cathy – are you all right, am I hurting you?’

  It was like when we cut our wrists and rubbed the blood until it mixed and no one could have told which was his, which was mine. But we cut too deep and there was too much blood, dripping in heavy dark drops on to the nursery floor. It hurt then, but I said it didn’t, and I suppose he did the same.

  When Rob was inside me he groaned as if I were hurting him, and knotted his fingers in my hair. I was half turned on my side and my hip ground into the icy floor. We had slipped off Rob’s coat and I didn’t know where the door was. The snow-house seemed suddenly huge, ballooning around us, stabbing us with pangs of freezing cold which were so sharp they might have been flames.

  Then it was all over. We weren’t Rob and Cathy any more. We were two cold, aching lumps of flesh, crushed
together and wanting to be separate. His weight hurt my left arm and I felt something slow and sticky trickle out of me and down my leg. He sighed and rubbed the back of his hand over his face. For a moment I thought he was crying. How were we going to get home without speaking to one another, because if we once started to talk about this what more would be uncovered? How were we going to throw words across the gulf of what had happened? It had gone too far. That baby in the village: I couldn’t remember if it had lived or died.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Rob. I laughed aloud in relief.

  ‘You’re always hungry!’

  ‘Yes, but now I could eat anything. I could eat Miss Gallagher.’

  It was an old fantasy of ours. How would we cook her to make her edible? Long, slow roasting after a judicious period of hanging in the game larder? Or should she be cut into small blocks of flesh and casseroled in the ashes overnight? And how should she be flavoured? We could never decide how she’d taste.

  ‘Like a mackintosh when it’s been rolled up and put away wet.’

  ‘Like the sweat on cheese.’

  ‘If we had a fire, we could cook something,’ I said.

  ‘If we had something to cook, we could make a fire. You’re cold, Cathy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re shivering.’

  ‘Not because I’m cold.’

  ‘I know that. I know everything about you. Even the way it says in the Bible. I told you we ought not to marry.’

  A pang of fear went through me. Had all this happened because of that? Because of Mr Bullivant, and the way Rob had watched us standing together at the fountain? Because of the empty room when he came in from the stable? Had he thought something needed to be stopped?

  ‘And I told you I wasn’t thinking of marrying Mr Bullivant.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of him,’ said Rob, in a voice of pure surprise. I hesitated, wanting to ask more, then I let him convince me. We were so alone now. If I couldn’t even believe Rob then I’d be bricked up on my own with what we’d done.