A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘The shock,’ Kate supplied, ‘and then running back all that way. You might have hit your head on a branch without knowing it. You looked terrible. I thought you were ill yourself.’

  Everyone nodded, looking at me. It was right to be weak. They could almost love me for it. The Semple boys’ rough springy hair was burnished bright by the lamps, and they looked at me pityingly, as if I were some hurt thing they’d found in the fields. They were known never to torment a bird fallen from its nest or a scattered litter of field-mice; it had been strange in them when they were boys.

  ‘I’ll have to show you,’ I said, ‘or you’ll never find it.’ Words were beginning to loosen in me like the relief of fever rising after the first sick, shivery aches of illness.

  ‘We went past the horse-chestnuts, then deep into the wood. She wanted to find the fountain.’

  ‘What fountain? There isn’t a fountain.’

  ‘No, that was at Mr Bullivant’s. We dug it out. But she knew about it. You would never guess what was buried under all that green. She wanted to see the windflowers.’

  ‘They won’t bloom for weeks yet,’ said Theodore. ‘Doesn’t she know nothing?’

  ‘It was another flower, I can’t remember it. My head won’t remember things. We went to the place of the hare. She knows where everything’s buried. She wants to see everything.’

  They were exchanging glances over my head, I knew it. The words slid faster like a sleek of water pulled from underneath as it comes to the lip of the waterfall.

  ‘I mustn’t say things,’ I said. ‘I can only do them. Let me go with you.’ I would fight the current. I pressed my lips tightly together and turned against the current, letting it part my hair like weeds. I swam harder and my face divided the water like the prow of a ship. I saw rows of bubbles streaming over my lips and I was silenced.

  They let me go with them. I led them like an arrow, though I had to-stop and wait for them to fumble through the trees with their lanterns. Rob was with me. He had to go behind because there was only room for one to pass, and I heard him breathing hard, harder than he ever breathed. He was afraid. If we’d been alone I would have laughed at him and told him there was nothing to be frightened of, but Theodore was too close to him and then there was Dr Milmain. I had to keep telling myself to slow down for them. The wood breathed and crackled too, woken out of its sleep, but its branches gave way for me as if they knew me, rolling back as smoothly as waves as I passed.

  ‘It’s like the Red Sea,’ I said to Rob. ‘Make sure you keep close to me.’ Here were the silver sides of birches caught in lantern light. Holly threw shadows like pitch, and the ivy flapped close, wanting to wrap us to it. It was as still as the inside of a room which is out of use and sheeted over. The wood squeezed in on us, wanting to touch us and glad we had come. I didn’t have to think about Miss Gallagher to find her. She was so close I could feel her.

  ‘The thing about people when they’re dead,’ I said to Rob, ‘is that you can’t keep them in one place. They can go everywhere.’

  ‘She’ll be all right, don’t worry,’ he said loudly, for everyone to hear.

  ‘It wasn’t Miss Gallagher I was thinking of,’ I whispered.

  We churned up the smell of the wood with our boots. Dry sticks and lichen, leathery leaves, the dust that lives in tendrils of ivy. Each type of tree has a smell of its own if you peel back its bark. I thought of Mr Bullivant’s new orchards bundled in straw against the frost. The flesh of his apples would be white and sweet when they grew. I had bitten my mother’s arm once because it smelled of fruit when she leaned over me. Where I bit the creamy inside of her arm there grew a half-moon of red teethpoints. She did not punish me for it though it showed that night when she put on her silver dress.

  ‘Little savage,’ she called me, and she laughed. I saw the inside of her laughing mouth. ‘Are her teeth pointed?’ she asked Eileen. ‘Does she file them like a cannibal queen?’

  Behind me the lanterns tossed shadows against the trees and all around us the wood pressed in. We were coming to its dusty heart, where I had left Miss Gallagher. The wood opened to let me move.

  ‘She’s here,’ I said.

  She had turned on her back since I had left her. Our lantern light skittered across the big slab of her face and showed her eyes wide open. Dr Milmain shoved at my back.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I must be the first to look at her.’

  But she looked past me, at the sky where there was no moon. Her chin was up as if she had tried to say something; but then I saw it was only the uneven ground tipping back her head. Dr Milmain was too quick for me. He knelt at her chest, listening.

  ‘Are they like mirrors?’ I asked. ‘Can you see anything in them?’

  ‘What?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Her eyes.’

  But Dr Milmain was putting his thumb on her eyelids, pressing them down. I could see everything. He pressed down firmly but the lids squeezed themselves up slowly each time he lifted the pressure of his fingers, and then he left her eyes as they were. There was nothing in them, I could see that now. There was no need to be afraid that I would find myself there.

  ‘Heart,’ said Dr Milmain, and he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. ‘Some sort of seizure. We’ll know more when we get her back, but I’ll lay money it’s heart. Nothing anyone could have done,’ and he put his hand on my shoulder, the same hand that had pressed down on Miss Gallagher’s dead eyelids. ‘Nothing you could have done, so don’t be thinking any more of it. She won’t have suffered.’

  The lantern shadows jangled as the Semple boys brought round their improvised stretcher in the tiny space of the clearing. They bungled her on to it somehow and tied her with lengths of crepe bandage. Their faces shone with sweat as they wound her coat tight to her sides. The rent was still there in her skirts. I thought it would have gone away. It seemed so long since she had torn it. And when they lifted her there was dried mud crumbling from the heels of her boots.

  ‘She’ll do.’

  ‘Got to ease her round.’

  ‘Steady now, mind you don’t tip her.’

  ‘Hold still, boy.’

  They called each other ‘boy’, the Semple boys, when they were working on a job together. They had got her safe and now they’d lurch her back through the trees to the house. They’d tied her neck so that her head wouldn’t loll this way and that.

  ‘Cover her face,’ ordered the doctor. ‘Here, have my handkerchief.’

  ‘Case she gets scratched,’ nodded Michael. ‘Should’ve thought of that. Tie it nice and tight, boy.’

  Rob and the doctor held up the lanterns to guide them. I was glad that Kate was not there. The brambles would have torn her cashmere to pieces and she’d never have been able to buy another. Besides it was better if Kate was not there with her long eyes flicking from face to face. She would be waiting for us with food and drink and a warm bed for Miss Gallagher.

  ‘We must take out the hot brick before we lay her down,’ I told Rob. ‘We mustn’t be like Kate’s grandmother.’

  There were other things Kate’s grandmother had done, in the middle of all her praying by her son’s dead body. She kept forgetting about his death and ordering hot bricks to warm him, but they wouldn’t bring them. Once she had asked for a cup of tea to be brought up. Thinking that it was for her and it was a good sign, my aunt Kitty brought it, said Kate. Then through the door she heard her mother talking, telling her son to drink his tea before it got cold, with the price tea was these days it couldn’t be wasted. When Kitty opened the door she was pouring it into Joseph’s mouth. She hadn’t let them tie his jaw decently closed, so his mouth gaped and the tea ran in and ran out again. I wondered if I would find myself bringing tea for Miss Gallagher. She liked sugar but she pretended she only took one lump. When no one was looking she would slip in another. No, I thought, she is dead. Her being dead was a bright certain space I must not lose hold of. I must not let myself think of bad things.

  It was ha
rd going back to the house. I felt like a swift which is safe as long as it stays in the air, cutting through air, feeding and sleeping on the wing. But they were slow carrying her, walking forward with their burden slipping about on the stretcher in spite of its ties, and I could not get past them. Rob had hold of my hand and I whispered to him that we could get back to the house a quick way if he came with me.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘stay with me, Cathy,’ and so I stayed. I wished Mr Bullivant had been there, because I’d have liked to walk beside him.

  ‘Did they send for Mr Bullivant?’ I asked.

  ‘No, why should they?’

  ‘I’d like to see him.’

  He was quiet, then suddenly he ducked down so his mouth was against my ear. ‘You must be careful, Cathy,’ he said. His breath tickled and I nearly laughed.

  ‘You don’t need to say those things to me,’ I answered.

  ‘She’s dead. There are bound to be questions. Remember that you didn’t touch her because you were frightened.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of any more,’ I said. ‘She can’t do anything to us. She’ll never open her mouth again, as long as they bandage her jaw.’

  ‘Cathy!’

  But Dr Milmain was on us, pushing between us.

  ‘They’ll crack her head against that trunk if they don’t look out. Hey, steady there!’ And the boys looked round startled, almost capsizing the stretcher.

  ‘Steady, I said! It’s not a dead pig on a pole you’ve got there. What a business, what a business!’

  I felt the important huff of his breath. Theodore and Michael snorted.

  ‘Heavy,’ they said apologetically, but it had been a snort of laughter. The pig on a pole had made them laugh.

  ‘She deserved it,’ I whispered. ‘She killed my baby,’ but no one heard me.

  When Kate knelt by the stretcher there was no doubt Miss Gallagher was dead. She crossed herself quickly. Against the rose cashmere the white dirty dead face did not change. There were burrs in her hair and scratch marks which had stopped bleeding.

  ‘She didn’t suffer,’ said Kate. ‘You can tell from her face. Look at the peace on it.’ I looked but as usual Kate was quicker than me. I could see nothing but flesh and blood congealing into something else. If I hadn’t known it was her I couldn’t have recognized Miss Gallagher.

  ‘Miss Gallagher,’ I said, to make sure.

  ‘Poor soul,’ said Kate, ‘to die with no one to call her by her christened name.’

  ‘We’ll get her upstairs now, and I’ll make my examination,’ said Dr Milmain.

  Grandfather led the way upstairs with the long procession flowing behind him: Theodore and Michael with the stretcher, in their boots this time, flaking mud on to the floor; Kate with white towels draped over one arm and a jug of hot water as if someone were getting ready for dinner, and Mrs Blazer creaking upstairs in the leather slippers she slit at the side to give room to her bunions. Annie wasn’t there. She could not bear the sight of a dead body, not even a bird. Except a table bird, of course. I stayed still, watching them go up.

  Rob and I were alone in the hall. There was that look on his face again, the one I could not read.

  ‘When Kate’s finished I’ll send her to you. She’ll help you undress.’

  ‘I’m not ill. I don’t need any help.’

  He stood near to me but not touching me. ‘You’re not yourself, Cathy. You must rest. Go to your room and I’ll send Kate.’

  ‘I don’t want Kate. You come.’

  ‘I’ll have to talk to Dr Milmain.’

  ‘Grandfather can do that.’

  ‘No, Cathy. I need to get things clear with him.’

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s clear enough.’

  ‘You mustn’t talk about it like that!’ He took hold of both my elbows and held me facing him, our faces close.

  ‘Like what? What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t know how you sound. Listen, Cathy. Promise me you won’t talk to anyone about it. Not even Kate.’

  I looked at him. He was fresh and beautiful from the winter night. I smiled but he didn’t smile back.

  ‘Let go of my arms,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Go to bed, Cathy. You need sleep,’ but his hands slackened and I pulled my elbows sharply down and sideways to break his grip, the way he had shown me when we were children.

  ‘There!’ I stood laughing at him. ‘I’ll go up, but you must come to me later.’

  ‘I can’t, Cathy. They’ll be here half the night. Dr Milmain and everyone. They’ll all be awake in the village. She’s dead, don’t you realize?’

  ‘I realize,’ I said.

  My heart was as light as summer. It was all finished and gone and we could start again. I hadn’t hurt anyone. It was a summer morning and mist was thinning over the wood. In a minute Rob would wake in the bed opposite me and we would throw off our bedclothes and run out without stopping to dress. My thick night-plait would thud between my shoulder blades as we ran down the long rough slope of the lawn. Our feet would leave wet black prints in the dew and we would scare the deer feeding on tender shoots in the rose garden. There was the whole long day before us: the cool shadows splashed across the garden thinning to the heat of noon, the long afternoon in the shade of the mulberry tree, the blue twilight in the woods. Rob would carry me on his back across the bog by the pond where everything simmered and grew juicily in a soup of water and green treacherous ground. He’d tread down water forget-me-nots and wild peppermint, and make tiny frogs shoot sideways like stars.

  But Rob was looking at me. Very, very slightly, without moving, he was shrinking back and away from me. He had that look in his eyes again and this time it was not unreadable, though it was a page that I had never read before. Always before when I’d looked at him I’d seemed to see a bit of myself there, looked after and held in love, and now I looked and looked and couldn’t find it. His eyes were open but they were closed to me.

  ‘Rob,’ I said, and he tensed, trying to guess his way ahead of what I’d say next. ‘Rob, where did Kate get the cashmere for her dress?’

  He didn’t answer, but I saw a tiny contraction in his pupils. My brother was afraid of me. It was not for my sake that he wanted me out of sight, but for his own.

  Eighteen

  ‘It’s never been my home,’ said Kate. I was talking to the back of her head as she knelt, packing layers of clothes into her tin box.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like a trunk?’ I asked. ‘There’s an attic full of trunks and we never use them. You could have one, I’m sure.’

  ‘No, metal is better. The damp can’t get in. There’s always damp on a ship, because the salt draws it. And I’d like to see the rat that could gnaw its way into here.’

  ‘Rat?’

  ‘Oh, there’s always rats. If you’ve a baby you keep it close.’

  She stood up, rubbing her back, and kicked the corner of the box triumphantly. ‘There, you brute. I’ll be done with you soon.’

  Her box was almost full. She had more clothes than I would have thought, and she had her own sheets too, which she had brought with her years before in case sheets weren’t provided for servants. We had sheets for everyone, so hers had laid clean and creased, put away for years in a brown-paper parcel. Dried fragments of sweet woodruff fell out of them when she shook them out. Then there were the things my mother had handed on to her: an air-blue silk with one of its breadths scorched by careless ironing, a white satin petticoat and a close-fitting plaid skating jacket. Kate had been going to make over the silk for years, but she never had. Still, she’d take it with her. It was good silk. She had packed her working dresses and aprons, her Sunday dress and her lace wrapped in tissue paper.

  ‘There’s the pin-cushion I gave you!’ I picked it up and squeezed its fat softness. I didn’t think she had kept it. It had her name embroidered on it in pink silk, and it was stuffed with sheep’s wool which I had gathered from the hedges
and washed, because everyone knew that pins stuck in sheep’s wool would never rust. ‘Too good to use,’ Kate had said, and she had never used it.

  The sunlight slanted in and showed up the bare patches on the oilcloth. There was a paler oblong on the wall where Kate had taken down her one family photograph. When I was a child she would bring it downstairs to show me when I begged her, and those stiff, set faces had become people to me, coloured by the stories Kate had told me so often that I almost believed they were my own memories. There was Joseph, alive and standing at his mother’s side, arms folded. Behind them a waterfall streamed and willows wept over a little rustic bridge.

  ‘Is that near where you live?’ I had asked Kate once, tracing the curve of the waterfall through the glass, but she had laughed. It was a photographer’s background, that was all, a painted cloth spread out behind the people on their chairs. You could choose the cloth you wanted. She remembered it well because there’d been an argument over whether they should have My Rose Garden or Country Peace. ‘It was bad enough to get us all in the one room for that photograph, Cathy. But I thought Joseph and my grandfather would come to blows over that backcloth.’ You would never have guessed it. The faces gazed out, empty and solemn, and I hardly recognized Kate.

  ‘God, it’s airless in here,’ said Kate. She pushed back her hair, went over to the window and unhooked it. It swung back and fresh cold air poured in, filling the attic, smelling of rain and new things.

  ‘You could tell with your eyes shut that it was spring,’ said Kate. She folded her cashmere over and over, trapping it in layers of tissue paper.

  ‘There, that’s it. I’ve only to put in my last things.’

  I looked through the swinging window at the landscape of the roof. The flaws in the glass made the tiles cockle up like seashells. Kate was going across the sea, back to Ireland. She’d find work there easily enough; indeed she had a place half-promised, she told us. She looked round the almost empty attic exultantly.