III
Enid slips out of bed and walks across to the window that´s rattling furiously. Rain splatters against the panes like thrown sand. Outside the night is wild: the wind howling as it batters the building in long, savage gusts. Standing on the threadbare carpet, the floorboards creaking with every step, Enid is grinning broadly.
She has never been able to sleep. She sees things. Faces made of light which form spontaneously on the dark canvas in her mind. She remembers things she doesn´t want to remember, things which might or might not be real but which seem real when she´s alone. She hears voices which sound real. People tell her what she is and where she comes from and she doesn´t want to listen to it. She can only sleep when she is exhausted, mentally and physically, and tonight she isn´t. And so she pulls on her red plaid dressing gown and slides into the slippers waiting by the bed like sleeping poodles. She will go out tonight and explore the school!
Her dormitory is next to the room her parents are sleeping in and Enid is careful to walk on the edges of the landing as she makes her way to the staircase. High-pitched whistling comes from somewhere below, maybe the chimney, while timbers creak and groan above her head. She passes the headmaster´s landing, with its green carpet, and shuffles down to the dimly lit Main Hall. The banisters are icy cold. The fire is out and has been swept: it smells of ash. The storm growls on beyond the stained glass windows.
I want to go out there.
Enid knows better than to walk out of the front door and so explores the corridor she couldn´t see down earlier, when they´d arrived. There is a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and, walking down, she sees two doors: one is marked Staff and the other, at the end of the short, panelled passageway, says Library. Underneath the brass plaque there is a smaller sign, adorned with the school logo, which reads: Magistrate or Higher Only.
Enid tries the door. It opens.
The room is spacious, she can perceive that, and she closes the door behind herself and searches the wall for a light. Again, the bulb is weak and flickers but she can see where she is. The room is almost windowless and bookshelves rise from floor to ceiling along every wall. There are books, old volumes, on the floor in stacks – someone is evidently sorting the stock – and on the only bare wall, where the lone window is, the school flag hangs mournfully from a sloping wooden pole.
Enid salutes, laughing, and skips across the shiny floor but stops suddenly when she notices a draught. It´s a cold thread of air which snakes through the room and burns her skin like ice. As it hits her, the hairs on the back of Enid´s neck stand up and she turns to check the door she´d come in through: it is ajar. Should she go and close it? It seems better to go on, to see if she can get out of the window, so this she does.
The small square window is dark, mottled glass, and about the size of Enid´s head. There is an iron fastening and this opens with nothing worse than a squeak. Immediately Enid feels the force of the storm, the wind trying to rush in, and she makes a decision. Now or never. Opening the window to the full – the main door to the corridor clicking closed, though not as loudly as she´d feared – Enid leans into the window space and sees if she can fit through. The storm buffets her, forcing her eyelids closed and spraying her hair flat against her head, but she thinks she can do it. And she does, wriggling out and falling down onto the damp earth outside.
Trying to control her exhilaration, Enid can´t actually see anything. She stands and fumbles for the window, pulling it closed, but when her eyes finally adjust to the dark she sees a cardboard box stuck fast to the red-brick wall nearby and has an idea. The spread-out cardboard covers the slightly open window and is stuck fast to the wall by the wind and Enid is free.
She walks through the rose beds and bushes and out onto the drive, leaning forwards into the tempest at such an angle that if the wind were suddenly to cease, she would fall straight onto her nose. Beyond the trees, out on the bare lawn they´d driven around earlier that night, Enid twirls in circles with her arms thrown out by her sides and screams with delight. The storm eats her words: it shoves her one way and the other and then, as though bored, races away to attack something else.
Enid looks back at the Main Building – she can only see one bright window, where the headmaster´s office is – and walks forwards to the edge of the lawn, the school gates, to where she thinks she´s seen a light.
As she gets to the main entrance she sees the glow is coming from a window, the window of a small cottage on the other side of the road, and that there is a face in the window. When she notices the face, Enid stops with shock, but the woman, for it is an old woman, takes a step away from the window and stands directly under the light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Gathering the shawl she´s wearing around her shoulders, the old woman gestures for Enid to come closer.
Enid stands at the perimeter of the school grounds, looking back at the Main Building, and can´t decide what to do. Across the damp road, where branches and leaves whip by as though racing somewhere, the old lady appears in the doorway of the cottage and waves again. She has neither a friendly nor unfriendly face. She is very thin. “Come here,” she seems to say with her toothless mouth. “Come closer.”
Enid crosses the road. “No, thank you,” she calls out, from the small stone wall at the bottom of the cottage path. The old lady shakes her head, turns an ear to Enid and moves her palm: What?
“No, thank you!” Enid repeats.
At that moment there is a great flash of lightning which hits either the ground, the top of a tree or the roof of the old woman´s cottage. Neither of them see it but they both feel it. Enid runs up the pathway and the old lady lets her into the cottage. The front door slams closed, silver letter-flap rattling, and immediately the sounds of the storm are muted.
Enid stands, dripping, shivering, in a small hallway which smells of carbolic soap. She tries to say something but her lips are purple and her teeth are chattering.
“Are ye The One?” the old lady asks. She sucks her gums.
“I´m Enid.”
“But are ye The One?”
Enid looks at the door behind the woman. Should she run for it? The sudden change in temperature makes her feel sluggish and she blinks to keep her vision clear and straight. The old woman is walking towards her. “When ye write, doth what ye write come to pass?” the gumless lady asks. Her breath is stale and she sucks her gums all the time. “Can ye save my Tommy, lass? Can ye if ye write it?”
“Oh, I don´t know,” Enid cries, and stumbles backwards out of the way of the old lady´s grasping fingers.
A door opens at her back, Enid turns and she finds she´s in a dormitory: some kind of sick room. There are men lying in the six beds, some women lying dozing on the sheets, bottoms on the chairs beside the beds, handbags on the floor. Everyone looks up at the noise of the intruder.
The white sheets look grey in the dim light coming from the curtainless window and Enid´s eyes see scars and legs lifted up in traction, missing feet, bandaged heads and bowls of blood.
“Who the devil are you?” someone cries.
Enid sees another door at the head of a bed, opens it, and is met by a wall of false limbs: claw-like hands, braces, prosthetic arms and a variety of masks. She backs off, people are rising from their beds, and runs to the only window she can see. Back into the storm.
The same mechanism opens the window, the same squeaking heralds her release, the same chaos greets her as nature rushes in and she forces herself out. This time the drop is further and she lands in the thick, gooey soil of a flower bed, but nothing hurts and, although sodden, she walks free, staggering back towards the road.
Before crossing the perimeter and entering the school grounds she turns once and sees twenty faces crowded into the small window space staring out at her and Enid waves at them. This act is not done out of naughtiness or niceness but because she wants them to know she didn´t mean to bother them. The toothless woman is near the bottom of the window and seems to say:
She´s The One! and Enid turns back to the Main Building and runs away across the lawn.
They are sick people, that´s all! They are the ones the headmaster was talking about! They have been hurt in the war. This place is a hospital, just as I´ve been told. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing strange about them.
Enid is blown onto her back by an unseen thump which slams into her chest and winds her. For a few seconds she lies flat, unable to do anything, scared for the first time that night. It is the power of the wind which scares her. She cannot move even if she wants to and what would become of her if the storm suddenly decided to throw her elsewhere? As she struggles to get back onto her feet she remembers tall stories of people being moved about by mysterious weather, of showers of fish or toads or sand. People picked up and deposited elsewhere, just like that.
But the giant´s breath ceases and Enid gets up, dusts herself off and runs for the window before it starts again. The cardboard is in place: in her haste to get it off she cuts herself on a thorn, or a bush, and knows she is bleeding. The cardboard is sodden and tears in her trembling hands as she claws at it. The window is open, she lifts herself and, with her last remaining strength, pulls herself through the sharp-edged gap and falls hard onto the wooden floor inside.
The Library door is closed, the light is on, there is no-one there. She stands and forces the window closed and the melee dies away. Enid can hear herself panting. It´s over, she thinks, chuckling to herself. Was there any better thrill than doing wrong? Doing what you shouldn´t? But any pleasure is short-lived as she notices the scene in the room. The wind has flipped open books and torn volumes from shelves. Pages are strewn everywhere. There is water on the floor; rainwater.
“Oh, no.”
Enid tip-toes through the wreckage and for a moment considers cleaning it all up and putting everything back. But that wasn´t her. No, she would sneak away, leave her mess behind, leave it for someone else to find it and deal with it, just as she always had.
On the threshold, tip-toeing out into the warm corridor, closing the door behind herself, she notices she has a sheaf of white paper – old, yellowing, thick paper – stuck to her foot. As there is no bin close by, she keeps it in hand as she runs down to the Main Hall and, after checking the coast is clear, up the staircase. At the top she pauses, breathing heavily, her teeth chattering and rainwater dripping off her clothes and hair onto the wood, and hears again those same sounds as before: the whistling of the wind and the rattling of the tiles, but how quiet they seem now!
Enid opens her dormitory door, sneaks inside, and closes it over gently. I´ve made it! She´s safe.
From her small travelling trunk she takes a towel and a fresh pair of pyjamas and quickly changes, wiping the dirt off her elbows and knees and from between her toes. After one more look out of the window – how she hopes and prays the storm will still be raging the next morning! – Enid climbs into bed.
Only then, lying on her back, heart pounding, does she think back upon her little adventure and remember the old woman. What horrible sour breath she´d had! And what strange things she´d been saying. Are ye The One?
She said if I was the one, what I write would come to pass, Enid thinks, laughing. And if that was the case?
Giggling to herself Enid begins scribbling on the old piece of paper she´s brought back to the dormitory. She writes with a pencil she´d stored under the springs of the bed above.
Heart of Winter Page 3