She was glad he had gone upstairs. The place felt more relaxed now. Molly had lent her a lamp and a pile of cushions, and although the room was still sombre and dark-toned, it no longer looked forbidding. The newly polished brass gleamed and rippled in the pouncing light of the fire. She threw another log on—almost wanted to waste them—to be a squanderer for a change. She had filled the bowls with nuts and apples, arranged beech twigs in a vase, their brave green burst of leaf contradicting the wintry snow outside. Lyn had closed the curtains to keep the weather out, but it wasn’t even dark yet. She drew them back again and let the hills surge into the sitting-room. The sun was setting—fire on ice, blood on bandages. Its raw red disc blazed so fiercely against the white and grey around it, it looked as if it had dropped from another stranger planet where everything was hotter and more violent. The sky was flaming with it—gold and scarlet streaked across the clouds, paling to pink and topaz in its reflection on the snow.
Jennifer pulled on her coat and boots and went outside. She yearned to be part of all that radiance, lose her pale quiet self in scarlet flame. She sometimes felt so ordinary. Other people could write odes to snow or set sunsets to music. All she could do was gawp at them. She hardly felt the cold. She was watching a last ray of light kindle every fold of hills until their gilded peaks leapt into the sky. She had never seen a sky as huge as that. There were no buildings to shut it off, no tower-blocks to diminish it. Hernhope was the last man-made thing before infinity. The house was set high, nearly a thousand feet, Molly had told her, but it wasn’t just a matter of feet and inches. They were higher in some more vital way. Words kept forming in her head, dusty biblical words with cobwebs in their corners. ‘Lord, it is well that we are here.’
Except for her wedding, she hadn’t been to church since childhood, but Hester’s funeral had set up echoes in her head, words from half-forgotten services, bits of gospels, fragments of old hymns. What was it called, that time when Christ took His disciples up on to a high mountain, His face shining like the sun and His garments dazzling as if they were made of snow? The Transfiguration, wasn’t it? Something about Moses and Elijah, though she wasn’t sure how they came into it. But all the rest was there—the sun, the snow, the mountain, even the shining. Everything was shining. And she was part of it. She might be ordinary, but she still groped towards those strange sacred feelings she imagined Lyn must burn with. She had always been praised as sensible and practical, the sort of person who could cope in a crisis and kept her feet planted firmly on the ground. Yet there was another secret part of her which no one ever saw. Even as a child, she had yearned to be someone different—a princess or a snowbird who could soar beyond her Sussex cul-de-sac.
‘And a voice spoke to them as if from a cloud.’ The words were coming back now, the scene surging up from some long-forgotten Sunday school. ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.’ She could almost hear the voice herself. The cloud was there, hanging gold and huge and scarlet with the sun trapped hot inside it. Yet no one could have spoken. There was only the sky, the snow, the dumb and muffled trees. Was it Hester‘s voice she was hearing on the hills? Had she ever said ‘beloved son’? She craved a son of her own. Children were less moody and closed than husbands, less grey and formal than fathers. Perhaps it was the only relationship where you were really one with someone, flesh of their flesh. What could she do if Lyn went on refusing?
‘And Peter said, ‘‘Lord, it is well that we are here.’’’ It was well. She had some deep instinctive feeling that they were meant to stay. She had only to keep still, not to doubt or run. Everything was planned—the sun at first to warm and lull, and then the snow to wall them up and hold them, give her time to turn Lyn into a father, the house into a home. However much Lyn jibbed, this was where his roots were. Only here could he be calmed and healed, linked with his ancestors, certain of his future.
Hester had conceived him when she was almost past the age for child-bearing, and only months before her husband died. He was thus a special child—twice special. Had Hester waited just a year or two, or Thomas’s death come sooner, then he would simply not have existed. She had never thought like that before. It was as if Hester were giving her some insight, pointing out that Lyn’s birth was not simply a mistake or an embarrassment, but something intended and important. It was partly a question of carrying on the line. Matthew had done that already—four times over—but Matthew had moved to London, wrenched the Winterton name and heritage away from its roots, set it up in a city where it would only shrink and wither. If Hernhope was to survive, then she and Lyn must stay. True, Lyn had run away himself, but he hadn’t had a wife then, hadn’t been accepted. She could help him now, support him, pioneer some different way of life which would bring them both peace and purpose. Hester herself was showing them the way. She had survived debt and bereavement, hostility and hazard. They could do the same.
The light was fading now. The scarlet shriek of the sun had left only an echo behind, a last whisper of pink and silver before night closed all around it. Towards the east, the hills were grey and shadowed, the sky swooping down to kidnap them with cloud. Colour seeped out and cold crept in, jabbing its icy fingers through her clothes. There were long streaked furrows on the snow, more grey in them than gold now. Tiny noises stained and blurred the silence, so faint they were only shadows of shadows themselves.
She turned to face the house which was fading into the fading hills around it, save for the sheen of snow and one dim lamp glowing through the window. The bedroom was in darkness. She hoped Lyn was asleep, not lying waiting for her, too hoarse and cold to sleep. She crept back in, tugged off her boots, switched off the light in the sitting-room. The fire still lit up the room, as if all the red and gold of the vanished sun had been thrown into the grate. She damped it down, then went upstairs to Lyn. He was lying diagonally across the bed with half the covers tangled on the floor, breathing hoarsely and irregularly with little shuddering gasps puncturing the in-breaths. He had drawn the curtains, but the moon had slunk between them and was playing chequers on his face.
He looked sickly with his eyes shut. His eyes were the feature that made him come alive. They were large, dark and angry in a face quiet and plain without them. She could never have described their shade—that burnt, blackish, brackish lava colour—assumed it was unique in all the world until she saw his mother’s. His brows were fine, but often kept drawn down as if he were warding off the world or shutting out the sun. His eyelashes were lavish like a child’s—a sort of luxury in a face otherwise ascetic—a pale, almost sallow face, with too many hollows in it. He had straight soft hair—child’s hair—the same uncertain brown as Matthew’s sons. Matthew’s hair was darker, yet both men had some slightly foreign look about them, as if they were two black lambs in a field and flock of white.
Jennifer longed to take Lyn in her arms and reassure him. He looked feverish, uncomfortable—younger than he was, as if all that he had felt and suffered had gone inwards to his soul and left his face untouched by it. His hands were long and thin, the fingers fidgety and nervous. Even now, they were twitching in his sleep. Although he was a light-boned man, lean and almost gaunt, when he was up he seemed to tower above her, be living on a different plane. She could never own him, never understand him, was frightened sometimes that she had even married him.
When she had first met him, he had been wary and unpredictable. Men in books courted you with flowers and compliments. Lyn had wooed her with his strangeness, his unexpected passions about things, his endearing combination of shyness and intensity. He never kissed her, never asked her questions. The nevers grew into a need. A need to stop him brooding, make him happy, make him kiss. She loved him for the things he wouldn’t do, but once they were married, the nevers grew more menacing. He kissed her now (incomparably), but supposing he never wished to own a house or sire a child or break free of brother Matthew? The first year hadn’t mattered. It was an escapade, a joyride, an escape from both their mothe
rs. Now, ironically, both those mothers were dead and it was Lyn himself who seemed to tie her down. She had to admit a certain streak of restlessness—resentment even, a longing for a proper home and children.
He was breathing painfully, a hoarse rasping sound which almost hurt her own throat. She would go and fetch the vaporiser. Despite his refusals, he probably wished he had tried it, but was too proud to change his mind. She crept downstairs again, stood at the cellar door. The light from the window opposite sent splintered shadows down the steep stone steps. She shivered, glad she had kept her coat on. It was damp in the cellar, a different and more dishonest cold from the bracing one outside, one which lured you down and then slowly squeezed in after you and stripped all the warmth and comfort from your limbs. There was a smell of must and age, as if all the centuries had crumbled into a pot pourri, made not of petals but of time.
She loved cellars, attics, glory-holes—anywhere where history crouched in corners and cobwebs wreathed old lives. Hester’s house had history stamped right into it, like letters in a stick of rock. The Scots had burned and pillaged it when they had skirmished from the border. The Wintertons (more Wintertons) had shored it up again. There had been a fire in 1780, a major rebuilding in 1822. Bits and pieces had been added or subtracted until, when Thomas took it over, it was a sturdy, self-opinionated house with farm buildings and outhouses clinging to its skirts. Hester had pared it down again, allowing barns and stables to fall into disrepair or be annexed by the Forestry. But the cellar remained inviolate, safe beneath the staircase in the very centre and foundation of the house. Any passing history had dripped and dribbled into it, left stains and footprints there.
Cellars were unusual in the hills. Even when it was possible to dig them out of the shallow rocky soil, the need was seldom felt for them. The weather was too raw to justify cold storage. Yet this dark and secret cellar was somehow in keeping with Hester and her house.
There was no electric light down there, so Jennifer fetched a paraffin lamp and watched its pale sickly beam turn humped and shadowy shapes into living objects. A dark blur became a baby’s cradle, hand-carved and set on rockers. She touched one end and set it rocking. Huge shadows lurched across the wall. Beside it stood a wooden butter-churn, shaped like a beer barrel and mounted on a stand, its handle wreathed in cobwebs. There were more exotic cobwebs all along one wall, little specks of flaking plaster trapped in them like snowflakes and glistening in the lamplight. She had only been in the cellar once before, and then Lyn had called her back. It was as if he wanted everything to fossilise at the time of Hester’s death, nothing to be touched or salvaged.
Surely an old tin vaporiser couldn’t hurt? It was there, where she had left it, in a crate of books and jumble. It wasn’t even as dusty as the other things around it, and there was a box of matches ready in the carton. Had Hester used it for a recent cold? Hester suddenly loomed nearer—coughing, shivering, left alone to die. They should have insisted that she came down south to live with them, but you couldn’t insist with Hester, any more than with Lyn.
Jennifer set the vaporiser on an upturned box, checked the wick, poured old and sticky fluid into the container. The first match didn’t strike. She tried a third, a fourth, a fifth, went on striking automatically. The tenth match took her by surprise. She jumped as its fierce and tiny flame cut a halo through the gloom. She lit the nightlight, placed the metal cover over. In only minutes, the powerful antiseptic smell was seeping through the cellar, nervous shadows from the nightlight entangled with the softer ones which fluttered round the lamp.
Strange that Lyn had never seen a vaporiser. She had always assumed they were an essential part of childhood like Sunday School or jellies. He had never had those either. She had made him a jelly in a rabbit mould on their first wedding anniversary. He had been so enchanted, he’d refused to put a spoon into it, and it sat there on the sideboard slowly shrinking. In the end, it had sprouted greyish mould. Her childhood had fairly glowed with jellies, fat Victoria sponges with little silver balls on, warm and sticky gingerbread men.
As children, they’d been far apart, both in age and geography, yet they had both been only children; both had old, careful mothers who kept the rest of the world away, as being too hazardous in her case and too invasive in his. He had never seen his father; and even before hers had died, he had been distant and unapproachable. Neither of them had had anyone young around, no one carefree or impetuous. Was that why they had married—to reassure each other, to carry on that same silent suspicious way of life? It was time they changed it for a noisy, normal family—pets, children, friends—challenge, even risk.
She ought to go up to him now, take the vaporiser, settle down to sleep. Yet she was reluctant to leave the cellar, to lie quiet and rigid in a narrow bed beside a restless husband when there was so much to explore. She glanced around her. Trunks and boxes veiled with dust, abandoned furniture, piles of newspapers. Stone shelves with cobwebby bottles stacked across them—perhaps old and priceless claret; a hat-stand made of antlers, a wooden milking-stool. She could spend hours down here, prying and probing, rescuing things, restoring them. There was a tattered patchwork bedspread she perhaps could mend and clean, a stone hot-water bottle—that would do for Lyn; a set of wooden butter moulds. Even solid everyday objects looked exotic in the shadows.
She picked up the lamp and moved a little further in, where the ceiling crouched down lower and the shadows were double-layered. Two leggy spiders scuttled across the floor. At the very end of the cellar was the largest chest of all, battered but still handsome, a wooden one, maroon with metal edges. On top of it stood a cardboard box full of broken coat-hangers. She lugged it off, revealing a brighter patch of colour underneath where it had protected the chest from grime. She tried the lid. It was locked. She shouldn’t really force it. She felt guilty suddenly, snooping around the bowels of Hester’s house. Except it was their house now. Even without the Will, it would go to Lyn as Hester’s only son and heir, and if it were his, then it must be partly hers as well. It wasn’t that she was greedy or acquisitive, just craved for continuity, something with roots, history, solidity, something which Matthew hadn’t bought and parcelled out to them.
She fiddled with the clasps, which remained firmly shut. She remembered seeing an old wire coat-hanger flung on one of the tea-chests. She went to fetch it, wrenching it out of shape so she could use it as a tool to force the lock. It wasn’t easy, but it gave at last. The lid creaked open and she smelt the fusty mouldering smell which gets trapped in old school halls or lingers in the folds of ancient velvet curtains or is sold at auctions or pressed between the pages of old books. The chest was packed with books, old and faded ones with leather covers. She picked up the very top one, blew the dust from it. Annals of the Ancient County of Northumbria by the Reverend Matthew Winterton. (Winterton again. And even a Matthew. Reverend Matthew—he’d love them all to call him that!) A bulky vellum-covered book with yellowing engravings of churches and castles, pele towers and sheep stells. She sat on the floor, clutched her coat more tightly round her, opened the book and read. ‘The Northumbrian character is a proud and lawless one—a product of his history. His shire has long been a scarred and bloody battle-ground where it was not just a wasteland. He is more often a raider or a rebel than a settled church-goer.’ Jennifer smiled. Her husband matched his shire.
She leafed through the pages, looking at the pictures. Except for the forests, the landscape had hardly changed. She stopped. There was a drawing of Hernhope, spreading in all its glory as a farm. She hardly recognised it. It was not only so much larger, then, but more important and alive. Animals were grazing all around it, children playing on the steps, men with buckets in the yard—all frozen in immobility and yet still busy, still involved. She longed to put it back like that, colour it in as she had done as a child with the black and white engravings in her Bible. Flesh out the children and the animals, add Lyn himself sketching in the fields.
She was glad Lyn had
started drawing. It wasn’t just the swallows he had sketched—he had made studies of the landscape, hurling it on to paper, distorting all its lines. She didn’t understand why he had made it look so threatening, the hills rearing up to crush him, the sky darker than the trees. Yet she felt excited by his work, the swift nervous way the charcoal streaked across the paper, sometimes snapping, so that he swore and used the stub. The results were nothing like these gentle tranquil pictures in the Annals of Northumbria, with their smiling skies and quiet and well-tamed fields.
She snapped the book shut and picked up the next one, a leather-bound journal with Game Book tooled on the front in gold italic. Inside were handwritten records of all the local shoots arranged in columns, each signed underneath in wavering copperplate. She tried to make the name out—R.B. Winterton. Was that Lyn’s father? No, he was a ‘T’, and later. This was dated 1896. There were little spaces for all the different game birds—grouse, partridge, teal, pigeon, pheasant. She remembered the pheasants dazzling across the road the day they travelled up here; Lyn telling her they were bred only for the shoot. It no longer seemed so cruel. R. B.’s gentle, kindly, sometimes humorous comments made it just an innocent diversion.
She could see the damp burnished mornings, mist on the hills and the trees beginning to turn, Mr Winterton striding out with his guns and game-bags, then returning home for a nap and partridge pie. September shivered into Christmas. Chilblains, blizzards, warm corpses steaming in the frozen air, Mrs Winterton ready with hot punch and plucking knife.
She leafed towards the later entries—pages scanning decades—nineties, nineteen hundreds, twenties, thirties. Now it was 1934 and ‘R.B.’ had changed to ‘T’. The writing was smaller, almost spiteful. ‘A very poor season for everything,’ he had written. ‘The weather wet and inclement for weeks on end. Hardly worth going out at all.’
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