Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  The house grew cold as Mr Jarmyn forbade any fires to be lit in the grates and, when the maid forgot or had not heard his edict, and he caught her laying out the coal in the morning room, he railed in furious anguish against her until she ran in terror and he railed against the fireplace as though it was a malevolent being that had acted wilfully.

  May slipped into June but the house grew colder. Alone in her room Dinah prayed nightly that her sister would die. And eventually, after ten days, she did.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  December

  A COLD WIND BLEW THROUGHOUT the night, whipping up the leaves from the plane trees in nearby Cadogan Square and sending them swirling down Cadogan Mews. When the wind abated, at a little after six o’clock, the mini-tornado of late autumnal leaves came to rest where they fell, strewn across road and pavement, and plastered to walls and lampposts and front steps in a decaying, sodden mass.

  The occupants of number 19 had passed a restless night for which the incessant whistling of the wind down the narrow laneway, and the rattling of every window in the house, and the repeated banging of a door somewhere in the distance, were only partly to blame.

  Mr Jarmyn had endured a particularly troubled night and had risen before the dawn intending to get to the office early.

  His wife did not appear at breakfast and he ate his veal cutlets with only the boys and Dinah and the lead story from The Times for company. As the lead story was taken up with yesterday’s fatal crash on the accident-prone North West Midlands Railway, he abandoned the newspaper and listened, instead, to a rambling account of the Battle of Crecy from Jack. A five-hundred-year-old battle had seemed preferable to a day-old catastrophe on one’s own railway. Eventually, and perhaps sensing her father’s growing irritation, Dinah cut short her brother’s oration and they completed their breakfast in silence so that it had been a relief to push back his chair and announce his departure for the office. As Lucas went upstairs to his study, Dinah followed as though she would speak to him but something caused her to change her mind for she made instead for her own room.

  The door of the drawing room was ajar, he saw with surprise. The room had lain vacant and unused since May yet someone was in there, or had recently been in there. It could not be one of the housemaids as both girls, apparently, had now departed. It was Mrs Logan then, returning something or fetching something from the room. It could not be one of the family who spent their time in the morning room.

  As he stood there, disconcerted and perhaps even a little unnerved, the door to the drawing room opened wider and Aurora came out. For a moment husband and wife regarded one another. Lucas opened his mouth to make some remark but the remark remained unspoken as he looked over his wife’s head and realised that the curtains in the drawing room were opened, that a narrow shaft of winter sunlight had found its way in through the window and was striking the dusty crimson carpet.

  ‘Lucas,’ said his wife, drawing his attention back to her, and he realised she was in a gown of deep lavender, instead of the black crape she had worn at breakfast every day since she had risen from her sickbed in late June.

  Six months. It was the sixth day of December and their half-year of mourning had, it seemed, ended. In the room behind her the mirror that hung above the mantelpiece had had its black covering removed. The room would need to be redecorated, he realised; there would be callers now and whilst they could utilise the morning room still it was awkward having a room out of commission. There would be dinner parties too, presumably, though he could not for the moment picture either himself or his wife presiding over such an event ever again. Yet he knew it would be so. Well, so be it. It would be best to get Mrs Logan to organise it. It was not something he could ask Aurora to do.

  And meanwhile his wife was standing before him in a gown of the deepest lavender. He found he had nothing to say to her.

  ‘Had you forgotten what day it is?’ she inquired. She had been waiting here to tell him, he realised. She believed the arrival of this day somehow changed things.

  ‘Your grasp of such matters, as always, exceeds mine,’ he replied with a brief bow.

  She looked down, a tiny frown creasing her brow, and seemed to wish to say more but instead gave him the quickest ghost of a smile and turned and went upstairs.

  Lucas watched wordlessly as she ascended the staircase, her feet seeming to glide up the stairs without touching them, and his mind went back to that very first meeting, the dinner twenty-two years ago at the Chelsea home of Mrs Cassandra Randle, Aurora’s mother. A dinner in honour of whom or in the presence of whom, he could not now recall. His own presence that evening had been entirely on account of her father, the Honourable Griffin Randle, MP, one-time member of Mr Peel’s government and already by that evening many years deceased. The Hon. Griffin had, sometime in the 1840s and in his capacity as undersecretary, assisted in the smooth passage of the Bill of Parliament permitting the building of Samuel Jarmyn’s new railway in the North along with the necessary compulsory land purchases that accompanied it. A notorious scandal a year or two later had meant Randle’s political career had ended abruptly and in disgrace and, aside from the annual payments of dividends to his estate (he had, at the time of his early death, been in possession of a substantial number of shares in the said railway) there had been no contact between the two families since. But an invitation to dinner had been made and Lucas, out of curiosity more than politeness, had accepted.

  It was a decision, made with little thought at a time in his life (aged just twenty-two and having inherited the directorship of a railway) when he had first begun to question the world and his own place in it, that had changed his life forever.

  The evening had been taken up almost exclusively with Mr Darwin, whose book had just been published. There had been much silly chatter about apes and fish in which he had taken little part, being entirely concerned with the young lady seated opposite him whom he had already surmised was Aurora, his hostess’s eighteen-year-old daughter and only child of the late Hon. Griffin. He had had a vivid impression of deep, grey eyes observing him, just for a moment, over the rim of a wine glass, of rich chestnut-brown hair in ringlets as was the fashion of the day. She had worn—he could recall it in detail even twenty years later—a crinoline gown in a blazing scarlet silk with bell-shaped sleeves, the silk brocaded and finished with some delicate piece of lace at the cuffs. The cut of the gown left both shoulders exposed but unlike every other lady at the table she wore no shawl to cover them. He had not exchanged so much as a single word with her throughout the meal yet once the evening had broken up he had paced up and down outside her window for the best part of an hour, and the lamps were being extinguished in his own street before he had eventually reached his home.

  He shook his head to rid it of this two-decade-old memory. How was it, he asked himself, that his wife’s feet seemed to glide up the stairs without touching them? It was a trick of her gown, surely, the way it covered her feet. All ladies glided in this way yet it seemed to him now that she did not quite touch the Earth. He remembered that he had thought this very same thing the evening he had met her, only then it had seemed miraculous. She had seemed miraculous. Now it seemed … inhuman.

  He turned away. He needed to go to the office and, making his way downstairs, he retrieved his coat, hat, gloves and umbrella and left the house.

  Dinah realised she no longer wished to help people.

  The realisation came as the mid-morning sun crept in through the dusty Georgian windows of the Town Hall and cast long shadows across the elegantly proportioned chamber where the five members of the committee for the Society for the Alleviation of Misery, Poverty and Misfortune Amongst the Poor and Destitute of London sat.

  The realisation came not so much as a sudden revelation, more as a gradual dawning. At the commencement of the meeting she had been a willing and enthusiastic member of the committee; by the time Miss Parson had delivered her report on the Society’s recent dispersal of funds and her proposal
s for the forthcoming year, Dinah had lost her desire to help.

  An hour ago, after breakfast, she had reviewed herself in the mirror in her room and her fingers had slid uneasily over the unfamiliar mauve of the new gown she had put on. She had got used to wearing black: at first it had seemed grotesque, a heavy, suffocating reminder every minute of every hour of every day of the loss they had suffered. They had gone out—one or two necessary visits to dressmakers and the like—and people had looked at them descending from a cab, entering a shop, making some purchase, and had not seem them, the Jarmyns, had not seen her, Miss Dinah Jarmyn; they had seem a Family in Mourning. The Jarmyns had ceased to exist. But now they were to reclaim themselves. They were to cast off their black and don lavender and mauve and dove-grey. They were to make calls and they were to receive callers. Soon there would be a dinner party. Her mother had already begun preparations.

  Outwardly, she presumed that to her fellow committee members, she looked just as she always had. She had resumed her seat on the north side of the committee table, in what had been—until six months ago—her usual spot a little to the left of centre, facing the window, with Mr Dunleavy on her right, Miss Joseph on her left. She wore her second-best bonnet (it was considered poor form to overdress for the Society), her weekday gloves and a light cashmere shawl over her dress that had barely kept the chill out that morning over breakfast, but that in this room, where a fire was crackling in the hearth not five feet away, was proving a trifle warm. Her face had displayed polite interest as Miss Parson had stood up to give her report and it still displayed polite interest as Miss Parson now placed her figures before her on the table and sat down again.

  But somewhere behind that polite interest something had quietly died.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Parson. A most thorough and interesting report,’ said Mr Briers, who was chairing the meeting. ‘And, may I add, most prettily presented.’

  Miss Parson, who was an ardent emancipist, bristled visibly. ‘I am not here to “present prettily”, Mr Briers. I am here to save lives.’

  The idea of Miss Parson, who, as well as being an ardent emancipist, was five feet tall in her boots and not a day under seventy, saving lives clearly tickled Mr Briers who indulged in a hearty chuckle then had to wipe his eyes with a large handkerchief.

  Dinah smiled though she had not been paying attention. In the months since she had attended her last meeting very little appeared to have changed—excepting, of course, herself. But it seemed the other members of the Society could not see this change—and why should they? She did not wish them to see it for it was not a change for the better. They would, she felt, recoil if they saw her as she saw herself. She looked down at her hands resting demurely on her lap. She did not feel demure. She slid her hands further beneath the table, out of sight.

  ‘Miss Jarmyn? I recall you were particularly impassioned during that meeting,’ prompted Miss Joseph on her left, peering at her over a pair of pince-nez perched on the bridge of her nose.

  Dinah stared at her. Had she been impassioned? It seemed impossible now to imagine. Yes, there had been a discussion, quite a heated one, if she remembered correctly. Miss Joseph had wanted to make placards and to picket Parliament. She had wanted to commandeer a series of rooms and houses all across the East End where the homeless and those in need of emergency shelter might stay free of charge. She had wanted to distribute food at schools to encourage the children to attend and their parents to let them attend. At the time these suggestions had seemed wild and exciting, revolutionary even, and Dinah had listened, amazed, and, when Miss Joseph had finished, she had applauded enthusiastically.

  Now they seemed absurd.

  ‘Miss Jarmyn?’

  ‘It was so long ago …’ Dinah replied. ‘But, you are right, Miss Joseph, of course. I do remember and I was impassioned. It is just that now …’

  She floundered again. What did she feel? And why did they peer at her so, leaning across the table and peering just as though her opinion mattered when she knew it did not. She wished they would stop.

  ‘Now I find I am not impassioned. Now I find that … I do not seem to mind as much.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miss Joseph looked affronted. ‘Do you mean you do not mind as much about my ideas or do you mean you do not mind which way the committee votes on the issue?’

  What Dinah meant was that she did not care if they sheltered the homeless or fed children or saved fallen women or provided for the destitute. She no longer cared about the poor of London. Or anywhere.

  But what she said was: ‘I think I would like to be out in the sunshine walking in the park with the leaves rustling beneath my feet.’

  ‘So would I!’ said Miss Parson unexpectedly. ‘Come, my dear!’ And she jumped to her feet and held out her arm to Dinah and together they left the meeting and went out into the chilly December morning.

  In Half Mitre Street, at a point midway between St Paul’s and the Bank of England, another meeting was under way. At the London office of the North West Midlands Railway Company a hurriedly convened meeting of the board of directors was in progress though, an hour into the meeting, little progress had been made.

  ‘This is intolerable!’ exclaimed Mr Freebody, who was the oldest director on the board and yet the one most prone to outburst and liberal thinking.

  ‘Acting in haste is not the answer, Freebody,’ countered Mr Sinclair, chairman of the board.

  ‘Haste? I wonder does anyone around this table understand the meaning of the word?’

  ‘Indeed we do, Freebody,’ replied Mr Kemp, who was the youngest and newest member of the board and yet its most conservative. ‘We all recall the haste with which a new type of rolling stock was introduced onto the line in time to fulfil certain standing orders and before the rolling stock had been properly and fully tested. We all recall the carnage that resulted.’

  Sitting opposite Kemp, Freebody thumped the desk with his fist and his face suffused with colour. ‘Damn it, I was the one who pleaded for restraint, was I not? The minutes will bear me out on this, I think, Kemp.’

  ‘Gentlemen, please!’ called Sinclair, holding up both hands in a conciliatory manner. ‘I think we are all agreed this is a dreadful mishap and that our immediate response is settled: to wit, myself and Jarmyn will journey to the crash site tomorrow and will stay to attend the inquest which I understand is to take place at Wolverhampton on the eighth. We can assume the public inquiry will commence some three to four weeks after that, for which various papers and statements will need to be furnished by us. Funeral costs for the fatalities will, of course, be covered by the company as a gesture of goodwill, and annuities arranged for the widows of the dead driver and fireman. This much is settled.’

  ‘How proficient we have become at dealing with a major crash,’ observed Lucas, not looking up as he held a match to his cigar.

  ‘It is our future course of action for which we must find consensus,’ continued Sinclair, choosing not to reply to this. ‘Obviously we will await the outcome of the inquiry but as I see it, it boils down to one thing: money. It is a simple enough equation—the introduction of additional safety measures at a certain cost to the company resulting, in the short term at least, in a drop in profits. Alternatively, no introduction of additional safety measures, meaning profits remain steady though public confidence, and no doubt the share price, continues to fall.’

  He held out both hands, palms upwards, offering his two solutions to the floor.

  ‘No! Sinclair, this is not acceptable,’ countered Freebody. ‘Why must we await the outcome of the inquiry when we surely already know the reason for the crash and, more to the point, it does not boil down to money. It boils down to lives—Christian souls. The souls that are in our care for that briefest of moments and whose safety we are, at present, in no position to guarantee, whose safety we toss aside with scant regard.’

  ‘These are working people, Freebody,’ remarked Kemp, mildly. ‘People who travel third-class. The luxury and safet
y these people now take for granted would have been unimaginable thirty, forty years ago—when your father was running this line, Jarmyn. Now we pander to these people as though they were first-class passengers.’

  And of course Kemp was perfectly right. In the forties the third-class carriages on the then Wolverhampton and Birmingham Railway had been simply goods wagons: low-sided, unroofed and with no seating whatsoever. The third-class passenger travelling across open country on a longish journey in the dead of winter risked death by exposure. Indeed, a number of fatalities citing this as the cause of death had actually been recorded in the early years of the railway. And that wasn’t all: the unfortunate traveller having survived the elements, risked, if the train braked suddenly, being tipped out of the low-sided carriage resulting, almost certainly, in a broken neck. The 1880s passenger could consider himself mollycoddled by comparison.

  The fifth member of the board, Mr Hart of Aldgate, had remained silent for much of this lively discussion. He now moved restlessly in his chair. ‘One hundred and eighty-five deaths,’ he announced into the silence. He spoke in a calm voice, expressionless and low and the other four members of the board turned towards him. ‘Since the line opened. Since 1841. That’s almost five deaths a year.’

  ‘Less than five a year?’ scoffed Kemp, throwing up his hands in disbelief. ‘Good God, do any of you have any idea how many people are killed crossing the streets in London each year? How many infants perish before their first birthday? How many have died of scarlet fever, cholera, consumption, this year alone? Five a year! It is hardly what one would describe as an epidemic.’

  ‘This absurd bickering about statistics is getting us nowhere,’ Sinclair interrupted. ‘As stated, Jarmyn and myself will make our way up to the crash site first thing tomorrow. We have already made contact with the Board of Trade inspectors. There is little else that can be achieved until the inquiry.’