Her Frozen Heart

by Lulu Taylor

  Once the beds were made and the contents of the suitcases put away, Caitlyn wandered about, taking everything in. The kitchen was like a time capsule with an ancient gas stove where a range had probably once been, and a scrubbed pine table. There was a fridge but it was at least forty years old. Everything else looked older than that but she liked the echoes of lives lived and meals cooked, and it seemed to be in working order.

  Going back down to the hall, she looked up at the magnificent Gainsborough hanging in shadow. Really, she thought, it should be illuminated so that it could be seen and enjoyed properly. But then again, who would see it? It was very odd to have this valuable painting hanging here, in an empty house.

  When she went back to find Max, Geraldine was awake and watching a television quiz with him, which they both were apparently engrossed in.

  ‘I’m delighted you’re both here, I shall enjoy having some company,’ Geraldine said, as Caitlyn kissed her soft, powder-scented cheek. ‘It’s so nice to meet someone who likes the television as much as I do.’

  ‘You definitely have an ally in Max,’ Caitlyn said with a laugh. Then it came to her that she had laughed a few times lately. When I thought I never would again.

  ‘We all need allies,’ Geraldine replied. ‘Now, I think our supper is nearly ready.’

  When Caitlyn woke the next day, she was bewildered by the pattern of roses everywhere and, for a moment, forgot where she was and panicked. Then she remembered that they were safe. Today she’d be driving Max to school from Kings Harcourt. If Sara went back to watch the house, there would be no one there to observe and no way to find out where they had gone. That thought alone made her relax.

  Outside it was bright and fresh, the green lawns velvety and smooth with just a hint of new clover bursting out. Fat pigeons were patrolling the lawns for insects and grubs, while sparrows, wrens and blackbirds darted down to pick up a morsel and flutter off with it to a branch or wall. The grass glittered with the remnants of the dawn dew, and the flower beds were riotous with full-blown peony heads, lavender and tiny, tissuey white geraniums on long spindly stalks. All around them, life was bursting out. Caitlyn went to wake up Max with a hope in her heart she had not felt in a long time. The buzzing of nature all around her made her aware of a future beyond this dark tunnel of misery she’d been walking through for what felt like an age. It might not be here yet, but there was something good still to be had from life. It always renewed itself. There was no other way.

  ‘Come on, Maxie, chop chop! Get your uniform on and we’ll go to Renee for some breakfast.’

  Max groaned but began to haul himself out of bed, and Caitlyn went to run herself a bath.

  By the time she got back from dropping off Max and picking up some shopping at the small supermarket in the nearest town, the morning was well advanced.

  ‘Geraldine says would you like to have a cup of tea with her?’ Renee asked, as Caitlyn was unloading the car.

  ‘Of course. I’ll be right over when this is done.’

  She stowed her shopping in the old kitchen, rather charmed by the lack of cupboard space. There were no wall cabinets, just open shelves, and all the food was clearly supposed to go into the cool larder with its marble shelf for butter and cheese. Then she went over to the other half of the house, where Geraldine was up and about, moving with the help of a three-footed walking stick.

  ‘Hello, my dear, how was your first night?’

  ‘Excellent. It’s so quiet here!’

  ‘Isn’t it? You can forget street lights and traffic and all the rest. The sky is like black velvet here. Now. I’m feeling rather mobile today and I thought you might like to see some of the paintings we’ve got. Nicholas tells me you worked in the art world.’

  ‘Yes, I did, a long time ago – but I’m no expert.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but you’d probably enjoy having a look, wouldn’t you? Yes? Excellent. Come on then, while I’ve got the energy. I never quite know when I’m going to flag.’

  They went almost directly to the Gainsborough, via a couple of pleasant but unremarkable oils of landscapes. The beautiful Venetia gazed out in her mournful way, half obscured by the shadow of the staircase. A picture light bent over the painting, but was not switched on.

  ‘I’m still getting my head around living in a place where there’s a Gainsborough hanging in the hall,’ Caitlyn said, gazing at it with renewed awe. ‘It’s a shame more people can’t see it.’

  ‘Oh, people do come to see it,’ Geraldine said, ‘they make appointments to view it. But I feel rather guilty about it.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure it’s the real thing. But I don’t want to disappoint people and they seem to like it very much as it is, so I don’t say anything at all. If the picture light were switched on, I’m sure it would be revealed in no time. So I leave it off and pretend it’s broken. That way it can’t do any harm to just leave it hanging there making people happy.’

  ‘She is so gorgeous.’

  ‘She is, but if you know the history, the sadness of her early death almost overwhelms the picture, don’t you think? All one can think of looking at her is the brevity of her life. You remember I told you about her.’ Geraldine stood in front of it, leaning heavily on her stick. ‘Her death must have caused great misery to all those who loved her.’

  Caitlyn gazed at the painting. This young woman must have seemed so full of promise, even in an age of precarious existence with all the dangers of sickness and childbirth. It was easy to accept her death now, when it was two hundred and fifty years since she had lived, and all the rest of her generation and the ones that followed were long dead too. But one day, in a flash, she had moved unexpectedly from living to dead, leaving agony and grief behind. Those who mourned were gone and forgotten but her short life had left this mark behind it, a window from now to then.

  Geraldine said softly, ‘You spoke before of your own grief.’

  ‘Yes. I am mourning too.’ She thought of Patrick, now alive only in pictures and memories.

  ‘The pain you feel now will change and lessen, I can promise you that.’

  Caitlyn turned to look at the old lady. ‘I thought I understood it at the beginning, and that I could cope, but now I know it was just the start of a much longer, more difficult journey than I expected. The pain at first was so awful – waking up every day and realising that it was still the same. He wasn’t there and he never would be there. I hated every minute that took us further apart. And yet I also thought that I would get used to a world without him in it, and I longed for that moment to come when I wouldn’t mind any more. It’s not come yet. I can’t see when it will. I fight every day like an Amazonian explorer hacking through the massive forest with a machete. It’s such hard work, and it achieves so little, but I have to do it, or sit down and be overcome by it. It was all so paradoxical – I clung on to the memory of him at the same time as trying not to think about him. I hated the way that time and random fate had separated us. And . . . and I’m tormented by the knowledge that he hasn’t escaped the void, and neither will I, and neither will Max.’ She stopped, choked.

  Geraldine nodded her white head slowly. ‘I’m closer to it than you are, most likely. I can tell you that it is natural to be afraid. The only comfort I can offer you is that when your time comes, you will make your peace with it. The great tragedy is not death in itself. I can see a time when I will welcome a release from this old body of mine. It’s being untimely ripped – taken for no purpose, before a life has been lived, through stupid accident or pointless circumstance or malevolent ignorance. That is where you and your poor husband are left – without peace and understanding.’

  ‘Yes.’ Caitlyn’s voice came out thicker than she’d expected, freighted with longing and grief. ‘And I feel I understand him less now than I did when he was alive.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Geraldine leaned on her walking stick, shifting her feet to be more comfortable. ‘You mustn’t let that feste
r, my dear. It will destroy something precious in you if you do. Do all you can to reconcile yourself to his death and trust in the past you knew. Even if something comes to light that gives a new facet to the person you loved – and it does happen, my dear – don’t let it destroy the truth of your experience of them. We all look for ways to keep our loved ones alive, to maintain our relationship with them – and sometimes not in the best way. Sometimes anger and resentment can be a relationship too, but not a healthy one. Not one that will give you peace.’

  Caitlyn nodded. ‘Yes . . . I see.’

  ‘Recovering from loss is not the work of a day or even a month, or a year. Grief must be worked through, it cannot be escaped, and it is a persistent creature, always tugging for attention. But ignore it at your peril – it will only appear when you least expect it, or in a guise you do not recognise: dressed up as anger or depression or self-destruction. Take a step every day out of the darkness – don’t try and run – and that step will lead you inexorably towards acceptance and a new, different life.’

  ‘You sound as though you know all about it,’ Caitlyn said softly.

  ‘I’ve lost many people. I have learned the ways of grief. But I also know that love lives on when those you love have gone.’ Geraldine looked around the flag-stoned hall. ‘This place is so familiar to me even though I come across that threshold rarely now. It seems like only yesterday that I was running down the stairs, just a child myself. Only days since my sister was here, gazing at this picture as she so often was. And there were other children here, running around and screaming their heads off. They are all gone now.’

  Caitlyn pictured youngsters racing about the large room, which seemed made for chasing. One of them must have been Nicholas’s mother. She recalled him saying that he had been a late arrival in his mother’s life. She had been too busy trying to ban the bomb and fight for women’s rights to get around to motherhood until it was almost too late.

  ‘What happened to Nicholas’s uncle? He said something about him dying young.’

  Geraldine sighed. ‘Harry was a little firebrand. He was killed in a car accident, far too young. Luckily my sister didn’t live to see that, it would have broken her heart. I still miss him too. He would have been an old man himself by now – but that wasn’t his story. Now, my dear, I want to show you the plasterwork upstairs.’

  It was a long, slow process to get Geraldine to the top of the landing. She needed to pause on every step and prepare herself for the next one. At last they reached the top and walked slowly to the plaster frieze on the far wall of the landing. Geraldine examined it for a while, then sighed. ‘Oh dear. The truth is that I can hardly see. I used to know them so well, these little figures.’ She reached out a finger and traced it over a tiny plaster ringmaster, holding up his whip high above his top hat. ‘I loved them. We all did.’

  ‘But they’re relatively new, aren’t they?’ Caitlyn said, bending to look closer in the gloom. She could smell the violet scent of Geraldine’s cologne and it was somehow very comforting. ‘Not the same age as the rest of the house. Nicholas said they were done during a long and hard winter that his mother often talked about.’

  ‘The winter of ’47, just after the war ended and all the men were coming back. That’s when this work was started. The children came up with the idea, I think. How they longed to go to a circus. About as much chance of that as going to the moon back then.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of the winter of ’47,’ Caitlyn remarked.

  ‘Everyone thinks now of the other great freeze – ’62, was it? Something like that. Those of us who remember the other one are dying out. That’s the thing with history, my dear. It loses its resonance once the eye witnesses are gone. That’s why you’ll see terrible things coming back into this world, as those of us who remember the horror of war disappear.’ She gave Caitlyn a sideways look. ‘Listen to me – like an oracle, just as Nicholas says. The winter of ’47 was quite the most horrible thing, worse than the war, or so it seemed to me at the time. We were so beaten already, you see, after six years of privation and effort to win the blessed thing. And what was the reward for victory? Harder lines, more frugality, a freezing winter and all that came with it. It brought the country to its knees – oh, the suffering of it. Cold and more cold, no electricity, no supplies, the wireless silent. We were cut off and left to ourselves for weeks.’

  ‘I suppose the house is quite remote.’ Caitlyn found it hard to imagine the kind of conditions Geraldine was describing. Would it be possible to be as stranded today? Surely not. The internet, cable, mobile phones . . . But no electricity. What then? As soon as we ran out of charge for our devices, boom. We’d all be alone. Perhaps even more alone than back then because we’re so dependent on our communications.

  Geraldine went on: ‘I suppose what made it bearable was that we were used to it. Lack of food, lack of everything. And we knew very well that here we were fortunate – we had supplies. Others were not so lucky.’ She turned back to the plaster. ‘And this kind of thing kept us all occupied.’

  ‘So who did this?’ Caitlyn asked.

  Geraldine looked vague suddenly, her blue eyes misty. ‘Dear Fred . . . Another loss. But he brought our family joy when we most needed it. Shall we look at some of the other paintings up here? I should like a wander around. It’s been so long.’

  They walked about the upper floor, opening doors and peeking inside. The rooms had an old-fashioned feel with their dark furniture and heavy curtains. Caitlyn thought again how much Patrick would have loved this house, with its patina of age. The pictures in the bedrooms were nothing special: watercolours, prints and the odd oil painting, mostly of landscapes. Caitlyn’s vague thoughts of finding an over-looked masterpiece hanging above a fireplace – an early Leonardo or a long-forgotten Picasso – were not realised.

  ‘Thank you for this, my dear,’ Geraldine said as they began the slow climb back down the stairs. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you very much.’

  ‘So have I. To you, I mean.’ Caitlyn went on one side of her, helping her negotiate each new step.

  As they reached the bottom, Geraldine said, ‘I’m afraid I’m very tired now. Please ask Renee to give you some tea if you’d like some. I must go and lie down.’

  ‘I won’t bother her. I must go and get Max.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll look forward to seeing him later. Goodbye for now, my dear.’ Geraldine kissed her cheek, then shuffled away, her shoulders bent with fatigue. Caitlyn looked at the painting hung opposite the door, nestling in shadow. With its picture light on, it would be illuminated and easy to examine but now it was a beguiling and beautiful portrait rendered out of focus by shade.

  Chapter Forty

  ‘I know a little place not far from your friend’s flat,’ Fred said when she telephoned him at the number on his letter. ‘We can meet there. It’s a tiny restaurant but it does a very good dinner.’

  He had been elated when she rang. The woman who answered had asked her name and then said, ‘Oh! Tommy. The wonderful Tommy. Delighted to make your acquaintance, even if only by telephone. I’m Octavia Burton Brown, Fred’s sister. And he’s quite your biggest fan.’

  ‘Is he?’ Tommy said, blushing, even over the telephone. ‘How . . . nice!’

  Fred had been excited to hear from her and even more so when he heard she was in London. ‘Can I see you tonight, darling?’ he asked. ‘Can you get away?’

  ‘Of course. Celia is dining out. I was staying in with a tray on my knees and a book anyway.’

  ‘We can do better than that. Here, have you got a pen?’

  Fred was right, it wasn’t more than ten minutes away from the flat; a short walk to Curzon Street and then a sharp turn down an alley to an area that might as well have been miles from the smart building that Celia lived in. Lights glowed red in upstairs rooms and women in shabby overcoats and scuffed shoes smoked in small groups on the corners of the twisting streets. Several pubs were open, their clientele sprea
ding out into the street despite the cold and the banks of snow against the walls. From inside the pubs came a fug of smoke and sweat and hot breath and laughter and chatter.

  Can this be right? It’s very insalubrious.

  Nevertheless, she pressed on and found a restaurant set on the corner of a small street across the road from a pub. Its corner frontage shone brightly against the darkness and it seemed that plenty of people were making the most of the hours of electricity as it was quite full. She opened the door and went in. The customers were a mixed bag but she stood out with her smart suit and the fox fur over one shoulder, and she glanced nervously about looking for Fred. He spotted her at once, and stood up to wave her over to his table.

  ‘Hello, Tommy!’ He kissed her on the cheek, his eyes glowing with happiness to see her. He pulled a chair out for her so that she could sit down.

  ‘Hello, Fred.’ She was suddenly shy, despite having been desperate all afternoon for this moment to arrive. ‘This seems an interesting place.’

  He laughed. ‘I like to think of it as a well-kept secret. I don’t know how the chef does it, but he conjures magic out of very scrawny ingredients. He’s French of course. Now – here’s the menu. It’s even barer than usual but everything will be good.’

  ‘It looks lovely,’ she said politely, though she didn’t much care about the food. ‘How are you, Fred?’

  ‘I’m much better. The dressings are off completely now and I’m almost good as new.’ He smiled at her, his face illuminated by the evident pleasure he felt in seeing her again. ‘You look beautiful. Are you well?’

  ‘Yes, quite well.’ She told him some of her recent doings, and then recounted what Gerry had said in her letter. ‘Roger isn’t at all happy, according to Gerry. In fact, he’s horribly miserable.’

  ‘I should think it’s only just dawning on him what it will mean to marry Barbara. There’ll be no going back.’