A Midwinter Promise

by Lulu Taylor

  ‘That boat hasn’t been looked at since I was a boy with Uncle Reggie. Don’t get in it, Julia, do you hear me?’

  Julia nodded, and meant it. She loved the sea, icy and alive, but she didn’t much like the look of the lake, so still, so full of dark fronds and little flicking shadows. It was slimy and grotty, and the surface was flecked with insects, dead leaves, waxy water lilies and floating detritus.

  The platform was romantic, though, hidden among the branches, with a pleasing sense that she was on board a private ship, sailing down a jungle river, or hidden among the tribes of the Amazon.

  Now she reached the rope hanging down the tree trunk and heaved herself up it, quick at grasping a knot, walking up the trunk until her feet hit the platform and then swinging the rest of her body up afterwards, and she lay, panting, on the smooth planks.

  ‘Pup from the second litter!’ she said aloud. What does it mean? I need to ask Lala.

  Lala was her older half-sister, the daughter from Daddy’s first marriage to Jocasta, the ex-wife who was only a name to Julia, always mysterious and absent and a little scary. Lala was not scary – quite the opposite. She came for a couple of weeks last summer, as she usually did, because that’s when her mother went to France, to spend June to early September at her large house in Provence with her second husband and their family. Lala told her all about it: the jade-green lizards that lay in the sun and then flicked out of sight when you tried to get near. The blazing hot summer days full of the sound of crickets and the scent of hot rosemary . . . but no sea.

  ‘No sea?’ Julia demanded, outraged. ‘That’s terrible!’

  ‘It’s too far away for every day. There are swimming pools,’ Lala said and, seeing Julia’s face, ‘Good ones, honestly.’

  ‘But it’s not the same.’

  ‘No. Not the same. But it’s pretty nice.’

  ‘Can I come?’ Julia would ask, more in a show of support than any real desire to go there. She wouldn’t want to leave Mummy, or Tawray, and most certainly not the sea in summer, the only time worth living for in the entire year.

  ‘Of course,’ Lala would say breezily, even though they both knew it wasn’t possible.

  Julia didn’t mind not going. It was wonderful to have Lala, who was older and might have been a complete rotter, but was instead the reverse: a kindred spirit, a fellow romancer who understood all the millions of magical possibilities at Tawray. The five years she had on Julia might have made her a tiresome would-be grown-up, but she wasn’t even jealous about the fact that Tawray had once been her home and now was not.

  ‘This was my bedroom before, you know,’ she said to Julia when they’d gone in to lie on the very hard mattress of her canopied bed.

  ‘Really?’ Julia looked around, trying to imagine Lala sleeping here and not in the Pink Bedroom, which was hers when she stayed.

  ‘Yes. Nicer now. I had the oldest curtains on this bed; they smelled mouldy. These ones are lovely and new. Your mother must have insisted. Daddy listens to her, doesn’t he? He didn’t listen to my mother much. They fought instead.’

  Julia looked anxiously over at the older girl, worried in case she was angry about the situation, but Lala didn’t seem to care. She was nice to Mummy, and nice to Julia, and she seemed perfectly happy with the way things were.

  She loved the tower on the roof. ‘You’ve made this brilliant, much better than I did,’ she said excitedly when she saw it. ‘I didn’t think to bring anything up, not like this. They wouldn’t have let me in any case.’

  ‘Lorraine doesn’t mind what I do,’ Julia explained, and it was true. As long as Lorraine was left in peace with her magazines and the kettle, an ashtray and the nursery television, then she was happy for Julia to do exactly as she liked.

  Lala looked very pleased at everything Julia had assembled in the tower: the rugs, the boxes of keepsakes and books. ‘But we can make it even better,’ she said. They raided the house for things to create a tiny but magnificent boudoir: the smallest paintings, filched from shadowy alcoves or back passages; embroidered cushions and velvet footstools to sit on. A miniature carved trunk, a tiny guest room bookshelf filled with Tom Thumb volumes from the nursery. That was where the world began to take shape: Morotania, their country, ruled by them. The tower was their palace where they were both queens; the house beneath was their kingdom, the gardens part of their spreading domains and the neighbouring kingdoms, both ally and enemy. But there were enemies within the kingdom. Aunt Victoria, or the evil fairy Malatrix, as they called her, whose oozing flattery towards Lala and chilly critical demeanour towards Julia marked her out as a bad ’un. Gran was their aged Lady Chancellor, in thrall to Malatrix. Mummy was the Fairy Queen – beautiful, fragile, adored – and Daddy the Grand Vizier or, sometimes, the Old King, but actually the Old King was supposed to be dead, so he was mostly the Grand Vizier. Everyone in the house had a role, whether they knew it or not, and hours passed by in playing Morotania, drawing its maps and naming its places, creating its laws and rules and geography, chronicling its history and sending its fleets to sea and its armies to war. The joint queens ruled over it benignly, wisely and justly, riding out on their white horses to survey their kingdom and greet their people, or retiring to their palace to eat teacakes and drink lemonade.

  When Lala’s stay in the house was over, and it was time for her to take the ferry across the sea to France to be with her mother, Julia was bereft. It was no fun to be the Queen of Morotania on her own. The kingdom lost its colour and vivacity and faded to a silly parlour game without Lala there to help create the magical alchemy that brought it to life. She moped after Lala left, unable to find pleasure in anything, until the vividness of her presence wore off and life went back to normal, with Julia doing things mostly on her own.

  Lala would be visiting again soon, once her final school exams were over, and Julia could hardly wait, but she wanted some answers before then, so she wrote to Lala, who replied in a very Lala-ish way.

  Hail my sister Queen!

  How go the affairs of the kingdom in my absence? I hope that scurvy wench Lorraine of the Silken Cut has not caused thee anguish. If she hath, I will condemn her to the stocks when I return and we will take much pleasure in smashing her in the boosh with rotten tomatoes.

  Meanwhile, thou askest what meaneth the phrase ‘pup of the second litter’. Dear Queen, don’t give this another thought. Methinks thou has listened anon to Malatrix and this is part of her game as an agent provocateur. It is true that you are fruit of the Old King’s second marriage, but that is much as Elizabeth I was, so don’t let it worry you. If they think it means you don’t matter, you just prove them wrong, that’s all.

  Mummy said your mummy is having another baby. I hope she’s all right.

  See you soon, O royal sister. I hope the raspberries will be ripe when I get there, so we can have a proper feast.

  Love from Queen Lala the Lackadaisical

  The letter made Julia laugh, even though she didn’t understand some of it. And, she decided, if being from the second litter made her Elizabeth I, then so much the better. Sometimes she tried to make herself look like the queen in her coronation portrait, which she’d seen in a history book. She made a cloak from an embroidered bedspread in one of the grand bedrooms, a crown from gold paper, and an orb and sceptre from a small cannonball from the display in the hall and the nursery poker wrapped in more of the gold paper. Then she spread her long tawny hair out over her shoulders and sat dead still in a chair opposite the mirror taken from the bathroom wall, practising her Elizabethan look.

  ‘You look proper royal,’ Lorraine said admiringly when she came in and saw her. ‘Your hair looks lovely.’

  The long red-gold locks were what made her look like Elizabeth; she didn’t share the queen’s almond-shaped eyes, but had large, round greeny-brown eyes flecked with gold. She took after her mother’s side of the family. Her father’s family were fair, with long, bony noses and high foreheads, like Aunt Victoria, with her
eyes the colour of watery sky. Lala was like that too, sharp and intelligent-looking, fair and blue-eyed.

  But I am a pup of the second litter, Julia reminded herself as she looked at her own face and saw the drama in her eyes and mouth, and knew she wasn’t like the portraits in the gallery – prim and controlled and proper. She was something altogether new.

  The screaming rang through the house. Julia woke and climbed out of bed, her heart hammering with fear. There was scuffling and noise downstairs, footsteps on the staircase, voices raised. She peered down over the banister and saw that the doctor was hurrying up the stairs, carrying his bag.

  She knew what it must be: it was Mummy and the baby.

  She already hated the baby, just like she hated the other ones, for making Mummy suffer so much torment. She could hear Daddy on the telephone, calling the local hospital and asking them to send the ambulance as quickly as possible.

  Julia sat on the stairs, shivering despite the warmth of the summer night. The noises subsided; they were all in Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom. Then the screaming, muffled now, started again, coming in waves, then quietening.

  All she wanted was for the terrible noise to stop, for everything to be safe and normal again, for the baby to go away like all the others had. But it was beyond the time when babies simply vanished and were never spoken of again. Mummy was too large and swollen for that, there was most definitely a baby and something had to happen.

  Daddy came running out, bounded down the stairs and picked up the phone again.

  ‘Listen, where is that blasted ambulance? This is an emergency, don’t you understand? . . . All right, all right. Just come quickly!’

  He ran back to the bedroom, slamming the door behind him to cut off the wailing inside.

  The house was empty at night. Lorraine went back to her house in the village, and the housekeeper lived in the cottage on the other side of the grounds. Julia went downstairs, a small white figure in her nightgown. She opened the large front door and went out through it into the navy night. Stars glittered hard far above her; a slip of a moon, like a fingernail in the sky, curved silvery white. She went down the front steps to the gravel and crunched across it in her bare feet until she found the cool damp grass of the verge. She began to walk down the drive, not sure of where she was going or why, but impelled by a sense that she must do something to help and this was all she could think of.

  I will open the gates. I will wave when the ambulance comes.

  The drive seemed long when she was in a car. On foot, it was never-ending. She felt as though she had been walking for hours and still there was no sign of the gate. Behind her, the house loomed as large as ever, lights showing behind one or two of the windows, the rest dark. On and on she padded, wishing that Hattie, her terrier, was with her.

  She had reached the stretch of lime trees when she heard the roar of the engine, the whine of the alarm and saw the flashing lights.

  ‘It’s here!’ she said, relief washing over her. The gates must already have been open. They knew what to do. She didn’t have the burden of responsibility after all. The ambulance flew past her in a flash, and disappeared towards the house, covering all the ground she had so laboriously walked in just an instant.

  With nothing more to do, she couldn’t think of anything else but to turn around and begin her march back to the house. She was almost there when the ambulance was leaving. Daddy stood on the doorstep, watching it pull away, his face white and anxious. Then he saw Julia, picking her way over the gravel in her bare feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he cried. ‘You should be in bed!’

  ‘I woke up. I wanted to help the ambulance driver.’

  He rushed over and picked her up so he could carry her back to the house. ‘You silly thing, your feet are frozen. You didn’t need to do that, sweetie. They knew the way.’

  ‘Is Mummy all right?’

  He paused, hugged her tighter. ‘She is going to be perfectly all right.’

  ‘Is the baby here?’

  His arms squeezed her tighter. ‘Yes, the baby came. But it’s not very well, I’m afraid. We must all be very brave. Now, shall we put you back to bed?’

  When Mummy returned a week later, there was no baby with her. One day not long after, Mummy and Daddy went away dressed in black and came home sad and sombre. Mummy went back to bed and didn’t get up for three months. By then, Julia had been sent to St Agatha’s and a new chapter of her life had begun. Sometimes she wondered what had happened to the baby, and where they had put it. She knew it must be dead, but she wasn’t absolutely sure, as no one had said.

  We’re not allowed to talk about dead babies. That must be the rule.

  Chapter Six

  1976

  It was Daddy’s idea to have the mural painted. Years before, the huge old drawing room had been divided in two and the back half had become the library. The wall that was built to divide them was not panelled like the others, and had been left quite plain by the ancestor who had decided on its construction. He had painted it brown to match the panelling colour and hung some paintings on it. At each end stood a suit of armour, a shield propped against its shins. Both suits were quite small, and so were not at all frightening, especially as up close it could be seen that they were etched with vines, flowers, bird and animals, rather lovely and unwarlike things. The suits had been stuffed with material to keep them upright, the hand pieces filled out by dark gloves that had been stuffed and stitched to the arm material, and under the helmets was scrunched-up brown paper, just visible behind the visor. Julia had amused herself by drawing faces for each of them on pieces of card – one blue-eyed with cherry-red lips, the other brown-eyed with a black moustache – and she stuck them under the visors, calling the blond one Sir Vivien and the other Sir Rupert. They were her knights, the knights of the kingdom of Morotania, charged with protecting it and its queens. Julia had found she could move the gloves a little so that the knights changed their hand positions from time to time, which made them seem a little more real, and she liked to imagine them chatting to each other when they were left alone at the end of the day. At almost thirteen, she was getting a little big for the Morotania game now, and was embarrassed even to mention it to Lala, who was so grown-up these days, but she was still fond of her knights.

  Then one day, Sir Vivien was standing by the fireplace and Sir Rupert had moved to the hall.

  ‘Why are the knights in different places?’ Julia demanded breathlessly, having run into her father’s business room without knocking.

  Daddy looked up at her from his desk, a pen poised in his hand. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘The knights! The suits of armour. They’ve been moved.’

  His face brightened. ‘Ah, yes. I’ve had a rather brilliant idea. I’m going to paint the drawing room wall.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Not a colour.’ He smiled at her, pleased with himself. ‘You’ll see. It’s going to be a trompe l’oeil.’

  ‘A trump loyal?’ That sounded very knightly, something Sir Vivien might toot on his bugle as he rode into battle.

  ‘It’s French and it means to fool the eye. It’s a wonderful plan. You’ll see. Now leave me in peace, cabbage, I need to work.’

  Julia could not think what he meant, but it became clearer when the artist arrived, a handsome and diminutive Frenchman with a small black moustache just like Sir Rupert’s and who looked like he would be able to fit easily into Sir Rupert’s armour too. The drawing room furniture was moved out of the way and covered with dust sheets, and Monsieur de Pelet took up occupancy in there, with various stepladders, cases of paints and brushes, tubs of pencils and sharpening knives, and jars of oils and mediums. Julia, away from school for the Easter holidays, was drawn to the room to watch what was going on, but she wasn’t supposed to enter and distract Monsieur de Pelet, so she peeked through the gap at the door, and watched him bustling about. He was always nicely dressed in dark brown moleskin trouser
s, a smart shirt with a fashionable long collar and a tight russet jersey that never got any paint on it. Most of the time he had a cigarette clenched between his lips as he climbed up and down the ladders, working on the wall; a little tinny transistor radio played constant pop music, which he hummed to as he worked.

  ‘You won’t make too much of a mess, will you?’ Mummy said anxiously, looking around at the room. Julia hovered behind her, watching.

  ‘Assuredly not, madame,’ he replied, calm and in control. ‘I’m quite used to working this way. I have painted in many grand homes and am still received in them. You mustn’t worry.’

  ‘I can’t help it.’ Mummy looked pale and tired, as usual. She put a hand into her thick tawny hair that was held away from her face by a broad dark headband.

  ‘Are you all right, madame? Do you want to sit down?’

  ‘No . . . a headache, that’s all. I’m fine.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sure I can trust you, monsieur.’

  He was looking at her quizzically and said softly, ‘I will try to make the sessions easy for you when it’s your turn.’

  She didn’t seem to hear, but turned to Julia. ‘You won’t disturb Monsieur de Pelet, will you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Julia replied.

  ‘Then I’ll go and lie down.’

  Julia watched her walk slowly out of the room. She had not been the same since the baby died. It was as though her life force had been drained away and now she was a pale shadow of her old self. Julia remembered that once she had been vibrant and gay and playful, bursting with energy and rushing about the house, full of enthusiasm for it and the great task of its management. There had been visitors, busy weekends, large dinners for important people. But she had retired from all that, and Aunt Victoria was busy being the hostess of Tawray in Mummy’s place. She was the one doing the tours for interested visitors, or opening the fete, or presiding over luncheons and dinners, and it seemed sometimes as if she had taken up residence in the house and would never leave.