A Winter's Child

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Good luck,’ said Kit Hardie over the bottle of champagne they both believed appropriate to such occasions. ‘That’s noble of you, Kit.’

  And they had remained on easy, mainly friendly terms.

  The Crown, therefore, just a week or so from its reopening had become entirely his own. A hundred years of grime had been removed from the exterior, a procedure considered by Faxby in general to be extravagant if not downright foolish since it was well known that the smoke from Faxby’s mill chimneys could be relied on to blacken anything within a twelvemonth. The woodwork had been painted white, a matter for hilarity in Faxby although no one could deny how well it looked against the newly cleaned, mellow, light brown stone, and a bold new sign erected, bearing a massive golden crown with a white ground.

  ‘First impressions count,’ declared Kit Hardie, sounding calm and cheerful although he was well aware that only a rapid accumulation of banknotes would impress the Croziers. The lobby, therefore, was aquamarine and gold, and full of flowers. The main lounge with its magnificent baroque ceiling, had dusky pink walls, a rose-patterned carpet, wide-bottomed armchairs in floral chintz and pink velvet, a clutter – according to Nola – of plants and potted ferns, bric-a-brac of the nymph and shepherd variety, a great many portraits in oval frames of swan-necked Regency ladies displaying their bracelets, their cashmere shawls, their bare bosoms. Each chair had beside it a little table ready to hold a glass, an ashtray, a coffee pot. There were cushions and footstools and reading lamps, a writing desk fully equipped at all times with pens, ink, and paper. There was a map table, arranged in a good light by the window with sporting and fashion magazines and newspapers of adequate variety which would be ironed throughout the day whenever – to Kit’s eagle eye – they appeared crumpled.

  ‘It is the little things,’ Kit said, ‘that make the difference.’ The dining room was starched white linen, Wedgwood blue walls, an Adam ceiling and, being connected by double doors to a room of equal proportions could easily be used as a banqueting hall or a suitable setting for the wedding receptions and dinner dances which, with housemaids not only in short supply but making strange mutterings about ‘regular hours’and ‘overtime’, could no longer so easily be held at home.

  There was also a second restaurant, smaller, darker, far more intimate than the first, the tables set very far apart in little alcoves where would be served the masterpieces of Aristide Keller, the thin, morose Belgian who, with his almost mute and skeletal wife, Amandine, was now installed in the superbly equipped kitchen, keeping a sharp, neurotic eye on his recipes which he believed the kitchen maids were conspiring to steal, and making sudden demands for more, or better, or simply different implements, which were always met.

  ‘It pays handsomely,’ Kit Hardie told Claire, ‘to look after the staff.’

  And, without knowing quite how it had happened – whether he had put the idea into her head or she had thought of it herself – she had agreed to accompany Amandine Keller, who spoke only French, on a dozen shopping expeditions to equip the cottage which Kit had provided for them in a quiet street not far from the hotel; Madame Keller exhibiting a far more capricious side to her nature than Claire had expected.

  ‘I must have sage green table linen,’ she said, the only shade, Claire noticed, to be unavailable in the drapery department at Faxby’s Taylor & Timms. Bradford had no sage green tablecloths either; a journey to Leeds on a sultry, sticky day producing the right shade but not the right texture; Keighley, which had both, affording Claire a temporary relief, soon shattered when Madame Keller rejected the merchandise with a scornful gesture at its narrow, light brown border.

  ‘Plain sage green,’ she said.

  ‘Try Manchester,’ suggested Kit.

  ‘Is she worth it?’

  ‘Oh yes – because nobody else will go to so much trouble for her. And when her husband throws a tantrum one night and decides to walk out on me perhaps she’ll remember it.’

  The trip to Manchester was duly made, the sage green linen – ‘not exactly what one had in mind. But, enfin, one should not be unreasonable. It will do’ – duly purchased; Amandine Keller returning to Faxby as perky and voracious as a little bird, Claire in a daze of exhaustion finely balanced between laughter and tears.

  ‘Why am I punishing myself like this?’ she groaned, kicking off her shoes and sinking into the armchair beside Kit’s desk.

  ‘Because I ask you,’ he would have liked to say, knowing it was true. But not quite in the way he wanted. Not yet. No more than an act of friendship at present which she would have performed for many others. He was well aware of that. For Euan Ash, for instance. For anyone who touched her sympathies or who knew how to impose upon her. And although sympathy was not his style and no woman, that he was aware of, had ever felt sorry for him, he knew very well how to impose, carefully, gently, little by little, tiring her perhaps but amusing her, involving her, fresh every morning, with the new day’s triumphs and disasters which, however they might sometimes exasperate her or wear her out, had the saving grace of not being Miriam or Edward – or Paul.

  It was not guile. It was –? He hesitated to name it. A tool of his trade, he supposed, when he applied it to other people, an ability not just to inspire confidence in those under his command but to arouse their enthusiasm; not just to get them going but to get them interested as well. A trick. A talent. A piece of professional expertise. Damned useful. But less straightforward, somehow, when applied to Claire. She was, of course, exceedingly desirable – the calm almost dreamy surface of a lily-pond that had slow-burning fires set deep underneath, he was sure of it. And he had desired her on sight. Almost uncomfortably. He had liked her too. And recognizing the lost, uncertain facet of her nature, the broken wing, the bruised antennae, he had even understood how best to reach her. Strength was the card to play. And steadiness. His feet were set firmly on a sure path, hers were wandering. And perhaps, with a little amorous cunning, he could take advantage of her present frailty to make her follow him. But for how long? To other women he had given cheerfully, freely, generously of his charm, his stamina, his abundant sensuality, the pleasure of his company, and had thought it sufficient. Nor had he asked for anything else in return. Now – and he was often less than pleased about it – he wanted to give more than that to Claire. Conventional things like diamonds, which were also easy things since it only took money to buy them. And rather more complex things. Status, which for him could never be easily obtainable. An established place in the world for which he had still to fight. Security. The fruits of labours he had only just begun to sow.

  And since these gifts were not yet his to make he did not – on her return from Manchester – take her slender, arched, undoubtedly aching feet between his hands to warm them, as he might have done, nor can for the champagne supper she might have accepted, but allowed her to go back alone to Mannheim Crescent where, later that evening, he sent a basket of cream-coloured roses with his card bearing a briefly scrawled ‘Thank you’.

  It was not guile. It was not love either. Or, if so, then it did not seem to be the sentimental, ungainly thing he had imagined. He simply knew that if he could choose a woman to live and work beside him, to be beside him, then it rather looked as if it might be this one.

  ‘It pays handsomely,’ quoted Euan Ash, his eyes on Kit’s roses, ‘to look after the staff.’

  ‘I’m not staff,’ she told him, arranging the lovely bouquet in Miriam Swanfield’s cast-off vases.

  ‘What then?’

  She hesitated. ‘A friend?’

  ‘All right. And you must admit, he knows how to choose his friends, the Major. I work for whisky. You work for a bunch of flowers.’

  ‘It’s not work exactly, Euan.’

  He shrugged, looking out of temper and out of sorts. ‘Well, whatever it is, he’s lost me for the moment. I’ve got a picture to do.’

  ‘A commission?’

  ‘Hell, no. Just a picture – inside my head trying to get out. It mi
ght just make it too. Wish me luck.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Thanks.’ And then, almost hesitantly, he said ‘It’s not easy – being alone with it.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Yet she had no true conception of the effort, the fever – for so he privately called it and suffered it – which proceeded to feed itself on his already fleshless body, paring him even nearer to the bone, blackening the skin around his eyes so that after two nights and then three spent nailed to his canvas by the anguished need to release in paint the very things he needed with equal ferocity to hold back, he looked like a man who has been sleepless for a month.

  Disturbed by the light burning in his studio, the noisy forays he made into the kitchen in the small hours of the night to clatter pots and pans, bang doors, and – for all one knew – leave on the gas, the dancing teacher hastened to complain.

  ‘Now listen here …’

  He neither listened nor appeared to see her, looking through her, when she lay in wait for him by the bathroom door, as if her wiry, entirely earth-bound body had been made of air.

  ‘Drugs,’ she declared darkly. ‘Did you see the colour of him – that sickly yellow? I can always tell, He’s not safe.’

  But Claire, translating the woman’s meaning as ‘We are not safe with him’shook her head.

  ‘He’s painting, that’s all.’

  And, having cleared away the mess of burned sausages and beans, the full mugs of cold black tea she found abandoned on the kitchen table, she knew that he was also starving, deliberately perhaps, consuming himself, flesh and fears together, in a soul-draining agony which might – or might not – end in renewal.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ she said. He was burning himself in fires she understood, in which she had not dared, so far, to hazard herself; a self-cauterization of withered hopes and maimed emotions, on the off-chance – no more than that – that, from their stumps, a new whole feeling, a glimmer of faith in life, might grow. And if he succeeded –!

  He was laying his ghosts and conquering his demons. Casting them out into paint and canvas. Exorcising himself; his face, when she glimpsed it, and his eyes so emptied of their mocking sweetness, their angelic depravity, that he seemed a stranger. A new man. Devoutly she hoped so. Sprawling in her own shabby armchair, wrapped in her disreputable kimono, she even prayed for him, without faith in any particular Almighty, simply wishing to leave no stone unturned on his behalf. ‘I don’t know if You are there, but if You should be, then-really-since You haven’t done a lot for people like him and me up to now –!’ Very much as she had prayed for Paul.

  ‘When are we to see the masterpiece?’ enquired Nola who, despite her scorn, would nevertheless have been more than ready to arrange the unveiling herself, in the presence of well-prompted Crozier bank accounts and suitably prepared gentlemen of the press.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Claire.

  ‘He won’t answer the door,’ the landlord’s agent grumbled, having three times called to collect the rent. ‘I don’t like it. Mr Crozier won’t like it. It’s queer.’

  She put a ten-shilling note and two half-crowns into his hand. ‘Please leave him alone.’

  ‘You heard what the lady said,’ advised Kit Hardie, looking at her from behind the rent-collector’s shoulder in a way – knowingly, wryly – which made her blush.

  And then it was over.

  Kit Hardie came upon him one morning sitting at the kitchen table pouring the dregs of a whisky bottle into his tea, a large canvas propped behind him, its face to the wall.

  ‘It’s finished then?’

  ‘It’s finished.’ And, far from triumphant, he looked chalk-white, fine-drawn, tight-stretched, breakable, disposable by the faintest breeze, his voice weighted and slurring with fatigue.

  ‘Mind if I have a look?’

  It was the face of a young man, yet not exactly a face. Not Euan himself, although very like him, a young gentleman, very blond, very pure, a clean soul somehow in his eyes so that looking at them – recognizing their blue – Kit, who was not much given to analysis, swallowed uncomfortably and felt that he ought to look away. A private face and behind it, around it, the open faces of minute flowers, the texture of cloud and sand and good ploughed earth; eggshells in deep, soft nests, cosseted by the tips of bird-feathers; the contentedly breathing flanks of a dog; swift striding horses; a smiling landscape of young manhood, half-lost and half-rejected, but still beckoning. Still there.

  ‘I don’t know …’ said Kit who was rarely troubled, rarely at a loss for words.

  ‘What don’t you know?’ The weary voice all too clearly did not care.

  ‘I didn’t have that kind of boyhood, Euan.’

  ‘What boyhood? It’s a chocolate box picture of Sir Galahad in cricket flannels, looking at flowers.’

  Kit didn’t think so, A lost paradise. A doomed paradise, its invitation, its soft beckoning a cruel illusion, hair-line cracks in the eggshells warning of dead chicks in those deep, cosy nests; a foam of madness, no bigger than a snowflake, on the mouth of the dog; blight on the dainty under-petals of a flower; disease in the horse’s hoof, the seeds of paralysis in the bird; mounds of earth that could serve as graves as well as furrows; a film of poison on the land. Paradise destroyed, decaying from within, rotting before the candid eyes, beneath the unsuspecting nostrils of the fine, fair young pilgrim, the Believer, the pure-hearted.

  And although this had never been Kit’s paradise and he had never believed in anything beyond his own drive and determination he shuddered slightly, needing more than ever to look away.

  ‘It’s good, Euan,’ he said roughly.

  ‘Christ.’ Weariness had hollowed Euan’s voice now to a kind of hoarse whisper. ‘It’s a story-book illustration – for children.’ Kit shook his head and smiled grimly. No. He had had no place in that sunlit, ailing world, no innocence to be destroyed, no boyhood, as such, to be taken from him and trampled into the Flanders mud. He had never had to learn the casual, everyday brutality of man to man. He had always understood it, dealt with it, from the feckless unconcern of his own father – whoever he might be – to the last elderly, alcoholic colonel who had sent the last schoolboy conscript off to be killed in France. He had always known the world of Euan’s young pilgrim to be false. Yet now he found himself growing angry with a strange need to defend it – or at least this heart-rending, sinister, exquisite portrayal.

  ‘It’s good.’

  Euan looked too exhausted to shake his head. And in any case, what was the point of a denial. It was good. He knew that. It was what he had set out to do, to force out of himself, drop by agonizing drop. And so, measured by that yardstick, one could call it a success. Weakly, almost fretfully, he began to laugh.

  ‘So you’ve come out of hibernation have you?’ A broad bright voice spoke suddenly from the doorway and the dancing teacher came into the room, looking more like an athlete with her wide shoulders and short muscular legs – a tightrope walker – than a ballerina, her sharp eyes, on the lookout for drugs and debauchery, fastening themselves at once on the canvas.

  ‘Oh I say – that’s awfully pretty.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Euan smiling. ‘Isn’t it.’

  ‘And what a good-looking young chap. Anyone you know?’

  ‘An old acquaintance.’ And Euan’s eyes which had been dull and void began to fill again with their malicious sweetness.

  ‘Well – well – fancy that. And here was I thinking you were – well – well!’

  ‘Taking cocaine,’ he supplied amiably, ‘and painting nude women.’

  She blushed very slightly and then, having lived in cheap lodgings far too long to be bashful, gave a loud, unmelodious laugh.

  ‘All right. I’m big enough to admit it. An old friend eh? I wouldn’t mind having him on my wall, I can tell you.’

  ‘Take him.’ And even Kit, for a moment, thought he was joking.

  He was not.

  ‘Now look here,’ she said considera
bly startled, ‘I didn’t mean… It’s very nice I’m sure, but as to what it’s worth …’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, his fallen angel’s smile breaking out of him like the poisoned sunshine dappling the face of his young pilgrim, ‘It’s a gift – from me to you, my darling – because you’re beautiful and I’m generous. Just take it away. Something to remember me by when I’m gone.’

  Eventually, after ten flustered minutes, she took it, half-convinced, as she carried it through the door, that it might suddenly explode or squirt jets of water at her or give off a bad smell; that there was something odd about it at any rate. Yet, since it was free and large and might come in handy someday, especially if he ever made a name for himself – although she doubted that – she took it, leaving the two men in a silence that lived and almost moved with Kit’s strangled pity and exasperation, an urge he recognized as crazy to defend that blasted painting – and Euan – coupled with another urge – less crazy he thought – to take Euan by the scruff of his neck and shake him.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ he said.

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘You sweated blood over that picture.’

  Euan’s listless shoulders sketched a shrug, the only substance in him, the only source of energy, his angelic smile and the innocent malice of his eyes.

  ‘Oh – pretty thin blood,’ he said carelessly, ‘blue, of course, but past its best.’

  ‘And that silly bitch didn’t even want it. I suppose you know that.’ Kit was becoming very angry.