THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER

by MARY HOCKING

  The dressing-up trunk revealed as well as the shawl a long black chiffon scarf which Frances declared to be the very thing. ‘But I can’t wear it smelling of moth balls. Do you think it will disintegrate if I wash it?’

  ‘You have enough time to find out.’ He turned the gossamery shawl over in his hands. ‘You don’t like this?’

  She looked at the shawl and then, putting a hand on his sleeve, said, ‘Not on me. I’m not as beautiful as Margery was.’ She went away to wash the scarf.

  Thomas sat on the trunk with the shawl across his knees and wished that Margery were here with him. Never a day passed but her loss presented itself in one way or another: the longing for company on a forest walk, the need to talk of Jonathan, a household problem, a joke too salty to share with Frances, a worry over Andrew. ‘If only Margery were here,’ he would say with many different intonations. Usually, her loss took the form of a dull ache, a feeling of something not in its place in the house, an ingredient missing in the fare life offered. But at this moment, the pain was as sharp as on the day she died and with it came the panic when he thought of the days, months, perhaps years ahead. He had managed well, friends assured him, but now, sitting here in the dusty attic, it seemed to him that he had not gained more than a foothold in that barren land in which he now found himself.

  He was aware that Margery would not wish him to give way to despair, so as soon as he had regained his composure he folded the shawl carefully and replaced it in the trunk.

  Far below, he heard voices, and going to the small window he saw Nicholas hoisting Andrew on to a pony, Jasper cavorting around them. As he led the pony towards the forest, Frances came out on to the path, waving. The scene sparkled with vigour and gaiety as snow scenes can when the sun comes out. Thomas had watched Nicholas’s mild flirtation with Frances with detached amusement. It had taken him only a short time to recognise in Nicholas the kind of man who shies away from serious emotional engagement. But now, seeing the three of them in the tableau so typical of a young family at Christmas, he thought how natural it was and how superfluous his own presence.

  He went slowly down the stairs to join Frances in the kitchen. As he entered the room she was testing the iron. She saw that he was in command of himself again and was proud of him, always so steady and upright, even although sometimes it seemed to her that he was like a soldier under indefinite sentence. She knew that he would have considered it a betrayal of Margery had he ‘made a poor fist’ of his widowerhood. She had wrapped the scarf in a towel to get as much moisture as possible out before ironing it, and she made a business of unrolling it to cover any slight awkwardness between them.

  ‘Would you care for a coffee?’ Thomas asked. ‘A Gaelic coffee, perhaps?’

  She said ‘Why not?’ with rather edgy enthusiasm.

  While he made the coffee she separated the scarf from the towel carefully as if it were something very precious.

  ‘It’s all right so far,’ she said, spreading the flimsy material out over the ironing board. ‘I’ve got the iron at a low heat. Say a prayer for me.’

  She was flushed and this animated her face. He thought that perhaps he had not said enough prayers for her. She had come to regard this house as her home while Margery was alive and there had been no doubt then of her need, a lonely, unhappy girl, starved of affection. The death of Jonathan had drawn her closer to them; she had grieved as if one of the family. Although she was rather too intense for his liking, he had accepted her as a daughter for whom he had as much responsibility as for Andrew.

  Now, looking around the kitchen, not as homely as when Margery presided, but clean and well stocked, it occurred to him that there had been a shift in their relationship so gradual he had not noticed it; the need had become his and it was Frances on whom the burden of care lay.

  ‘I nearly made a mistake yesterday,’ Frances said. ‘It was on the tip of my tongue to mention Konrad – as if I’d met him, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I slipped up, too.’

  ‘It’s odd, don’t you think? Nicholas out with the pony this morning, and all of us going to Christmas lunch. It’s as if they didn’t want to know what was happening.’

  Thomas, not much minded to judge his neighbours, said, ‘Mmh. We don’t know any of them very well, do we?’

  ‘But it’s better to be aware, isn’t it?’ she persisted, bearing down rather hard on the flimsy scarf. ‘Even if it’s something you’re not going to like, it’s better to know.’

  ‘It may be better to be prepared,’ he said slowly. ‘But it doesn’t lessen the pain.’

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ she said, with a little less conviction. How mismanaged it seemed that Margery should have been the one taken and he, so little fitted to deal with the complexities of human behaviour and emotions, should be the survivor.

  ‘You’re happy about going over there for lunch?’ he asked, feeling this was the most he could do by way of probing her feelings for Nicholas.

  ‘We couldn’t not go, could we?’ she said.

  ‘We could say we had succumbed to this deadly virus.’

  She draped the scarf round her neck while she folded the ironing board. ‘If we didn’t go, we should have Florence round here ministering to us. She was very taken with you.’

  Thomas held up a hand in mock horror. ‘Don’t say that. Even in jest, don’t say that.’

  Frances went upstairs to change. Thomas, washing up the coffee cups, reflected that not the least of the things she had done for him was to save him from such as Florence. He was a proud man whose independence was important to him. The possibility that Frances might go – indeed should be encouraged to go whenever the time was right for her – leaving him to become the object of pity and calculation was more than distasteful, it was frightening. There was Andrew to consider. He had known several men who had made disastrous second marriages for the sake of their children. For a moment, as he dried the cups and trod in Jasper’s lunch bowl, he felt threatened as never before.

  ‘Our history teacher says all explorers are a little mad,’ Andrew said as Nicholas led the pony into what Andrew imagined to be a Himalayan glade.

  ‘It helps,’ Nicholas said soberly. The history teacher had been joking, but the face which Nicholas turned to the wood was striated with lines that owed more to anxiety than humour. ‘At least, I don’t think it would be something you’d do to prove you were a fairly ordinary sort of person.’

  He had thought only this morning as he was shaving that the eyes which started out of the thin face were too bright – not the brightness of expectancy, either, more desperation. But then, the cottage was small and there was a tree right up against the bathroom window.

  ‘Have you been to the Amazonian rain forests?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘No. I try to steer clear of jungle and forest as far as I can. I need space. Explorers aren’t necessarily brave. I’m not even at ease here in your airy wood.’

  Andrew, for whom the forest was a place of refuge, said, ‘I’d like to explore the rain forests.’ He rubbed the pony’s shoulder, which was the colour of coconut matting and just as prickly. The mane was flaxen and so were the eyelashes, which protruded stiff as the bristles of a toothbrush above the dark, liquid eyes.

  It seemed to Nicholas as he led the boy on the pony through the wood that this was not Andrew but another, long-lost child from whom he needed something rather badly – only he was not sure what. It was a very long time since he had been sure of anything. The boy on the pony was wise in his own fashion because, being at his beginning, he was master of the here and now; whereas Nicholas had become one of those lean and foolish knights who go on quests and after many arduous adventures come to realise that they have forgotten what it is they quested. He said to Andrew, humbly, as if he needed to know, ‘Why do you want to be an explorer?’

  ‘But you must know.’ The boy was surprised.

  ‘I did once. Perhaps you could remind me.’

  ‘I’d be able to go where I w
ant and do what I want when I want, of course. And get lost without people making a fuss.’

  ‘But do you know what you want?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to go to school, for a start.’

  ‘But what do you want from your exploring – can you tell me?’

  Andrew wrinkled up his nose so that his cheekbones touched the big round glasses. ‘I won’t know that till I get wherever it is, will I? I mean, if I knew what it was before I got there, it wouldn’t be worth exploring, would it? It would be like one of those treasure hunts where someone goes and tells you where to look.’

  ‘And when you got there, and you knew, do you think it would have been worth it?’

  ‘It depends. Grandad took us to France for the day last year and it was just like England, streets and shops. They even had the same T-shirts. I think what I’d do would be to search for something – a lost city, that sort of thing. If it had been lost for centuries it would be bound to be different, wouldn’t it? And there wouldn’t be any people.’ No people was obviously a bonus.

  They went on in silence for a little while and then Andrew said, ‘And you’d be free. I mean, you’re never free here, are you? There’s always someone on at you about something.’ He played with the pony’s tangled mane, making up his mind to speak. ‘I’m not good at games, you see. Do you think that would stop me?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Unless you go in for the sort of thing where you have to be first.’

  Again they were silent until Andrew said, bending down as if speaking for the pony’s ear alone. ‘And there’d be no one to worry whether I was happy.’

  Nicholas said, ‘I don’t know . . .’ He knuckled his forehead to no effect. ‘I wish I could help you, but I don’t really know any more than you. I’ve just covered more miles, that’s all.’

  ‘Could I come with you some time, when I’m a bit older?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I’d train and all that. I’m quite fit. I don’t really need these glasses. It’s just that it’s easier to sort of work things out behind them.’

  ‘No promises. You might want to do something different in a few years’ time and I might . . . well, one never knows. Promises are things which don’t leave people free.’

  Andrew sighed. ‘Grandad tells me promises are meant to be kept.’

  I go on and on searching, Nicholas thought, and all the time I get thinner and my eyes get wilder. It’s as if I’m wearing myself away and one day there won’t be anything of me at all except a pair of staring eyes.

  ‘We’re going in a circle, did you know?’ Andrew asked politely. ‘We’ve just passed the double oak again.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Shall I walk the pony now?’ Andrew was getting a little tired of just sitting, and cold as well.

  Nicholas turned to help him down and he said, ‘I can manage. It’s not as if he’s very tall.’ But Nicholas was standing so near that he couldn’t get down without pushing. For a moment, they remained still, looking at each other. Nicholas said, ‘The one place we never see is what’s at the back of our head. We don’t see as far round as a lot of animals, and birds have a much more panoramic view. What I’m trying to say is – you don’t think you would ever feel that you ought to explore what you have turned your back on?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have turned my back if I’d wanted to explore it, would I?’ Andrew said primly.

  ‘Yes, silly of me.’ Nicholas stood back while Andrew scrambled down.

  Andrew said, ‘Shall I take you and show you the tawny owl’s tree?’

  Anita sat with her father while Florence helped Sophia to prepare for lunch. At half-past ten, Sophia relieved her.

  ‘Where is Mother?’ Anita asked.

  ‘She is gone on a goodwill mission to the Prentices.’

  ‘But it’s here that she’s needed.’

  ‘She needed to get out.’ Sophia looked tired. ‘What is more, I needed her to get out.’

  ‘I could visit Terence this afternoon, if you’d like me to help you now.’ As Sophia seemed unable to make up her mind about this, Anita said, ‘Or perhaps you need me to get out as well?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’ Sophia passed a hand across her eyes, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not good in the morning, nothing seems to function, brain included. The doctor says it’s my heart that’s not up to much.’

  She would not normally have confided this, Anita guessed; that she did so was a mark of her extreme need to be rid of her guests.

  Anita had the tact to go quickly. In a matter of minutes, a scarf bound round her shorn head, she was on her way to visit Terence. She, too, was glad to be on her own.

  It was bitterly cold still, but bright and Anita found the clear, sharp air invigorating. It seemed her father walked with her as he had long ago on a perfect winter’s day when she had felt light and new as the first snowdrop. It came to her more vividly than recollection, as though the two experiences had become one. She walked through a landscape itself made new, boundaries, barriers and paths all blotted out. She passed a signpost pointing with laid-back hilarity to a hamlet somewhere in the sky. She felt a tinge of regret when she saw the first house in the distance – Millionaires’ Acre, Sophia had dubbed this area on the outskirts of the forest. The hurricane had stripped the houses of their protective cover and they now gazed baldly across their snow-covered lawns. Anita could imagine the owners fighting for the preservation of the forest as passionately as if their own dwellings had grown with the greenwood. The Carteret house was small in comparison with some of its neighbours, but it had an air of discreet wealth, each jewelled window radiating soft coloured lights. There was a big holly wreath hanging on the front door.

  Anita felt rather like Elizabeth Bennet approaching the residence of the Bingleys to visit her sick, only not so well disposed to the sufferer. When she had telephoned to speak to Terence, messages had been relayed by Mrs Carteret because ‘he finds it difficult to speak’. The messages had related to Terence’s BUPA membership and the steps to be taken to ensure the college was made sufficiently aware of the crippling nature of his injuries. He had not included any greetings to her – or Mrs Carteret had not seen fit to pass them on; her tone had suggested that she held Anita to blame for Terence having set out on such a foolhardy expedition. ‘One has to know the ways of the forest,’ she had said, sounding like one of J. M. Barrie’s more fey characters.

  There were several children and a dog playing in the garden under the supervision of a young man whose chunkiness was beginning to turn to flab. From Sophia’s description, Anita took him to be Mrs Carteret’s son. The whole group regarded her with the suspicion of the stranger peculiar to wealthy country-house owners. The son must be in his late twenties, Anita judged; which meant that Mrs Carteret must be going on fifty. This was unlikely to inhibit Terence, provided she was personable and agreeable. Anita knocked on the front door and after a longish pause she was admitted by a round little woman with a cloud of ash-blonde hair and a face as soft as marshmallow. She held a glass of wine in one dimpled hand and didn’t look as if she had been recently occupied in the kitchen.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to disturb him,’ she said, examining Anita much as a wren might observe a hovering hawk from the shelter of a hedge. ‘He’s had a quiet morning so far.’

  ‘She looked at me as if she thought I was going to dive into bed with you,’ Anita said to Terence when they were alone. She noticed a glass of wine on the bedside table.

  Terence looked anxious lest the idea should prove irresistible. Anita thought he resembled a panda with the black smudges round his eyes. ‘There’s small chance of that,’ he said. ‘I can’t take a deep breath without feeling someone is at me with a branding iron.’

  ‘Really as bad as that?’ She regarded his chest judicially as if at any moment she might poke to verify the truth of this assertion.

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘But a branding iron? Havi
ng quite an effect on you, isn’t it, this forest retreat? Do you feel you’ve slipped into another century, perhaps?’

  ‘I could have punctured a lung, that’s what should be worrying you.’

  ‘There’d be blood, wouldn’t there? Did you gash crimson all over the snow?’

  ‘What are you so edgy about? And why have you got your hair bundled up as if you’d just come out of the bath?’

  ‘You want to know?’ She unwrapped the scarf.

  Terence gave a sharp intake of breath and screeched with agony. ‘You look dreadful,’ he said when he could speak. ‘Like one of those women who collaborated with the Nazis.’ The idea seemed to waken unpleasant associations in his mind. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘I thought I needed a change.’

  ‘You’re not the same person.’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘Just what has been happening in that cottage?’

  She got up and walked around the room, picking up ornaments, opening the wardrobe, pulling out drawers. ‘It’s a comfortable room, isn’t it? She didn’t stash you away in the attic, did she? Warm, central heating working nicely, no electricity failure. I expect they generate their own. Lots of pleasant smells. Telephone so that you can have a chat to anyone you might want to speak to. Comfortable bed, good springs . . .’ She made as if to test the springs and he bared his teeth in a grimace of anguish. ‘All right, all right, I don’t intend to do it. But you have to admit you chose a good spot to incapacitate yourself.’

  ‘Incapacitate myself? I was mown down by a flying toboggan. You don’t seem to understand that I am racked with pain. I never knew what that meant before . . .’

  ‘Actually, it means stretched. You haven’t been stretched, crumpled rather. I’m sick of all this self-pity. What about me? Sleeping alone in that icy bed.’ She put her face close to his, mouth to mouth.

  ‘Anita, please!’

  ‘It’s the one thing you can do.’

  ‘What’s left of your hair is tickling my nose. If I cough it’s sheer agony.’