A Spell of Winter Read online

  She had always been sentimental about men in uniform. Her nonsense was making my head ache.

  ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘he went somewhere, didn’t he? Did you know they wanted to send him to Bedlam?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said, ‘and I don’t want to.’

  ‘Oh yes, they did. But your grandfather stopped it.’ Her words dropped on me like little balls of spittle. She spoke quietly and conversationally, and no one passing through the hall would have guessed what we were talking about. I didn’t feel like laughing at her now.

  ‘Your father was a moral lunatic,’ said Miss Gallagher. ‘Do you know what that means, Catherine?’

  ‘God knows!’

  She paused, torn between her automatic desire to defend the Redeemer’s name (‘She treats God like a pawnbroker,’ Rob said) and her hunger to move on to better meat.

  ‘I had hoped, Catherine, never to have to speak to you on the subject, but I know my duty now. I should never have kept the truth from you all the time,’ she continued, with an involuntary smile of pleasure. She would have got her phrases out of one of the novels she loved, tales of virtue rewarded and the flowering of beauty in plain, poor women. I saw her rolling the words over on her tongue in her narrow bedroom, rejoicing because at last she’d made her chance to use them.

  ‘I knew about that, anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Did you, Catherine? I wonder,’ she said, looking at me with amused pity. She would have rehearsed that too. Then she poked her neck forward with a jerk, ugly but effective, like a blackbird stabbing at the head of a worm as it emerged from the wet soil. Her eyes pinned me. ‘Have you ever thought what happens to a servant who gets herself into trouble?’

  ‘She gets married, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, you innocent!’ she trilled, letting it hang between us that innocent was certainly the last thing I was. ‘Not always, Catherine. The asylums are full of such girls. They are moral idiots, not fit to live among decent people. They need to be taught the difference between right and wrong. I visit one such place quite regularly, you know. Of course I have never talked to you about it.’

  But now you can, I thought.

  ‘Not many people know about them,’ she went on, ‘but charitable people contribute funds. The inmates wear a uniform. I helped to design one.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Really, Catherine, I should hardly have thought that was significant. As long as their bodies are covered. Though I flatter myself that I know something about clothes.’

  I looked at her long swathes of dustcoat. You are a monster, I thought. How she would love insinuating herself into any institution, sipping tea with the matron and gently recommending further punishments. How she would love walking up and down among girls who might have been pretty once and were now on their hands and knees scrubbing flags with big chapped hands.

  ‘The matron of St Agatha’s is a particular friend of mine,’ said Miss Gallagher. ‘Moral idiots,’ she repeated, with light, particular emphasis.

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything to me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, doesn’t it? I thought it might. Your grandfather would know what it meant at once, after his terrible experience with your father.’

  Chill was licking at my heels. No matter how much wood we piled on, all we ever achieved in the hall was a blaze on our faces and a desert of cold behind. She knew and she was going to tell our grandfather.

  ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘I’m tired. It was a long walk. And I haven’t changed.’

  ‘Oh yes, Catherine, I think you have,’ she said, looking at me with her head on one side. Then she became practical again, the friend of the family. ‘You must have perspired and it has given you a chill.’ She looked at me as if she could see the pores of my skin and smell my sweat. ‘Shall I ask Kate to fetch hot water for your bath?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘I could stay while you have it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Gallagher,’ I said, and I smiled appeasingly, ‘I’m not Feeling awfully well.’

  ‘Eunice. How many times have I got to tell you? After all, you are grown-up now. We’re both women. Eunice. Perhaps it is one of those times? Have you got your visitor?’

  I felt as if she were running her hands over my body.

  ‘Oh you silly girl! You don’t need to be shy with me.’

  She had creaked into horrible playfulness. We were girls together, talking about female intimacies.

  ‘If Rob does go away,’ she said, lingering over the idea deliciously, ‘I could come and keep you company. I’m sure your grandfather would not object, if you asked him. And you need someone to help you with your clothes, if you’re going to have all these parties and gaieties. Won’t it be fun?’

  We were in the future tense already, not the conditional. I knew all about how language was put together from hearing Rob’s Latin as he struggled to learn his tenses and declensions. I could feel my way to the right answers swiftly, as if a path lay between them and me. She was so sure of herself now. Stupidly sure. She really thought it had been that easy and it was all over. I would give in and Rob would go like a lamb. Oh, she’d juggle us all. Yes, she’d frightened me, but now her big face was silly with the prospect of happiness.

  ‘I must go upstairs. I’ve got a pain,’ I said. She looked at me with maternal satisfaction, like a mother who loves her child the more when it is sick and scabby, hidden away from other eyes. Then she reached out the back of her hand and stroked it down my cheek. I jerked sharply away and rubbed my flesh where she had touched it. Her hand fell down to her side and she looked at me with tiny hating eyes.

  ‘Touch pitch, and you shall be defiled,’ she said. ‘You’re filth, Catherine. You are walking in the darkness. It is the evil spirit in you that makes you turn from me. But I shall rescue you in spite of yourself, Catherine. I know my duty.’

  She was rapt. I had given her more happiness than she had ever imagined. The prospect of my redemption glowed before her face, brighter than the fire. It was perfect: she could hate the sin, and love me. She scarcely saw me go out, leaving her there.

  ‘She knows,’ I said, and watched the pupils of Rob’s eyes shrink to pinpoints.

  ‘How? How can she?’

  ‘I don’t know. She just does.’

  He sat back on his heels on my bed and whistled softly through his teeth.

  ‘The old devil. She’s been after you since you were born.’ Sss, sss, sss, went his whistling, and he actually smiled, his cheekbones rising mockingly.

  ‘She’s a monster. You don’t know half of it. You’re to go, and she’s to move in with me and help buy my clothes.’

  ‘Help buy your clothes! That’ud be the worst of it. Do you think she’d find you a nice coat like hers?’

  ‘It isn’t funny, Rob. She knows. She’s going to tell Grandfather.’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Cath. She wouldn’t dare. He’d get rid of her the way he got rid of Susan and Tommy Linus. Besides, he wouldn’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘She says he would, after Father.’

  ‘Did she actually say that? Threaten you?’

  ‘No, not quite … but it’s what she meant.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He was frowning now, tense. ‘I always said she was mad.’

  ‘We’re moral idiots, that’s her line. She could get me put away for it.’

  ‘That’s absurd. She can’t do that.’

  ‘She could. There are asylums for it. Father nearly went to one, why not me?’

  ‘You don’t believe she could, or you wouldn’t be talking about it like that.’

  He was right, of course. Just by talking her over between ourselves, the way we’d always done, we were weakening her. We’d annulled her between us many times.

  ‘But it’s different this time. She really means it. She is mad, or half-mad, anyway. That’s why she’s dang
erous.’

  We’d always laughed at her. Her clothes, her scarab pin, her long teeth and her cloying love for me. But all that mockery hadn’t changed anything. She was still here, as durable as rubber, and she came and went in our house as she wanted. She hadn’t changed. In her grotesque way she had the same power to want as Mr Bullivant had, and to go on wanting long after anyone else would have given up. We had never taken her seriously.

  ‘She’s the hare and the tortoise,’ I said.

  ‘She can’t be both at once.’

  ‘No, we are the hare. We think we’re so far ahead of her. We’re young, we’ve got everything. We bound off for a bit then we lie down in the sun and shut our eyes and forget about her. But she won’t be forgotten. She just keeps going, plodding on her track.’

  ‘Funny things, tortoises,’ said Rob, ‘the way they move. If you watch them all the time they don’t seem to make any progress. But if you go away then come back after a while, they’ve always gone out of sight. And they’re the devil to catch in the long grass.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it – that’s what I mean. She’s like that.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about her?’ He said it lightly, as if it was a game.

  ‘Make her go.’

  ‘Make her go? And how do we do that?’ Hazel flecks swam in his eyes. I could see every grain of colour and the way it thickened into patterns, raying out through the iris like a dandelion clock.

  ‘I’m sure there’s a way.’

  He laughed. ‘She’s not the boy in the wallpaper, Cath.’

  The boy in the wallpaper had lived in a narrow frieze of pattern until nightfall, when he came out and slipped between the bars of my cot-bed. He had gone on coming for years. At first I liked him, but his stories ballooned bigger than shadows and I couldn’t control them any more. He told me about the burned ladies who always wore veils of deepest mourning over their faces. And when they drew them off, slowly, there were no faces at all, only greasy knobs of melted flesh with two eyes sitting in the middle. There were the Noink-Noinks who squeaked whitely, like mice, only high up. At night they all came to me, flocking and twittering.

  I was six when Rob killed the boy in the wallpaper. I’d woken again, sweating and grovelling at the bottom of my bed. My nightdress clung to me in urine-soaked folds.

  ‘I’ll kill him for you,’ Rob promised. ‘I’ll wait for him tomorrow night and when he comes I’ll kill him.’

  ‘How will you?’

  ‘I mustn’t tell you. You’ll have to hide with your head right under the blankets and promise you won’t look out. If you do he’ll win and he’ll kill me.’

  I cowered under the blankets. They were hot and scratchy and I had no sheets: it was a punishment for wetting my bed. I heard the squeak and shuffling begin. They were coming, peeling off the wall, dropping lightly to the bed, scampering across the floor. Then there was a thud, a cry. Silence. A long pause.

  ‘Rob?’ I did not dare peep out of the blankets.

  ‘It’s all right.’ His voice, curt and muffled. ‘I’ve got him. But he’s done my arm.’

  ‘Can I come out?’

  ‘Yes. He’s dead.’

  He was dead and gone. Rob sat on his bed, rather pale, holding his arm.

  ‘Ouch! Don’t touch it, Cathy. That’s where he hit me with his nightstick. If I hadn’t been quick he’d have done worse.’

  I stared respectfully at Rob’s nightshirted arm where he clutched it.

  ‘You won’t wet the bed any more,’ Rob told me. ‘Kate will put your sheets back.’

  I listened for the boy in the wallpaper, but his teasing voice was silent. He had gone, and the wallpaper was only wallpaper.

  No, Miss Gallagher was not the boy in the wallpaper. Footsteps tapped down the corridor and we sprang apart.

  ‘Has that one gone yet?’ demanded Kate. ‘I’m late with your grandfather’s coffee for keeping out of her way, and now he’s raging. Why he can’t drink tea in the afternoon like a Christian soul, I can’t think.’

  ‘Nothing very Christian about tea … nothing very Christian about Miss Gallagher, come to that. Kate, you’d know – is she a witch?’

  ‘I’d know, would I? Well, as it happens, I can tell you. She’s much too stupid to make a witch. Any broomstick she had would never get off the ground. Now out of the way and let me see to this.’

  She knelt, building a wigwam of kindling. Somewhere a bell rang furiously.

  ‘He wants his coffee, the old devil,’ she muttered as if to herself.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Rob.

  ‘You will not. You make a terrible fire.’

  ‘We can’t sit here like a pair of stuffed owls while you do everything.’

  ‘Why not? Isn’t that what you’re for?’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘Too-shay yourself. Do you think I don’t know French? At least push the damper in after a quarter of an hour. If you remember, with all you’ve got on your mind.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  She looked at him with her long bright eyes and shrugged. ‘You don’t usually stop talking when I come into the room.’

  ‘No more we do. Sorry, Kate.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not complaining. Just observing. I’ve enough to do making all these fires up and putting clean linen on your beds.’ She gave another long oblique look that included us both, lifted the basket of kindling, kicked open the door with her heel and was gone.

  ‘Yes, she’s got to go,’ said Rob, as if we hadn’t been interrupted.

  ‘It’s all right saying that, but how?’

  ‘I’ll think about it. And you do too. My best ideas come in the middle of the night, I find.’ He grinned at me and the burden lifted. It was all play.

  But he didn’t come to my room that night and I lay awake, alone. I didn’t think of Miss Gallagher. I thought of my father and how they had taken him. Had they grappled his arms behind him, pinioned him, made him walk between two indifferent men who’d been brought in knowing nothing but that there was trouble? Had they been rough with him? Or had he crumbled already, compliant as he’d been in the hospital?

  If he’d been himself he’d have stung that doctor into silence. Instead he’d sat there with his glass of milk in front of him, and reached out his hand to lift it obediently to his lips. But Rob had taken the glass and poured the milk in a long arc to the ground.

  My father had stumbled in and out of the rose garden, looking for us. There would have been thorns in his hands. They had been able to take him and do what they liked with him. ‘A moral idiot’. The flesh had hung from his face, slack and heavy. He was fatter than he had been, stripped of house and wife and children and gun. I wished he had still had his gun. He would never have hurt anybody.

  ‘When I’m out of sorts, a day’s shooting soon puts me right.’ Had he said that, or was I imagining what I wanted to remember? The beads of moisture on his shooting jacket. The battered cap he always wore. The way a hare or a pair of rabbits would swing from his hand. And the cold touch of the skin, the warm flesh beneath, the smell of rain and tobacco and cologne when he swung me up and kissed me.

  ‘Moral idiocy,’ her doll-like voice tapped at me. I twisted in my bed. How I hated her.

  Twelve

  In the middle of the night I gave up trying to sleep, sat up, wrapped the counterpane round my shoulders and settled to wait for morning. The house creaked like someone turning over in their sleep. How quickly I’d got used to Rob’s warmth beside me, and the strawlike smell of the bed we shared. Kate had put on clean sheets and there was nothing left but a bland smell of soap.

  I hadn’t forgotten. The memory of it was in my body, not in my mind.

  Soap flannels my ears. Water runs in and blocks them so that Kate’s voice booms like a deep-sea diver’s. I shake my head, trying to get rid of the sound.

  ‘Stand still, Cathy. My God, you could grow a crop of potatoes in here. Stand still, will you, you’re not going out with
your father looking like that.’

  Kate seizes my head and crams it between her knees. She’s in a bad mood today, cuffing me about as she gets me ready. Where is Rob? I don’t know and I don’t think of him. My whole imagination is set on the expedition with Father and I hold out one leg and then the other, indifferent as a doll, while Kate garters my woollen stockings. She rakes my hair with the comb and begins to plait. I don’t know how long it is since Father promised me this day with him. I have taken it to bed with me, shaped it in the dark. I am hungry for it but it is a satisfying hunger, as if I can already smell the meal that has been prepared for me. Father never takes me out on my own. It is always Rob on his left hand and me on his right. We call these hands our hands. Rob must not touch mine and I must not touch his. I swing Father’s right hand possessively, and sometimes I put my face against it, quickly so he will not see, and turn it over to kiss his palm. I do it very lightly and he never notices it is me.

  Today I’ll have both hands if I want. We are going to walk over to Silence Farm because there is a horse we might buy for ploughing. It’s not really called Silence Farm, but we’ve called it that for so long I can’t remember the proper name any more. At Silence Farm they’ll give me black tea, and a nip of something stronger for Father. The darker and more bitter the tea, the prouder I am to drink it. My tea comes in a china bowl with bands of flowers on it, not in a cup.

  ‘There,’ says Kate, tipping me off her lap, ‘that’s you done for today. Mind you don’t go over the top of your boots in the mud.’

  It’s been raining for weeks but today is fine. There is a wind and the ground’s drying fast, but there are big, mud-slopped puddles too. I always go in puddles. I start at the edge and shuffle in very slowly, watching the skin of the water lap my boots. Sometimes I get right to the middle, sometimes there is a snatch and a slap and I am whisked up and dumped back on the dry earth.

  ‘And don’t go raising the dead with those boots outside your mother’s room. She has a headache.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I say, but half-way down the corridor I notice that my boots make a much more satisfactory noise now that they have been away to town and had little steel tips put on at sole and heel. I click my heels like a pony and shy at my mother’s closed door, tossing my head. But the next minute Kate whisks out of the night nursery, sweeps me up and whooshes me to the top of the stairs. She kneels down in front of me and hisses into my face,