Spell of Winter Read online

  Livvy’s mare skittered, her hoofs flying, and I backed into the stable doorway. Released, Rob touched Starcrossed with his heels, and the two of them turned to go, the sunlight flowing on the horses’ flanks like water.

  There was a drip drip from a tap someone hadn’t quite turned off. In the doorway dust curled slowly up a beam of sun. The stable floor was matted with dirty straw. It ought to have been swept out, but John was ill and Rob had left it. He should have been working here, not out riding with Livvy. There was too much to do and the place was falling apart. I was sick of it suddenly, sick of the way we lived and of my own passivity. My body itched with impatience and I seized John’s broom and began to sweep. I heard the sound of hoofs behind but I wouldn’t turn. He couldn’t see me from the yard, he’d have to come in, ducking his head and losing the advantage of being on horseback. I knew it would be Rob, come back to make things right with me so he could enjoy his day with his mind at ease.

  ‘Cathy!’

  ‘Mmm?’ I said, sweeping so hard that a cloud of sour dust went up in his face, ‘What?’

  ‘Stop it, I can’t talk to you when you’re whisking about like that.’

  ‘It’s got to be done. This place is a pig-sty. You ought to have done it.’

  ‘All right, I know, I know. Listen, I’ve only got a minute. I told Livvy I’d forgotten my whip. Listen. Don’t be like that, Cathy. I had to go when she came over specially. It would have looked strange if I hadn’t.’

  ‘Yes, of course. So you had to go. Why did you come back, then?’

  ‘You know why. Because I – ‘

  ‘Because you?’

  ‘Because I had to.’

  I glanced up at him as I swept round him. ‘Mind your feet. So you went because you had to and then you came back because you had to. That’s very interesting but where does it leave me?’

  I was hot, sweaty, exhilarated. With the broom in my hand I felt strong.

  ‘You’d better go,’ I said. ‘She’ll wonder where you are. That stuff about the whip won’t fool her for five minutes. Go on, go to her. You know you want to.’

  I had never felt so powerful. He stood there not knowing what to do. I felt my smile stretch across my face. ‘Go on. I don’t care.’ And I didn’t. I was big and coarse compared to Livvy but I was strong. When there was a job to do I could do it. I could clean out these stables and more besides.

  ‘What about her?’ he asked, hesitating in the doorway. I knew he meant Miss Gallagher.

  ‘I’ll deal with her. You’d better go, Livvy doesn’t like waiting.’

  No one else came to interrupt me. I kilted my skirt into my belt and heaped the dirty straw in the yard. Winter flies crawled slowly, almost asleep. They looked blind. If we’d let that straw lie much longer there’d have been maggots in it. I forked it on to a barrow, then wheeled load after load to the midden. I fetched John’s zinc bucket and swilled down the cobbles with clean shining arcs of water. I put fresh hay in the mangers and spread new straw for bedding. When it was done I leaned in the doorway. The thin January sun felt warm. Wisps of new hay blew about and the wet cobbles glistened. A wood pigeon purred on the roof as if it were summer and I stretched myself until my bodice creaked. There was a burning ache at the base of my spine.

  I’d had an ache like that the day I came back from the hay field with Rob last summer, so late the moon was up. Rob had been working with the men. Kate and Elsie carried heavy tin cans of tea, and I took a basket of plum cake with a white cloth tied over it. I wore my old blue cotton and I’d stuck marguerites and yellow poppies into the ribbon of my straw hat. I didn’t care about anything that day. I was at ease in my body, and forgetful. The sun flickered on my face through tiny holes in the straw brim, and a little breeze blew over the standing grass and made it shiver. They had cut all but the square in the middle of the field, and they’d be done by night. The breeze dropped and the sun struck hot on my arms through the cotton. The men were resting in the shade under the hedge. Rob lay on his back, staring straight up at the sky, nibbling the juicy end of a grass stem. His hands were folded behind his head and there were patches of sweat under his arms. He’d been in the field since early morning, when the dew dried.

  The men saw us coming and there was a shout, the kind of shout they’d give girls from the village: I don’t think they recognized me. Rob sat up too and I saw how he would look if you didn’t know him, his teeth gleaming in a burnt face, his eyes narrow. I pulled back the cover of my basket and walked from man to man, offering them the cake. I knew Rob was watching me all the time.

  ‘Is that tea Kate’s brought?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We ought to have beer for the men. It’ll be dark by the time we finish.’

  ‘Ought we? I’ll ask Grandfather.’

  ‘You ask him,’ said Rob. ‘The way you look now, he’ll give you anything you want.’

  The smell of the hay was sweet. I drew my skirts under me and sat on the grass, next to Rob. The way you look now. I felt the glow of it all over my body as I looked down into the minute world of stalks and insects. The stalks bristled where they had been cut, and the insects ran about purposefully, lugging invisible crumbs of food. I dropped a currant and watched two ants wrestle with it. The sun was low now, its light warm and jelly-like. I looked out and saw that we were all gilded, more beautiful than we had ever been or ever would be again. I wouldn’t go back to the house and ask about the beer. I would stay up here and help with the haymaking.

  All that long light evening we worked to get in the hay. My big open-pronged rake dragged on the uneven ground. At first I was clumsy with it, then I caught the trick of swinging my whole body, not just my arms, as I pulled the loaded rake towards me. I didn’t think of anything, only the heaped hay, the swing of the rake, my slow progress across the field. Kate was working a few yards from me but we didn’t speak, except once when she said I had got the hang of it fine. She might have grown up in Dublin but she’d spent every summer with an aunt on a townland not far from Cork. She had a terrible life, the aunt.

  ‘I’ll tell you now, Cathy, it was a warning never to marry on to a farm. All the men arguing over the land year in year out while the women work themselves to death and have a baby a year.’

  My hat was in the way and I took it off and threw it into the ditch. The flowers in its ribbon were wilted already. The sun was lower and less burning now. The air grew thick, blue as rosemary in the distance with columns of gnats whining as they rose and fell. Queen Anne’s lace showed in the hedges like phosphorescence. I raked and raked, stooping until my eyes swam in the near darkness.

  There was another shout when John came up with the beer. Grandfather had thought of it after all.

  ‘Here, Cathy,’ said Rob when the can came round for him to dip in his tin mug. He held the mug to my lips. I was thirsty and I drank it straight down as if it were the cold tea we’d had earlier. He tipped it higher, too high, and beer ran over my lips and down my dress.

  ‘Steady, Cath, you’ll smell like a brewery.’

  But I drank down to the end of the mug before I handed it back to him.

  We walked back together, a little behind the others. The wagon had gone down from the next field already. Another day or two to dry off the hay we had just cut, and we’d be finished. I’d go up again tomorrow to help turn it in the heat of the day. The shorn fields smelled sweet. An owl coasted low behind us, looking for baby rabbits. All the men had gone off with a rabbit or two. It was as easy as picking daisies to get them when they were dazed with fear, making for the ditches. They were mostly young ones. We linked arms and swayed from tiredness as we walked. Rob was whistling, a bit flat as he always was. There were dog roses in the hedges, the white ones like tiny flat lamps lighting our way. It had been perfectly clear all day and now dew was falling, bringing out the smell of cut grass and the smell of heated dust as we kicked it up with our boots. I hadn’t bothered to find my hat. Somewhere there was an old cotton
sun-bonnet I could wear tomorrow. It didn’t matter what I looked like. I was lightheaded from beer and the sun, leaning on Rob, feeling the stored warmth of the day come out of his skin. He turned and smiled and I knew he liked to have me there, as close to him as he was to himself. The others were nearly out of sight, but they could have turned and called back some joke or greeting that sprang from the hours we’d all spent in the field together. They would have thought nothing of the way Rob and I leaned together. We were brimful of weariness and happiness, we were brother and sister, that was all.

  ‘That’s a good job done,’ said Mr Bullivant. I jumped. He was standing by the mounting-block, smiling at me.

  ‘Don’t come too near me,’ I said. ‘I smell like a stable. I must go and change.’

  ‘You look fine to me.’

  I looked back at him and smiled. I felt fine. I wasn’t tired any more. The stable was clean and the long confused unhappiness of last night seemed to have melted away.

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ said Mr Bullivant. ‘There’s a picture framer coming by the 3.14. But I brought something for you. Here.’

  He had put down the box on the ground. It was made of pale wood, nailed roughly together. Just a packing-box, to keep safe whatever was inside it.

  ‘I’ll need something to get these nails out.’

  ‘Shall I go and look?’

  ‘No, I’ll use my pocket-knife.’

  He knelt down and began to lever out the nails that held down the lid. They came out easily, the wood splintering round them. He lifted the lid and there was a layer of white crumpled tissue paper. He looked up at me.

  ‘Come and feel. See if you can guess what’s in it.’

  Under the paper were round lumps, firm but not hard. I didn’t want to guess: it was always embarrassing to guess at a present, in case the guess revealed that I had expected too much.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes you do. Smell the box.’

  I leaned forward. It smelled of cheap soft pine, and then, inside, sharp and unmistakable enough to make my mouth water –

  ‘Lemons.’

  Our faces were close as we knelt one on each side of the box. He reached in and took off the top layer of tissue paper. Under it there were rows of lemons. Twenty, each one wrapped separately in coloured tissue paper. In between the lemons there were long dark-green leaves.

  ‘Take one out.’

  They were tightly packed together so as not to roll and bruise. I eased out one fruit. Under the paper it was plump and gleaming, a clear yellow streaked with green.

  ‘I asked them to pick these just before they were ripe,’ he said, ‘there are five layers. A hundred lemons.’

  ‘Where do they come from?’

  ‘From the lemon house at my villa in Italy. Tommaso writes that they’ve had snow there, it’s very unusual. They’ve had to keep the braziers in the lemon house burning all night.’

  The fruit was not quite ripe. There was an acid edge to its lemoniness, which it breathed out through coarse, gleaming pores. The lemon was chilly in my hand, as if it had been travelling for a long time through the winter. I thought of the long train swaying its way north, whistling as it plunged under the alps. Mr Bullivant had written to his villa in Italy and asked them to pick a hundred lemons for me. I wondered what Tommaso was like, the man who’d opened the letter and gone out to the lemon house with his basket, and picked the fruit. He had looked for lemons which were still a little green, so they would arrive perfect.

  ‘They are full of juice,’ said Mr Bullivant, ‘and quite thin-skinned. Let me show you.’

  He took the lemon from me, laid it on the cobbles, pulled out another blade on his pocket-knife.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  I shook my head. ‘Of course not. They’re yours, really.’

  ‘Oh no. I’ve given them all to you. You can do as you like with them.’ He slit the skin of the lemon. There was a spurt of aromatic oil, then he cut the lemon in half and a bead of juice welled to the cut surface, flattened and began to drip.

  ‘Three days ago these were growing on my trees,’ said Mr Bullivant. I put my finger on the cut fruit and tasted the juice.

  ‘I’ll make lemonade with them,’ I said.

  ‘It’s good for you, in the winter. You look tired. You ought not to do so much.’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t do this every day. If I’m tired, it’s because I’m tired of doing nothing. I ought to do more.’

  ‘You could read? Or study – a language perhaps?’

  I shook my head, remembering French lessons with Miss Gallagher. Those endless yawning afternoons, with Miss Gallagher rolling her ‘r’s over the smothered sounds of her digestion. ‘I don’t like that sort of thing.’

  ‘I know. Very tedious, that sort of thing,’ he agreed, while his different-coloured eyes laughed at me. ‘But you might try Italian, in case you ever came to my house in Italy.’

  ‘That’s not very likely. We never go anywhere.’

  ‘Catherine –’ he began in quite a different voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why do you just – accept things like that?’

  ‘But you gave me the lemons,’ I said. ‘I accepted them because you offered them.’

  ‘No, of course I don’t mean that. I mean how can you accept so little? How can you say that you never go anywhere as if it doesn’t matter?’

  ‘I don’t see that it does matter so very much. Lots of people never move from where they’re born.’

  ‘Your grandfather did.’

  I looked at him sharply. How much did he know?

  ‘That was different. He had somewhere to leave. Somewhere he wanted to leave.’

  ‘And your mother,’ said Mr Bullivant, ‘she left too. She speaks French, and Italian. She speaks better Italian than I do.’

  ‘She’s had plenty of time to learn it. I don’t suppose she’s got much else to do.’

  ‘She struck me as someone who would always have things to do,’ said Mr Bullivant.

  ‘Very likely,’ I said. ‘But I don’t take after her.’

  ‘Nor after your grandfather?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s strange, because you are so like her to look at. And not at all like your father – at least, to judge from the photographs I’ve seen. Whereas Rob is very like his father. Even the way you move is like her.’

  ‘I might look like her, but it doesn’t mean I am like her.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s very important, the way someone moves. The gestures. The way you turn your head. They flow from something inside, don’t you think?’

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I’m happy here, in this house. I’m half English. She isn’t English at all.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be safe to take a little journey somewhere, just to find out?’ he asked.

  I began to unwrap the fruit, laying it so that each plump waxen body pointed the same way. I thought of my mother leaving. There’d been nothing dramatic about it. It was just a holiday, away from the children and the terrible winter. There was a story about how she’d never really recovered from my birth, although between her sick headaches she crackled with dangerous health. Then the holiday stretched and became a season of absence.

  ‘You’re very fond of your brother,’ he said. My heart jumped. I turned over a lemon. Now the row was perfectly straight.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘But he’ll go away himself. It’s bound to happen.’

  ‘No, he’ll take over here. When Grandfather –’

  ‘He might,’ said Mr Bullivant, tapping a lemon, ‘but he might not. Times are difficult.’

  Grandfather talks to him, I thought. Those long nights, playing chess. What slips out? The unmended fences, the poor prices, the borrowing of money and plough horses. Kate’s buckets beneath the holes in the roof. The bravado of our party in the middle of it all, outfacing the neighbourhood. But Grandfather would cling to the house whatever happen
ed. He would be one of those corpses that cannot relax its grip: you have to break the fingers.

  ‘So you won’t count on it, will you? Rob being here, the house being here. Don’t let it make you turn your back on everything else.’

  ‘If there is an everything else,’ I said.

  ‘Of course there is,’ said Mr Bullivant. ‘Why, you don’t have to go as far as Italy. In London, even –’

  ‘I’ve never been to London.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Mr Bullivant. ‘Good God. The railway runs not two miles away, and you’ve never been to London. Where’s your curiosity, Catherine?’

  ‘Where’s my money?’

  ‘That silk dress you wore to the dance would have bought a few railway tickets.’

  ‘It was cheap,’ I said, ‘couldn’t you tell? I’m sure you could.’

  ‘It certainly did nothing for you,’ he agreed instantly, as if he could see the dress in front of him. But it was dead and buried, rolled into a ball in the bottom of my wardrobe.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you won’t be seeing it again. Didn’t you say you have a picture framer coming?’

  ‘Yes, I must go.’ He stood up and brushed the dust from his knees.

  ‘Thank you for the lemons,’ I said.

  ‘I shall build my own orangery at Ash Court,’ he said, ‘and I’ll ask you to come and pick the fruit there, if you won’t go to Italy. We’ll eat our dinner under the orange trees.’

  ‘They take a long time to grow,’ I said.

  ‘I can wait.’

  We said goodbye, and I stooped to pick up the box.

  ‘Let me. It’s too heavy for you.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s nothing,’ though the box was awkward in my arms. I should have asked him into the house, given him something to eat and drink. It was exhilarating to be deliberately ungracious to him, to play against the grain of my liking for him. He made me see those orange trees kindling with fruit, sweet-scented in a velvet night. As I walked away from him into the house I felt myself smile.