A Spell of Winter Read online

  ‘Very well,’ said the nurse. ‘Ve-ry well.’ I waited, but she did nothing. She stared out of the window, past Miss Gallagher’s scratchy shoulder to the glaring summer sky, looking even more pleased than she had done when she came in. Then she wheeled round and crackled out of the room. Father rubbed at his boot with the cloth. He went in circles which grew smaller and smaller until the cloth wasn’t moving at all. His fingers were gripping it so tightly that his knuckles were stretched and white. The smell of polish and roses was beginning to make me sick. Father polished and polished. There was sweat on his face, all over, like mist on a window.

  ‘Can we go out?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Of course we can go out,’ Miss Gallagher said triumphantly. ‘We aren’t prisoners. The question is, may we? Hadn’t we better wait for Dr Kenneth and see what he says?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Father abruptly, shoving the cloth into the drawer. ‘Let’s cut along and see the garden.’

  He pulled back the bedclothes and swung down his legs. He had all his clothes on in bed, even his socks. It made it look as if he was only pretending to be ill. Perhaps it was all a joke. In a minute he would tell Miss Gallagher he was taking us home. I watched his legs as he got out of bed, and they looked just the same as they had always looked. Rob was watching too. We both saw how his feet fumbled their way into the boots, like an old man’s feet.

  The garden was a dull pale square of lawn, cut by paths and clumps of trees. There were long white chairs set out in the shade, and people lay in them with their eyes shut. Some people were walking about but there was nowhere to walk to, except around the same trees and chairs, over and over. The people had cloudy looks on their faces, as if they could not see anyone else. But they never bumped into each other. No one spoke to us. I wondered if Father knew any of these people. They did not look at all like people he would choose. Father stood in the middle of the grass, looking around as if he did not know where to go.

  Then it was all right. A lady with a little black dog under her arm waved at us from the shade of a big oak tree. She got up from her chair and swam towards us, her big smiling face tilted up to the sun like a plate, her eyes half-shut. One of her hands was held out as if she were meeting us at a party, and her white dress was just like the dresses Mother used to wear when people came to tea on the lawn. But it flopped a little on the lady, as if it did not belong to her. She had a white parasol too, with blue ribbons threaded through it. Her hair was a fine heap of shiny fairness, as pale as straw. She smiled at us welcomingly and I thought perhaps this was the owner of the house, the one we should have met in the hall instead of the pen-scratching lady. She walked across the lawn as if it belonged to her.

  ‘And so these are the children. What perfect pets,’ she said, and she laid two white fingers on Father’s sleeve. Her eyes were smiley and swimmy and she kept them fixed on Father as much as she could, drawing him under the wavery shade of her parasol where her pale cheeks glimmered and her crown of shining hair tumbled down like water. She didn’t look at us. The hard eyes of the dog glared at me from the crook of her arm. I stared back, because I knew that a dog will always look away first. Then I nudged Rob.

  ‘Look,’ I whispered. ‘Look at the dog.’

  It was a toy. It looked so real that I thought that the lady had just had it clipped, but now I saw that the stiff tufts of fur were false. The dog’s head bobbled as the lady rocked it, but it didn’t really move. She handed her parasol to Father and he held it over her while she cradled the little toy dog and stroked its fur.

  ‘Does he want his dinner, does he? I’m most frightfully sorry,’ she said, putting out her hand to Father, ‘I shall have to go. He’s terribly impatient, poor darling …’

  He bowed, handed back the parasol, and we watched her beautiful skirts brush away over the grass.

  ‘Shall we have tea?’ asked Father. ‘How about meringues? Still fond of meringues, Kitty cat?’

  A maid was walking around the garden, setting out tea things on little tables. Father seized some chairs and pulled them up for us round one of the tables. Miss Gallagher flumped down in front of the teapot, and began to fuss with the hot water. Then she pulled angrily at her bodice.

  ‘The heat!’ she said crossly. Half-hoops of sweat had soaked through her dress shields on to the dark-blue cloth under her arms.

  ‘And there aren’t enough cups,’ she snapped. ‘Only three.’ Father looked worried. The maid was over at the other side of the garden, with her back to us. When she turned with a pile of plates he crooked his finger as if we were in a restaurant, but she did not come. Now I saw how pale he was.

  ‘I don’t want any tea,’ Rob said quickly. ‘I hate tea anyway.’

  ‘Jolly if they had lemonade,’ muttered Father. No one was taking any notice of what he wanted. I felt my face grow hot. There was no shade near our table, and all the places under the trees had been taken. People sat in the dapply shadows and stared out from their safety as if we were on stage. Nobody else had children with them. There were thin slices of pink-and-white cake on a plate in front of us. Rob took one and munched it, although he hated sponge cake. I looked for the meringues, but there weren’t any.

  ‘Angel cake,’ said Father. ‘Their sponge is first chop. Have a slice, Catherine.’

  My hat had slid down on to my neck, and the elastic was digging into the soft place under my chin. Father reached out and stroked back my rough, heavy hair from my forehead. ‘Catherine,’ he said, smiling. I smiled back, but in a moment his smile broke up into flecks and disappeared. His hand still lay heavy on my head, as if he didn’t know it was there. I looked at Rob, but he went on eating his cake right up to the icing, keeping the icing till last. Miss Gallagher poured out the tea noisily, clinking the cups and tutting into the hot-water jug. Father kept stroking my hair, not looking at me, as if I were someone else. He had forgotten about me, as well as the meringues. And it wasn’t fair to keep on saying ‘Kitty cat’ and never ‘Robbo’. I bent down as if the lace of my boots had come undone, and his hand slipped away. When I wriggled upright again he had put a slice of the cake on to a plate for me. I didn’t want it, but he kept watching all the time. I took a mouthful of tea to swallow down the cake, and choked. ‘Catherine, really!’ said Miss Gallagher, and the tea burnt my throat. Father looked away as I crumbled the cake while the sun beat hard and hot on our heads. Three men were walking round and round the garden with their arms linked at the back, criss-cross. Sometimes, at dusk in the summer, Father walked round the lawn arm in arm with someone who had come to dinner, both of them smoking cigars. We watched them out of the night-nursery window. Then Mother would come out and call them in, her pale skirts like moths against the shadowy grass. Once she came right out because Father called to her that a nightingale was singing in the magnolia tree under the terrace.

  The three men did not speak to one another. I wondered if Father knew them, or if he would like to walk round the garden like that with someone. They were coming round again when one of them said in a loud voice, ‘Tea time!’ and the others broke away and began to snatch up slices of cake from different people’s tables. Miss Gallagher’s tongue clicked again.

  Suddenly a shadow crossed us.

  ‘Dr Kenneth,’ said Father. We looked up. Dr Kenneth was a tall black pillar against the sun, and we couldn’t see his face. He was leaning back against the blaze of the sky, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. His shadow fell on Father’s head like a hand.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said, looking at Rob and me. ‘Mmm.’ He frowned and stared as if he were looking through our clothes to find out what illness we had. I clenched my hands into fists so he wouldn’t see the chocolate on my gloves.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said again. ‘Jolly little beggars.’ Then he reached over and put two slices of cake on to Father’s plate. ‘Cake,’ he said. Father said nothing. ‘But where’s the milk, where’s the milk?’ boomed Dr Kenneth. ‘Didn’t I give orders about the milk?’ He turned and the maid came over to u
s as if she was being pulled on elastic which Dr Kenneth held in a secret pocket. ‘Milk,’ said Dr Kenneth. ‘One glass mid-morning. One glass before luncheon. One glass at teatime. One glass before bed, warm or cold.’ He ticked the glasses off on his fingers until there was only his thumb left.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ bobbed the maid.

  ‘Fetch it now, girl, fetch it now. No time like the present,’ said Dr Kenneth, and he watched the maid scuttle towards the house. His big meaty face turned on Father. He looked as if he had been half-cooked, then taken off the range.

  ‘Milk,’ he said. ‘Milk. That’s the ticket.’ I squinted up my eyes to see if he was smiling, but he wasn’t. He took a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and held it in front of him. Then he nodded, and said again, ‘Milk. That’s the stuff.’ Father sat absolutely still. They had cut his hair so that it slipped down over his forehead and made him look not like Father. Dr Kenneth put one hand on my head and one on Rob’s and pushed down hard, as if he were testing how far our necks bent. Then he was gone. A moment later the maid bobbed back across the lawn and slapped a glass down in front of Father. She looked hot and cross with us. It wasn’t fair, because she should have been cross with Dr Kenneth.

  ‘We shall have to be going,’ said Miss Gallagher, wiping her moustache. But Father sat heavily in his chair as if he hadn’t heard. His head was sunk forward. There were drops of sweat hanging in the fine hair above his forehead, and I watched them crawl like tiny transparent insects. Suddenly Rob stretched across the table and took the glass. Very deliberately he lifted it, held it high and turned it over until a slow and careful arc of milk ran from the lip of the glass to the hard lawn. I watched it fall, make a blue-white pool, and begin to vanish. Soon there was only a skim of whitish grease on the grass. I wished I had done it. Slowly, slowly, Father’s lips creaked into a smile.

  Father said goodbye to us in the corridor. He kept yawning, even when he was shaking Miss Gallagher’s hand and saying goodbye. I thought for a moment he was going to shake Rob’s hand, too, and even when he hugged us it felt more like a push. And then he was gone, and all the things we hadn’t told him vanished, too.

  ‘Poor Father is tired, Catherine,’ whispered Miss Gallagher loudly. ‘It’s the heat.’ All the doors were shut again. For a moment I thought that I would run back and find Father’s door and catch him before he got back into that bed, and make him stop. But already we were walking along the corridor. Miss Gallagher slowed down as we went past the desk in the entrance, but this time the dark lady was scratching hard on her pile of paper, and she did not even look up at us. Rob had taken a bit of string out of his pocket and he was making a special knot in it as we walked along.

  The path we had to take wound back through the rose garden. Roses grew high on both sides, nearly as high as my head. They were drooping their big, soft heads in the heat. As we brushed them, hanks of petals fell on our sleeves, on our boots, on the path. There were brownish-white petals, and apricot ones, and deep dark red, like the ones in Father’s room. But the dew had dried and the roses would be dead by the end of the day. They smelled old and sweet, like the rose-petals Mother used to put in the silver bowl in the drawing-room. I watched patterns of sunlight on the hard earth, and my feet in front of me, walking and walking. Nothing but petals, and boots, and the rasp of Miss Gallagher’s skirts, and the blurry shapes of roses everywhere, and the smell of roses strong enough to choke us.

  We came round a bend in the bank of roses and there was Father. He was breathing in long whistly breaths, as if he’d been running and was trying not to gasp for air. He was waiting for us. He must have found another way and run to get there first, just as if he was playing hide-and-seek with us in the woods at home. Perhaps he’s coming back with us after all, I thought. But Miss Gallagher pulled me close to her with bony fingers. Freckles were standing out on Rob’s face, the way they did when he was ill.

  ‘Toffee,’ said Father. ‘Forgot about the toffee.’ But there was nothing in his hands. He began to search through his pockets, and I waited for the little sky-blue and silver packet to appear, the way it used to do when Father magicked it down his sleeves for us. Father was the only one who ever bought us that toffee. And sometimes he bought nougat instead, in a long light wooden box which slid open. The nougat was wrapped in rice-paper which melted on our tongues. Now there were just two pockets left, and they were flat, empty. Father looked at us like a conjuror whose trick had not worked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Father,’ said Rob hoarsely. He cleared his throat and said, ‘I expect you left it in your room.’

  ‘Yes, of course!’ said Father. ‘That’ll be it. What a chump. Never mind, I’ll make it up to you next time. Which shall it be, toffee or nougat? Kitty cat?’

  ‘Toffee,’ I tried to say, but my voice wouldn’t come out right. The roses dissolved like Father’s washed-away face. I shut my eyes and turned towards Rob.

  Father pulled me against him. He pulled me hard against the roses. There were petals all over the ground and the crushed smell hurt my eyes and my nose and spilled down my face in salty gulps. He was holding me too tight, he was hurting me –

  ‘Father,’ I cried. We were shaking and I didn’t know if the shaking started in him or in me. He was burning hot, even through his clothes. He kissed my hair and kissed my head with quick, hot, clumsy kisses. But it wasn’t me he was kissing. His voice came thick and hot by my ear as he crouched down and clutched me to him. ‘Cincie,’ he said. ‘Cincie, Cincie, Cincie.’ I wriggled and twisted but I couldn’t get away from his voice. Miss Gallagher was shouting but the words were all jumbled up in my head with ‘Cincie, Cincie, Cincie’, and Father’s hot breath blotted out everyone.

  Then there was a thud which went through me though it didn’t touch me. Father’s arms fell, and Miss Gallagher pulled me away. The side of Father’s head was flowering with bright, fresh blood. It ran fast and shallowly down his face, over his eyes and round to his ears. I saw Rob standing with a twisted branch in his hand, his face white, staring at the place where he had caught Father with the torn end of the branch. He looked as if he were going to be sick. Father put up his hands to his head then drew them down with a sticky web of blood on them. He looked at Rob and almost smiled.

  ‘Damn it, Robbo,’ he said, but as if it were a small thing Rob had done.

  ‘Leave my sister alone,’ said Rob in a breath of a voice.

  ‘Why, Kitty cat,’ said Father. ‘I’d never hurt my Kitty cat.’ He faced us and we stared back. Then in a quite different voice, Father’s voice, he said, ‘That’s enough now. Cut along,’ just as if we’d been playing a wild game in the corridors and landing by the night nursery and it had got too rough and ended with me crying and Rob angry, the way it did sometimes on winter evenings when we hadn’t been able to get out all day.

  But it was summer and the smell of roses licked at us like the tongue of an animal. Miss Gallagher’s fingers pecked at my back. She was a huge crow which had settled on me, wanting to drag me away.

  ‘Cincie!’ she panted. Her hands were stiff with rage. ‘He’ll soon send you the way of his precious Cincie.’ I had never heard her talk like that, her voice thick and coarse as if she hated us all. Her hands batted at my dress, swiping off rose petals. Her words snaked into my ears and clung there, stickier and stronger than Father’s desperate kisses. I twisted out of her grip and there was Rob, his white face bent as he finished the knot in his string. He had dropped the branch. He looked at me and I took his hand and he held on hard as we walked away down the sunbaked path together, leaving Miss Gallagher and our father to tidy away what had happened.

  Four

  The door opened. I knew it would be Kate, so I didn’t move to cover myself.

  ‘What are you sitting here in the dark for?’ she asked from the door. Her shadow sprang out on the opposite wall, big and comforting.

  ‘It’s not dark. There’s the fire.’

  I spread out my hands to the rosy tissue of fla
me. I had kept my fire in all afternoon and its heart was molten and bright.

  ‘And you in your chemise. You ought to get dressed. It’s dinner at eight and everyone’s upstairs, changing.’

  I looked round at the glow of Kate. The house was full, and she was in her element. This was what she thought life should be like. She had had enough of our long, quiet, visitorless days, and she’d told me so often since I began to grow up and to be the one who held the key that could open our house to light and music and dancing.

  ‘It’s only right – he’ll do it for you, if you ask.’

  He was my grandfather. It was true, he would do as I wanted, though it never fooled me into thinking I was anything in his heart compared to Rob. I was too like my mother, and so he couldn’t love me. He’d given my mother everything, even the fine slender upright Englishness of Father. But my mother had shown her true colours and she’d given everybody the slip, even her own children.

  It was because of Kate that we were having our dance at last. Kate was the one who had made all these lights pour out, softly golden, from the rows of upstairs windows. They splashed down on to the terrace stone, and the house hummed with voices, the clink of hot-water cans, the slap of doors and hurrying feet. Young men with cold bright cheeks had been fetched from the station and now they were wrestling with too-tight collars in front of every mirror Kate could find. Clouded, silvery looking-glasses, propped up where the light was good. The trap had met each train since one-thirty. The girls had come the day before, to give their complexions time to settle before the dance. It was so cold that some of them had arrived with their faces blotched candle-yellow and purple. Then there were pretty girls in furs, their heads dark and sleek as ash-buds and their noses pink from the cold. They pulled off their gloves and laughed and bent down to sniff the tubs of white hyacinths in the cold hall. Later they’d go exploring the edges of the woods, and the spiky geometry of the rose garden. I went with them, but they always wanted to turn back before we were out of sight of the house. There was always someone playing the piano, and whoever it was it sounded the same: hesitant, faulty phrasing, then a rush and ripple of notes. There was always someone winding the gramophone in the conservatory. It played until my head ached: ‘Bye-bye Daisy’ or ‘Solitude’. But they were all the same tune. That was why I’d come up to my room after tea, thinking I’d go down soon. Grandfather would be looking round the room and asking where I was. But Rob was there, that was enough. He was the one who had dragged the gramophone into the conservatory, and they were wearing in the soles of new dance slippers on the cold black-and-white tiles while the gardenias gave out more and more perfume as the air grew warm. Rob had scratched the soles of Livvy’s slippers with his penknife, fine criss-cross scratches to stop her from falling.