A Spell of Winter Read online

  ‘And Miss Gallagher will be in raptures,’ I added.

  ‘God, girl, you’re right. Get yourself down to the company before she comes creeping up the back stairs to paw you.’

  The fire shuffled softly as the coals collapsed inward.

  ‘Put more coal on, Kate, I’ll want it later.’

  ‘You won’t want it. You’ll be dancing till dawn.’

  ‘Oh yes? With the piano tuner?’ I said, smoothing the raspy pink pleats. I caught hold of Kate’s hands.

  ‘Waltz!’ I said. Kate often danced with us when Rob and I practised with the gramophone. She took the beat and lifted me into it, and we were off across the floor of the night nursery, breaking up firelight and shadows in a waltz that became a gallop and ended in a dizzy stop by the door.

  ‘Down those stairs. Now!’ ordered Kate, pointing, and I went.

  Five

  I looked down into the pool of the hall and saw the dancers flicking like white carp under water. There was Livvy. She saw me and called up, ‘Catherine!’, turning her mermaid face to me and half-smiling the way she did.

  ‘You look lovely,’ she said, but she wasn’t thinking about me.

  ‘Are they going in to dinner?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, your grandfather was looking for you.’

  There would be a partner picked out for me, to take me in and sit on my right hand and make me talk and smile. I knew who it would be: Mr Bullivant. I would find myself placed close to Grandfather, where he could hear what I was saying and make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself. He had never trusted me. That was why he had his eye on Mr Bullivant. Mr Bullivant was new in the neighbourhood and he had money. He was not like the others round here, who were so proud of being the same as one another and just the same as they’d always been. He was like Grandfather, but richer, younger and I think even hungrier, though that was deeply hidden.

  No one cares what they say in front of children. We’d known we were different. It was in the gossip at children’s parties, wafting over my head while I struggled with a lump of sweet cake.

  ‘He’s getting to look exactly like an old pirate. All it needs is the patch.’

  ‘You wouldn’t remember when he first came, would you? His hair was black as the inside of your hat.’

  ‘Quite Spanish.’

  ‘And the way he used to carry that child everywhere in his arms!’

  ‘The man from nowhere, d’you remember? That’s what we used to call him.’

  ‘Poor Charlie.’

  ‘Like a lamb to the slaughter.’

  Charlie was my father. The slaughter was being married to my mother.

  ‘Someone should have said something to him.’

  ‘Yes, but you never know, do you? These things take time to come out.’

  ‘The little girl’s awfully like her, isn’t she?’

  ‘Awfully.’

  There was never enough money. We had the land Grandfather had wrested from God knows where, and we sat on it as if it were an island. Mr Bullivant had bought land too, three times as much as my grandfather. He too had no connection of blood with this place. He would ride over and ask my grandfather’s advice and they’d sit drinking stone-dry sherry together and drawing plans in the library. Or, rather, my grandfather talked and Mr Bullivant drew plans, and the one had no connection with the other. Mr Bullivant wasn’t a friend, because Grandfather had no friends, but he was always welcome in our house. If he married me I would be taken care of, close but out of the way, as Grandfather preferred me to be.

  I stared at Livvy. She was wearing white satin and she had no colour at all, from her pale, close-coiled hair to her white slippers. There was a sheen on her like the inside of an oyster shell. She was what every girl here hoped to be, but no one else would ever look like Livvy. She put two fingers on my arm and I felt their coolness through my gloves.

  ‘Are you going in with Rob?’ I asked. She hesitated.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said. If she had not been so beautiful her childish voice would often have grated on me. Her eyes, that never quite fixed on anyone, swam wide as she turned away, showing the perfect shallow curve of her cheek and jawbone. Suddenly she smiled. Her cheekbones lifted. Another door opened on another room of Livvy’s beauty. But that was an old trick of hers. She would make you catch your breath.

  ‘Isn’t this fun, Catherine?’ she asked.

  I wondered if she really thought so. Once Grandfather gave me a porcelain vase, so delicate that the fine strokes of colour on it were like veins in skin. It was for violets, because I had brought him a bunch of cold, white sweet violets twined with ivy, and he had been pleased. It was Rob who had the gift for doing things like that, not me. I’d been afraid to bruise the violets with my hot fingers when I had found them, a white splash in the bank, sweeter than common violets. I kept the vase for a long time, until one morning my looking-glass swung forward and swept it off my dressing-table, so that it smashed on the floor like an egg and showed the brown water stains inside it.

  Grandfather leaned over the table and gripped my wrist. I started, and realized that he had been talking to Mr Bullivant while I sat silent, staring down the table at Livvy next to Rob. Mr Bullivant smiled at me. I heard the echo of the words I hadn’t listened to, and realized he’d been inviting me and Rob over to Ash Court. He had a new billiard table and perhaps Rob would like to play. Yes, he had money and everyone knew it. In the four years since he had bought the estate he had poured out thousands on it. I wondered if he knew how people talked and judged, or if he cared. He did not look as if he cared. He sat at ease, not bothering with most of the neighbourhood beyond politeness.

  Grandfather had a pile of shells on his plate and a little heap of white, plump Kentish cob-nuts. He had cracked them for me. I knew why he was doing it now, showing me attention, showing that I had value so that Mr Bullivant would value me more. Tonight I was his granddaughter and he would prove to the world what he was doing for me. This dance was mine, even though I didn’t want it and it cost too much. He smiled the tight, cornered smile that was all I ever got from him, and I thought of Kate’s grandfather and the man whose body came apart as he fell down the stairs, then I held out my gloved hand and took the nuts. I wondered if he had cracked nuts for my mother when she was a child. However hard I looked at my grandfather I never saw my mother there. I was looking for the wrong things, perhaps. Mr Bullivant was talking of planting a cherry orchard. There would be Morellos for preserving, and Whitehearts, and he had a scheme to net the young trees in a new way against bullfinches. Perhaps Rob and I would come over and look at the plans he had prepared.

  I never saw my father again, after that one time at The Sanctuary. He fell under a horse. Perhaps it was a cart or a dray and the great hairy hoof of the cart horse swung out and caught him on the temple. It could happen like that. Never walk behind a horse, Catherine. They told me that as soon as I could walk. I saw the hairs on the horse’s fetlock and the sharp yellowy edge of its hoof, and the metal shoe glinting. Or it was a carriage horse, high-stepping, with a wide wicked eye in spite of its harness. Its hoof would flash and my father would fall and the next horse would be caught in the traces and my father would go down as the horse rolled on the ground, crushing him as it struggled to find its feet, and its hoofs struck sparks from the air. Or perhaps it was just one horse, stepping out airily on a summer morning, its rider thinking of nothing, touching its flanks lightly with the whip, breathing in the damp blue air collected under the limes, when my father …

  Nobody told us. There has been an accident, Grandfather said, his face crumpled. He looked even worse than he’d done when our mother had left. An accident with a horse. Father had lived for two hours and then he had died. We didn’t go to the funeral.

  ‘You had chickenpox, Cathy!’ said Rob. I remembered the itch of the pox, like wool next to my skin in summer, and the way Kate dabbed calamine all over me while I lay bare on a white sheet. Powdery dust of calamine came off on t
he sheets, and Kate said she would tie my hands if I didn’t leave the scabs alone. But I was sure that was later.

  ‘You did. It must have been then, or we would have gone. You know Grandfather. He would have made us,’ Rob insisted.

  But I knew I’d been well when my father died. For a while I forgot his face but I still felt his hand as he pushed back my hair which was like my mother’s hair, flaring up to the brush like hers. I smelled medicine and roses. I was back in that day when I took Rob’s hand and we walked away from our father, leaving him on the path with Miss Gallagher. We did not turn round even when we heard the little whining noise he made in his throat.

  I had seen him so often in my dreams, as often as I saw the dead man with his white-rooted arm bouncing down the stairs. Once I dreamed that white violets grew out of his arm and I picked them to give my grandfather. I felt the hairiness of violet stems between my fingers. But the mark of the hoof was in my father’s flesh. It was embedded in his forehead and it moved when he smiled at me. ‘Tuesday, perhaps?’ asked Mr Bullivant. ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t mind seeing the plans for his cherry orchard, if Rob would come too. I would make him. The long white table glittered and flashed. All down it people were lifting their silver knives and peeling their fruit. Our fine William pears had been unwrapped from the brown paper which let them sweeten without rotting, and now they fell into grainy yellow slices on the plates while the juice ran down on to the napkins. Only a silver knife would cut the fruit without browning it. Each golden pool of sweet white wine shuddered in a crystal glass. Voices tapped and rang and I saw Livvy’s beautiful shoulders arch above the white satin that looked greenish under the candelabra, as if she had water pouring from her.

  ‘Yes,’ I said again, ‘I’d like to see them,’ and Grandfather tumbled another handful of cracked nuts into my hand. They tasted like white meat. Grandfather and Mr Bullivant smiled at one another, but their smile was about me; it did not include me. In the next room band music dipped and swooped excitedly, waiting for us to open the double doors of the dining-room and stream out in our couples, our hands warm and sweating from the wine we’d drunk and our bodies looser than they had been, ready to mould to one another. They were playing ‘Solitude’ again. Before I could sleep there would be hours of dancing.

  ‘More kidneys?’ Rob asked, lifting curls of bacon and tonging them on to plates. Coffee smoked against the light. There had been a hard white frost again and the skin of ice on the lake was thickening. If this went on we would be skating by the end of the week. I wanted to go down and test the ice to find out how it was bearing, but I would wait until the house was empty or I’d have a crowd of them, eager and red-faced in the frost, streaming out of the house behind me like hounds, talking of skating-parties and ice-picnics. It was ten-thirty and our guests were still coming downstairs, their faces small and wan in the daylight. The men looked as if they had just dipped their heads in buckets of water to get the wine out of them. They jostled politely by the sideboard, spearing kidneys and sausages. Kate came in and out, slapping down pots and stirring the porridge where skin had formed. She put down a jug of thick yellow cream, wrinkling her nose as if to say, ‘You can eat it. I wouldn’t.’ She stood there, fresh and strong, with her arms folded, looking as if she were laughing at them all. I longed for them to be gone and us to be alone again, the way we were.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Rob whispered, ‘they’ll all be gone by the 12.40.’

  They were leaving already. Grandfather had ordered the station fly and John was coming round with the trap. A group of the young men had volunteered to walk across the field paths, while their bags went in the fly. The ground was so hard they could have walked in their evening shoes without spoiling them. Grandfather organized everyone, telling the girls to wrap their furs close, offering rugs for their knees and brandy for hip flasks. He was buoyant, in his element, his desire to have his house to himself again sheathed in an elaborate display of courtesy. An apple-wood fire flared in the hall as the door swung open and shut, and the sharp smell of apple-wood smoke blew out on to the icy terrace. We might not often open our house like this, but when we did there would be extravagant flames and flowers and hours of dancing. None of them would suspect the coldness at the heart of it as my grandfather waved to the girls’ rosy faces, turning to the house, misted by plumes of horses’ breath. I longed to have the house empty. Mr Bullivant had slept on the leather sofa in the library for a few hours and ridden home at first light. I half-envied him.

  ‘Where’s Livvy?’ I asked Rob.

  ‘I haven’t seen her,’ he said briefly. I wondered if the night had been a success for him. I’d seen her revolving in his arms, dance after dance – or, at least, for exactly as many dances as was correct, because that was Livvy’s way. But she was the kind of girl who could have her breasts touching a man’s shirt front and his hand on her waist and seem farther from him than ever. I thought how she might leave an ache in Rob, like the ache in your arm from stretching up to touch fruit just out of reach.

  ‘She’s tired from dancing, I expect,’ I said, with a false reassurance in my voice that went against the grain of the more complicated things I felt about Livvy, and Rob and Livvy.

  ‘Tired!’ he said. ‘She’s always tired, whenever –’

  He would have tried to kiss her. Maybe in the conservatory where he thought the heavy perfume from the hyacinth tubs and the half-dark would soften her. I knew just how she’d say it, ‘Oh Rob, I’m tired. I must go and say good-night to your grandfather. Didn’t I see Catherine go up half an hour ago?’ The words would have dropped like small, cold pebbles, not the fountain spray Rob dreamed of when he thought of Livvy. He wanted to bathe himself in her so he would come out dripping and newborn, the way Kate said a man could feel after he’d been with a Woman. I didn’t know what Kate knew, but I guessed there was rock in Livvy under all that pearliness, and Rob would break himself on it before he really knew it was there.

  ‘You’ve got to come to Mr Bullivant’s with me,’ I said.

  ‘Why? What is it this time?’

  ‘He wants to show me the plan for his cherry orchard.’ Rob laughed. ‘You ought to take Miss Gallagher. She’d soon scare him off for you.’

  ‘Say you’ll come. I told him we’d come tomorrow. He’ll give us lunch.’ No one we knew had food like Mr Bullivant’s. He had a cook from Italy who made pasta like kid-gloves, slippery with meat juice. Some people laughed at his food but I loved it. In the summer Angelo made a lemon ice so tart it was like biting into a plump ripe lemon and getting the spray of zest in your mouth.

  ‘But you’ve no idea what it tastes like when Angelo makes it from lemons which were growing on the tree an hour before,’ said Mr Bullivant. The lemons hung lamp-like behind flickering dark leaves, in the lemon house of Mr Bullivant’s villa in Italy. The earth was dry and in the winter there was the smell of the oil stoves which kept the frost from burning the lemon trees. The people there sent his lemons to England, packed in tissue paper in long wooden boxes. I had seen them and helped to force out the nails that held the lids shut on the fruit.

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Rob.

  ‘And you’re not to go off and leave us, the way you did last time when Mr Bullivant was showing us the wine cellars.’

  ‘The way you rushed on, there wasn’t time for a fellow to look at anything.’

  ‘Because you kept stopping to taste the wine.’

  ‘He said I could. Why do you think he had that tray with the glasses brought down, and the wine biscuits?’

  ‘You should have seen your eyes when you came up the cellar steps into the light. Black and swimming, like frogs’ eyes. And then you nearly fell up the last step.’

  ‘If you call that drinking –’ said Rob scornfully. He always had that card to play. I’d been nowhere and seen nothing.

  ‘We’ll go at ten. If it’s like this, we’ll walk,’ I said. I wanted to stride out across the field paths, not trundle along the lanes in the trap. I
would wear my thick-soled new boots, and feel the swing of my heavy coat and the strong beat of my blood. I would hook my arm through Rob’s and lengthen my step to his. On the path the mud would be packed and frozen flat.

  Six

  When they had all gone the fire in the hall died down. Ash blew across the rugs as doors banged open and shut. Grandfather had gone out and Kate, Elsie and Annie whisked about the house, tidying and polishing and moving back the furniture which had been taken out of the drawing-room for the dancing. The Semple boys came up from the village to move the piano and the heavy chairs. Little icy draughts teased my skin. My eyes stung from tiredness as I emptied flower vases and piled up heliotrope and white lilac for the compost heap. The flowers had wilted overnight, from the heat of our bodies and the fires. And then they’d been forced. Forced flowers never live long. They put on a show to deceive you. But there was a vase of early Lent lilies just opening. I touched the petals: they were cold, veined purple and green. I knew where they grew in the garden. If it snowed they would bud under its blanket, hidden, then with the thaw the flowers would stretch wide to the sun as if it stunned them.

  Rob had his jacket off and was heaving at the piano with the rest of them. They were all laughing, their teeth white. How red their mouths were. Where was Livvy now? I wished she could see Rob laughing as he hauled at the piano, not thinking of her.

  ‘Steady on! She’s tilting. Let her swing round.’

  A dull jangle came from the piano.

  ‘This ’ull want tuning,’ said Theodore, slapping its deep-polished side the way he would slap a girl behind a barn or in the warm sweet-breathing dusk of the milking parlour. Their chapel-going soon peeled off those boys, once they were out of their father’s sight.

  ‘Tickle ’er up and tune her,’ George joined in. ‘ ’Cos she won’t make her sweet sounds ’less you treat her right.’