Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘It’s going to be fine tomorrow,’ said Rob. ‘What about a long tramp and a picnic, Cathy? Just us two?’ he added boyishly, flicking half a glance towards Grandfather. The snow and frost had gone and we’d had a run of those soft, blooming January days that sometimes fool the birds into brilliant singing. There were snowdrops out, and fat white Christmas roses where heaps of snow had been.

  ‘God knows who else you think would have the time to come,’ said Grandfather. ‘We’ve all got work to do. If you’ve got to walk, why not go shooting?’

  It was fine. I woke early while it was still dark, and dressed as it grew grey. After I’d lit the fire I wrapped a shawl around me and sat at the window looking out. I love the colourless look of winter gardens from a distance. Then when you are walking in them there are hundreds of tiny changes of grey and green, bright orange lichen on the walls, and golden shreds of half-eaten crocus under the oak trees. I was full of excitement. I wanted to walk miles and come home with my whole body aching.

  I saw something move in the shrubbery. It would be a deer, I thought. But it was a fox, alert to the pale morning light, its ears pricked. It stood still, looking towards the house, scenting the air, for there was no wind. It was only for a minute or two that it stood there, but it seemed longer. Then it turned and trotted away across the grass, its paws making deep pad-marks in the overnight skim of frost. Rob would be up now. I must go down to the kitchen and find our picnic food.

  ‘Sausages,’ said Rob. ‘We’ll make a fire and cook them. And what about some of that cold game pie?’

  He packed the food into two canvas bags which we could sling over our shoulders. He was much quicker and neater at this sort of thing than me. He could make better sandwiches, too. I was clumsy and my sandwiches always fell apart. If I’d lived alone I’d have eaten fruit and cheese at every meal rather than think of what to order each day.

  ‘Apples?’ Rob asked, weighing one in either hand.

  Mrs Blazer was stoking the range, keeping an eye on us as we stripped the larder. She smelled of days of sweat as I brushed by her. ‘Not too much of that game pie now,’ she warned. ‘Your Grandfather likes that.’

  ‘And this seed cake,’ said Rob, pouncing on it. ‘Is there any greaseproof paper, Cathy?’

  ‘If you’d a waited, I’d a made you up a passel of tongue sandwiches,’ said Mrs Blazer. ‘Off that tongue I pressed yesterday. It’s ready to cut now.’

  ‘We’d rather the sausages, thanks … Any mustard? And is there a jar of those pickled walnuts?’

  ‘Not a whole jar, you’re not going to take,’ said Mrs Blazer flatly.

  ‘Can’t carry them otherwise. Got to have the jar, or they’ll make the sandwiches soggy. Look, you’ve a dozen at least. You’ll never miss one.’

  ‘They’ve to do till the end of next summer. And what’ll you have to your cheese after dinner if there isn’t a pickled walnut?’

  ‘Right, we’ll just take this little jar then.’

  I found some stuffed prunes in paper shells, left over from Christmas, and a packet of Muscatel raisins. It was these odd sweet things I liked. Mrs Blazer wiped Grandfather’s breakfast kidneys with a clean cloth, split them open and skewered them ready to grill. Kidneys and roast bone Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, bacon and eggs Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and devilled chops on Sundays. Grandfather had to have meat in the mornings. He did not eat breakfast with us, ever. All our childhood he’d been up and out at five-thirty, back to oversee our porridge at eight, then he would eat his own breakfast while we started our lessons. The wafting fragrance of his bacon drove Rob mad.

  ‘Grandfather’s a hog, guzzling bacon while we get nothing!’

  But Grandfather believed in a low diet for children, with meat no more than once a day. ‘We had bacon when Father was alive,’ said Rob, but I looked back and couldn’t remember. I didn’t like bacon anyway.

  ‘Meat’s for men,’ said Kate.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re wild wolves. Look at their eyes.’

  Her voice set the wind howling. Under their hoods Grandfather’s eyes gleamed strangely, piercingly –

  ‘Kate!’

  ‘There now, what’s the why of all this caterwauling?’

  ‘I had a bad dream.’

  ‘We’ll blow it away then.’ She held her palm out flat in front of her and puffed. ‘There! It’s gone. Now go to sleep in two minutes or I’ll spifflicate you.’

  Rob buckled up the straps of our bags. I was in my walking skirt and heavy plaid wool jacket and cap. We looked at each other. ‘Ready?’

  Last night he had curled sideways to suck my nipple. His first suck had sent sensation in a thin bright line down through my breast to my stomach and between my legs. I jerked, then lay still, watching the dark top of his head. I could see just where the hairs sprung and parted. We’d learned to manage in the narrow bed so that we got the best of it. I’d put my hand down and touched his hair, then stroked it. It was like being on a boat at anchor far out on a summer’s day, lying with the heat of the sun soaking into the length of our bodies, feeling the knock and ripple of water under the hull. If we’d been other people, not Cathy and Rob, brother and sister, it would have been so easy to say ‘I love you’. But of course we did. We were brother and sister, weren’t we?

  There was a fine pale mist as we set out, but the sun was growing stronger. It was a perfectly still morning, full of the sound of rooks.

  ‘Where will we go?’

  ‘Somewhere high. I know. Isley Beacon.’

  Ten

  They used to light fires on Isley Beacon. When Boney was going to invade there were tinder-dry heaps of brushwood ready to flare up from hill to hill. Or so they said. There were no marks of fire on the close-bitten turf. The soil was thin and poor, no more than a skin over white bone. But the pasture was beautiful with flowers when you looked close: tiny speedwell, rock rose, kidney vetch and wild thyme set in the turf nibbled by sheep which left their tarry droppings all over the hill.

  We flung ourselves face down. The early frost had melted and the hilltop was drenched in sun. We were hot from the climb, sweating. I took off my coat and lay on it, staring up into the sky, which was a fine, glazed blue. It might have been summer but there were no larks singing. The sheep ran away from us, their horny hoofs hammering the turf so that it echoed dully when I put my ear to the ground. But in spite of the sun a deep chill struck up through the ground, and I left Rob lying there and walked along a smaller flinty track to the edge of the hill. The ground fell away steeply there. Our track wound up, following the ribs of the hill, a pale ribbon of exposed chalk. Below me the land stretched out for miles, half in the shadow of the hill, half bathed in sun. I could see our woods and fields, and the bulk of the house, almost hidden by trees. Behind the trees Grandfather would be overseeing a couple of men hired for the day from the village while they cut turnips out of the clumps and chopped them for fodder. Then they were going to repair a length of fencing which had gone in the October gales. If I’d had a telescope I could have seen the tiny figures bending and stretching over their tinier burdens. The air was absolutely still and clear. Everything looked so ordered from up here. I couldn’t see the mud in the lanes, the choked hedges, the gates sagging on their hinges. Everything was asking for money, the kind of money Mr Bullivant had.

  I glanced behind me. Rob lay flat on his back, eyes shut. He had chosen the highest point, the flat slab where the fires were lit. Or so they said. There was a bronze-age fort here once, when the land below was a sea of forest lapping the flanks of the hill, full of bears and wolves. They made fences of stakes around their huts and watched for their enemies. I saw their enemies mounting the hill like shadows, moving from hiding-place to hiding-place so that their movement was like the rippling of the wind. No sound, no hint of their presence until they were on you.

  I walked across the turf to Rob. My feet made no sound but he sensed me coming and looked up.

&nbs
p; ‘I surrender,’ he said.

  We opened our bags of food and ate greedily. The pickled walnuts puckered my mouth but I ate them one after another, staining my fingers. Rob brought a white paper bag out of his pocket. Sugared almonds. He laid a trail of them between us. Comfits for weddings, or christenings. I bit through the hard crust to the nuts, eating my way towards Rob.

  He spread out his coat and we lay together, not really touching, our faces to the sun. Red worms of sunlight wriggled behind my eyelids. His hands were dry and warm. From the side his lips looked as if they were smiling, though I knew that they were not. The sheep bleated as they came close again, gaining courage from our stillness.

  ‘What if there’s a shepherd with them? Whose are they?’

  ‘These are from down below – look at the marks. He wouldn’t come close if he saw us. He’d think it was some lad with his best girl.’

  ‘He might recognize us,’ I said.

  ‘Not he.’

  But I’d never really thought before of how careful we would always have to be. No twining together in warm summer lanes. No dancing close to the tolerant smiles of the middle-aged ladies sitting at the sides of the ballroom. No public love, ever. No weddings, no christenings. There was a time when secrecy was exciting, when it was like a warm fire burning inside me. We are the only ones who know. I held my breath as my bedroom door creaked open and Rob slipped in. No one else knew. But there was always that unspoken ‘yet’ to terrify me. What was happening between me and Rob might be growing towards its own discovery, We could see everything from up here and no one could see us, but we couldn’t spend our lives on Isley Beacon.

  The thought passed. We watched the shadows of cloud-shreds move over the fields. It was not quite so clear now. The days were short. Already an evening blueness stained the more distant fields and woods. But the sun was still on us.

  ‘We’d better be going,’ said Rob.

  ‘Oh no, not yet. Let’s stay a bit longer.’

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’

  ‘No. Not in this sun.’

  I was always the cold one, but not today. Rob sat up.

  ‘I’m going to run to get warm,’ he said.

  He ran from a standing start. He ran from where I was as if he were being spooled away along an invisible thread. His head was thrown back, his arms high at his sides. He set a pounding pace that always crumbled after a few hundred yards. But he could sprint. His shadow fled away behind him on the grass, growing huge. His boots drummed the ground and it echoed hollowly, like a memory of the beat of horses’ hoofs.

  It was late. I felt the cold now, standing up. He was still running, away from me, small in the distance against the rim of the hill. He looked as if he were going to run off the edge of the world.

  ‘Rob!’ I called after him, but he still ran. ‘Rob!’

  There was a darker patch of turf under my feet, as if the chalk below had been burnt. I’d found it at last, the place where they lit the beacon. When I’d looked straight at it I’d missed it, but out of the corner of my eye it showed up like the shadow of a scar. The brushwood must have crackled as the buried flints split their way out of the chalk. That long flare of red tonguing out into the night.

  Rob had dwindled to a pinpoint on the long spine of the hill. I shouted again, louder and louder, frightened, seeing myself left alone in a darkening world.

  Eleven

  Her bicycle was by the front steps. Upright, ugly and insistent. Usually she’d wheel it round to the stable yard, out of the way.

  ‘Give me your bag,’ said Rob. ‘I’m going in through the kitchen.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  ‘No. She’ll be waiting for you. She’s your person. You deal with her.’

  There was mud on my boots and I would need to brush the braid round my skirt. My hair had slipped out of its knot in the long lolloping run down the track from Isley Beacon. All I wanted was a bath and then dinner and a drowse by the fire, my mind blank from the day in the air, my body slack. Even the black spokes of her bicycle looked accusing. She had been sick and I hadn’t visited her.

  She was waiting in the hall, wearing her new yellowish dustcoat and her felt hat. The coat flopped around her, long and lean as a washed-out banana. Why did she persist in wearing the thing all the time, when she never drove anywhere? Her shoulders were hunched as she strained forward, devouring the fire. She always made me feel that the blaze was too high and the flames too luxuriant, though all we burned was wood brought in from the estate. She heard me and turned.

  ‘So you’re back,’ she said, ‘and where’s Robert?’

  There were two heated spots, one in each cheek. They did not burn clear; they were a dull hectic red. Her glance slithered over me and away.

  ‘He’s gone round to the stables,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been out the whole day, Kate tells me.’

  It was like being a child again. For years now she hadn’t dared assume her rights over me so openly. But first we’d had the scene in the conservatory, and now this. She was pushing for lost territory. She could always sense when I had something to hide.

  ‘It was good to get out of the house,’ I said. ‘We don’t often get a day like this in the middle of January. It was beautiful, we walked right up on the top of Isley Beacon,’ I went on, offering up our day to her and hoping it would satisfy her. She would pounce on it and smear it.

  ‘It was cold enough. But I dare say you kept warm, the pair of you.’ The malice in her voice frightened me. The pair of you. How she’d always hated us being a pair. She’d never acknowledge it. The most she’d yield to our relationship was a cold, grudging ‘your brother’. She could say the name Robert as if it were a punishment.

  I dare say you kept warm. I looked at her and she looked back at me, her face full of narrow triumph. Her lips were parted over her long teeth. She was excited, and there was something sly and childish in her excitement. We stared at each other too long, until I felt my stare become an admission. When I spoke my voice was over-friendly, and I knew even as I asked, ‘Have you had tea? Shall I ask Kate to bring some?’ that I had lost ground.

  ‘Kate has other fish to fry, I dare say,’ she answered. I dare say. It came across with ugly boldness. She was admitting things too: how Kate had never liked her, how she wasn’t really welcome in this house, how the love she’d tried to pour out on me had been thrown away like waste water.

  ‘All the same, let’s have some. We’ll go and sit down.’

  But she wouldn’t leave the hall. She must have been thinking it over beforehand, imagining the scene, painting it in the colours she wanted. She was like a child colouring neatly between the lines and hoping for masterpieces.

  ‘No, thank you, Catherine. I’m not staying.’

  But she wasn’t going either, and I was stuck there with her in my dirty boots and muddy skirt, wiping loose hair out of my eyes. She looked me up and down. How she always exaggerated everything. Her life was theatre, bad theatre. Her trusty steed, her scarab pin, her love of secrets behind closed doors, her little way of pursing her lips over words that had almost slipped out. What a liar she was. I had had enough.

  I wanted to tell her to shut up, let us alone, get out. She knew nothing. Nobody had ever touched her or wanted to. I’d had enough of her sliming her trail over our lives. She stood there rocking slightly from heel to toe like a huge, useless doll, and I wanted to push her, see her keel over and knock her head on the hard stone hearth, singe her hair in the flames. I wouldn’t help her, not if she had her head in the red heart of the fire. I knelt down and pushed the poker between the logs, dislodging a shower of sparks and the smell of apple wood. The last load of wood had come from two James Grieves we had lost in the gales. I breathed in the smell of the smoke. Of course she didn’t know anything. How could she? On Isley Beacon we’d been higher than anything but a hawk. It was just her old jealousy. She was sick and yellow with it. I jabbed the poker in hard and levered two logs apart until they
sent up new bright flames. I thought of how she’d held my hand and led me through The Sanctuary to where my father was, and I shivered with revulsion. She’d enjoyed that too. I remembered her fingers rearranging my petticoats, tucking in, scrabbling at the lace. Thank God I was out of that long tunnel of my childhood. She had had her time.

  I glanced up over my shoulder and caught her looking at me. She was drinking me in, and she went on boldly even when she saw me looking back. She’d got me at last, she thought, and I belonged to her now. Everything had changed and I was where she’d wanted me all those years. She put out a long hand and touched my hair.

  ‘Catherine …’

  I shrank away from her. I would have knocked her hand off but I didn’t dare. Yes, she knew. Somehow she’d spied and watched and she’d got what she’d always wanted. She could hold me where she wanted now. You are dirty, her eyes said, and I shall make you pure. The most frightening thing about her had always been the lies she told herself.

  ‘It’s not right for a young man to be hanging around at home. Your grandfather ought to send him away to work for his living,’ she said. ‘He needs knocking into shape. He ought to go to sea,’ she added wildly. Visions of the future she could visit on Rob rose like goblins in her eyes. Storms at sea, a ship rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Rob clinging to the railings – a wave breaking over the decks, a sickening lurch, a cry no one heard, the ship sailing on while a tiny figure tosses in its wake, growing weaker and weaker … She could do it now, she believed. Through me she could get rid of Rob, the way she had always wanted.

  ‘Why on earth would he want to go to sea? None of us ever has.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, with heavy satire, ‘of course not. It’s good enough for the finest men in the land, good enough for my second cousin the Admiral, but not good enough for you. You’d rather go elsewhere, like your precious father.’