Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  We seem to have plenty of money here. Our English money changes into thousands of francs, and a few sous buy what we need each day. We could live here for months. If we took a cottage, we could get fish, bread, cabbages. One day we’re going to Italy, but not yet.

  ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk.’

  He’s restless today. Something stands between him and what he sees.

  ‘I don’t like that whine in the wind,’ he explains. I listen. Yes, the wind’s getting up. It does sound like someone moaning, far off, so far off that you could ignore it if you chose. The horizon is brilliantly clear. I pull on my cotton stockings and the cotton dress which is exactly the same colour as the convolvulus clinging to the sandy paths. My hair is sticky with salt and I can put it up without even looking in the glass. Everything’s so easy here. Mme Plouaret has gone out, so for the first time Jean-Marie serves us with coffee and new rolls. He has fastened a clean white cloth around his waist, no doubt in imitation of some waiter in town whom he admires. His nails, however, are black. Jean-Marie’s hair is much too yellow – surely no adult has hair like that? It flops over his pale forehead so he can’t see, and he has a permanent twitch from flicking it back. He tells us about a caporal from the next village who lost both legs when a shell fell into his trench.

  ‘He was washing himself, imagine. When they found him he still had the soap in his hand.’

  ‘Remarkable that he had any soap at all,’ agrees George.

  The caporal has just been sent home from the military convalescent hospital. There was an official welcome.

  ‘And he’s going to get married next year, think of that.’ But he speaks with a child’s curiosity which has nothing salacious in it. He hands us our coffee with a flourish. His mother made the coffee before she left, so that he would have nothing to do but warm it up, and this he has failed to do. If you met Jean-Marie on a train you’d place him as a barman who has been got rid of by a succession of employers. He has all the mannerisms of a busy man, but he never does anything. He watches our every mouthful, hungry not for the food but for our difference. It’s off-putting, and although I’m hungry I eat only one roll. George wraps two more in a napkin and smiles at Jean-Marie.

  ‘You’ll be hungry later. What about a long walk? I think this weather’s going to break.’

  ‘There’s a storm coming,’ Jean-Marie assures us, nodding his yellow head.

  At low tide it’s much quicker to walk round on the sand. The wind is whipping crusts of foam off the top of the waves, but the tide is down and we walk fast, leaving a long line of footprints on the clean sand. My hair is coming out of its knot already. It streams across my face, half-blinding me. We are close together, our arms hooked, my head down so the wind won’t blow sand into my eyes. Suddenly I feel his arm jerk. He stops.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look.’

  I shade my eyes. There’s something glistening on the sand a few hundred yards off, like a grey rock or an upturned boat. Two gulls which are sitting on the wind just above it begin to scream at the sight of us.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask again.

  ‘Come on.’

  We are running. The thing is big, as big as a boat, but it’s not a boat. It’s a smooth, shining wall of flesh.

  ‘Is it a whale?’

  We come up to it where it lies on its side, beached, its big ribby tail dug into the sand. It is about eight feet long, its grey-black skin drying already in the wind and sun. For a second I imagine us raising it, dragging it back into the water, pouring water over its back, watching it hang still in the waves then suddenly convulse with life. But then I realize that it’s already dead.

  ‘It’s a porpoise.’

  I walk round to its head. The cloud of gulls overhead shrieks at me. The porpoise is theirs. They have been at it already: they’ve had its eyes. There’s no sign of how it died.

  ‘What do you think happened to it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps a big wave …”

  ‘But there haven’t been any. It’s been calm.’

  ‘Sometimes they go in the wrong direction and keep on going. They run themselves up on to the sand.’

  I wonder where the porpoise thought it was going. What was it like, that moment when the bright sea slopping over its eyes went suddenly grainy and began to hurt? Or perhaps it happened in the night, last night when there was a track of moonlight over the sea, leading nowhere. The porpoise has lost its beauty as quickly as a pebble which dulls when it is taken out of a rock pool. Already its skin has stopped reflecting the light. It is grey and hard. It looks like meat, lying there waiting to be cut up. I can see Mme Plouaret picking up her skirts and racing over the sand towards it with her sharp little knife in her hand. Soon the flies will come.

  ‘Perhaps it will float out on the tide.’

  I hope it will. I hope it will go back to where it came from, to the deep water. Even there crabs will burrow under its flesh as it rolls, and the fish will eat it. There’s no getting away from it. And in the earth, worms. Its sheen is fading as we stand here.

  We walk on, to where my mother is busy with something else, not knowing we are coming. I see her on the doorstep, shading her eyes with her hands. She is waiting for the baker’s cart, not for us. She wears a mauve-and-white striped skirt, and a rather severe, high-necked white blouse. The fashion has changed, but I cannot change her. On her feet there are small workmanlike black boots, like the boots Mme Plouaret wears to market.

  ‘Of course she has no money now.’

  ‘Hasn’t she?’

  ‘Only what she earns from her stories.’

  ‘I didn’t know she wrote stories.’

  ‘Yes. For children. She publishes them under another name. They’re supposed to be quite good. These friends she’s staying with – they illustrate them for her.’

  She is shorter than I am, just a little. George has told me that.

  ‘An inch or two. There’s not much in it.’

  But then I am tall for a woman.

  I am making my mother up. An oil lamp hangs over a scrubbed table. My mother reaches up and pulls up the wick with a pair of blackened tongs. Then, carefully, she trims the wick. The lamplight shivers and begins to burn clear. We face one another across the table. My mother puts her elbows on the clean white wood and rests her chin on her folded hands. I have her face, and she has mine.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Here we are.’

  I am making my mother up. She is my child, my sister. I lean close to George, and he feels me shiver.

  ‘Never mind,’ he says, ‘there’s nothing we can do now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Best not tell Mme Plouaret, though, or she’ll be serving porpoise for supper.’

  I laugh with pleasure. He too has seen her tiny assiduous figure swarm over the body of the porpoise.

  ‘Quick. The tide’s coming in.’ It is very close now, sly and innocent, licking the sand. Ahead of us there are the rocks we must get round before it comes. Behind us the gulls sink down and settle.

  The sky is full of hurrying clouds, thin strips like torn-up paper.

  But my mother isn’t in the cottage. Its door is open in the way they leave doors open here, because there’s nothing to steal. We look in. The walls are apricot, glowing, the colour uneven as the cheek of a ripening fruit. There’s a table covered with papers, held down with stones, and a jar of cornflowers stands in the middle of them. There’s a big silk shawl thrown over a wooden settle by the wall. Black silk, with yellow iris splashed over it. There’s a small iron stove, not lit. My mother must cook here. I never saw her cook.

  ‘I remember that rug,’ says George. ‘She had it on the floor in her villa.’

  It’s Chinese, I think. Yellow and black like the shawl, too beautiful to walk on. It covers the whole of the far wall. There are no pictures, which surprises me. If I were alone I’d read through her papers, wrap her shawl around me, stroke her Chinese rug. Or would I? If I were alone I w
ould never have come here. I would still be waking in my iron bed in the old night nursery, with Rob’s coat around me like a shroud. I shiver. I can smell the mud on it, even here.

  On the little dresser there’s a round loaf of bread, the same bread as we eat each morning in Mme Plouaret’s house. I don’t know why this should surprise me as much as the absence of pictures, but it does. My mother eats, and cooks, and uses the privy in the battered shed that leans against the cottage wall. Her room looks as if she’s only left it a minute ago. Perhaps she’s still here somewhere. There is a narrow wooden stairway in the corner of the room.

  ‘That’ll go up to the sleeping-place,’ says George. ‘These cottages are all the same.’

  ‘Can we look?’

  ‘Why not?’

  I go up the ladder. My head comes out level with the boards, and I look around. Light comes in through a narrow window cut into the side of the cottage. The sea leaps in the distance. The whistle of wind sounds louder here. I bunch my skirt up and scramble into the room. It’s easy. The spurs of the ladder stairway are secured to the floor and worn to a dark shine where generations of hands have grasped them. Thousands of quick touches have put that polish on the wood. My mother’s touch is part of it, too. Her hands, like everyone else’s, grasp and move on.

  It’s a plain narrow room. Hardly a room at all. I can’t stand up straight. I am directly under the roof, and if it rained I’d hear each drop spatter. Seagulls scream, inches away. They’ll be floating round the cottage on their way inland from the coming storm. Through the window the sea heaves, grey and white as the storm blows up, wilder and wilder. There’s a narrow bed tucked close to the wall. My mother has thrown back her bedclothes and humped them up to air. White sheets, white bolster, a big shapeless white plumeau that she has shaken into a cloud. Bending my head, I go over and sit down on the mattress. My mother has a box chest by her bed, with a candlestick on it, a book and a deep-blue glass bottle of perfume. I pick up the book. It’s in French, stories by a writer called Anton Tchehoff. So my mother reads in French at night, not English. Page seventy-nine is turned down. I weigh the book in my hand, not reading it. My French isn’t very good, not good enough. I put it down and pick up the bubble-shaped bottle of perfume, take out the glass stopper and breathe in.

  It’s my mother. Not flowers or musks but her. Her skin, her hair. The way those tiny crisp curls round her forehead would tickle me when she bent down to kiss me. It fills my throat and I can’t swallow it. I put the stopper carefully back into the bottle, sealing up her perfume. The wind bats at the window and the gulls scream. I shut my eyes to the white sealight and lie down. I have my face in her pillow, where she lies. Without opening my eyes I reach out for the plumeau and drag it around my shoulders. It is as light as snow. This must be how a plant feels, wrapped in snow. Snow is better than frost. Frost scorches, but snow protects, though we call it cold. I think of Christmas roses sleeping, flowering under a crust of snow.

  My mother’s smell is all around me. The wind beats and beats like a heart on the window. I think the plumeaux they have here are filled with feathers. The best ones are tiny white feathers, the down of the bird. They trap heat so that even in the middle of the harshest winters you sleep warm. My brother had a coat that weighed so heavy it must have bowed his shoulders as he stood on guard at night, straining his eyes into the humped region of nightmare where shell-craters bulged as the flares went up. His coat could not keep him warm. They sent it back to me but when I knew after a long silence that he was dead I could not bring myself to throw it away. I could never get the damp out of the cloth, no matter how much I roasted it by the fire. The heat of my body would not pass into that coat. It was winter in the house and in my body which could not warm anything. In the end I knew I had to get rid of my brother’s coat. I took it off one morning and rolled it up and tied it tight with twine. I went out to the orchard carrying it, and I buried it under the conference pear tree. They are big pears, some of the best we have. They look like drops of rain in September. I dug a hole and buried the coat. First the hare, then the little female thing, then Miss Gallagher and my grandfather. The coat was the last thing I buried. I should have known as soon as I opened the parcel it came in that there was no use in keeping or wearing my brother’s coat. It belonged to the earth, with him.

  I’ve stopped imagining ways he might have died. It doesn’t help. I can’t go there with him. But I still wonder how hard it was. Did he walk, then crawl, and then shrink back to nothing but a cry in the darkness? Nobody came. I would have come. Nothing would have stopped me. But I was picking apples in the orchard I’d made mine, carrying baskets of them home to store in the house that was mine too. I’d left no room for him.

  There were always the two of us. There are two of us now. He hears our mother’s heartbeat, just as I do. A hard bump, then its echo. Her flesh fans out the sound into our soft bodies. He heard it before me. He feels the warmth of her and smells her skin. He will leave her body before I do, and he’ll be there, waiting for me, making sure I’m never alone. We slipped like fish over the lip of our mother’s body. He waited for me. He waits again.

  The white down covers us both like a wing, and the noise of the gulls and the approaching storm covers the sounds I’m making.

  George doesn’t come up the ladder to look for me. After some time I push away the plumeau and get up. My mother hasn’t got a looking-glass, so I wipe my face on the sheet and push back my hair. On the floor in the corner of the room there’s a white china jug and bowl, with some water still in the jug. I dip in my handkerchief and wash my face with it, then I recall something Kate used to do when we had fever and I let the water drip on to the insides of my wrists. Each drop cools me. Where did Kate learn all these things? She was a child when she came to us. Fourteen is nothing, though to me she was a woman. It was from Kate I learned how to be a woman, though I didn’t know what I was learning. I see her hands, working. Her voice, telling me of things she saw that no child ought to have seen. Then her laugh and the mocking smile in her long eyes. It doesn’t matter how many respectable photographs Kate sends me from Canada, I shall never believe in them. I’ll always see her alive, laughing at everything, moving with her own sure grace.

  The floor creaks. These cottages are built to lie low to the earth, to resist the wind by yielding a little each time it blows. Downstairs George is seated comfortably at my mother’s table, reading. He looks up and smiles.

  ‘It’s one of her stories,’ he says. ‘Quite good, I think. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doesn’t look as if she’s coming back just yet, does it? Shall we go up to the house and have a look? Even if she’s not there, Marc and Isabelle ought to know where she is.’

  Outside the wind snatches at my skirt. Sand is blowing up from the low dunes and whisking across the grass. No one will hear us coming.

  ‘I’ll just use your mother’s privy,’ says George, and disappears. I might as well use it too, I think, considering all the bushes I’ve had to crouch behind since we came to France. When I go in I can smell his urine, quite strong but not unpleasant. It’s strange to live so closely with him, but I am getting used to it more quickly than I would have thought possible. The privy has a big wooden seat over a hole. The walls have been washed white years ago, but the whitewash flakes wherever I touch it. There is dark-red valerian growing out of the top of the wall, where the light comes in. My mother has spiked sheets of paper on to a nail. There’s writing on one side: her manuscripts I suppose. I like the mixed smells of earth and carbolic and urine and the sea. I tear off a piece of paper.

  And then the nurse blew out the candle so all Emily saw was the glow of the fire.

  ‘That’s not the end of the story,’ said Emily. ‘Tell me the re

  I wipe myself with the paper.

  Rain scuds in from the sea. Bars of rain move fast, gaining on us as we run towards the farmhouse. The door is open.

  ‘Go on,’ sa
ys George. ‘We’ll get soaked if we stay out here.’

  We step through the low doorway, ducking our heads. There is no one in the long narrow kitchen which runs back into shadows. A heap of fire sends out petals of flame, and a black kettle has been pushed to one side of the hearth.

  ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  Wind funnels through the doorway. I watch white curtains of rain shudder as they rush in from the sea. Then I see a figure, head down, hurrying to get out of the rain. A woman. The wind buffets her clothes as she runs the last few yards up the path. She stops in the entrance, not seeing us. She bends down, unlaces her boots and kicks them off.

  We stand still in the shadows as she comes in, pushing back the hair which has blown all over her face. I notice her hands first, mud-stained and as broad as mine. Then her face. The hair she smoothes isn’t black any more. It is grey, grey at the roots. The grey is pushing up into the dark mass she wears knotted at the nape of her neck.

  She is smiling to herself. She reaches into her pocket and tosses something into the air. There is a flash of yellow. She presses her thumbnail into its skin and I catch the small explosion of volatile oils.

  The air floods with summer. Against a screen of leaves the lemons hang, dipped in shade. It is noon. The sky burns white and no one moves. I hear the croak of a frog huddled by the water tank, the stir of a bird in the leaves, a shimmer of cicadas in the valley below the lemon grove.

  She turns, her eyes lively, friendly. They don’t see many people here. Then she stands quite still.

  ‘Catherine,’ says my mother quietly. One hand goes up to her hair, holding it back. This is my mother. For a moment my beautiful mother with her long white fingers, her hair like ink, her perfect, averted face stands between us, filling the space across which we must touch. Then I blink and the slide of my tears across my eyeballs washes her away. Here is my mother.

  I look at my mother’s face, her lively eyes still and watchful, her body a strong column in its dark dress, her face which is not beautiful at all but is like my own.