THE WINTER CITY

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘I thought you were going to tell me that.’

  He sounded irritable, because he did not like Pickard; he sounded tired, too.

  Then Rosamund took up the familiar refrain.

  ‘There is a story that the Zeitzen Tunnel is blocked—by an avalanche, if you please. There’s a frightful performance going on at the Embassy—all the visiting fellow-travellers trying to get home to dear, safe England as fast as they can, and that tiresome little man from Clyment’s brandishing his passport and demanding protection.’

  ‘And Ted Ravenhill thinks there’s going to be a bloody revolution,’ Doyle interposed lazily.

  ‘What do you think?’ Kate asked Paul, stirred at last to some interest.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Pickard snapped. It annoyed him, Helen knew, when people referred questions to Paul Daniels as though the man was some kind of seer. ‘Absolute rubbish! What are they going to fight with? Their bare hands?’

  Helen looked at Paul Daniels. He had drawn up a chair and he was sitting hunched forward, like a man who is too tired to relax.

  ‘The army has other weapons,’ he said. He spoke slowly, as though he was thinking something out in his own mind.

  ‘The army!’ Pickard gave a scornful laugh, and Doyle looked down at Paul with amused affection. ‘The army won’t turn its coat—a damn sight too comfortable and well-fed. And just suppose it did, who is going to lead this rising? There must be a leader.’

  Pickard, for some reason, was disturbed and his blustering tone made the others uncomfortable so that it was into a rather uneasy silence that Paul dropped the word:

  ‘Matthias.’

  Pickard drew in his breath sharply. ‘Matthias!’ He laughed, without much humour. ‘Matthias? The Party leaders let him out of prison a year ago to satisfy the murmurings of an intellectual clique, a few dissatisfied writers with liberal leanings. Now he is living in peaceful retirement on a farm, and you can be damn sure he is very well supervised. In any case, do you imagine he wants to come back? Do you imagine any sane man wants power at a time like this?’

  ‘It might be something beyond his control; events could move too fast for him’

  At the far end of the room the curtains stirred in a draught from the window. Doyle laughed softly; he drained his glass and laid his arm across Pickard’s shoulders.

  ‘You see, Marshall?’ he cried:

  ‘ “The drums shall crash a waltz of war

  And Death shall dance with Liberty!” ’

  Rosamund smiled. Pickard pulled himself free, his face red with anger. He ignored Doyle and spoke to Paul. ‘I can’t see why there should be this agitation about Matthias. Have you ever met him?’

  ‘Once, years ago at a conference in Vienna.’

  ‘An insignificant creature.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said that.’

  Paul remembered the man vividly, with his wizened, monkey-face and the great dolorous eyes; the face of a clown or a martyr.

  ‘The main point about Matthias,’ Pickard went on, ‘is that he quarrelled with the present Party leaders and got the worst of it. Enforced absence from the political scene has put a totally undeserved halo round his head.’

  Paul did not reply. His intellectual equipment was considerably superior to that of Pickard, and usually he took malicious pleasure in demonstrating the fact. It was one of the things about him which had antagonized Helen. Now she felt an irrational anger at seeing him sitting there, looking tired and beaten.

  Pickard droned on. Paul lit a cigarette and leant back in his chair; he allowed Pickard’s voice to become a meaningless murmur and gradually the scene dissolved and lost its relevance. He watched Helen Jenner sitting staring into her glass as though she, too, had detached herself from the present. He wished that she did not dislike him so much. Suddenly, she gave a little shiver and looked up. Their eyes met. She did not look away; gradually as they gazed at one another it seemed to him that fear darkened her eyes. He felt irritated, and yet he was filled with tenderness for her.

  The delicate French clock on the mantelpiece began to chime midnight, its dainty notes reduced to an absurd tinkle in the lofty room.

  ‘The witching hour!’ said Doyle, and he bent down to whisper in Kate’s ear.

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘You mean that I have to go back to my lonely little attic . . .’

  ‘It has been a very nice evening, Lady Hilton,’ said Kate, turning abruptly to Rosamund. She always managed, on these occasions, to sound rather like a child leaving a party.

  ‘My dear,’ Rosamund murmured, ‘how very nice of you.’

  They began to drift into the hall.

  ‘You don’t seem quite yourself,’ Pickard said, taking Helen’s arm. ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘I think perhaps I have a slight chill,’ she answered quietly.

  When they had gone Rosamund joined her husband in the library. She went to the window and drew back the curtains. Sir Edward looked up, frowning irritably.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’

  ‘Is it true that there may be trouble here?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Sir Edward shrank from the thought of so much undisciplined emotion.

  ‘What will it be like, though,’ she persisted, ‘if something really serious happens?’

  ‘It will be a massacre,’ he answered drily.

  She stared into the darkness.

  ‘These poor, poor people! And we shall stand by, of course, quite helpless. Damnable, don’t you think, Edward?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sir Edward said absently, turning to his work again. ‘Damnable.’

  Chapter Three

  NIGHT

  I

  When they reached the flat Kate sent Doyle away. His resistance was rather half-hearted, which piqued Kate: just for a moment, as they drew together on the dim landing, his face looked older and unfamiliar. As she listened to his footsteps dying away on the stairs, she felt a strong desire to call him back.

  She went into the flat slowly, her plump face puckered and unusually thoughtful. Helen, who had returned a few minutes earlier, was sitting in the living room, warming her hands in front of the electric fire.

  ‘I’ll make some chocolate and we can talk,’ Kate said. When Kate was disturbed her remedy was to discuss it at once and then forget about it.

  ‘Helen,’ she called out from the kitchen. ‘Don’t you think it’s odd, Doyle and Rosamund meeting at parties and behaving as though there had never been anything between them?’

  ‘What else can they do?’ Helen sounded disinterested. ‘But there’s something so . . . cold about that kind of behaviour.’

  ‘You don’t talk to anyone but me about Doyle’s affair with Rosamund, do you?’ Helen asked. ‘It’s not generally known.’

  ‘Oh, I’m very tactful,’ Kate said carelessly.

  She busied herself with the chocolate for a moment or two, and then she said:

  ‘Helen, did you ever have with David that feeling that he was a complete stranger?’

  There was a rather long silence from the next room before Helen replied:

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Kate said. ‘Because I felt that way with Doyle just now and I wondered if there was anything peculiar about it.’

  Helen did not reply and Kate, who had a great deal that she wanted to say, was disappointed. As she carried in the chocolate, she thought that Helen looked particularly lovely, leaning towards the fire with the light-brown hair falling forward across her cheek.

  ‘Do you ever think of marrying again, Helen?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ Helen sounded rather defensive.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind my asking?’

  ‘No.’

  But she did mind. Helen could never get used to the directness of Kate’s approach to matters which Helen regarded as very personal and private. David had been living with another woman when he was killed, and their marriage had broken down long before that; but these
were not things which she wished to discuss with Kate.

  Kate sensed that she was being kept at a distance. Since she never questioned her own behaviour, she did not interpret Helen’s attitude as a rebuff; she was, nevertheless, disappointed because she had wanted very much to have a long talk with Helen about love. However, the present was obviously not an ideal moment.

  ‘Will there be trouble here, I wonder?’ she asked, switching the conversation yet relating it, in some dim, subconscious way, to her own problems.

  ‘I hope not,’ Helen said, but she did not seem very concerned.

  ‘It would be dreadful,’ Kate said, but she felt excited, nevertheless.

  When she got into bed she was unable to sleeps which was unusual for her; for hours, as the night grew colder and the moon appeared at her window surrounded by a furred halo, she tossed and turned, pounding her pillow, harried by an obscure uneasiness about Doyle.

  Helen, too, lay awake. She thought of the way that Paul Daniels had looked at her that evening, and the old fear of failure and inadequacy, which was a legacy of her marriage, began to torment her. How could she allow her feelings to become involved again? The risk was too terrible; to lose a second time would be something which her spirit could never hope to survive. Surely no man could ask so much? But the demand had been made tonight; she knew it as clearly as though he had spoken to her and told her that he needed her. But why me? she thought despairingly, as she watched the thin layer of ice forming on her window. There had been many women in his life, more experienced than she, and some of them would be glad to give him whatever comfort and love they could. Let him go to them. Yet in her body, so long numb under the anaesthetic, there was a new and intolerable pain, and little splinters of hope stabbed like broken glass beneath her finger tips.

  II

  Doyle had, in fact, planned to leave Kate when they reached her flat. He had managed, by a skilful calculation of her reactions, to manœuvre events so that the initiative for his dismissal appeared to come from her. Now, as he walked up the road which climbed away from the river towards the hills, he reflected how little Kate understood him: as he did not wish to be understood, the reflection pleased him.

  The gradient was steep, but he walked quickly, impatient to leave the city behind! To his right a few terraced cottages clung precariously to the slopes of the hill. Doyle glanced at them; their shutters were down and they seemed to regard him with a look as bland and secret as his own. He passed on and soon he felt the jolt of rough stones beneath his feet and realized that the road had come to an end.

  He paused for a moment by the crumbling monument; below he could see the lights of the city and beyond, the darkness of the great plain. A night breeze was blowing, very faint, yet even this slight movement of the bitter air was painful and brought moisture to his eyes. He could have turned back; there were simpler and less risky ways of making contact. But Doyle was only interested in the risks, and so he turned towards the mountains.

  There had been a fresh fall of snow and he was forced to walk slowly. It grew colder. The moon, blurred behind a frosty haze, cast a diffused blue light. The track climbed and twisted. The mountains drew together, overhanging the track, until at last Doyle could see nothing but the grey, creviced face of the rock. He thrust forward, his body bent almost double. His feet were numb so that he moved clumsily and stumbled often. The air seared his lungs. It took him an hour to reach the head of the pass.

  Beyond, the track widened and the full mountain range stretched out before him. In spite of his fatigue, Doyle stood erect, rigid in the centre of the pass; his head was lifted slightly and he stared in front of him with the concentrated intentness of a blind man. Few people who knew him would have recognized him at this moment; there was a dedication in his attitude which they would have found unfamiliar. The mountains lacked the emotional splendour of giant peaks so that the image was of a vast desert of snow, unrelieved by conventional beauty of colour or form; it was a landscape which seemed to range beyond human conceptions. Paul Daniels, who had once been persuaded to climb to this spot, had rejected it violently as a place of utter negation; to Doyle, it was a place of great purity which seemed to hold a promise of some final and absolute ecstasy.

  Doyle’s path did not lead him towards the main mountain range and this was not something which he particularly regretted: the experience of the pass was complete in itself. To the south, a sidetrack descended towards a concealed valley, and half-way down, where the slopes were gentle, there was a farmhouse from which a single light shone. Something reckless in Doyle’s nature that demanded a deliberate risk of self-destruction forced his mind to dwell on that light, stirring within himself as he walked a familiar conflict.

  The gate stood open. He walked up the narrow, rutted lane, ice cracking beneath his feet; on either side scarecrow trees twisted above his head and the stars blinked between. Somewhere a dog barked, and as he passed an outhouse he heard the slow, cumbrous movement of the cattle. It was two o’clock when he knocked at the kitchen door; later than he had promised, but the light told him that someone was waiting for him. Heavy boots scraped a stone floor and there was the rattle of bolts drawn back. A woman stood before him holding an oil lamp in her hand, she did not speak but motioned him to enter.

  The kitchen was long and the ceiling was low, traversed with heavy wooden beams. There was a stove burning and the windows looked as though they had been closed for the winter; the smell of past meals lingered in the air, mixed with a more permanent smell of oil, damp sacking, and manure. Doyle felt cramped, and after the harshness of the mountain air it seemed as though he was breathing through a blanket. There was a heavy wooden table in the centre of the room on which the woman placed the lamp while she went to a cupboard against the far wall. Doyle sat at the table. The oil lamp created a small circle of amber light beyond which the room was shadowy. Doyle could just make out the windows, steamed over, with sacking stuffed round the edges to keep out the draught.

  The woman came to the table and placed a tray in front of him on which there was a bottle of wine and a plate with sour, black bread. As she bent forward he saw her face in the glow of the lamp. The pale gold hair was knotted back so tightly as to create a momentary illusion that her head had been shaved; she had broad, slanting cheekbones and very, light hazel eyes which had no lashes and which gave a certain oblique quality to the whole face.

  ‘My husband is away tonight,’ she said, ‘but you can talk to me and I will tell him what you say.’

  She sat in a stiff-backed wooden chair which she turned slightly towards him. On the table there was a pile of clothes and he watched her brown, roughened hand reach out for them. He did not speak at once. He was trembling with exhaustion and his fingers were so stiff that he could scarcely break the bread. She waited, sitting very upright, her hands working at the sewing. She had always waited, inscrutable, without words, ever since he had first known her. But now, there was no repose in her stillness. He sensed that his presence tormented her and this excited him. Recently, whenever they were together there was a conflict between them and the fact that he could not be quite certain that he would remain invulnerable gave an edge to his pleasure. It also made him wary of her. The wine was surprisingly smooth and full-bodied and as he drank it the blood began to pulse painfully in his frozen limbs. Minutes passed.

  ‘It’s about this idea of a freedom radio,’ he said at last. It was a proposition which appealed to him, but tonight it seemed unimportant, a part of an unlikely and slightly absurd melodrama, which was being played out somewhere far removed from the urgent reality of the golden arc of light which isolated him and this woman.

  ‘A freedom radio,’ she repeated, without looking up. ‘Yes?’

  At times he wondered whether she listened at all; whether she shared her husband’s fanatic zeal, or whether, secretly, she mocked at him for his conceptions of liberty and human dignity. Looking at her inscrutable face, Doyle felt an urgent need to fathom her mystery.
It was a relief when a child called out from one of the rooms above. The woman rose quickly and went to the door. Doyle watched her. She wore a severe black dress, long-sleeved and fitting high at the throat; there was no adornment, but her body strained against the coarse, sober cloth.

  ‘It is a friend of your father’s, that is all. Go to sleep now.’

  Although she spoke softly, the timbre of her voice was harsh. Doyle stirred slightly. In the lamplight, his broad, heavy face glistened with sweat. The woman had gone up to the child’s room. There was silence in the kitchen save for a soft fall of ash from the stove. Doyle drank the last of the wine and then sat quietly watching the lamp, it made a noise like a long, indrawn breath as it burnt; as he listened to the breathing of the lamp, the room grew smaller, he could smell a peat fire, and if he were to look up he would see, beyond the half-door, the stone-littered hills of Connemara. The memory stole upon him unawares and he was disarmed by its wilful sweetness; he began to relax, past and present merged in the glow of the lamp and it seemed to him that this moment was one for which he had been waiting. He delved into his memory for some incident which would explain the illusion and when this failed, blamed it on the wine which was beginning to make him drowsy. Then, just as he was on the edge of sleep, he remembered the words he had said to Paul Daniels a year ago, in a moment of drunken revelation: ‘The snare is set for all of us; we have to be careful to watch, for we know not the day nor the hour! It closed on you when you visited the General . . .’ Now, an instinct of self-preservation told him that here, in this room, the snare was set for him.

  He heard the door click and the woman came back to the table. For a long time they sat in silence, and then she said: