A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  Their mother had left enough money to educate them through university, but Harry could not see the point. The only future he dreamt of – born of visits to friends of Jack’s or relatives of their mother – was to live somewhere surrounded by his own land, to have an estate or just a farm.

  Jack, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted. Ironically, he had always been obsessed with horses. He drew them with increasing expertise and knowledge in the margins of his exercise books, read about them, and, like Harry, rose early every morning to ride. They both loved riding, but when they accompanied their father to his cavernous south London stables, it was Jack who reached out to horses, talked to them, and asked questions of the grooms. He swiftly ascertained that horses needed vets and that vets made money, good money. He studied hard and so intently – compared to Harry, who studied with no end in view – that he soon won a place to study at the Royal Veterinary College.

  Jack joined Harry at his bachelor lodgings in town. While Jack pursued his course, and came home bright-eyed with the excitement of it all, bringing the faint scent of formaldehyde with him and occasionally a rowdy gang of friends, Harry slipped into a daily pattern of gentlemanly idleness that might have lasted for years. A brisk routine with Indian clubs, a shave at his barber’s, a vigorous walk around a park, a visit to the club in which their grandfather had enrolled him – involving the newspapers, a quiet lunch, a digestive read in the library – and then a call on the London and Provincial Turkish baths in Jermyn Street for a bath and massage. Then he would call back to his club for tea before walking back to their lodgings, where he would dine with Jack.

  Unless Jack had other plans, their evenings were quiet, so Jack could study, and their nights early. Their lives were careful, temperate and, on Harry’s part, quite chaste, in marked contrast to those of their neighbours. The apartment they rented was in a fashionable building of bachelor lodgings to the north of Piccadilly. The wholesome routine of their habits was overseen by Mrs Allardyce, the same respectable housekeeper their father had first taken on as their nursery maid, who travelled in from Lambeth every day to cook and clean for them.

  Their absentee father’s death, announced by a visit from the family solicitor, who in turn had been contacted by a lawyer in Nice, was more troubling to Harry than to Jack. Jack had never really known the man, except through his formulaic and unrevealing letters (I am glad to hear of your excellent exam results . . . I approve your choice of lodgings . . .), so the death felt no more a cause for grief than the news of failure in a distant mine in which one had briefly considered investing. Naturally Jack looked to Harry for his cue as to how he should feel and behave. They adopted black suits for a year, of course, but Harry would not hear of Jack falling behind in his studies for the observance of form, although they did have a week away to attend their father’s burial in Nice’s English cemetery.

  The funeral was a strange, chilly affair. (It was a revelation to Harry that the South of France had bad weather.) Besides the two of them and the local Church of England parson, the weather-beaten consul was in attendance, as were two plump Frenchwomen in veils, one of whom had to support the other when grief overcame her at the graveside. They melted away into the drizzle before Harry could introduce himself, and the consul was either discreet or genuinely at a loss as to who they were.

  Harry could not pretend to be grief-stricken. If he mourned anything, it was the lack of anything to mourn. His memories of his father were so scant and so distant that they had become rigid to the point where he could no longer trust them. He remembered, or thought he remembered, walking alongside him on a shingle beach, but it was the difficulty of walking on shingle while holding an adult’s hand that informed the memory, not any paternal warmth. He remembered a luxuriant beard a little like the king’s, and a tang of limes and something sweeter from some manly preparation or other, a beard oil or a shaving water. He had absolutely no memory of his voice, and realised that he had come, with time, to supply a voice, as he read his father’s letters, that belonged to a disliked master at Harrow and not to his father at all. His principal feeling on losing this second parent was to miss his mother with something like fresh grief and to feel a powerful yearning for nothing more complicated than feminine company.

  They had no women in their life beyond Mrs Allardyce, and she was not precisely in it, and was better at sustaining a pie crust than a conversation. Their building was designed to accommodate only bachelors, but neighbours upstairs and down would entertain more or less respectable women by day and occasionally Harry would coincide with these visitors on the stairs or in the entrance hall. Feminine conversation, exotic in the building’s habitual quiet, would peter out as he opened a door or rounded a staircase corner. He would lift his hat in greeting and be met with a greeting in return, or demurely downcast eyes, and then the conversation would start up again behind his back, leaving him with torn rags of sentences and no less tantalising wafts of violets, perfume or soap.

  In the theatres, or in shops, or on his daily walks, Harry observed women as one did wild birds, noted the elegance or occasional strangeness of their fashions and the way their behaviours changed depending on whether they were alone or in company, with a man or with other women. But there was no woman he counted as a friend, none he could truly say he knew. He had known Mrs Allardyce all his life, but she was the soul of decorum and released personal information so rarely that on the occasions when she let slip that there had been a Mr Allardyce but that he had died fighting the Boer, or that she shared a house in Lambeth with her four unmarried brothers so was quite used to the ways of men, he found himself chewing over the gobbets of information days later in a way that hardly seemed decent.

  Had they a sister or mother still living, or even friends with sisters, none of this would have been so and women might have become normal, even uninteresting to him. Their mother’s parents used to make a point of inviting them to visit in the country every summer and, now they were adults, would surely have set about making suitable introductions. The boys’ grandfather had long since died, however, and his widow become senile, and their uncles and cousins, who had always regarded their existence as a piece of social awkwardness, had let all communication wither.

  Harry looked around him, especially at his club or in the Jermyn Street hammam, at the men who had never married – one seemed to gather by osmosis which they were – and thought their lives did not seem so very disastrous. Provided one had a Mrs Allardyce to keep one fed and clean, and the services of a tailor and a barber to keep one presentable, the single manly life was apparently not so bad. He noticed that these men reached a point, perhaps over some tacitly understood age limit, when they began to be called confirmed bachelors, which implied they had passed (or failed) some test, or even, kindly, that their single state was of their own choosing and not a cruelty of fate.

  After their father’s death, Harry was made aware of where the money that had always materialised so reassuringly in his bank account came from. Apparently under the impression that he was a species of cosseted imbecile, the family solicitor talked him through it with such pedantic slowness that his brain did indeed begin to feel barely able to retain all the facts. Most of his father’s estate was tied up in property – terraces in Brixton and, indeed, Mrs Allardyce’s Lambeth, whose rent was raised by agents. As part of the bargain struck when he sold off the omnibus company, he had acquired stock in the LGOC and a portfolio of shares in affiliated railway companies. At some point – presumably during his sojourn on the Continent – he had obtained a considerable interest in a German armament company, which had performed extremely well, and in a ballet company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. The residue of Harry’s mother’s legacy had been used to buy a row of houses in Kensington.

  A property in Nice was to be left to a Madame Grassert. Harry remembered the woman at the graveside, how her veil had become caught in her mouth, how firmly her little b
lack-gloved hands had grasped at her friend’s arm. Had she, he wondered, been led to expect more?

  The solicitor carefully avoided Harry’s eye but, staring at the Frenchwoman’s name on the paper before him, said, ‘Your father’s French bank account was frozen at the time of his death, naturally, once his notary had settled all outstanding accounts. It might be possible, if you like, to have him pursue the matter to see if any, er, substantial sums had been transferred to . . . another French account, but I fear these could not be recovered. Should you wish to contest this bequest, however, we could certainly—’

  ‘No, no,’ Harry insisted. ‘Let the matter rest.’ Such gifts were not made without forethought and planning. If she had made his father’s latter years happier, she had earned the roof over her head at least. Nice was, he felt sure, not a place he would ever visit again.

  The thought of suddenly being responsible for so much property worried him, and he was relieved to hear that once he had signed a few bits of paper, he could leave everything exactly as it was and his now considerably larger income would continue to come in as before. It was brought home to him that, left nothing, Jack now depended directly on him for everything. His immediate instinct was simply to split the inheritance in two, but apparently this would not do. Because of fees, his holdings generated more income for them both if left intact.

  ‘Besides, you’re now in a position to marry,’ the solicitor reminded him, ‘and a wife and household will draw on your resources far more than your current circumstances do.’ The solicitor then actually produced an illustration of annual average household costs for a husband, wife, two children and staff of four. Harry had so little sense of what anything cost that he could not tell if the figures were supposed to make him wince or offer a pleasant surprise, so he looked at them blankly, which the lawyer evidently took for risky sangfroid. Apologising for his forwardness, and saying he was aware that Harry had no father or mother to advise him on such matters, he added that he assumed Harry naturally had little experience of such realities and warned him to be on his guard because he had now become what was vulgarly termed a catch.

  Harry pondered this in the hours that followed, as he walked the length of Piccadilly and Knightsbridge to soothe his thoughts in a visit to the museums. The idea was so strange. It was not as though his actual worth were suddenly more visible; not even his own dear brother knew it. He knew there were guides to the peerage and the landed gentry; he had looked his mother’s family up in the latter in an idle hour in the club library. Perhaps financial information was published somewhere as well, in a husband-hunting equivalent to one of Jack’s beloved stud books, and even now some unscrupulous mother was poring over it and placing a little question mark beside his name with her ivory pencil?

  He decided to be not secretive, exactly, but discreet with Jack. Jack was more in the world than he, and was naturally trusting and open, so would never suspect people’s motives or think to hold things back from them if he thought they liked him. He was one of Nature’s friends, not her privy counsellors, and had always found the keeping of secrets an intolerable burden.

  Harry resolved that ushering Jack through his training and seeing him somehow settled would, in any case, be his first priority. The fending off, or not, of potential mothers-in-law could come later. Even had it not been so important for Jack to concentrate on his studies, the observance of full mourning gave Harry a convenient year in which to remain socially aloof and take stock.

  Jack was athletic and good-looking and, without being a peacock, took a natural pride in his appearance and a keen interest in what he wore. He chafed at having to don mourning all year and itched, Harry was sure, to cut a dash again in his rowing club blazer or a suit other than his black one. Harry, by contrast, found he relished the excuse mourning gave for withdrawal. His life had hardly been a social whirl before, but for twelve months he was spared even having to make idle conversation. Strangers and acquaintance alike now treated him with a welcome reserve. It reminded him of the legend he had read as a boy of Perseus granted invisibility by a magic cap. Other boys in the class had bragged of the mischief it would let them work, the people they would spy on or banks they would raid, but he had dreamed only of the way it would let him be entirely alone, unpestered, unprovoked. Ironically, he found himself observing other people in mourning, now that he was one of them, and noting the slight differences in their approaches to the discipline of dressing like a crow.

  Chapter Three

  Months after black had become second nature, to the point where Harry could imagine wearing it for ever, like a handsome doorman’s uniform, and weeks after his brother had graduated as a vet and begun applying for positions, Jack burst in on Harry’s morning exercises excitedly waving a card. He was dressed like springtime itself in a gaudy blazer.

  The card had been left by the mother of a girl he had met at a recent rowing gala. Jack’s eight won a cup, and he had fallen into conversation with the young woman when queuing up to enter the marquee to collect it.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Well I don’t remember. Nothing probably. But she’s awfully nice. It was a hot day, so the marquee was like a furnace, and nobody much wanted to be in there. I think I said something stupid about Lady Whatever deserving a cup of her own for standing in there in full fig to make speeches and hand out little bits of silver. She’s got about ten sisters apparently. Miss Wells, that is, not Lady Thingummy. Oh don’t look like that, Harry. It’ll be fun. And our year ended last week so we don’t have to dress like undertakers.’

  ‘Can’t you go on your own?’

  ‘I’m shy.’

  ‘Piffle.’

  ‘Please, Harry. We never go anywhere and it’d be jolly. Besides, you’re the eldest, so you’re the one they’ll really want to meet. You’re my passport. And it’ll do you good, you know.’

  So Harry agreed, because he could refuse Jack nothing and because he was slightly ashamed that he had not even noticed that they had emerged from their year of mourning. He kept to his usual routine, but did so in a summer suit and blue tie, whose pale colours made him feel conspicuous as he walked around Green Park and St James’s.

  He lunched at his club earlier than usual so as to meet Jack in good time. Mrs Wells lived far out to the west, on the Thames near Twickenham, so they had to catch a train from Waterloo, which felt quite like an excursion, and a holiday mood stole over Harry. As Jack told him all he knew about the people they were visiting, it dawned on him that this brother who he’d always thought of himself as guarding might actually be feeling protective towards him. To Jack, he realised, he must seem a faintly pathetic figure, a sort of hermit.

  Mrs Wells was a solicitor’s widow of independent means with three adult sons and a tribe of six daughters. The eldest two boys had followed their father into law, the next was a district commissioner in Africa. The daughter Jack had met was Georgina, the second girl.

  ‘And you intend me for the eldest, I suppose? The one with ginger hair and whiskers?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Jack told him, glancing out of the window at the blackened backs of houses they were passing. ‘I’m reliably informed she has no hair whatsoever.’

  Arriving at the small station in Strawberry Hill felt like visiting the country. There were trees, birdsong, hardly any traffic. Consulting his Boot’s District Guide, Jack led them down from the platform, over a level crossing and past a sequence of decorative villas to Mrs Wells’s road, which had the preposterously pretty name of Strawberry Vale.

  ‘Didn’t Pope live near here?’ Harry asked as he glimpsed the river between trees.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You remember. Poetry. School.’

  Ma Touraine was a handsome house, older than the smaller ones that had sprung up to either side of it. It was set back from the road behind neatly clipped hedges. It had some small stables t
o one side, which Jack glanced into instinctively only to pronounce them unused. There was a giggle and Harry saw that three children were observing them from an open window on the second floor. He raised his hat, which provoked more giggling, then a woman’s distant rebuke, at which the three heads were withdrawn.

  Somehow one expected the matriarch of such a gang to be tall and imperious, but Mrs Wells was tiny, a little under five feet tall. She was elegantly dressed in a dark violet silk that rustled as she rose from her tea table to offer them each her hand. She wore no widow’s weeds, but the striking silver streak in the chestnut hair piled up on her head like a little crown conferred a certain dignity, as did the keys and chatelaine dangling from her waist on a length of jet beads.

  She introduced them to a visiting neighbour, who chatted to them about the warm weather and the delightful way the house’s gardens ran down to the river and a little landing stage, while Mrs Wells slipped across the hall to summon The Girls.

  A muffled exchange from another room revealed a sterner note to Mrs Wells’s voice. The neighbour took her leave almost at once on their hostess’s return, as if on cue, saying, ‘Oh I only live two streets away and Estervana and I see each other all the time.’

  Mrs Wells poured tea, offered little cakes and explained that her eldest daughters would join them shortly but that Winifred was shy.

  ‘So am I,’ Harry told her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, startled by his candour. ‘That’s nice. So few men will admit to that. I fear my late husband was a terrible bully when he was at home, which left some of the children rather cowed. Me too!’ She laughed shortly. ‘Georgina was the only one who stood up to him, so of course she was his favourite. Winifred is more like me. Only artistic.’

  There was a clattering on the staircase, as of a dropped toy, and much giggling.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Mrs Wells murmured and returned to the hall. Jack caught Harry’s eye and winked – one of the many tricks Harry had never mastered. ‘Madame Vance?’ Mrs Wells called up, just a hint of steel showing through her gentle tone. ‘Would you, er, s’il vous plaît?’