A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  His experiences with Browning and then Troels were enough to prove that the secret side to his nature would only lead to unhappiness, even disaster, if not kept in check by the love of a good woman. He didn’t write any of that, naturally, but after asking her to pass on his best love to little Phyllis, he ended with a paragraph saying that it was clearly impossible just now and he knew she hadn’t wanted to come with him initially, but later, when he was settled and had a house and land of his own, he truly believed she and Phyllis could be contented there with him. He assured her that having them join him eventually would make him happier than he could say.

  He signed the letter with love and read it through swiftly, folded it around two clumsy drawings he had made of the house and the view from his open door, and sealed it before he could have second thoughts. He felt a shiver of fear at Robert’s prohibition but waved it aside; if ever Winnie chose to join him, it would be her decision alone, made without consulting a brother who no longer lived under the same roof. Besides, Robert was pompous but not a tyrant, and his threats on that horrible night had quite possibly been a drunken bluff, counting on Harry’s shame.

  The post office was not far away, but he had to hurry there, having taken far longer over the two letters than he had intended. The Jørgensen women would have been there earlier; it was usually their first port of call. They were assiduous letter-writers, maintaining precious links with friends and relations left behind in Wisconsin and Denmark. They liked to take any mail they received to a Chinese restaurant they favoured, to devour it at once along with tea and little dumplings. They would thereafter wring days of pleasure from the letters, even the displeasing ones, reading sections of them out for one another’s horror or delight. It was a strange, self-exposing practice that made Harry tense to witness. Even had he been comfortable reading aloud, which he never had been, he would worry too much about the risk of inadvertently reading too far and exposing something private.

  Jørgensen tended to leave the room during their recitals, so perhaps it made him uncomfortable too. He was not a letter-writer and confessed to Harry that his penmanship was poor, which Harry took to imply that his literacy was wanting. Certainly he was not a reader, and preferred to have one of the girls, Goody for preference, read to him of an evening.

  The postmistress had a lively curiosity and, like many in her position, was attuned to niceties of rank. Harry’s accent and, possibly, his lack of beard had aroused her curiosity the first time he came in to buy stamps, led there by serious Minnie. Firing off several quick questions he had been too startled to parry, she ascertained that he was the Jørgensens’ latest hired hand, there to learn farming skills before setting up on his own somewhere. Evidently she knew, or had dealings with, the carter, because on Harry’s second visit, she challengingly declared that she had heard all about his magnificent luggage. Since then, her manner of pointedly greeting him by name when he came in, granting him a rare Mister, although he was only a hired hand, hinted that, in intervals of tedium in her job, she had woven a romance from the little she knew of him.

  Today was no exception, and she drew herself up behind her counter, saying, ‘Mr Cane, what a pleasant surprise. What can I do for you today?’ in a manner he felt sure was designed to alert others in the post office that this, right before them, was the very Mr Steamer-Trunk Cane of whom she had been speaking earlier. He paid for two stamps to England and she took his letters off him then said, ‘I know how rarely you get in, so when the Jørgensen ladies were here earlier, I let them have your mail for handing on to you.’

  He hurried out, picturing spiteful Annie ‘accidentally’ flicking open an envelope with her fingernails and reading out the contents to her horrified but fascinated sisters.

  As it happened, he wasn’t the last to arrive back at the cart. The Jørgensen women were all aboard, but Mr Jørgensen was still in the bar.

  ‘I’m worried he’s gotten into one of his arguments,’ his wife said. ‘If you go in to look for him, it will remind him of the time.’

  So Harry found himself revisiting the bar after all. He half expected a waiter to accost him, saying, ‘You were here with that tall Dane that night,’ but of course nobody knew who he was. Jørgensen was indeed in an argument, something about fences and land rights, which he must have been losing, for he seemed to seize on Harry’s appearance as an excuse to introduce him all round as My man, Windy Cane, from London.

  Jørgensen’s tipsiness, and his wife’s teasing him for it and offering to shame him in public by taking the reins off him, led to a mood of hilarity, and they drove out of town with the girls laughing over something they had seen in the haberdasher’s.

  ‘Ooh, I almost forgot!’ Goody reached into her bag. ‘Two letters for you, Mr Cane,’ and they all laughed at her impersonation of the postmistress. She tossed the letters back to him and he had to scrabble for them to stop them blowing out of the cart.

  ‘We’re all rather envious,’ Minnie put in.

  ‘Yes,’ Annie added. ‘Mother had none, so was all for reading yours instead, but Goody Two-Shoes forbade it.’

  Harry glanced at the precious envelopes. He recognised the hands as Winnie’s and Jack’s, and registered a childish pang that each envelope was so very thin. He tried to make out the dates on their postmarks, but the road was rough and the jolting made the letters blur, and it was all he could do to keep his seat. He became aware that Annie was watching him, and the others less overtly so.

  ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Naturally we’re all agog.’

  ‘One’s from my brother,’ he told her. ‘The other’s from my wife. But I can’t read them while we’re in motion.’

  She turned back to face the front with a graceless shrug and he turned to face the road behind them, tucking the letters into his breast pocket, relishing the warming sense of a pleasure to be enjoyed at leisure. He would save them, he decided, until he was alone again after supper.

  He was surprised to feel a sense of something akin to homecoming. While Minnie went to call the hens into their hutch, he helped Jørgensen and Goody unload the supplies, many of which were quite heavy. Annie and her mother hurried inside to make a start on supper, Annie scolding that it was certain the stew she had left to simmer on the stove back would be quite spoilt as the men had made them so very late. It gratified Harry to note that he could now shoulder a sack of flour or cattle cake without hesitation, and that Jørgensen assumed he could lift a thing rather than assuming he couldn’t.

  When he had stowed the last item, a heavy drum of molasses, he headed towards his room, thinking to wash his hands and face before supper, and found that Goody and her father were coming with him.

  ‘Do you have a picture?’ Jørgensen asked him, a little awkwardly. ‘Of your wife?’

  ‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘You’d like to see it?’

  ‘Yes please,’ Goody said.

  ‘As proof?’

  ‘Troels never said,’ Goody told him, with a trace of apology.

  Her father snorted. ‘Your mother’s cousin says nothing unless it’s to his own advantage.’

  Goody blushed prettily in the fading light, so that Harry guessed the poor girl nursed an impossible passion for her rough kinsman. For her sake he prayed it would go unnoticed and unrequited.

  As he opened the door to his room and lit the lamp in there, he saw them look around at the small changes he had made and remembered with fresh amazement that it had once been Jørgensen’s home.

  ‘Clever,’ Jørgensen said briefly, gesturing with his empty pipe to where Harry had adapted the bed base by turning the crates to create shelves. ‘Never occurred to me to do that.’

  ‘Well you never had all those books to put in there, Pa,’ Goody told him, evidently itching to read the books’ spines in the gloom.

  If she hoped for racy novels, Harry reflected, she’d be sorely disappo
inted in Animal Husbandry Made Simple or Agronomy for the Gentleman Amateur. He reached to his bedside shelf and passed Jørgensen the little leather travel frame he kept there, holding the lamp so father and daughter could see.

  Jørgensen’s face softened. ‘How could you bear to leave her?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s with her family,’ Harry said. ‘It’s easier to make a start alone.’

  ‘But you’ll send for her?’ Goody asked. ‘And the dear little girl?’

  ‘If they’ll consent to come,’ Harry said. ‘They’re used to city comforts.’

  ‘Might I know their names?’

  Harry told her, and she sighed.

  ‘Perhaps you’d let me stitch Phyllis a bookmark with her name and a little picture for you to send back with your next letter?’

  ‘She’s too young to read yet.’

  ‘At the rate I stitch, she’ll be reading Dickens before it’s ready for her,’ she told him with a laugh.

  Annie’s stew had begun to stick to the pot, then been angrily diluted with a slosh of water from the kettle and a pinch of salt, which had done little for its savour. The dark, dense rye bread served with it had its usual sour tang – for which Harry was, oddly, developing a taste – and, as ever, they drank only water, because the women of the family were all abstainers. But a cushion had been placed on Harry’s chair – thin, but somehow representative of a change in attitude – and he began to be included in the family’s conversation in small ways, asked to back one or another up in their arguments or to say what people in London thought of this or that.

  When the meal was cleared away, he stood to retire to his room and Mrs Jørgensen said, ‘Oh don’t leave us just yet. It’s so much warmer here. I want to hear about your brother. Is he married too?’

  So Harry told her about Jack, always an easy subject of conversation: how they had been all in all to each other when they were growing up, how Jack had overtaken him in confidence and achievements at school, how Jack’s courting of George (whose name amused them greatly) had naturally led to Harry’s courting of her sister, and how Jack and George had effectively eloped with the family’s blessing.

  Told at the fireside, with the Jørgensen women variously knitting, darning and embroidering, and the master of the household smoking his pipe, it sounded like the stuff of fiction. And as with any fiction, Harry edited as Mrs Jørgensen’s gentle interrogation nudged him onwards in the story. He omitted the salient details of the drama of Pattie. There were similarities enough – another houseful of daughters! – for the tale of Mrs Wells to hold the sympathy of Mrs Jørgensen. And when he reached the point where, giving them the received version, he lost his fortune, even Annie lowered her needles, having decided Frank was entirely to blame in the matter.

  When Minnie chipped in to ask what was in the letters, her father said, ‘Allow the poor man some privacy, kvinde,’ and, standing to tap out his pipe in the stove, implied that the entertainment was at an end. When Harry stood too, to thank Mrs Jørgensen and to bid them all good night, the response was casual – he was still only the hired hand, after all – but there was a response at least, and even a little smile from Goody. On previous nights, his leave-taking had been met with little more than silence.

  Back in his room, lamp lit, pulling his overcoat back on against the night chill, he sat at the table by the lamp finally to enjoy the two letters. He read Jack’s first, because he sensed it could be the least troubling. Jack had written as soon as he received Harry’s note of the Jørgensens’ address. He had never been one of life’s letter-writers; in fact, he never wrote to anyone except Harry, and then only because Harry obliged him to by writing to him. (Having her mother’s chatty fluency and ear for dialogue, George would be the household’s letter-writer now.) With a pen in his hand, Jack became stilted as he never was in conversation. He had hated the letters they were obliged to write home once a week at school and had fought against it ever since. But precisely because of all this, his personality was forcefully there on the thin sheets of paper in Harry’s hands. (And yes, he had managed to express himself across three and a half sides in his pinched, scientist’s scrawl.)

  He dutifully commented on all Harry had told him of the journey, saying the fellow passengers sounded like sewers but that meeting the Danish Troll was evidently a spot of luck. He envied Harry the adventure of the long train journey (he loved trains, and had hopes of taking George on a railway holiday around Germany if ever the practice allowed him enough time off). He confessed he was relieved that Harry was taking time to learn about farming and the Canadian way of doing things rather than throwing himself directly into homesteading, and made a joke about not wishing to downplay his big brother’s resourcefulness, etc. He had been asking around since Harry’s departure, he said, and had heard grim stories of chaps heading out into the Canadian wilds all gung-ho and coming a cropper. He went on to write in some detail about challenges he had been facing at work, where he’d had to deal with a racehorse owner who insisted he knew more than any vet and wreaked havoc administering home-made cures that were quite possibly toxic, countering Jack’s every protest with well of course you would say that. He rounded off with a maddeningly brief message that George and the children were all well and sent love, and that plans were afoot to bring the Grass Widow and little Phil on a visit to take their minds off absent friends.

  Harry read the letter through again more slowly, made homesick by his brother’s familiar slang and magnanimous, trusting outlook. He wished more than anything that Winnie might move to live alongside George, or even to share their household. Jack would never treat Phyllis as an object of obscure shame or refer to her, even out of her hearing, as Poor Phyllis, as he felt sure Robert and Frank and their wives would do.

  He opened Winnie’s letter. It smelt, as he knew it would, of lily of the valley. She had a trick, caught off one of their French governesses, of storing her writing paper in the same small drawer as her handkerchiefs, with several bars of Floris soap, so that both paper and linen would smell delicious and – indirectly – of her. Harry couldn’t resist holding the neatly folded paper to his nose for a second or two to breathe it in. The scent was redolent not only of Winnie but of all the soft comforts he had left behind. The pieces of soap Annie sawed off a great block were harsh, orangey-pink things that smelt of nothing but puritanical cleanliness and conjured up nothing kinder than hospital.

  My dear Harry, Winnie began. I’m so glad finally to have an address I can write to, because I’ve been writing to you in my head so repeatedly it’s hard to believe I haven’t stamped and posted this already. And it will take such weeks to reach you, I expect. Oh dear.

  The thing is, Harry, that since you left us – which I quite understood you felt obliged to do – Tom Whitacre has taken to visiting again. You remember; I told you about him in Venice. I met him at a dinner party at Frank’s and of course he asked lots of questions and soon found out about our marriage and you having gone to Canada. Mother saw no harm in inviting him to lunch, just like in the old days, now that I’m a respectable married lady and an old matron. (I worry that, since Pattie’s adventures began, and Robert’s and Frank’s marriages, she has become far less strict in her supervision of the youngests. She’s certainly less severe than she was when George and I were their age!) And of course we talked and talked and he charmed little Phyllis, or rather she charmed him (she is quite the charmer, darling!), and I found all my old feelings stirred up again.

  Harry, I fought it all I could. I pretended to be ill or out when he called again (twice), but then he started to write to me too. Well. The last thing you want is details that might wound your pride still further. When you left, Harry, you did say you wouldn’t mind him visiting. You even started to say, until I stopped you, that you thought it would be good for Phyllis to have an ‘uncle’ about the place.

  I can hardly believe I am writing this. (This is
a fair copy, as you can imagine, after several I have scribbled on or cried over or thrown in the fire.) You have been worked upon in no short measure by us all, I feel, a thing my lawyer brothers would be angry at my writing, but it is true and I love you too much to be dishonest with you. I was persuaded that my heart would mend and alter and it did for a while, Harry. The transfer of my love would have been complete, I think, if only we could have stayed at Herne Bay, where we were so happy and where we were all in all to one another.

  There was a large gap between paragraphs, quite as though the writer were taking a deep breath before feeling able to continue.

  If, for Phyllis’s sake, if not for mine, you would consent to my divorcing you on grounds of ‘desertion’, Tom will meet all the legal costs. He’d then be in a position to look after Phyllis and me so that we would, of course, no longer be adding to your financial burdens. I will never let Phyllis forget who her father is and will see that she is in regular touch with you as soon as she is of an age to write.

  In case you were wondering, the Whitacre department store has been sold and taken on its new owner’s name. Mother is convinced that Tom is a reformed character. I am not a party to the details but I believe he has given her some discreet financial assistance, which the brothers know nothing about!

  I pray you will thrive out there, darling Harry, and that you’ll find the true, unstinting love you deserve, better than the sly half-measure you had from me. Winnie.

  Harry had to read the letter through twice more, it was so far removed from the one he had expected. At first he felt sorrow at the rude demolition of his recent wholesome fantasy, then a flare of anger that his dashing – he felt sure Tom Whitacre was the sort of man thus described – rival should have made his approach to Winnie so soon after the field was left open to him. And indeed, at the convenient crumbling of Mother Wells’s principles. But he couldn’t help but see that her reversal of attitude was also rather comic, and rather than resentment of a wily manipulator looking to her own material comfort as well as those of her kinswomen, it stirred in him affection for a kindly pragmatist.