The Winter Children

by Lulu Taylor

  ‘And we,’ says Olivia, turning back to the hall again, ‘have unashamedly taken the room with the en-suite shower. I mean, it has no windows so no view, but the luxury of the shower meant we had to have it. And here we are.’

  Olivia opens the door and Francesca looks in with that strange tingle she has always felt when she’s caught a glimpse of Dan’s marital bed. It’s blameless enough: the bed she, Francesca, chose, but now with Olivia’s bedding – a faded ticking stripe duvet and matching pillowcases, a floral quilt folded at the foot, going rather well with the taupe buttoned headboard that was already there. But despite the appearance of utter normality, Francesca knows that this is where Dan and Olivia share their most intimate moments, and she can’t stop herself imagining them as she looks: the kisses, slow at first, growing in intensity, the exploration of each other with hands and fingers, and the meeting of their bodies, the movement growing more urgent until it’s over in a rush of ecstasy. Francesca pushes the image out of her mind, but in the moment that she and Olivia stand there looking in, another takes its place. She recalls an evening when the old crowd were all assembled at Dan’s flat, and the evening turned drunken and riotous. As usually happened, Olivia retired to bed and eventually the others left, while Dan and Francesca stayed up until close to dawn, opening another bottle, lighting up cigarettes long after they’d both given up smoking, and talking intensely about times past (though they never mentioned that, because they never did). At last Francesca crashed out on the sofa, Dan offering her a blanket to go with the rough Navajo style cushions before he staggered off to bed. She woke, dry-mouthed and heart pounding, at around 8 a.m. and realised she needed to get home and restore herself to normal. The cigarettes that she rarely touched had given her mouth a particularly foul taste and her headache a violently thudding quality. On her way out of the flat, she had to use the bathroom and as she tiptoed past Dan and Olivia’s bedroom, she glimpsed through the door that stood slightly ajar their naked feet emerging from their bed. The reality of their sleeping together hit her anew like a punch to the stomach, and she was crippled by the feelings all over again – the ones she’s tried all these years to subdue: jealousy, outrage, injured pride, fury . . . She stared for a long minute, then found the bathroom, and eventually crept away. The glimpses of Dan’s private life were the hardest things of all to cope with, when it was all still so raw.

  All of that flashes through her mind now, as she looks in at the bedroom. Olivia is beside her with an air of expectation, as though waiting for her verdict on a room that Francesca considers more or less unchanged.

  ‘It’s . . . wonderful,’ Francesca says a little weakly, wondering what Olivia wants for a room that’s not exactly the Brighton Pavilion. ‘Such a special room.’

  ‘Then you know the secret,’ Olivia says jauntily.

  ‘Secret?’ echoes Francesca.

  ‘I didn’t find it right away.’ Olivia goes into the room towards the back wall. She’s right that this room has no windows, so it has an enclosed, removed feel, rather dark and close.

  Is that what she means?

  ‘It was only the day before yesterday that I realised,’ Olivia continues as she reaches the wall beside the right-hand side of the bed that looks like the rest of the panelling covering the walls. She puts out her hand and pushes down, and suddenly the wall moves, opening outwards into a twilight gloom. ‘There’s a handle here, but it’s very easy to miss. And here we are.’ Olivia goes through the doorway that has appeared in the panelled wall, and disappears. Curious, Francesca crosses the room in three strides and looks out through the doorway. They are on a wooden balcony that she can see, in the evening dimness, stands above a part of the house she knows, but she’s having trouble orienting herself. A moment ago, she was in the cottage, now she’s somewhere else entirely, in the main house. Actually, she’s in the great hall, at the far end, high up and looking down into the room.

  ‘Can you see?’ asks Olivia, laughing at Francesca’s face. ‘We’re in the minstrels’ gallery. We’re connected by a secret door.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Francesca says, surprised.

  ‘Well, it’s very hard to see that handle. And to be honest, I wish I hadn’t noticed it. I’ve not quite felt the same about our bedroom since. When I’m in bed, I keep thinking I hear it move, even though I know there’s no one there. It feels ever so slightly creepy to be connected to the rest of the house right by our bed like this.’ Olivia smiles at her conspiratorially. ‘But it’s empty. Silly, isn’t it?’

  For a moment, they both look out over the huge hall with its vast empty fireplace at one end, the chill rising from the stone floor. Francesca is assailed suddenly by images of the past – the Tudor lords and ladies, the Jacobean nobles, all the way from the fourteenth century to early in the twentieth, when the last great house parties took place. They’re all gone now, every soul who was entertained here, who danced across this great stone floor or warmed themselves at the fire. Francesca shivers again.

  Why did Walt buy this house? It’s so full of the dead past.

  ‘Come on. I’m cold.’ Olivia turns back to the warmth and normality of the bedroom. Francesca follows, slightly stunned by the unexpected coalition between the cottage and the main house. She takes a gulp of the cold white wine as they go. Olivia goes in and sits on the bed, beckoning Francesca over as she takes a sip from her own glass. ‘Come and sit down,’ she says. ‘I want . . .’ She pauses while Francesca sits down a little gingerly beside her, almost as though afraid of defiling the place where Dan and Olivia perform the intimate rites of marriage. ‘I want to thank you for sorting this out for us. I’m only just beginning to realise how incredible this place is, and how lucky we are that you offered it to us. You could be getting amazing money for it from any number of holiday people. And we’ve got it for free. We won’t take advantage, I promise. We’ll be gone as soon as we can.’

  Francesca blinks at her, hoping she is hiding the start of pity she feels. Olivia actually seems to think that she and Walt need the few hundred pounds a week that a holiday let would bring them. ‘Don’t be silly, you can stay as long as you like, you know that.’

  Olivia smiles, her gaze sliding away. She clutches her wine glass with one hand and the other plucks a little nervously at the duvet cover. She sighs. ‘Thanks. It means a lot. Francesca . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Francesca’s heart begins to beat nervously. She is suddenly aware of the size of the secret she has inside her. It sits on her tongue. With a few breaths, a few vibrations of her voice box, a quick series of movements of her mouth, the secret would be out, free to wreak its havoc. She has to keep it in, even though she has the wild impulse to release it and see what happens. Don’t tell. Don’t tell.

  ‘What do you think of Dan?’ Olivia asks suddenly.

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ Her heart flutters with nerves and her breathing quickens. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This play. It doesn’t sound like it’s anywhere near finished.’ She frowns anxiously and plucks at the duvet cover. ‘I thought . . . it’s just he’s spent so many hours on it. We agreed that he would take this opportunity to see what he could make of writing.’ She pauses, a look of uncertainty on her face, as though she’s afraid of sounding disloyal. She shrugs and laughs lightly. ‘I’m being silly. He’ll do it, of course he will. And then either he’ll make a huge success of it, or he’ll go back to doing the job he did very well. And, thank goodness, we’ve got this place in the meantime.’ Olivia suddenly reaches out and grasps Francesca’s hand, gazing at her straight in the eye. Francesca is aware of the candour shining out of Olivia’s blue-grey eyes, the rim of long dark lashes around them, the little blood vessels creeping in from the edges of her whites. ‘You’ve given the children a home,’ she says in a low, urgent voice. ‘When we needed one. Thank you.’

  No. You gave my children a home. Thank you. Francesca smiles. ‘You’re welcome. After all, what are old friends for?’

  She is in the kitch
en again, while Olivia does the bedtime story for the twins. In a moment, she’ll be back, and then it will be the usual dynamic: the three of them round a table, eating Olivia’s food and talking brightly, or intensely, or laughing, or sharing experiences. But they won’t be able to say what really lies at the heart of everything. Olivia is in the dark. Dan has chosen to wipe it from his mind. Francesca holds the power of havoc in her hands.

  Doesn’t he realise I could undo everything if I chose?

  Perhaps he does and that’s why he’s so afraid of meeting her eye.

  Francesca sits sipping her wine while Dan washes up the dishes from the children’s supper. There is a dishwasher, but he seems happy to fill the sparkling white butler sink with water and suds and do it by hand. She watches him, his broad back inside the blue T-shirt he’s wearing, the way his firm body fills his jeans. A tremor of lust pings through her, catching her unaware. Her attention has been so taken up by the children that she hasn’t noticed Dan in the way that she usually does, but suddenly she is almost convulsed with the old longing for him: he’s tall, firmly built and masculine, strong across the shoulders and solid where he should be. She thinks of Walt, older now, sagging and paunching. His kneecaps are wrinkled and his buttocks droop, and his belly hangs heavy with a fatty pouch in front. Not that he was ever exactly an Adonis. Dan has always inspired a lust that’s all the stronger for its simplicity. She finds him irresistible.

  Along with the desire, which jolts through her, leaving an empty yearning in its wake, she feels a twinge of the old anger at being condemned to a life with Walt when it could all have been so different. Quickly she suffocates it, reminding herself of the old mantra: It was my choice. It was what I wanted.

  She takes another sip and says softly, ‘Dan?’

  He turns slightly in acknowledgement. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I just wanted to say . . .’

  He stiffens, then turns back and continues washing up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well . . .’ She lets the word hang in the air for a moment. ‘You know what we need to talk about.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do,’ he says quickly, defensively.

  So I was right. He’s convinced himself to forget the truth.

  She will have to talk to his back. But maybe that’s best. Perhaps it works better for both of them if they don’t have to look into one another’s eyes when they let the secret out.

  ‘You’re not to keep me out, Dan,’ she says in the same soft voice, removing any hint of menace from her tone. ‘I don’t want much. Just to see them now and then. That’s all. Don’t deny me that.’

  He says nothing, but there is a tension across his shoulders and the angle of his neck.

  ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine. I’m happy with that. But don’t stop me from seeing them. That’s all.’ She sips her wine again. He still says nothing.

  And then, at last, he mutters, ‘I understand.’

  She smiles, even though he can’t see her.

  A moment later, Olivia is coming into the room on a sigh and a smile, and their evening can begin.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1959

  Alice likes to make her excursions on Friday nights. Julia wonders if it is because that is the evening when there is a special service in chapel, with candles lit and the chamber choir singing an anthem. There is a vaguely romantic air to the whole thing, and Julia thinks that perhaps it gets Alice in the mood.

  But when she asks, Alice says it is only because that is the night that Roy says he will see her. Friday is pay day, and a lot of the men go down to the pub in the village to spend whatever part of their earnings they’re not sending back to Ireland. That means the caravans are usually empty and no one is there to spy her sneaking into Roy’s.

  ‘What about the other chap?’ Julia asks. They are in the library, supposedly working on their Latin, but actually whispering as quietly as they dare, hoping not to rouse Miss Johnson, who sits several shelves away at her desk by the door. ‘The one we saw at the building site.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alice raises her eyebrows. ‘Donnie. The Cliff Richard one. Fancy him, do you?’

  Julia blushes. ‘Of course not.’ But she has been thinking about him. The hollow cheeks, the sharp blue eyes and the greased-up quiff with the hair separated into stiff dark tresses that look like the sagging bars of a cage. ‘Anyway,’ she says quickly, as a distraction from her pink cheeks, ‘I’m surprised you still want to go and see him, after that time.’

  Alice ignores her, suddenly absorbed in her second declension conjugations, her eyes hard with annoyance. She doesn’t want to talk about the time that she came staggering back through the canvas sheeting, into the passage where Julia was waiting.

  ‘What is it?’ Julia hissed when she saw Alice crying, her hand clutched to her face.

  ‘Roy was angry with me,’ Alice sobbed as quietly as she dared. ‘Because we went to see him working.’

  ‘I told you we shouldn’t have gone,’ Julia burst out before she could stop herself. ‘It was obvious he didn’t want you shouting and waving at him.’ Alice sobbed again and Julia stared at her compassionately, feeling rotten for telling her off when she was in this state. ‘What did he say?’ she asked, trying to remember to keep her voice down. ‘Did he shout at you?’

  Alice sniffed, and tried to muffle her sobs. They subsided into small hiccups. ‘Not at first. He was all right at first. We drank some whiskey and we had a laugh and then . . .’ Her blue gaze slid to Julia and then away again. ‘Well, you know, we messed around. But Roy started talking about us coming to the site. He’d drunk quite a lot of whiskey and he got ever so angry. I couldn’t quite understand why he was so cross now, after he’d been so nice to me and said such lovely things. But he was. He shouted, and said I wasn’t to risk his job like that again, and didn’t I understand what was wrong with it and then he . . .’ Alice choked again on a sob and took her hand from her cheek. In the dim light, Julia could make out a shadow along Alice’s face. ‘He hit me.’

  Julia gasped. ‘Oh my goodness! Alice, he didn’t! That’s terrible . . . I can’t really see it, we’ll have to take a look in the light.’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt as much as it did at first,’ Alice said miserably. ‘It was just a slap, I suppose. Not so very bad. Is it awfully noticeable?’

  ‘I think so. Come on, let’s go to the lav and take a look.’

  They crept upstairs in the familiar way, but took a detour to the girls’ lavatories on the first floor, where they dared to turn on a light and look in the mirror.

  ‘Golly,’ Julia said as they both stared at the bright livid mark stretching over her cheekbone.

  ‘Maybe it will be gone by morning,’ Alice replied, gazing at it with a kind of horrified fascination.

  ‘I don’t think so. It’ll probably look worse. What will we tell Miss Allen?’

  They turned to look at one another, each reading the other’s fear in their eyes.

  Alice had stopped crying, her hurt evaporating in the face of this crisis. She said stoutly, ‘I’ll tell her I fell out of bed, right onto my face.’

  Julia giggled because it sounded rather funny, and she tried to imagine someone falling onto their face. It was ludicrous. Alice’s lips twitched and then she laughed too, but without much mirth. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell her I hit the chest of drawers on the way down.’

  ‘That’s better,’ agreed Julia. ‘Come on. We should get back quick as you like.’

  So in the morning, Alice told Miss Allen that she had bashed her face on the drawers and Miss Allen sent her to Matron for a cold compress, although by then the redness was speckled with blue and purple, with yellow climbing up under Alice’s eye, and there wasn’t much to be done but wait for it to heal.

  Julia was so relieved. She hadn’t wanted Alice to be hit, but perhaps she now understood how stupid it was to risk everything for a man like Roy. And for two weeks, Alice didn’t go to the caravan on a Friday night. When
she told Julia she was sneaking out again, Julia was horrified.

  ‘But he hit you!’

  ‘No he didn’t, not really,’ Alice replied loftily. Her memory of the evening had faded with the bruise. ‘Well, not much, and I had annoyed him. Besides, he’ll be sorry now, he’ll be missing me so much.’ She smiled to herself and her eyes sparkled, as if envisaging some private pleasure that would be enhanced by her absence. ‘I want to see just how badly he is missing me.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ Julia begged. ‘You’ve left it this long. They’ll have finished that blessed pool in a bit, and then they’ll go away and you can forget about him.’

  Alice turned to Julia, her blue eyes cold. ‘But I don’t want to forget about him. Don’t you see? He’s the only thing I’ve got in my life that’s mine, and I don’t want to lose him. You don’t have to meet me if you don’t want to. I don’t care.’

  But Julia wasn’t able to lie upstairs in the dorm wondering. She was afraid now that one day Alice might not come back, and so she played sentry, guarding the entrance and waiting for her friend to return, the scent of whiskey and cigarettes hanging around her. Roy was very happy to see Alice again, and apologised for the blow, and there was no question that Alice would not go again. As long as the builders were there, she would continue her forbidden jaunts.

  ‘You do fancy Donnie, don’t you?’ Alice whispers suddenly, looking up from her Latin.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Julia shoots back.

  ‘Oh, you do. No need to pretend, I can see it written all over your face. Why don’t you come with me next time?’ Alice’s tone is suddenly wheedling. ‘I’ll ask Roy if Donnie can stay back in the caravan, and I’ll bring you, and we can have a party.’ The idea has taken hold and she bounces slightly in her seat. ‘Oh, go on, it’ll be fun.’