A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘I’ll shoot her again,’ said Rob.

  ‘Don’t, she’ll come to pieces,’ I said. ‘Hit her on the back of the neck like a rabbit.’

  I took Rob’s gun and he got the hare by her ears and swung Grandfather’s blackthorn stick. She gave a buck in his hands then she was still and her eyes began to film at once, though blood dripped steadily out from the hole in her thigh.

  ‘You’ve got all blood on Grandfather’s stick,’ I said. I thought of the hare’s form we’d come upon once, when it was still warm. I’d put my hand in it and felt it.

  ‘She wouldn’t have young at this season,’ said Rob, as if he was arguing with someone. I thought of leverets lying still as death, waiting for their mother to come home. He bent down and pulled up a tuft of grass, then wiped the stick carefully with it until there was no trace of blood left.

  ‘No,’ I said, my mind full of the blind, skinny leverets, ‘she won’t have any young. It’s the wrong time.’

  ‘Do you want to carry her, Cathy?’

  I knew that the hare sickened him. She was a bagful of blood, dripping, not the beautiful thing she had been. ‘All right. Give it to me.’ I took the hare by her front paws. She was heavy, and warm. Much heavier than I would have thought, from the way she leapt down the field. My arm ached as we walked back to the house, and the hare banged against my legs. She would be staining my coat, but I didn’t look down to see. It was black, and the blood wouldn’t show. Rob carried my gun as well as his own. Two of the Semple boys were working in the woods with their father. Theodore and Michael. They were planting young beech where Grandfather had had to take down an oak that was rotten to the heart. It might have been there a thousand years or more, Rob said. When it came down we’d count the rings, we said, but we never did, and it was soon sawn up and carted away for firewood. The Semple boys were twelve or thirteen then, a couple of years older than Rob. A short while ago they’d been children like us, but now they wore working clothes, like men. They stopped digging to look at the hare.

  ‘Give it to Mrs Blazer, she’ll hang it and roast you a fine saddle of hare for Sunday,’ said old Semple. Theodore looked intently at it, as if he were imagining what it would taste like. We often gave them rabbits, but hare was richer, different, darker meat.

  I thought of it hanging in the pantry, with blood coagulating in a white china dish under it. It was always cold in there, because the pantry faced north and there were big, chill marble slabs on which meat rested. Wire mesh covered a small window which looked out to a bank of earth. There was always a faint, iron smell of blood. You had to know how long to hang each creature. So long for a piece of venison, so long for a pheasant or a hare. Grandfather knew everything about hanging animals. But you didn’t call them animals once they were shot, you called them game. Like you called people corpses.

  I walk up the frozen field. I cannot damage the earth, or anything that is in it. The rooks circle low, flapping their big wings emptily. Cold stings my cheeks and I walk faster, tucking my hands under my elbows to keep them warm in the squirrel fur. I should have brought my fur gloves, too. At the top of the field I stop and look back at the house, where one thin plume of smoke goes straight up into the sky. It is my fire. All the other chimneys are cold. Later Elsie Shell will come up from the village and light the kerosene stove in the back kitchen and cook my dinner. She will bring butter and eggs in her basket, and a new loaf. I told her I didn’t want fancy food. I am used to plain. When Elsie has gone I will tear off the crust of the loaf and spread it with sweet yellow butter and eat it walking from room to room, with Rob’s coat round my shoulders. Elsie shudders exaggeratedly as she goes away in the early December dusk.

  ‘I shouldn’t care to be on my own in this great place all night, the way you are,’ she said to me yesterday, planking down my mutton cutlet and gravy with her big raw hands. She wants to come and live here again, with Annie and Mrs Blazer and the others, the way it used to be. But I won’t let her. It is never going to be the way it was. I tell her she ought to think of getting a job in the new drapery at Over Loxton. There is money there. They are setting up the shop in a big way, hoping to catch trade from half the county. Elsie could sit in a black dress behind the counter, waiting for the little cylinders of change to whizz back along the wire. But would they want Elsie with her kitchen hands and easy way of talking? And Elsie likes coming here.

  ‘I know the ways of that range like nobody else,’ she says, looking at it as if she sees it pulsing with heat again, the blacklead on it glistening like tongues in hellfire.

  ‘It doesn’t worry me, Elsie,’ I say. ‘I like the kerosene stove. And I like being alone.’

  I am going back into the silence my grandfather came from. You have to keep on with a house, day after day, I think. Heating, cleaning, opening and closing windows, making sounds to fill the silence, cooking and washing up, laundering and polishing. As soon as you stop there may as well never have been any life at all. A house dies as quickly as a body. Soon the house will be as it was when my grandfather first came here with my mother still a baby. He had imagined the way it would be, with lights burning, and fires, and people moving to and fro, and births in the bedrooms. Everything had stopped when he stopped being able to imagine it any more. I should have asked him more questions when he was alive. If I shut my eyes I see him now, with my mother in his arms, wrapped in a long coat and tramping round the house he was going to buy, the future he was going to buy, the life he was going to buy.

  ‘The man from nowhere.’

  ‘Convenient place, nowhere.’

  I ought to have made sure I knew more. He’d had a past, a geography of silence. None of us had ever mapped it.

  My feet are beginning to hurt with the cold that strikes up through the soles of my boots. It is not a day for standing still. In summer you can’t see the house from here, only a thick waving frame of green. But now through the black limbs of the trees I see the country of its tiles, where we sat and baked in the valleys on simmering hot summer days, where we hauled ourselves up through skylights, kicking wildly, where we clung to chimney stacks as we felt for the next foothold. I see long rows of blank, staring windows. I am too far away to see the paint curling on the window frames, the marks of damp and rot. When Grandfather was alive the struggle to keep out water and wind went on and on. There was never enough money for the army of workmen that was needed. One of the Semple boys would be taken out of the fields to slosh paint on to window frames, or scaffolding would be cobbled together and a man sent up on to the roof to pour liquid tar on to the worst leaks in the valleys. Grandfather would go round the house with Rob, showing him where a patch of brickwork was crumbling, or the streak of a hairline crack was beginning to race and widen. All these things were like symptoms of a disease that could never be put right, only kept at bay for a year or two.

  Grandfather never took my arm and pointed it up towards a missing tile, though I knew as much about the house as Rob did. More. I watched it, and he never did. I knew where its walls trapped sunlight and fed it back to you when you leaned against them after dusk. I knew where the pears ripened first against the kitchen-garden wall, and how to reach inside the apricot net, twist out a rose-freckled apricot and cover up the gap with leaves. I knew the long white rows of attics where Kate and Eileen slept, reflected in their spotted looking-glass. I knew the yeasty smell of the cellars where beer was brewed for the house. I put my finger into the head and sniffed hops and malt and once I turned the spigot and drank thin new beer out of my hands until the cellar walls spun round me. I slept all afternoon under the mulberry tree, and when Rob came to find me my dress was splattered with black mulberry juice. I knew the icy gush of pump water on a blazing July afternoon when Rob and I took turns to work the handle and let the water pulse out over our arms. It was my house, too. I had the smell of it in my clothes and on my skin.

  The sky is not going to clear. Mist rises off the ground and mixes with the thickening grains of cold in
the air. The sun is fading. Perhaps it is going to snow.

  It is winter, my season. Rob’s was summer. He was born in June, and I was born in the middle of the night, on the 21st of December. My winter excitement quickened each year with the approach of darkness. I wanted the thermometer to drop lower and lower until not even a trace of mercury showed against the figures. I wanted us to wake to a kingdom of ice where our breath would turn to icicles as it left our lips, and we would walk through tunnels of snow to the outhouses and find birds fallen dead from the air. I willed the snow to lie for ever, and I turned over and buried my head under the pillow so as not to hear the chuckle and drip of thaw.

  I look at the house, still and breathless in the frost. I have got what I wanted. A spell of winter hangs over it, and everyone has gone.

  Two

  Rob’s season was summer. August. The shade as black as wet walnuts. The birds silent in the heat. Rob was nine, I was seven, and Miss Gallagher was coming at eleven o’clock. We were dressed ready, told to go nowhere until she came. My sleeves were too tight, not enough to hurt but enough so that I couldn’t forget that I was wearing my blue travelling dress and not my everyday pink summer poplin and my white pinafore. And my gloves were crushed and crumpled already. Rob looked cross and scratchy in his Norfolk jacket. Grandfather wasn’t coming. He had come into the nursery very early, and given us sixpence each, and told us that he would send the trap for Miss Gallagher at half-past ten. We must be ready at eleven, and mind not to keep Miss Gallagher waiting.

  The stable clock struck the three-quarters. It was hot already. Wisps of straw lay baking between the cobbles, and there was a steady clang clang of John’s bucket as he swilled out the stable floor. Then his boots tramped across the yard to the pump. He did not look our way. On a normal day we would have taken the big whisk broom and chased the straw round the yard, or I would have sat on the mounting-block while John lifted Princess’ great tufted hooves to check them for stones. But everyone knew we were going to see Father in the sanatorium.

  ‘Let’s go and wait for the trap at the top of the drive,’ said Rob.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Kate and Eileen will be looking out of the window.’

  I thought about this. They’d been talking this morning while Kate brushed my hair. Eileen had come for the slops. Nanny didn’t get up with us in the mornings any more, because she was too old. She had been our mother’s nurse too, and she was very tired. Soon she was going to live in a cottage by the sea with a girl to do for her. She’d been all right until Mother went away. Now she just looked at us with misty, surprised eyes and called us by the wrong names when we went to say good morning to her. They were the names of children she had looked after years ago. Kate and Eileen were whispering about Father. When I got back I knew they would ask me lots of questions, looking at each other over my head and nodding. Kate’s bright dark eyes would snap messages too quick for me to see.

  ‘But they won’t know where we’ve gone,’ I said to Rob now.

  ‘Course they will!’ said Rob scornfully. ‘They all know we’re going in the trap with Miss Gallagher. And she’ll get out and talk to Kate, you know how she is.’

  Kate didn’t like Miss Gallagher, nor did Eileen. But they would listen with still, respectful faces, drawing her on to say more than she meant to. The way Miss Gallagher wanted everyone to know she had a secret soon stripped her secrets from her. Kate and Eileen would make mincemeat of Miss Gallagher. Kate was cross anyway, because she had found Rob’s baby field-mouse in a box under his bed. He had been keeping the mouse alive with milk from the rubber inside of a fountain pen, but its eyes were stuck up with yellow stuff and the milk ran out as fast as Rob dropped it in. Kate said it was a nasty thing and she would put it on the fire, though we knew she wouldn’t. It was just her temper.

  I thought I heard the horse, but then there was nothing but the empty lane and all the noises we never thought of or counted, because they were always there. Rob had a stick and he swept it along the ditch, slicing off heads of cow-parsley as cleanly as if the stick was a sword. He turned his wrist and a blade flashed in the sun. Rob was teaching me to bat. Before this summer I’d had to bowl all the time so he could practise. Time hung, and stopped. I would be here for ever, I thought, watching the dust spurt under Rob’s boots, hearing the chunk of an axe in the woods, listening for the stable clock to strike eleven, and the sound of the trap.

  ‘Rob,’ I said, ‘do you think Father knows we’re coming?’

  ‘Course he does. Grandfather told him in a letter.’

  ‘But sometimes … when Grandfather goes, Father won’t see him. Eileen said so when she was talking to Kate in the night nursery.’

  ‘Eileen! What does Eileen know?’ said Rob scornfully, mashing at the broken stems in the ditch. ‘I’d like to see Grandfather tell Eileen anything.’

  I looked up, comforted. Rob smiled. His face was like a warm brown speckled egg. I wished I had hair like Rob’s, conker-brown and shiny. He and Father had the same hair, but Father put stuff on his to make it lie still, and Rob only used water. I had rough, springy black hair that crackled when Kate brushed it at night. When there was a storm coming the hairbrush made sparks.

  ‘Irish hair,’ Kate said.

  ‘Just like the mother, I’ve brushed it many a time and watched it flare up to the brush like that,’ added Eileen in a low voice over my head. We were in the night nursery and Eileen was beating up the pillows on Rob’s bed. She liked beating pillows. Sometimes she would pretend they were people she was beating.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s for you to ask and me to know.’

  ‘Oh, Eileen!’

  Rob came to bed later, when the nightlight was half burnt down. Eileen stared into the gas lamp as if she saw Mother sitting at her dressing-table, with the heavy silver brush making long sweeps down her wild hair.

  Rob and I never talked about Mother downstairs, in case anyone heard. Only when we were in bed and Rob’s legs made a tent which threw huge shadows over the opposite wall, and our voices met and mingled in the darkness, saying anything they liked. Sometimes I got out of bed and pattered across the oilcloth to squeeze in next to Rob. Our beds were so narrow that it was only the tight way Kate tucked in the bedclothes that kept me from falling out. Rob was always warm, and I was always cold. Kate thought it was bad for us to have the nursery fire kept in while we slept, unless we were ill. If we were ill at night she would lean over us and hold her hand on our foreheads to feel if we had a fever, and if we had she would go and fetch a shovelful of red coals and set the kindling to it. It was part of the ache and dazzle of fever to see Kate’s big shadow and the glowing heap of fire she held out at arm’s length in front of her.

  ‘She’s coming,’ said Rob, ‘I can hear the trap.’

  In a minute I heard it too. The clipping of hoofs in warm dust, the squeak of the springs, the clink of the harness. It was Semple driving Miss Gallagher today.

  ‘Don’t ask her anything about Father,’ hissed Rob. Semple crossed the reins and climbed down to help me up the little step, though I didn’t need him. I remembered when he used to swing me up, holding my waist tight. Close up I saw the crinkling of his burnt brown face, where the lines were deep enough for an ant to walk in. He smiled at me but he didn’t say anything. He never talked to us when there was anyone else there. Miss Gallagher patted a place for me, close beside her.

  ‘Spread out your skirt, Catherine, we don’t want Father to see you all creased and crumpled, do we?’ she said. She fingered my skirt. She always fussed over my clothes, even though she had on the same things every time we saw her. A hard, prickly, dark navy-blue coat and skirt. In winter, an umbrella with a yellow knob. In summer a dark-blue parasol. Miss Gallagher could make a sunny day look like a funeral.

  She darted a glance at Rob and pursed her lips. Her little eyes were shiny under her hat. Miss Gallagher didn’t like Rob, but that was only because she didn’t like boys and never sp
oke to them if she could help it. If I made her have to say something to him I scored a point, but if Rob did he scored two, because it was harder for him. When I was there it was easy for Miss Gallagher, because she could talk to Rob through me.

  ‘And have you heard from your dear mother?’ she asked me, leaning close as the trap began to jounce along the lane. On the other side of us Rob scowled, and I knew he was wishing he still had his sword and Miss Gallagher was a dried-up stalk of cow-parsley in the ditch.

  She was not supposed to ask us about Mother. No one was. But Miss Gallagher didn’t care.

  ‘She’s quite well, I hope? Not suffering too much from her hay fever this year?’

  There was no hay fever where our mother had gone. Once I asked Nanny and she told me. Mother was in a beautiful country with flowers like yellow feathers which made arches over your head. The country was by the sea, and almonds grew there too, green almonds, not like the ones we had at Christmas. The sea there didn’t go in and out like our sea at Sandgate, and it was dark blue.

  ‘So warm you’d think you were swimming in milk,’ Nanny said.

  ‘Did you swim?’ I asked, staring at her.

  ‘I paddled up to here,’ said Nanny, showing me the place on her leg. ‘Mackintosh bloomers, we all wore.’

  Nanny had been there years ago, with her old children. Our mother’s house would be glittering white, she said, so white it hurt your eyes. I thought of the yellow feathers tickling our mother’s face, and the way she would shut her eyes and laugh.

  ‘Mother doesn’t have hay fever any more,’ I answered. I moved my feet as if my boots hurt.

  ‘You can take those off in the train, Catherine,’ said Miss Gallagher. She was always wanting me to take things off so she could help me put them on again.