A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  Everywhere smelled of lavender polish, gardenias and the tubs of forced hyacinths old Semple had brought in two days ago so their flowers would open, perfect for the day. And there was a smell of warm, excitable flesh. I caught the note of each body. There was Livvy’s cool, greenish-blondeness, nearly as scentless as water, the Avery twins’ blend of papiers poudrés and their own sharp foxiness, the dark Ellenby boy who smelled of warm brown paper. Rob was a mixture of new bread and gun smoke. Even today, he’d been up and out into the woods with his gun as soon as it was light. I looked out of my window and saw his steps go black as the frost softened.

  Everything was ready. Our life was put away so it would not spoil the party. The dark wicked spikes of Grandfather’s cacti had been pushed back so they would not catch on the girls’ dresses and tear them.

  I looked at Kate’s strong white arms, bare to the elbows. She’d been running up and down with hot water since tea.

  ‘Have they got everything they need?’ I asked. ‘Did you remember to put out the violet soap?’ Kate held up her hands to me and I smelled the violet on them. Her hands were rough but in this light all I saw was their broad shapeliness. Her hair had gone into close damp curls from the steamy water she’d carried. She was near and I breathed in the familiar Kate smell of cotton and soap and sweat. My Kate. She was twenty-nine now. I had grown up and Kate was no longer just a pair of powerful, pummelling arms, a warm, wide lap and a rustle of half-understood gossip and sweet names and slaps. She was a woman.

  Eileen had gone. Her mother had had female troubles after the birth of her last child. She couldn’t walk, or lift, or turn the mangle for the washing. I was thirteen when Eileen went. It got mixed up in my mind with the griping pain of my first monthlies and the certainty that everyone knew and could trace the bulge of stitched rags under my skirt. I didn’t want even Rob to know. But Kate made nothing of it. She whisked away my rusty bundles to boil clean in the laundry, and brought me a vile-tasting cup of raspberry-leaf tea to ease my cramps. She stood by the bed, arms folded, looking down to make sure I drank it all, with the ironic, impersonal expression she always had when she was outwitting illness in either of us. Pain floated in my stomach like a tight hand suddenly unclenched.

  ‘Kate,’ I said, sipping the stuff slowly to keep her there, ‘what happened to Eileen’s mother?’

  ‘Well, now. It’s her female parts paining her, a bit the way you are at this moment. Only she’s had eight children, and she was getting too old for it. She should never have had this last one, but catch Eileen’s Da leaving her alone for five minutes.’

  ‘Eileen said she couldn’t walk.’

  ‘No,’ said Kate, ‘what should be held inside her has slipped and it keeps her from her walking.’

  I waited, but she gave me no more details. I thought of the tight, springy cleft of my own body and I tried to imagine it loose and sagging. I lay there under the thick white sheet and loved the feel of my own body, hurting but undamaged. I would never have eight children like Eileen’s mother, never let myself be lame and limp for anyone to catch. I would run fast.

  I knew where babies came out, but how they did it I could not imagine. I knew the pain was terrible, like with a cow when the calf got stuck. I had seen John plunge his arm up to the elbow into a bellowing cow to turn the limbs of the calf twisted up inside her. I had seen the bloody streaks and strings from the cow running down his arm. I tried to imagine someone doing that to Eileen’s mother. The thought of it made me squirm sideways and squeeze my legs tight together.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate sardonically, ‘you’ll have no troubles, if you keep like that.’

  ‘Can’t they – put it back again?’ I whispered, out of the huge curiosity brimming in me.

  ‘Oh, with cutting and stitching they could do it, I dare say,’ said Kate in her usual bold voice. ‘But would you let a man do that to your own flesh and blood? No surgeon’ll take his knife near Eileen’s mother. ‘Eileen will nurse her – anyway, she’s worth ten of any doctor. If her mother binds herself up tight things’ll go back as they should. Only she’ll never be able to do for her family again, and so we’ve lost Eileen.’

  She said it like that, ‘we’ve lost Eileen’, tasting the drama of it on her tongue the way Kate always did, even though I knew she really felt it too. She had cried when Eileen went, up in her attic when I was supposed to be in bed. But I was listening at the bottom of the attic stairs, rubbing the rough drugget with my bare foot, caught there, knowing she wouldn’t want me, not now. Where would Kate be without Eileen to sleep with in their white attic, and sit with over the fire after we slept, and go out with on their half-days? How would she trim her hat without Eileen to look and judge; how would she choose new ribbons from the pedlar to thread through bodices and petticoats without Eileen to tell her when a pink was too harsh or a blue drained the colour from her lips? They kept the pedlar in the kitchen drinking tea while they turned the heap of ribbons over and over, choosing. But no one was ever going to see them, I thought …

  When Eileen left I couldn’t imagine what the house would sound like without the constant running-water ripple of Kate and Eileen calling, talking, ordering, reminding one another of things they had forgotten. And the night-time murmur of their gossip, like water clucking over stones. We got used to it, of course. Kate talked to me more. I was growing up, as she said, and Rob was away at school, so there was just the two of us. For years Kate was my ally against Miss Gallagher, who still came to teach me French and Geography and watch me with her small, hot eyes, cannibal eyes. Miss Gallagher had a bicycle now. ‘My trusty Pegasus’, she called it, patting the saddle. She sat bolt upright, pedalling so slowly the front wheel wobbled. The sight of her coming up the drive drove Kate into a frenzy.

  ‘Will you look at the sight of her. And that one skirt she wears all draggling there in the dirt.’

  Kate’s scorn made her almost ugly. If she’d had Eileen there they would have blotted out Miss Gallagher with their laughter. I never defended Miss Gallagher, although I knew how she still loved me. Her love frightened me. She would have wrapped herself round me like a rubber mackintosh and kept off the rest of the world, if she could. It was a great day for her when Rob was sent to school. But there was always Kate, fresh as a summer night after a thunderstorm, twitching the clammy shelter of Miss Gallagher away from me. I never forgot how Kate raged and shook me when she caught me once praying with Miss Gallagher, both of us on our cold knees on the oilcloth, trying not to sneeze because of the fluff under the bed.

  Miss Gallagher had talked of nothing but the dance for weeks. She had pored over patterns and swatches of silk, taking off her glasses to peer for flaws in the weave even though I told her they were meant to be there. She had wanted to be there when the dressmaker came to fit me.

  ‘She’s coming up tonight, to see me when I’m dressed,’ I said to Kate, standing up and smoothing down my chemise and petticoat. I loved myself half-naked, and the way the fire shadows made a rich tunnel of darkness between my breasts. If I could have gone down and danced like this now, it would have been worth while,

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Miss Gallagher,’ I said, knowing Kate knew already.

  ‘I thought you were to call her Eunice,’ said Kate, ‘now you’re seventeen and you’re a young lady.’ I smiled at the wealth of disbelief Kate put into the last two words. At my age she had been working away from home for five years.

  ‘Eun–i–ke,’ I said, ‘not Euniss. It’s Greek.’

  ‘That’s what she tells you, is it? The Greeks would turn away their eyes for shame at the sight of that one. Well, if I were you I’d put something decent on yourself before Yewneekay gets here, then. Where’s that dress?’

  ‘Hanging up, where it was. If it hasn’t fallen down. It’s so slippery.’

  ‘You don’t deserve to have nice things,’ scolded Kate, ‘the way you treat them.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ll never wear it again after tonight,’ I said. />
  ‘Don’t you be so sure of that. The money this is costing we’ll all be walking naked by next winter,’ said Kate. ‘And now I’ll get your hot water. Mind how you wash your arms and shoulders. And under your arms. Think of him breathing in when you put your arms on his shoulders in the dance.’

  Firelight warmed the fine down on my forearms while I waited for her to come back. Thank God I did not have thick dark hairs on my arms, the way Miss Gallagher did. If I had, I would have got Rob to singe them off with a match-flame, no matter how much it hurt. Though Kate said you could melt a puddle of wax and spread it on your skin and once it was hard it would bring off the hairs with it. She knew a girl who did that before her wedding-night, because she had hair all over her legs, like a monkey. Thick, black, silky hairs. Beautiful if they hadn’t been on her legs. And then she had to go on destroying the hair in secret, all her married life. Imagine that, said Kate.

  In a minute she would be back with the water. I was late. Everybody would be ready except me, and I was supposed to be there to welcome them in my rose-pink dress, first at dinner, and then at the dance. But it felt far off, and the lapping of the fire was more real than anything.

  It was Rob who came in, not Kate. He was dressed but for his collar, which flapped loose.

  ‘I can’t get at the studs, Cathy, do it for me.’

  He had mangled the stiff collar, trying to force it.

  ‘Haven’t you got another one?’

  ‘I had three. This is the last. You can make something of it, can’t you?’

  I stood up, pushed the collar into shape with my fingers and fixed the studs. It was all right unless you looked closely, the way Livvy would look with her cool, fastidious eyes. I held him back and stared at the unfamiliar black-and-white column that shaped his body instead of shaping to it like his soft everyday clothes. There was a red raking line on his neck where he’d dug the collar into the skin, but it would fade. He put up his hand and fingered the collar uneasily.

  ‘Is it spoiled?’

  ‘It’s fine. No one will notice.’

  I picked a speck of white cotton from his jacket and turned him round. He was perfect. He smiled suddenly, forgetting about the clothes. At once they began to look right on him, the way Rob’s clothes always did.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get dressed?’

  ‘Kate’s bringing my hot water.’

  ‘My eye, you’ll be late,’ he said gleefully, as if he was ten again. Then his face changed. I felt his look move over my breasts and shoulders, where the firelight polished my bare skin. I stepped back a little. The door tapped as Kate pushed it with her elbow, the way she did when she was carrying the heavy water cans.

  ‘You’d better go down. One of us ought to be there. Grandfather –’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kate was studying him, judging the effect of black and white against his brown skin. He had parted his hair in the centre and it lay flat, close to his head, but I knew after ten minutes’ dancing it would spring free, or else he’d forget and run his hand through it and the careful parting would be gone. Kate nodded. He looked right, not like me.

  ‘Quick and wash now.’ She turned to me. ‘We’ll have our work cut out with that hair of yours.’

  ‘Why should she put it up?’ said Rob, to provoke her. ‘Isn’t it better the way it is?’

  Kate looked at me and laughed. She was seeing the rosy light on my bush of hair and half-nakedness. She always said to me that I didn’t pay for dressing. I would catch a husband better with my clothes off; the pity was that things didn’t work that way. Or else I needed better clothes than I had ever had. The way my skirts and blouses came back from the dressmaker made my breasts and hips look lumpish, like something big and soft packed into parcels and dented with string. I used to wonder if the Miss Talbots had got the measurements wrong when they cut out the pattern; they made all my clothes. But Kate said, ‘It’s not the measurements, it’s the way they cut the cloth. They’ve no eye for the hang of it.’

  The Miss Talbots hadn’t been let near my rose-pink silk. I had gone up to town for the fitting, and the dress came back in a white, flat box full of tissue paper, to be shaken out by Kate and tried on me in the glare of a sunless winter day. I only looked in the mirror once. The dress was not part of me. It hung like something pegged out on a line.

  ‘A pity there hasn’t been a death in the family,’ said Kate. ‘With your skin you’d look like a queen in black. Black velvet,’ she repeated, eyeing me, ‘and a black velvet ribbon round your neck. And then something in your hair … diamonds maybe …’

  But the light rose silk hung off me like a frill on butchers’ meat.

  ‘You want something moulded, like this,’ said Kate, showing me with her hands. ‘It should be tight round your breasts. After all, you aren’t a piano.’

  I laughed. The pleated silk bodice did look exactly like the pleating on the back of a piano.

  ‘If we had a death, we wouldn’t be having the dance,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘at least wear black velvet in your mind. That way you’ll hold yourself better.’

  It was time to get dressed. I turned to the wash stand and picked up my sponge. I swept the warm violet-scented water down my arms and let it trickle into the folds of my elbows, then washed my neck, ducking down so that water would damp the corkscrew curls at my nape. Rob lounged by the fire, spreading his hands to make them into red starfish against the flames. Kate brushed past him,

  ‘You’d better be getting yourself downstairs,’ she said, ‘or someone else will be taking her in to dinner.’

  Kate didn’t like Livvy. She never used her name if she could help it, only ‘her’ or sometimes, mockingly, ‘Miss Olivia’. She thought Livvy was sly. It was just the way Liwy looked, her greenish-blonde flesh, her coils of hair that were bright like the moon, not the sun, her pale, slanting eyes. Kate had never bothered to get to know Livvy.

  ‘If that’s beautiful, you can call me a kettle,’ she said.

  Livvy made me think of hyacinths. She was waxy, like they were, with the kind of scent that you could not get out of your mind once you had smelled it. She was cool and perfect. Her furs were like the dark sheath of earth from which the white hyacinths grew. The real, clodded earth of the fields and woods never came near Livvy.

  Rob got up and stretched, making wild shadows on the ceiling. Kate ducked under his arm, giving him a push towards the door.

  ‘Get on with you, I’ve her hair to do yet, and that dress to get on.’ The draught flickered between my shoulder blades as he shut the door behind him.

  ‘Sit down so I can get at you,’ instructed Kate as she pulled my hair loose for brushing. The brush would never go through unless she lifted my hair and swept it through from underneath.

  ‘You’d think the black would come off on your fingers,’ Kate grumbled. It was hard to make my hair shine, though the fire brought out glints of red and gold in its blackness. The strong, sure tug of the brush in Kate’s hands was almost the oldest thing I remembered. And the blue sparks in the dark nursery at night.

  She rubbed in some pomade to soften it, and brushed again. There would be no sparks tonight. The violet pomade masked the smells of hair and skin, as the violet soap had done. I wanted to wash it off.

  ‘It’s going up beautifully,’ said Kate in triumph, as her quick fingers twisted, knotted and pinned. I felt my head grow heavy, and the cool air struck my neck. The knot of hair pulled my head back. Kate fluffed curls loose on my forehead, wetted her finger, ran it round the inside of a curl so it would lie as she left it.

  ‘Look at yourself!’ she told me. I saw the rich slope of my shoulder, the heavy, cloudy knob of hair, the line of my cheek and jaw.

  ‘It’s a crime to put that dress on top of it,’ said Kate, but I stood and lifted my arms and she slipped the silk over my head, holding the dress like a tent so it would not touch my hair. There was a brief moment of pleasure as the cool stuff slithered
down me, then it settled and Kate twitched at the folds, fastened the neck, pulled the skirt straight. I stood still, not bothering to look in the mirror. I knew Kate was looking for me.

  ‘Hmm,’ she murmured disappointedly.

  I glanced and saw how the rose-pink drapery bulked out my breasts and made the mass of hair above it look suddenly too dark and clumsy. The skirt was not right either.

  ‘It’s the devil of a dress,’ exclaimed Kate, looking as if she would like to tear it off me.

  ‘It’s what they all wear, it doesn’t matter,’ I said.

  ‘Think of black velvet. If they’d even put some black velvet ribbon, say here, across the neckline …’

  ‘It would only make it worse. The silk is too light. It would bunch it up even more.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Now if Eileen was here …’ said Kate in frustration. Eileen was the one for clothes. She would have done something about the silk, if only to make sure it was never bought. Kate could do anything with hair, but though she could see in her mind’s eye just how the black velvet of her imagination would look on me, she could not cut out and sew the way Eileen could.

  ‘Grandfather will like it, anyway,’ I said. Kate smiled back. For once I would look like Grandfather’s version of the young girl growing up in his house.