A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  They all laughed, their faces red and shiny with sweat. Rob laughed like the rest of them. They hadn’t seen I was there.

  I walked away, into the conservatory. Outside the day was thickening to a dull yellowish twilight. Three o’clock. The dead stillness of frost had eased and I saw a flicker of wind cross the tops of the elms. It would be like this to the end of winter. The dark coming a little later each night, and the stubborn pushing of bulbs at the soil. My mother was walking on a long bright promenade by a purple sea. She did not write to us. Was her hair turning grey now? Was age putting a check on her blitheness? Did anybody love her any more? I saw her wind her hair in a white silk scarf, and then the breeze from the sea unwound it, coil by coil. She would stand and face the water: there would be a frigate, far out and lit up. The air would smell of salt and orange blossom. She would never come back to dig Lent lilies out of the snow and drag her skirts in the ash that blew across our hall.

  Now there was a figure standing beside my mother, dark and upright. He took her arm, turned her to him, gently fastened the scarf about her hair while she smiled past him.

  ‘My angel!’

  ‘Rodney …’ But she spoke absently. Rodney; no, the name was wrong. The sky faded. It was all rubbish, anyway. She only wore the scarf so that the loose skin of her throat was hidden. Soon the flesh under her chin would begin to wobble. In a year or two she would start to wear palest pink, never white, and she’d always sit with her back to sunlit windows. I’d got to grow out of seeing her as I’d last seen her, always victorious and sweet-scented, always going somewhere else and leaving people behind as if that was part of her triumph. They were just a man and a woman, two insects squeaking to one another in front of the long mouth of the sea, where foam showed like teeth. She was a fool, a fool who ruined other fools. That was what Grandfather said when he sat drinking after my father’s funeral. He looked at me as if he hated me and told Kate to plait back my hair and not let it fall in my face like a street child’s.

  ‘Tight! Tighter than that! Can’t you make the child look decent, even in mourning?’

  There was something about my eyes that was wrong, and the way my hair grew. I had eyes that were put in with a dirty finger, Kate said. I should have had eyes like Livvy’s, clear and pale like collected water. I was too like my mother. My face made people think of the things men and women did together in the dark.

  When my mother left I saw Father cry. It was because a dress she had had altered came back to the house in a long flat brown-paper parcel, addressed to her. He tore it open and the grey folds of the dress blew round his face like cobwebs. It was an evening chiffon which we called her ghost dress. He scrubbed the fabric against his face, snuffing up the smell of it, which was the smell of her body. I watched him and knew exactly what he was smelling, because whenever I went past her bedroom door I tried the handle. Usually it was locked but sometimes I got in. It was just as if she was coming back any minute. I climbed into her wardrobe and rubbed my face against her skirts: the slither of satin, rasping wool, fine cotton lawn. All round me there was the smell of her body, bringing me home. It made me cry, so I knew why Father cried.

  Grandfather came into the hall.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said, seeing Father, but Father didn’t seem to hear him, or anyone. Grandfather went over to him and drew the dress out of his hands. He put his arm round my father. I had never seen him so gentle. They were like that for a long time, my father sitting with his head down and his arms hanging loose at his sides, my grandfather bent over him. I wished I was one of them. My grandfather kicked the grey chiffon under the bench with his boot, and I never saw it again, though I looked everywhere. I did not dare take anything out of my mother’s wardrobe, but the chiffon, perhaps, I could have had, since nobody wanted it. I’d take it to bed with me and wind it round me in the darkness.

  They’d stopped moving the piano. The Semple boys must have gone. My forehead had a ridge on it from leaning against the pane, not seeing what was outside the windows. I couldn’t see the elms any more, the air was thickening, whitening –

  ‘Rob! Rob! It’s snowing!’

  It was falling fast, the first flakes sticking to the terrace stone, joined by others. In a few minutes it was thick enough to make a footprint. Rob wound his arm over my shoulder and I smelled his sweat. He was panting.

  ‘Cath, let’s go out in it.’ He wrenched at the bar fastening of the conservatory door and the air blew in, carrying snow.

  ‘No, wait!’

  I looked round. The conservatory was filling up with white light. We were both inside and outside. I looked up and saw the furry flakes tunnel down and settle in a pelt on the glass.

  ‘Shut the door, Rob, let’s get some candles.’

  I ran to the kitchen for a box of household candles and saucers to put them in. Rob fetched the oil lamp. We’d set them around the edges of the glass, where the flames would shine through the plants. Kate followed to see what we were doing as I knelt to light each wick, dab wax on the saucer, fix the candles upright. The flames sprang out and turned the snowy sky dark blue outside the glass. I set a candle by the orange trees my father had planted when he was a boy. He had planted twenty, and these four had survived and grown into trees. He’d brought them with him when he married my mother. Every summer they went out on to the terrace, and they were brought into the conservatory again before the first frosts. My grandfather saw to it still. I lit the candle and at once the sour wizened oranges that the trees bore shone out like treasures. Their dark dusty leaves made pointed shadows on the floor. Rob lit the oil lamp and hung it up so it spilled yellow light like petals. Already the warmth of the candles was drawing out the perfume of hyacinths. Rob knelt on the floor, dragging out something hidden against the wall.

  ‘The gramophone! Wind it up, Rob, we’ll dance.’

  I’d dance now. I felt like dancing. There was our stack of records in their cardboard sleeves, ready to play. He pulled one out, balanced the record on a finger, twirled it like a conjuror’s plate.

  ‘Give it to me, you’ll smash it.’

  I held it while Rob wound up the gramophone. It was ‘Nile Journey’.

  ‘Come on, Cathy, we’ll have much more room if we push the tubs back.’

  We shoved back the heavy tubs, the orange trees and the hydrangeas and the camellias, pushing them against the snowy glass.

  ‘Mind you don’t leave them there for the frost to scorch,’ Kate warned.

  ‘It’s all right just for now –’

  More and more of the black-and-white tiled floor appeared. I tapped my foot and heard the ring of my toe against the cool surface, sweeter than the pock of a dance slipper on polished wood. Candle shadows leapt from my foot across the tiles. Rob held out his hand for the record. The needle wobbled, settled into the groove, and started to spin out sugar.

  ‘Up – on the NILE

  in the bright moonshine –

  will you be mine

  or the crocoDILE’s’

  bawled Rob, drowning the words.

  ‘God, that’s desperate stuff,’ commented Kate. ‘Imagine, he was paid to write it.’

  ‘Perfect tripe. Let’s find something else.’ He lifted the needle but it bumped down again, scoring the wax. Kate stood there, her skirt switching just a little, side to side.

  ‘Is there nothing worth dancing to in all that lot?’ she demanded.

  ‘Depends what you call worth dancing to –’ frowned Rob, shuffling through the records. ‘Nothing much here – what happened to “Because”, Cathy?’

  ‘You danced it to death last night.’

  ‘Mmm, come to think of it, so we did …’

  ‘Because – you went away,

  Because – you said goodbye …’

  he hummed, sitting back on his heels with the spoiled record in his hand. Kate stirred the pile of records with her toe, lightly, contemptuously.

  ‘Here – there’s this waltz -’ said Rob. He put it on. It was thi
n and plaintive, like music from far away, snatched by an icy wind. It matched the falling snow and the sour smell of oranges on my fingers. Rob stood up, shoved the records out the way and held out his arms to Kate. She moved forward lightly, smiling. She tapped her foot twice then she moved off in the curve of his body, on the beat of the waltz.

  Kate didn’t dance like Livvy. There was part of her that went out of herself, into the music, into the touch of the man holding her. How light and elastic she was as she danced. Kate lived in her body, not like the girls of the night before who carried their pretty bodies around with them as if they didn’t know they were there. Not like Livvy, who was always half elsewhere. Kate’s waist swayed. She took Rob’s hand and her white freckled arm shone against the darkness of her blue dress. I saw his eyes half shut, smiling down at her. Kate’s white arm, Kate’s dark-blue dress. She was not just Kate any more, our strong Kate with her jugs of hot water and her flashes of temper and sadness. I saw it didn’t matter that Kate was twenty-nine, not really young any more. Her long sliding eyes, the strong white line of her throat, her red mouth: they hadn’t changed and they wouldn’t change. Kate was beautiful. Another flurry of snow funnelled down to stick and slide on the glass while the twilight lost its grey and became as dark as the sky between stars. I would keep it like this for ever. Snow stitching its pattern, whirling down and furring the white windows. The little bitter oranges my father had planted, glowing in the light from the oil lamp, and the perfume of hyacinths all around us, teasing then yielding. I wiped orange oil from my fingers and knelt on the cold tiles by a tub of white hyacinths and watched them dance.

  The music stopped.

  ‘Wind it up, Cathy, let’s have it again,’ said Rob.

  ‘No,’ said Kate. ‘Why would the poor girl want to sit and watch the two of us dancing all night? Come on, Catherine, I’ll dance with you.’

  ‘What about me?’ Rob asked.

  ‘You’ll play the music for us,’ she ordered him.

  I was used to dancing with other girls. It was the way we had learned when we were little, before we were let loose on the boys at dancing-school. I put my hand on Kate’s waist the way Rob had done. My hand fitted into the soft warmth of her the way my whole body had once curled into her lap. Suddenly I remembered what it had been like to burrow my head into Kate’s breasts and hear the deep, quick thump of her heart. Her heart was hers but I could hear it when she could not.

  ‘We can’t both lead,’ said Kate. She was laughing. Her face was very close to mine. Her sharp white teeth showed in her red mouth. I felt clumsy, bumping and fumbling against her. We couldn’t get started. I would never be able to go through the waltz with her, the way Rob had.

  ‘No,’ said Kate, ‘not like that.’ She took hold of me the way she’d take hold of a dress that was hanging the wrong way, creasing itself. She would shake it out with one brisk shake and put it back so that it hung, smoothing itself by its own weight. Suddenly I was at ease, letting her hold me. I remembered Kate and Eileen folding sheets in the attic, holding the corners, bringing them together, cracking the linen hard as they pulled it straight. They made it like a dance. Rob lowered the needle and it started again, the pale sound of the waltz. I moved off with Kate, smelling the sharp fresh sweat of her day’s work and the faint scorched smell of her newly ironed dress. I shut my eyes as our skirts brushed the white hyacinths, then the dark-blue ones that leaned over the edges of their tub. I felt one snap and I knew how its juice would trail from the glutinous stem on to the tiles. We would break more flowers as we turned and swooped, but I didn’t care. Kate was closer to me than the darkness behind my closed eyes.

  ‘My turn,’ said Rob. He took my hand and my waist and I danced out of Kate’s arms into his. He spun me faster so that the snow whirled outside and the little oranges trembled on their stems as we brushed the trees. Kate wound the gramophone while we danced without music, and she brought the waltz back to us so we didn’t miss a step.

  ‘Now!’ said Kate, and she cut in across, took Rob from me, danced him to the ice-cold door which led out to the terrace, danced him back and left him, and in two steps I was Kate’s again. Whatever she’d done to the music it seemed to go on and on now without anyone winding the gramophone. It ached in me like the cold settling slowly through the dome of snow. The waltz caressed me under my clothes, touching my breasts and all the white warm flesh which was so much more myself than the face I showed. Rob was watching us, his face yellow from the oil lamp. I felt the pump of Kate’s heart, beating fast from the dance.

  ‘Kate,’ I said. ‘Kate,’ and I laughed without knowing what there was to laugh for, and she smiled back, the corners of her mouth curling as they did when she sang me to sleep on songs of girls dying from betrayal and young men leaving the country where they were born.

  The conservatory door smashed open. I felt the jar before I saw her. She stood there in her black mackintosh coat with snow heaped on her shoulders. On her it looked dead as scurf. She glared at me out of her pinched and raging face and the music wound down slowly until the needle hissed into silence. I saw that the black-and-white tiles were mashed over with hyacinth flowers. It was a wonder we hadn’t fallen. The little oranges had split and rolled to the corners of the room.

  ‘Are you mad, Catherine? Are you completely mad?’ demanded Miss Gallagher. She wouldn’t look at the others, only at me. I thought how she’d seen me with my eyes closed, leaning back in Kate’s arms. How long had she been standing there, waiting to burst the door open? Now I felt the flare of colour in my face and the way my hair stuck to my forehead. In spite of the oil lamp and the heating pipes it was cold.

  Rob turned his back on Miss Gallagher, whistling through his teeth, dismissing her. She would like to kill him, I knew. She’d always wanted to wipe him out, make him not be my brother. I knew the murderous edge of her love for me. She would like to blot me out too at this moment, because of what she’d seen. She would wipe out Rob, and Kate. She would wither the fruit and flowers and blast the snow so that there was nothing left but hard brown earth. It would be better for us to be destroyed than to sin. But she could do nothing except stand there. She was ugly in her long coat with the snow starting to drip off it on to the floor. The wind outside had polished her nose to purple, and at the end of it a drip gathered to match the dripping snow. She looked ridiculous and I saw Kate thinking her ridiculous, shrugging her shoulders slightly as she picked up bells of crushed hyacinth from the floor. Kate could always play the servant when she wanted. Kate was on her knees and bold, and I was cowering upright. I was bad at anger; I’d always been bad at anger. There was something pitiful in Miss Gallagher which muddled me. It made me crisp my fingers inside my fists and I could not share the hostility which burned clear in Kate and Rob. I was afraid of Miss Gallagher because she loved me and I had always feared she sensed some affinity between us which I couldn’t yet see. It made me fear that other people pitied me as I pitied her.

  ‘Look what you’ve done. It was your precious father who planted those orange trees,’ said Miss Gallagher to me. She was panting and it thickened her voice so it could have been a man’s voice.

  ‘We know,’ said Rob, tinting his voice with boredom. She was scarcely human to him.

  ‘You know! You know nothing, none of you!’ she raged. ‘But you will know. You’ll find out. You’ll drive your sister the way her mother went, and then you’ll find out. Look at her! Look at her face! You fool, can’t you see what blood she’s got in her?’

  She knows something, I thought in a panic. She knows something we don’t know and she’s going to say it now unless we can stop her. I saw Rob sharpen, his eyes narrow on her. In a moment she’d say it and then it could never be changed or taken away. But Kate was there first.

  ‘She has her mother’s eyes,’ said Kate, her voice a light flick of assurance across Miss Gallagher’s fury.

  ‘And what would a piece of Irish filth know about it?’ asked Miss Gallagher. Then she gasp
ed and her high colour shrank into red patches while her throat gulped. She was afraid. She hadn’t meant to say that.

  ‘Was that meant for the mother too?’ asked Kate easily. It was a minute before I realized she was talking about our mother. I saw how Kate could hate without a blow or a word. I had seen women fighting in the village once, two of them clawing at a third. When she fell to the ground they kicked her in the side of the head, then one of them jumped on her face with her heavy boots so that the marks of the nails in the soles sprang out in blood. She twitched and jerked and they waited each time until she was half out of the mud and cow dung before they kicked her down again. Her face was slimed with blood and snot where they had broken her nose. No one stopped them. It was a fight over a man, the husband of one of them.

  But Kate used different weapons. She stared at Miss Gallagher until Miss Gallagher had read in her face everything that Kate thought of her mackintosh and her love for me and her ravings about my father. Miss Gallagher began to cry. She turned away from Kate with her shoulders hunched as if Kate had hit her, and she blundered back to the door. She skidded where the slime from the hyacinths had coated the tiles like a snail’s trail. She would escape through the house, and then she would have to tell the story of this afternoon to herself over and over until she could make a different shape from it to comfort herself. All alone in her house she’d make herself believe that everything had happened differently. That I’d been glad to see her, had welcomed her even. She would make herself believe that I was grateful when the candle flames shrank into nothing and the snow was just snow. Then she would dare to come back. Kate had beaten her again and it had been too easy. I couldn’t bear those mackin-toshed shoulders with the snow drizzling down them. She was shaking. But Rob looked at me and smiled.

  Seven

  ‘The fountain,’ said Mr Bullivant.