A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ I said.

  ‘You should eat. Why don’t you go out? I’ll go for a walk with you, just round the garden. We needn’t go far.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of walking. And I am eating. Look.’ I picked up a knife and cut my tea cake into tiny squares. One by one I put them into my mouth and swallowed them. There was a salt slither of butter on my tongue, then the dryness of the cake. I had to think about each chew and swallow, but if I concentrated I could still do it. ‘There.’ I looked at Rob triumphantly.

  ‘You can’t have tasted it. Why do you eat like that?’

  ‘I can’t do everything for you!’ I spat out. ‘Haven’t I done enough?’

  But I could still be calm. For an hour or two I could stitch time together and keep my fear on the fringes of my mind. When Kate told me she was going the first thing I said was to ask her whether she had found a place yet. I told her she could be sure of an excellent reference. The day we sat in the attic and talked while Kate packed there was a little space between what happened and the reality of it. That day everything was easy. I sat and watched her pack and I gave her the opal ring. It was more than she expected, and she was ill at ease, not me. Kate didn’t steal my mother’s dress, so someone must have given it to her and I knew who. Sunlight blew in through the window and there was the kindness of its warmth on our skins, the first real warmth after the winter. I was kind with the ring. I looked at the shapes of the roof slanting away and thought I wouldn’t be afraid to step out on to them, but I said nothing to Kate. I’ve always had a great sense of balance and I never minded the drop at my feet, no matter how high I was, as long as I had a foothold. When she’d finished packing and the lid of the box was down she went away to make some last visits in the village.

  I said to Rob, ‘I ought to go away, not Kate,’ and he didn’t tell me not to go. Instead he said, ‘But where would you go?’ and I looked at him, longing for him to tell me I must always stay, I was as much part of him as the blood running round his body. But he said nothing more, and only looked at me with the quiet wariness that pushed me even farther away from him.

  Once I did go out. I walked as far as the top of the drive, where we had waited for Miss Gallagher to collect us in the trap to go and see Father in The Sanctuary. At first I was quite safe because I made a tunnel in my mind and walked in its safety, and whenever the sides wavered I plastered them together so nothing could come through. But when I was at the top of the drive I thought I was stronger than I was and I let myself slip into knowing how far I was from the house. The trees changed from themselves and became unreal as paintings. I put out my hands as if I was swimming. I looked round quickly, jerkily, at the trees, the wall, the gate, the sky. I could not see the house. Even if I ran I could never run in one breath. Gaps came in my tunnel faster than I could patch them together, and the world began to pour through. My heart was beating faster and faster and I could not breathe. The noise in my ears hurt me.

  ‘You’re all right,’ I said to myself loudly and angrily, dragging in the breath for it. ‘Don’t be so stupid. Don’t be such a fool. You’re as safe here as you are in the house,’ but this time it didn’t work. I could not run, so I shrank into myself and curled up there on the drive and lay in a ball where nothing could get into me and then the world broke on me like a rough sea.

  Rob found me. He had to talk for a long time before I knew it was him. I thought he was something happening inside my head. I don’t remember what I said but I was crying and shaking. I’d never cried before although two people had died. I wanted him to stay with me and hold me but he was frightened and he tried to pull me up and get me back to the house.

  ‘It’s not far,’ he kept saying. ‘Come on Cathy. Another step.’

  He should have left me there. Nothing worse would have happened, and perhaps after a while I’d have uncurled and looked up at the branches tangling the sky and everything would have been back in its place: the wet oak leaves plastering my knees, the rustle of sparrows which had come out to look at me, the cool wind sifting my hair. I would have watched the sparrows bounce closer and heard nothing but their cheeping. I would never have been frightened again.

  When we got back to the house Rob didn’t want to be with me. I knew why he was afraid. He thought I was ill because of Miss Gallagher. I’ll deal with her, I’d said, and Rob remembered it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said when we got to my room, ‘I’ll be all right. Just leave me for a bit. I’ll rest.’ I lay on the bed and let myself sink down as if I would vanish into the shape my own body had made over the years. I shut my eyes.

  ‘I’m no good to you, am I,’ he said, not making it a question.

  I smiled. He was so wrong that there was no point in answering, but I could tell him that another time. I had to get him out of the room while I was still strong. I wanted him so much, but every time I tried to pull him to me it made things worse.

  ‘I just make it worse. I make things worse for you,’ he said, and he left a space for me to answer. But I couldn’t say anything then. I was fighting too hard. I was in the ditch with my father, sweating and trembling. I couldn’t have anyone near me who was afraid of me, and I knew I’d be better alone.

  ‘I should never –’ he said, then he stopped.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’

  That was when he went up the stairs and met Kate. I’m only guessing, but I’m sure of it really. I know how it happened as if I had been there, in Rob’s skin. She came round the turn of the stairs with kindling in her arms and she saw at once from his face that something was wrong and he needed her.

  They both had their secrets. I wonder if they’ve ever told them? Kate is the only one who knows where my daughter is buried. And Miss Gallagher’s dead, knowing what Rob and I did at night in the narrow space of my bed. She took with her that tiny image of us twined and sleeping. Rob thinks he knows what happened in the wood. If I said again that she fell down before I had a chance to touch her he would want to believe it, but in the end uncertainty would creep back, a cloud growing to cover the day. I can’t give him certainty because I haven’t got it. I go back to the woods in my mind and I hear her voice. Did I touch her?

  There wasn’t a mark on her. Dr Milmain had to write down her cuts and bruises for his report, but they were made by bramble and stone, not human hands. It was just a weakness waiting in her body, and it could have happened at any time.

  ‘We all carry our deaths around with us,’ said Dr Milmain, ‘but if we’re lucky we don’t know what they are.’

  Everyone reassured me, but there’s still a little gap that no one knows about except me. Sometimes it closes up so it’s as thin as a hairline, then at other times it gapes wide, but it’s always there. It separates me from people.

  I don’t think Kate would ever tell Rob what happened in the empty cottage with the syringe, or how that little female creature twirled slowly in her bucket of blood. I can trust her for that. I don’t think Rob would ever tell Kate about the gap he senses although he can’t see it: what happened in the moment before Miss Gallagher’s natural weakness overtook her. But I also know that two people don’t always need to tell things to one another. Secrets can cross from one person to the other without words, and suddenly you find that you’ve always known them. If a child was born from those two people, I wonder if it would be born knowing all their secrets, somewhere within it. Perhaps that’s why I was born with such heaviness inside me.

  I’ve always liked letters. I get so few of them. And then the sight of my name on the envelope makes me feel real. If the writer believes that I exist, why I must do. But this time it wasn’t my mother’s writing on the envelope, though I had half expected it since Mr Bullivant told me she was sure to write again. There was just my first name written there, ‘Cathy’, and that would never bring a letter safe from France. I fingered the envelope without opening it. The writing wasn’t clear and blac
k: it was the cramped handwriting they had never been able to do anything about at Rob’s school. It was hard to read because he did not always form his letters in the same way. I would read it later, I thought. There were two cups on the breakfast table, my own and Rob’s, one half-full and one clean. He must have gone out early, to the woods perhaps. He wouldn’t be late back, because this was the day Kate was going and everyone would gather in the hall to say goodbye to her, then spill outside to wave for as long as the trap was in sight. I had planned to go to the station with her, and perhaps Rob had too. The house was quiet and the room was full of gentle sunlight. I heard a blackbird in the magnolia. Once it had stopped singing I’d open his letter.

  He began it the way he used to open his letters from school. Never ‘Dear Cathy’, but just ‘Cathy’, as if he were talking to me.

  Cathy,

  This is the fourth time I’ve started to write this, and whatever I write this time I’ll seal and you will read it. There isn’t time to write it again. I’m sorry. You know I’m not good at letters. Yours were always so much better.

  Cathy, you’ll be better without me. I know it. You don’t believe it yet but you will. Remember what you said about the Callans? You said ‘the barrenness of it’ and I couldn’t forget it, although I didn’t see what you meant then. I thought you were talking about children, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? I can’t bear to see you not eating and frightened to go out. I hate it when you’re frightened. I used to be able to stop it but I can’t any more.

  I’m going with Kate. By the time you get this I’ll have gone. She was going to go to Ireland but she’s changed her mind. There’s nothing for her there except another place, worse than this one probably. I think she only wanted to go because of

  The next bit was scratched out with deep gouges of the pen and I couldn’t read it even when I held up the back of the letter to the light and tried to read the words backwards.

  Never mind. It doesn’t matter. We’re going to Canada. There are liners from Cobh. They sail from France, then they call at Southampton and Cobh. We’ll sail to New York. I’ve got the money for the passage and some to live on until we get started, but don’t worry, I’ve only taken what’s mine. I’ve written to Grandfather to tell him.

  I don’t care what I do, I’ve got to get away from here. I know you don’t feel the same. You ought to have this place, not me. It seems to belong to you more.

  You know that Kate has a cousin in Canada. We’ll start there, and I’ll write to you. I must finish this now, because there isn’t much time. I went to look in your room but you were sleeping. You looked so peaceful.

  You’ll be better without me, Cathy, I know you will. Don’t let Grandfather know what’s in this letter.

  At the bottom he’d written Remember our, then put a line through it and scratched out what came after so it was illegible.

  Twenty

  ‘Canada,’ said Mr Bullivant.

  We were walking in the rose garden. I’d been pruning the roses that morning. Their stems were woody, and I wore my pigskin gloves against two years’ growth of thorns. I cut hard back until I came to the greenish shadow of sap. Now another skin was hardening over the cuts I’d made, slanting just above the bud spurs. I’d been outside the whole morning, working until I’d cut away all the old spongy wood and raked the prunings into a pile. Later I’d fetch a barrow and wheel them to the ashy place behind the glasshouse where John made his fires. They were dry enough to burn at once. Fire would pour upward, thin and colourless in the spring sunshine, snapping with heat. Tomorrow I’d do more.

  We walked on. The word ‘Canada’ expanded like a breath in the following silence. I looked out and away to the woods where they were covered in a grey-green haze, not quite leaf but a little more than bud.

  ‘Which part of Canada? Do you know?’ asked Mr Bullivant at last.

  ‘I’m not sure what it’s called, but I’ll tell you what it’s like.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s in the middle of the prairie. You can see the roof a dozen miles off, rising over the grass like a sail. The grass is taller than a man and when the wind blows through it makes roads wide enough for a wagon and horses to turn. The house is made of white board and the roofs red. You can see a thread of smoke as it comes out of the chimney, then it blows away to nothing. The wind’s always moving, day and night, like a sea, and the house creaks and moves with it. There used to be a turf house there before, a sod house they call it, made of the earth and crouched down low to it so you could almost walk past without seeing it. They have a fence round the vegetable garden to keep the fowls in, and you would never believe what they grow there unless you’d seen it with your own eyes. Their tomatoes are so fat they bend the vines down and loll on the ground till they split, and their potatoes are yellow-sweet and each as big as a fist. They never turn to mush in cooking. There are peas and beans and squash and berry bushes. What they can’t eat or store they take to the cannery. In the winter the snow buries it all a yard deep so you’d think nothing would ever grow again, but the cold cleans the ground and as soon as it melts the sun’s hot and the seeds crack open and start to grow. They don’t have spring as we do. The soil’s black and it crumbles sweetly in your hand, and it’s so rich that if you put your ear to the ground at the start of the season you can hear the grass growing. If you stuck your walking-stick into that earth it would burst into leaf.’

  ‘How on earth do you know all this? Your brother can’t have written to you already. He’s only been gone a fortnight.’

  ‘Twelve days.’

  ‘He might be in Ireland still, waiting for his ship. So what’s this place you’re telling me about?’

  ‘It’s what Kate told me. She made me half believe I’d been there myself.’

  He hadn’t said Kate’s name. He’d talked as if Rob were travelling alone, from delicacy I suppose. But everyone knew. When I went to the village waves of whispers opened in front of me and closed again as I passed. I didn’t care. Why shouldn’t people know? I walked steadily. I had to speak to the Semple boys about some work that was needed on the roof. If I didn’t arrange it, no one else would.

  ‘Is your grandfather any better? I’ll call on him as soon as he can have visitors,’ said Mr Bullivant.

  ‘He’s not ill at all. It was just –’

  ‘The shock?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Shock was one way of putting it. He was ill with rage. His skin was yellow with it. Then when his rage had burnt out he lay on his bed, tiny and malevolent, his hawk eyes masked as if another skin had grown over them. He looked at me with hunger.

  ‘Ah, Catherine. You’re still here.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been sitting with you. You’ve been asleep. Do you want some of this barley water?’

  ‘Good God, no. It looks like an overnight chamberpot. I’m not ill.’

  ‘I know you’re not.’

  ‘I’m angry,’ he said. ‘What did I bring her here for?’

  I knew he meant my mother.

  ‘To run away from me, that’s what,’ he went on, ‘and to teach the boy to do the same. That fool doesn’t know he’s born, but he’ll soon find out once he gets wherever he’s going. Canada! Fairyland,’ he said. ‘He’ll soon see what he’s thrown away. For he won’t get an inch of the land now, not if he crawls back through the snow on his hands and knees.’

  ‘He won’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘You’d know, I suppose. He’s a stranger to me. You’re all I’ve got now, Catherine.’

  I said nothing. He began to eat the beef sandwiches I’d brought him, chewing them with quick, chopping bites at the front of his mouth. He had lost most of his side and back teeth but the front ones were good, small and sharp. His room faced north, and the light was sparse, crowded out by the tall furniture that he’d bought with the house. When I was little I thought a family might easily live in his wardrobe. There was a badger-hair shaving brush on his wash stand, stiff with disuse
, and water standing in the jug. He hadn’t washed.

  ‘I could eat another plateful,’ he said, chasing the crumbs and pinching them between his fingers.

  ‘I’ll bring you some more. There’s any amount of beef.’

  ‘It’s a fine life we lead, isn’t it, Catherine?’ His laughter cracked out. ’Any amount of beef! Wait till that fool of a brother of yours gets to Canada. He’ll be begging for beef in his sleep. Kate will be all right. She’s not soft like him. She wasn’t brought up between sheets.’

  ‘I think she was, Grandfather. She brought her own when she came.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Get those sandwiches and I’ll tell you something.’

  The kitchen was empty and clean, with the bleached dishcloths hung up to dry above the stove. Mrs Blazer would be sleeping. Without her afternoon sleep she was a dead thing by dinnertime. I cut the beef myself; the yellow fat and the rosy, marbled flesh. I made a plateful of sandwiches and a big pot of strong tea and took it up to him.

  ‘You forgot the mustard. Beef’s no good without mustard.’

  ‘There was no mustard in the ones you ate before. But I’ll fetch it if you like.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Outside Grandfather’s window there was a laurel tree which had grown up to hide half the window. He would not have it cut back. He seemed to like its dim, leathery leaves feeling at the glass, but to me they weren’t like living things at all. I would have chosen something supple and tender to look at every day, like a birch or a beech. I said so.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Catherine, you can’t have a beech growing so close to the house.’

  ‘Or wistaria.’

  ‘That wouldn’t live out of the sun. What’s wrong with my laurel?’

  ‘It’s so stiff. The sun doesn’t come through it. And it doesn’t shake and make shadows when the breeze turns the leaves. That’s what I like.’