A Spell of Winter

by Helen Dunmore

  I’d never talked to him like this before. Perhaps it was because he was lying down, or because I’d never spent so long in one room with him in my life.

  He turned sharply on his pillow, raised himself on one elbow and said, ‘That’s what you like, is it?’

  There was too much in his voice for the small conversation we were having. ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised. ‘I like to look up at the sky through the leaves.’

  He pushed the sandwiches aside and was silent for a long time while I looked out of the window. I thought he was falling asleep again, but then he said, ‘She liked to look up at the leaves.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Cynthia.’ Not ‘your mother’, not ‘Cincie’, not ‘my daughter’. I’d never heard him call her by any name since she’d gone. I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing, and in a while he went on.

  ‘It’s hard for a man to rear a child. He hasn’t the feeling for it. She wanted soft things. Even when I was holding her she was wanting to crib herself round into something soft that wasn’t there. The way a man’s body is made, it’s like a rack of ribs. It doesn’t fit to a child.’

  He was quiet again and I thought he’d finished. There was so much I wanted to know but I didn’t dare question him. He was talking as freely as if I weren’t there and he was alone inside his head.

  ‘I had her from ten days old. Her mother seemed to be better. She sat up in bed and drank a bowl of milk with the baby folded into a shawl at her side. But the next day the rash started on her throat, then lower down and all over her body. She wouldn’t let anyone see it until she was too weak to stop them. She put out both hands to push me off, and I let her. She talked all the time for two nights and then she was quiet. She’d forgotten that she had the baby. It didn’t cry like a baby – it sounded like the door creaking, to and fro.’

  He looked at the laurel leaves. ‘The smell of her was terrible,’ he said. ‘It hit you as you came over the threshold.’

  I thought of the baby: my mother. I knew he had brought her here alone, and no one knew anything about her mother, except that she’d died.

  ‘She was the first to go,’ said my grandfather. ‘I couldn’t keep her. But I kept Cynthia though there were women waiting to take her, thinking they knew more than I did. She was my flesh and blood. I gave her goat’s milk. You’ve no idea what it is to sit up all night with a child, dipping your hand in goat’s milk so she’ll suck it off your fingers. Then I found she liked sweet things and if I let her taste a little honey first she’d swallow the milk. I could hold her in one hand with two fingers behind her neck to steady it. She would never sleep in her cradle. She wanted a body round her, so I had to sleep with her curled inside one arm and I’d wake to find she’d crept up close and her face was crumpled against me. I was afraid I’d crush her in my sleep, but I never did. Later, when she learned to smile, that was the first thing I saw: her face beside me looking like half the world because it was so close, and her smile.’

  He stopped talking. I poured the tea and handed it to him. It was as dark as he liked it. He swallowed and said,

  ‘If you ever have a child that won’t sleep, Catherine, though you won’t if you go on the way you’re going, take it out under the trees. When she cried I’d hold her in my arms and walk her under the leaves so she could see them spread out against the sky and moving. It always quieted her. She’d put her head back on my arm and open her eyes wide and I could walk her there for an hour or more without another sound from her. It was nothing much when I looked up to see what she saw, but it pleased her. Just the leaves. I suppose the sound of them quieted her too. She liked birches best, and then the horse-chestnuts.’

  There was a sound in his voice I’d never heard before.

  ‘Did you ever take us out under the trees when we were babies?’ I asked.

  ‘You! No. There was no call for it. You had your mother.’

  He drank down the tea, his fingers agitated on the cup. ‘And once was enough,’ he said. ‘It was enough.’

  ‘Yes, I think he’d like to see you,’ I said to Mr Bullivant.

  ‘Good. I’ll come.’

  We walked on. There were weeds sprawling in the gravel and the grass was overgrown. Everything grew too fast: weeds, damp patches on walls and ceilings, the holes in the roof, the brambles in the woods, the debts that nobody mentioned. None of this would be Rob’s now. There was no way of asking if it would be mine, but already I felt that it was. It was mine to work on.

  ‘You must be very much alone,’ said Mr Bullivant.

  ‘Yes. Look, let’s go this way.’ The magnolia’s buds were fat. I picked one off and sliced it through with my fingernail, to where the flower crouched, crumpled. I dropped it and pulled off another.

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Look, this one’s a bit pink. They’re just as they will be.’

  The exposed petals turned brown almost at once where they had been torn.

  ‘It’s getting old, this magnolia,’ I said. ‘That branch is coming down. It’ll go in the next storm.’

  ‘You must miss them. Kate too.’

  They were suddenly as close as if they’d been standing on the path in front of us. Kate in her dark-blue work dress and apron, her arms folded, looking at me with the beginning of a laugh in the corner of her mouth, and the same laugh sliding into her eyes. There was Rob, stopped in mid-stride, his gun over his shoulder and his bright brown hair crushed down under his cap. He glanced back over his shoulder and walked on. They were like a great wind tearing at the sides of the house, like the storm four years ago when the windows had bent as if they were sucking in breath. Grandfather had jammed the big drawing-room window shut with a doorstopper and the wind hadn’t got in. I forced my mind shut. As if the wind had dropped they hung suddenly still, shimmering a little, then vanished.

  ‘If they were in the house now they wouldn’t be any more with me than they are,’ I said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I wonder sometimes, if it’s the people themselves who keep you company, or the idea of them. The idea you have of them.’

  ‘I think that’s true.’

  ‘I know it is, for me.’

  ‘So they’re still with you.’

  ‘Or still not with me. Perhaps they were not with me all the time, when I thought they were.’

  ‘Because they kept things secret from you? You didn’t know?’

  ‘I don’t know that there was anything to keep secret.’

  ‘There must have been.’

  ‘People do things suddenly sometimes. Out of nowhere.’

  ‘Am I just an idea in your mind, then, Catherine?’

  He was facing me. Although it was so early in the year he was already tanned. The sun had got into him in Italy and it was always half there, ready to be brought out again even here in April. He looked at me carefully as he always did, as if I were as much worth looking at as a painting. A bright spring wind blew clouds across the sun and away again, so their shadows flickered over us. ‘You’ve got some colour,’ he said.

  ‘I was out all morning. There’s so much to do. This place is falling to pieces.’

  ‘Will it be yours? Is that what you want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going away.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Quite soon.’

  ‘To Italy?’

  ‘Yes, but to France first.’

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You can’t just leave it. All that building. And the new orchard – your fountain –’

  ‘It isn’t going as I wanted it to,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t know why. If I were a painter I’d say I was overpainting – do you know what I mean? Stubbing out what was good in the sketches. But I’m not a painter. It was a wonderful idea but now it feels like moving things around for no reason. Soil and trees and furniture.’

  ‘But it’s going to be beautiful.’
/>
  ‘Very likely. But that wasn’t the point.’

  ‘I thought it was.’

  ‘Part of it, perhaps. I wanted to explore, to find something that might have existed, to feel along the thread like a spider. Perhaps discover a landscape I could live in.’

  ‘And you can’t?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think I can. I wanted to.’

  ‘So you’re going away.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’ll sell up.’

  ‘No. Not yet. Listen, Catherine. You could come too.’

  The wind was loosening my hair and blowing strands across my face. The sharp sunlight scrubbed at my eyes. Down below us the tops of the woods were moving, ready to come to life like great arms that lifted me and held me in. The woods. The place of the hare. He knew nothing about me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave here. It’s my place.’

  ‘You’ll never be able to keep it on, just you and your grandfather.’

  ‘I can work. Besides, I can’t leave him. Everyone else has gone, and if I left then he would have to leave too. I’ve had a look at the books while he’s been in his room. We shan’t be able to pay wages if things don’t change soon.’

  ‘He’ll stay till the house falls in around him. He made it. It’s his. He won’t leave it.’

  ‘Nor shall I.’

  Our hands lay quite close on warm grey stone. We had drifted across to the terrace wall, looking out at layers of grey and green, stubby with buds and the raw, hurting sense of spring.

  ‘You really are very like your mother,’ he said, and touched my hand lightly, as if he were pointing something out.

  ‘She never sent another letter, did she?’

  ‘I could take you to see her.’

  ‘No. Not yet. Have you ever been to Canada?’

  ‘As it happens, yes. I seem to be haunted by your family wherever I go, Catherine.’

  ‘What’s it like really?’

  ‘The part I went to was mostly forest. Wild, but not as things are wild here. Anything might happen. If you walk into the trees and turn around with your eyes shut you might lose yourself for ever.’

  ‘It’ll be like that here soon. Why were you there?’

  ‘Oh, business. Railways. There’s a lot of money to be made in an empty country.’

  Twin steel lines glittered like fish as they disappeared into the forest. The train rounded the bend with a long plaintive whistle that there was no one within a hundred miles to hear. Its freight was money.

  ‘I’d like to go there,’ I said, ‘but not yet.’

  ‘Time might run out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Things don’t go on for ever, waiting till you want them. And the world’s changing fast. All the things we’re so sure about can vanish just like that.’

  ‘I’m not sure about anything.’

  ‘Except that you’ll stay here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when I next come, will the roses have grown right up the castle walls?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll prune them.’

  I looked at his hand, which had been to Canada and to France. It had held my mother’s. I looked at my hands, which had pushed at Miss Gallagher as she stumbled. Or had they? Had they touched her? I had no memory any more, only a puzzle of images, each one so bright I had to believe it as it burnt up in my mind. My body was thin now and full of hollows, but it had carried my child inside it. I had buried the hare but I was alive and my body was not a burial ground. I had worked two hours without stopping. If I looked behind me I could see where I’d cleared the ground. I would make myself strong.

  Twenty-one

  Ash Court was empty of Mr Bullivant. I was surprised how much difference it made. I’d got used to thinking of him there, building and planting, giving as much attention to a new type of kitchen stove as he gave to the carving of a balustrade. I missed the crackle of new plans in his pockets: plans not of things the way they were, but as they would be. He was back in Italy, they said in the village, trying to save the precious things in his villa against the war. No, he was in France. He’d volunteered though he need never have gone, seeing he was close to forty. He’d had to fight to make them take him, ‘near as hard as he’ll fight in France’. Then they laughed, because in the end a man was a fool to leave his land unless he was taken. France was far away and unimaginable, like the war.

  ‘It’s all nonsense,’ said my grandfather. ‘George Bullivant is on a hospital ship, lugging stretchers about. He wrote and told me so himself. He asked after you, Catherine. There’s mud on your forehead.’

  I rubbed it off. I’d been chopping turnips, but half of them were rotten with frost. My hands stank with their slime. They were chapped too, and there were itchy sores on the middle fingers of my right hand which wouldn’t heal.

  ‘He’s gone to Gallipoli,’ said my grandfather, ‘the more fool him.’

  ‘I’ll go and wash.’

  Mrs Blazer came in with a dish of mutton stew. She still slept in the house, but you couldn’t have said we employed her any more. She had her keep from us, a share in whatever there was. We’d pared life down to manage without money. I could skin a rabbit now as easily as I could undress myself. We ate pigeon-pie baked with apples stored in the loft until they wrinkled into intense, nutty sweetness. We ate rabbit and rabbit and rabbit. Roast rabbit, potted rabbit, rabbit stew. We didn’t buy and sell any more: we bartered, exchanging a load of firewood for honey on the comb, and a bushel of apples for a length of calico. We were lucky.

  Mrs Blazer traded like a market woman, using our house as her supply base. She kept goats in the paddock, starting with a pair. We had milk and cheese, as much as we wanted, and she sold the rest. Their milk was sweet. ‘It’s all in the feed. Everything they eat comes through to the milk,’ she said. She knew a man who kept a market stall in town. He sold remedies, simple things like horehound pastilles for coughs and Goalings Syrup for gripe. And other things too, she said, nodding at me, kept under the red-and-white checked cloth and slipped into women’s hands after they’d added a whisper to their request for ‘something to settle this stummick that’s troubling me’.

  ‘They’d have called him a wizard when I was a girl,’ said Mrs Blazer.

  He sold her goats’ milk for her, under a sign we’d painted to his direction: ‘Cleans the Stomach and the Complexion’.

  ‘D’you think that’ll sell it?’ I asked.

  ‘Course it will. You wouldn’t credit how many people are troubled with their digestions, specially these days.’

  She wrapped her goats’ cheeses in comfrey leaves and heaped them under a second sign: ‘Fine Sweet Cheese to Slip Down Easy. Build up your Best Boy when he Comes Home’.

  She grubbed up handfuls of wild garlic from the neglected paddock so the goats wouldn’t eat it. She was old but she was young too, more vigorous than ever. I saw shadows of the tough, free-stepping girl she must have been once, before kitchens swallowed her. ‘There’s no call for a goat to smell goaty ‘less you keep them dirty,’ she said. She taught me to make bread, punching down the dough in a big earthenware bowl and setting it to rise under a clean damp white cloth. But she hated the flour we had now, coarse stuff that looked as if it had grit in it or worse, and made a loaf that wouldn’t rise no matter how you kneaded it.

  We fished for carp and shot duck on the lake at Ash Court. Mr Bullivant had made his lake before he went. He’d left enough money to keep everything immaculate as a stopped clock, but once the war took hold you could buy everything but men to work for you. One by one men had leaked out of the village. Not many went from choice, but some did. It’s hard now to remember how it was then. I only knew one well, and that was George Semple, but I couldn’t say what it was that made him go. Then they brought in conscription and the hunger of the war began to close in on the village. Suddenly all the things that had been difficult became easy: men who’d never been five miles from the village had
their travel warrants issued and they were gone. Men who’d always worked alone, ploughing with a cloud of starlings for company, now marched and drilled and slept in a flock, like starlings themselves. And the things that had been easy were difficult. It was hard to get up and put on your working boots and go to the job you’d been doing all your life.

  The Tribunal was set up and whatever reason a man pleaded for exemption, they’d knock it back at him again, blinding him with quick office words as he stood there in his Sunday clothes twisting his hat in his hands. The men who’d hoped to melt into the land were winkled out and conscripted. It made an empty quietness in the village, as if it was always haymaking with the men gone to the fields and the sun moving along whitened doorsteps while a baby wailed.

  One June day I went out with my gun at dawn. There was a smell of fox round the hen-run, but nothing was harmed. He must have come padding round the wire, busy and quick, not wasting his time when he saw he’d get nothing. Mist lay on Mr Bullivant’s lake. A duck took off, running across the top of the water before he whirred into the air. My gun followed his flight and as soon as he was over the marshy end of the lake I shot him and he dropped plumb into the meadowsweet. I waded through the black, boggy ground. The reedmace quivered stiffly in the shallow water at my side. The duck had made a hollow in the mud where it fell, and there was a light sweet sound as I pulled it out, like the pulling of a tooth when it hangs by a thread. The mist was changing to pale blue, thinning as if cream were being skimmed out of it. The noise of the gun rippled outwards like sun’s heat, clearing the sky.

  George Semple was dead almost before people had begun to believe this war would lead to dying. I met him in the lane before he went, on a dry November day which was so still it felt warm. The war had been going on for three months. He was walking one way and I the other, but the day was perfect and as we stood there its perfection was borne in on us like a scent, light and evasive on the air. The ground was printed with exact shadows, and the air was sweet and a little fermented, like an apple that had lain in long grass for a week. Brown oak leaves rattled lightly in the hedge, and the sun fell on us, low and slanting. Through the hedge we saw the ridges cut deep in the ploughed field, made deeper by the late afternoon sun which was turning the earth damson in the shadows of each ridge. George had been ploughing there till yesterday.