Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  ‘You probably find us somewhat … grim,’ his father observed.

  ‘Oh well. After Oxford, you know …’

  ‘Ah yes. Oxford.’ Lucas nodded as though remembering his own time there and, perhaps finding this a safe topic, turned now to face Bill. ‘How is the old place? Are you drinking too much?’

  ‘Not too much, no. Just the right amount I should think.’

  ‘Ha. Good. Good answer.’ Lucas returned to his contemplation of the grate. ‘You’ve seen your mother?’

  ‘Yes. We had afternoon tea. In the drawing room.’

  ‘Afternoon tea, was it?’ and he regarded Bill thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes. Teapot. Crumpets. That sort of thing.’

  Lucas nodded but said nothing.

  ‘I say, it’s jolly cold in here,’ observed Bill. ‘Can we not get the fire lit? Looks like it hasn’t been lit since the summer. Unless Mrs Logan has taken to sweeping it out herself every morning? Wouldn’t put it past her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said, no. We don’t have the fires lit. Not now.’

  There was a silence.

  Bill stared at the grate then took a sip of the whisky. Of course, it was a rebuke, plain and simple. His father’s somewhat clumsy way of saying, You seem to have forgotten what has happened here. You have been away and you can have no understanding of us, of how we are doing.

  It was absurd! Refusing to light the fires was the most irrational, the most childish thing he had ever heard. And how long, exactly, did Father intend to keep this up? All winter? Until one of them—his other daughter perhaps?—caught cold and ended up with pneumonia? And why the Devil had they put up with it? Someone, Mama at least, or Mrs Logan, must surely have said something?

  He knew they had not. Would he say something? He wouldn’t have, a few months ago. But now he was at Oxford.

  ‘And is that really the best course of action, Father?’ he said, squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin, aware as he did so that this was some kind of milestone between them. The outcome almost did not matter.

  ‘I would not be doing it if I did not believe that it was,’ his father answered quietly.

  Bill nodded slowly. ‘And if Mama or Dinah or the boys are cold?’

  ‘No one has complained to me of feeling the cold.’

  Bill made no reply. He sipped his whisky and felt it burning his insides.

  ‘I think Father has become some sort of tyrant,’ said Bill as he shovelled coal into the empty grate in the drawing room.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Dinah, aghast.

  ‘I’m shovelling coal into the grate. Have you been without a fire in this house so long that you have all lost the ability to make one? Fat lot of use you would all be shipwrecked on a coral island with only your wits to help you and two sticks to rub together. You’d probably be forced to exist on nuts and berries.’

  ‘Put it down. Now. Please, Bill.’

  Bill stood up and regarded his sister with some consternation.

  ‘Why? Because Father tells you to? Or because you’ve all suddenly stopped feeling the cold even though it’s the same temperature in here as it is outside in the street—where, I might add, there is a frost on the ground? It’s his idea isn’t it? How long does he intend to insist on this barbaric decree?’

  ‘You do not understand,’ said Dinah quietly as she observed her brother doggedly stoking the fire. She went to the window. He was right: there was a frost on the ground. And yet she felt nothing. Had she stopped feeling it?

  ‘I understand very well,’ he countered. ‘But I happen to believe this is not the way. And I simply do not believe Mama will stand by and allow this nonsense to continue.’

  ‘You do not understand,’ said Dinah a second time. ‘You haven’t been here, you’ve been away.’

  ‘Yes, I have been away and I believe that being away allows me a certain … broader perspective on things that the rest of you do not have.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded though she did not really believe this.

  ‘I believe Father has lost his perspective,’ Bill continued. ‘Why, he appeared barely interested to hear of Oxford and his old college.’ He paused to hold a lighted spill to the coals to get them to catch.

  ‘It has been a difficult time,’ Dinah said. ‘There was a dreadful railway accident a fortnight ago—’

  ‘But you believe this change in him is acceptable? That there is nothing … strange, ghoulish, about it?’

  ‘Acceptable?’ Dinah regarded her brother in surprise. ‘To whom? To God? Or to you? To Mama, perhaps?’

  ‘Blast this thing!’ Bill lit another spill and attempted, without success, to light the coals. ‘Where is Annie?’

  ‘You won’t get the maid to light the fire. Certainly not in here. Besides, Annie has gone. Agnes too. There is a new girl.’

  ‘Ah, there she goes!’ The coals had caught alight and one or two now began to glow. ‘Now, we shall have some warmth in this mausoleum. Come, warm your hands, Dinah.’

  The fire flared up as though some pent-up force had been released and Dinah found the glow from the coals bewildering, mesmerising. It drew her in and she experienced an almost primeval need to reach out to embrace the fire, but another part of her, a no less instinctive part, shied away in horror. Her father had forbidden the lighting of all fires in the house and Bill had gone against him. But it was more than this. Was Father’s decree so barbaric? She had seen what the fire could do to a child’s flesh.

  She could not stay in the room.

  ‘Dinah! For God’s—’

  ‘You were not here, Bill. You were not here when it happened.’

  And what she meant was, you are free of guilt, you cannot be blamed in any way for what happened. He was absolved and he did not even know it and the fact of it formed an impenetrable barrier between them.

  She could see her words had stung him for he stoked the coals vigorously with the poker. A single lump of coal slipped off the pile and rolled off the grate towards the carpet. Bill made a grab for it with the tongs but only succeeded in dropping the coal onto the floor, where it burnt a small round patch on the new carpet.

  After dinner, and in deference to Bill’s homecoming, the family retired to the drawing room where—inexplicably—a small fire seemed to have been recently lit in the grate but was now out, the coals cold and grey and lifeless. No one mentioned this though they could hardly fail to see it or to notice how this room, even after the fire had gone out, was a few precious degrees warmer than every other room in the house, save Mrs Varley’s kitchen.

  Mrs Logan’s team of tradesmen had come and then departed and a new Turkey carpet now covered the floor and new curtains of a plush deep red velvet hung from the large bay window at the end of the room. Otherwise the room was untouched. The same crimson flocked wallpaper covered the walls. The Sistine Madonna still hung above the fireplace. The same array of ottomans, upright chairs, easy chairs and stools still crowded around the various writing desks, console tables, occasional tables and the big round table in the centre of the room. The grand piano still stood in the corner of the room and the same palm in a brass pot nestled beside it.

  The family, minus Gus and Jack whose bedtime had been passed, paused on the threshold and it was Mr Jarmyn who led the way, negotiating the various obstacles in the room, and sat down, adjusting one of the lamps so that the room became instantly lighter. It was the first time the family had sat together in the room since its recent transformation but no one remarked on the new carpet or on the plush new velvet curtains. And no one commented on the small round patch on the brand new carpet that looked like a burn mark. The fire was out yet still Mrs Jarmyn went straight to it and sat on the chair closest to the hearth, holding her hands out to the empty grate as though the fire burnt still, and it seemed to Dinah that her mother’s hands shook.

  Roger was four days into his voyage. Dinah had pushed the thought down and down for fou
r days, and it had helped not knowing the exact hour of his departure, but the knowledge that he was, even now, sailing southwards was, somehow, quite awful.

  ‘Dinah, why don’t you play for us?’ her father suggested.

  Dinah gaped at him in mute horror. But they were all watching her. She moved over to the piano and arranged herself on the stool. For a moment she looked down at her hands as they rested on the lid of the piano and it occurred to her that her father had no particular desire to hear her play, it was simply a way of precluding conversation. A sheet of music lay on the music stand and it must have been there all this time as no one had played the piano in all these months. It was Mozart’s Minuet No. 2 in F, an easy piece she had learnt years ago and had played over and over till she was note perfect. She laid her hands over the keys and after a moment’s hesitation began to play.

  Her fingers had not forgotten. They flew over the keys, no longer in need of the music, finding their own way and it was joyous!

  When she came to the end she turned around smiling, and the faces of her mother, father and eldest brother were all turned towards her.

  ‘Bravo,’ said her father quietly. ‘I had forgotten. I had quite forgotten …’

  Dinah turned back to the piano and rummaged through the pile of sheet music, coming up with another old favourite, the first movement from the Sonata in D. Why did I ever stop? she wondered, amazed at herself. The piano had been here in this closed off, silent room all this time and she had simply forgotten its existence. A memory popped into her head: Sofia running into the room in her tiny silk slippers, so full of excitement.

  ‘Dinah, I can play a duet with you! Let me show you!’ And she had squeezed her slight frame onto the piano stool beside her sister and placed her small hands inexpertly onto the keys and begun to pick out a tune. Dinah had been scandalised. Her own piano teacher had been rigid in his enforcement of the seven-year rule: seven years of scales and finger exercises and then, and only then, should the student be allowed to play. But Sofia had a different teacher and the rule apparently no longer applied. The injustice of this had smarted and she had replied tartly, ‘I certainly will not play a duet with you—you have only just begun practising scales!’ and had pushed her sister off the stool and snapped shut the lid of the piano. There would be no duets.

  And so it had proved.

  Dinah’s fingers floundered and struck the wrong chord, then slumped, lifeless, on the keys. She lowered her head.

  ‘Ouch!’ exclaimed Bill. ‘Did you lose your place?’

  But Dinah had closed the piano lid.

  ‘Bravo! Bravo, Dinah …’ said her father, his voice trailing off, and he stood up and went over to the window though the curtains had been drawn hours earlier. Perhaps he wanted to admire the new fittings.

  ‘How lovely your playing is,’ said her mother, turning momentarily away from the fireplace to smile. ‘Lucas, isn’t it lovely to hear the piano again?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Lovely.’

  We should not be in here, realised Dinah. It was a mistake. The room ought to have remained closed forever.

  ‘I see we have new carpet,’ Bill remarked then he sat up and looked around him. ‘And the curtains are new too—’

  ‘How is your uncle this evening, Aurora?’ said their father, and Dinah could see Bill looking at him in surprise at being cut off.

  ‘A little confused,’ replied their mother. ‘I think all the changes have, perhaps, made him more restless than usual.’

  Dinah left the piano and took a seat beside her brother who, perhaps irritated by his parents’ conversation, had picked up a book from the table and begun idly flipping through the pages. It was Squires’ Study of the Workings and Evolution of the Railway Steam Engine and it was full of technical diagrams and specifications. Bill soon closed the book and returned it to its place on the table.

  ‘Dinah, you are wearing your hair up,’ he observed.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied. She had turned eighteen, though no one else appeared to have given it a thought.

  She had given Bill a lock of her own hair, she remembered, on the day of Sofia’s funeral. She had taken his hand and placed the lock of hair in it, closing his fingers over it and clasping his hand to her and saying, ‘Put this in the grave, Bill, please do this for me.’ And he had given her his solemn word that he would do this for her. After the funeral she had asked if he had done it and he had assured her he had done exactly as she had bidden. Yet in the moment between her asking and his reply his eyes had slid from hers and she had known, as surely as if she had been there herself, that he had forgotten.

  Despite Bill’s homecoming it was not a late night.

  After so many months without practice, Aurora observed, Dinah seemed to have lost her skill on the piano and could not be enticed to play another piece. Lucas was lost in thought and was clearly having to make an effort to rouse himself to converse with his eldest son. Fortunately Bill was in a loquacious mood and regaled them with tales of undergraduate life and Aurora, watching her eldest child from her chair by the fireplace, thought: he has accepted what has happened, he alone, amongst us all. And as she watched him she could not decide whether this was a good thing or not. It was good for Bill, perhaps.

  ‘Well, it would appear the old place does not change much,’ said Lucas of his old college, twirling his tumbler of port on the armrest of his chair. ‘Lord knows, everything else changes at a terrifying rate.’

  No one replied to this and soon Dinah excused herself and went off to bed. Aurora followed soon after, though found she did not feel tired. Upstairs in her room she sat by the window and listened to the sounds of the house. Presently she heard footsteps and a door open and close; not her husband’s door, Bill’s.

  She stood up and went silently back downstairs. A lamp still burnt in the drawing room so she presumed Lucas was in there. She hesitated outside the door, wondering if he was aware of her presence outside, if he had heard her come down the stairs. She would look foolish standing here without going in. Bill had accepted what had happened, why shouldn’t Lucas and why shouldn’t she? Was it right that she, his wife, should hesitate to go into a room where her husband was?

  But Mrs Logan was there. Mrs Logan was—doing what? What could she be doing at this time? Were her duties so numerous she had to work till past midnight to finish them?

  ‘Mrs Jarmyn.’

  And why did her greeting always sound like a challenge?

  ‘Mrs Logan. Don’t let me keep you.’ And Aurora waited till the housekeeper had gone.

  Her parents had had a housekeeper at their Chelsea house, though that had been a much grander establishment, a house that required a housekeeper. She had been a child then but even so she had only the faintest recollection of the woman who had faithfully served the family for a decade or longer. She had been invisible. A housekeeper ought to be invisible but Mrs Logan was not invisible and somehow she was becoming more opaque with every passing week.

  Aurora opened the drawing room door and stood in the doorway. Lucas was standing in the middle of the room, and he turned to face her, cradling a glass of port in his hand. Perhaps he had heard the interaction with Mrs Logan. Three years earlier when Mrs Logan had first arrived she had reacted, as any wife would, with outrage: the home was her domain and she had been undermined. What did it say about his faith in her ability to run his household that he had brought this woman into the house to run it for him? It was a humiliation not to be borne! Aurora had departed at once on an extended visit to a distant relative. Lucas had been furious. But if he had anticipated her meek acquiescence, if he had expected her return after a day or two, he had been mistaken. He had waited two weeks then come after her, by which time his fury had been frightening—and a little thrilling. But he had not married a meek and acquiescent wife. They had fought but in the end he had brought her home with him, once more the master of his own house, and the new housekeeper, whose position in the house she did not understand and whose pr
esence she resented, had remained. She had given him his victory because his love for her, his passion after this breach, had been as it had in those first intoxicating years of their marriage.

  But that was three years ago and now he was frowning, and whether at her or at his glass of port she could not tell. Perhaps he might offer her a glass? But he placed his glass on the table without taking a sip and she had an idea he was not pleased that she had seen him drinking.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, and his greeting was not the sort of greeting a husband gave to his wife, to the mother of his children. It was a challenge. She ignored the challenge and took it the way he had not intended it: as an endearment. She came into the room, closing the door and smiling at him.

  ‘It’s so nice to have Bill home,’ she observed warmly. ‘Is it not?’

  ‘Yes. Certainly,’ he replied, facing the fireplace. ‘I thought you had retired?’

  ‘I was not tired. I think it is Bill’s return. It has quite invigorated me.’

  ‘I am delighted you find yourself invigorated.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Lucas, is it not time we put the past behind us? That we try to look forward a little?’

  ‘I did not realise I was not doing exactly that.’

  She came forward and spoke in a low voice. ‘I was referring to our marriage, Lucas. To you and me,’ and she placed a hand on his arm.

  Instantly she felt the muscles in his forearm tense and he reached across and with his other hand removed her hand from his arm.