Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  The pale, ghostly light was the moonlight. The curtains had been pulled back and moonlight streamed into the drawing room. No lamps or candles burnt. A solitary figure knelt on the floor before the hearth, bent forward, forehead almost touching the carpet, hands covering the face. The figure let out a sound—part sob, part gasp, part animal howl—such as Mrs Logan had never heard before. The blood seemed to slow in her veins as, watching from the doorway, she saw that it was Mrs Jarmyn.

  She would have been less shocked had she seen an actual ghost. As it was, Mrs Jarmyn’s was a ghostly figure, an apparition, a cruel facsimile of the woman she normally was. And for a fleeting, a horrifying, moment Mrs Logan stared into the chasm that her mistress daily endured. The loss of her child—how was such a thing to be borne? But the sensation was fleeting. It came and went in an instant and she was left feeling—nothing.

  She had no recollection of turning away, of pulling the door to behind her, of rejoining Cook in the passage. She found herself grabbing Mrs Varley’s arm, aware that Cook was gaping at her in terrified silence, but allowing herself to be pulled quickly away. Together, they hurried down the stairs, along the hallway, picking up speed as they dived down the uncarpeted back stairs and not stopping until they were back in the kitchen. Here, they collapsed against the doorframe, Cook purple and wheezing, bent double and clutching her sides, but lifting her head to ask the question:

  ‘Was it … there? Was … it?’ she gasped and Mrs Logan nodded, giving the confirmation Cook clearly dreaded to hear.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Varley. You were right. Hermione was right. It was the ghost,’ and Cook, who wasn’t a Catholic and had no truck with religion, crossed herself.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DINAH HAD RECEIVED A LETTER from Miss Parson of the committee. ‘My Dear Miss Jarmyn,’ the letter said, ‘You will have heard by now that the soup kitchen in Commercial Road is to finally open. Both Miss Joseph and I know how active you were in fighting for its establishment. It is—I need hardly tell you—a triumph for the Society and you, Miss Jarmyn, were instrumental!’

  Dinah paused. She had been instrumental. She had gone with Mr Briers and Miss Parson to Whitechapel a year ago to find a premises for the Society’s first soup kitchen, holding up her skirts and pressing a lavender-scented handkerchief to her nose as they had traipsed through one dilapidated and infested building after another. And when they had finally located a suitable place only to learn that the Virtue and Temperance League had got there before them and intended to turn it into a reformatory for wayward girls, she had thrown herself into a frenzy of ardent letter-writing, lobbying, placard-making and meeting attendance and had even, on one heady occasion, thrown an egg—though it had missed its target. She had been not only instrumental, she had been impassioned!

  ‘You will, I am sure, wish to witness the fruits of your labour,’ Miss Parson’s letter went on and it was plain—with or without her indiscriminate use of underlining—that the soup kitchen was the ace up Miss Parson’s sleeve and with it she clearly expected to trump Dinah’s desire to quit the committee.

  In truth Dinah had received the letter from Miss Parson five days ago but thus far had not seen fit to reply, which was tardy of her if not downright discourteous. She would have liked not to reply at all, to simply ignore the letter, to ignore every letter. But if one gave up on the social niceties what else was there? She thought of her mother choosing just the right mourning notepaper and poring over her seating plans and studying the cards left by callers, and she understood, at last.

  She went to her drawer and took up a clean sheet of notepaper (the paper, she observed, had an unusual purple border) and composed a brief reply stating that she would reconsider her resignation from the committee. There. It was done and it had not, in the end, cost her so very much.

  Or had it? Is this the limit, then, of our choices? she wondered, a feeling of helplessness almost overwhelming her: whether to choose one gown or another, one style of notepaper or another, one dinner menu or another, to reply to a letter or not to reply—and even in this it seemed one did not really have a choice.

  Whether to marry or not to marry.

  But there was one thing she could do, of her own volition and without anyone’s interference, and her cousin, Rhoda, was to be her confederate.

  She took up a second sheet of paper and wrote a note to her cousin in Great Portland Street proposing they seize the initiative and contact the spiritualist woman to arrange a meeting. The meeting, Dinah proposed, should take place on the twenty-eighth, a Friday six days hence and she, Dinah, would undertake to write to the woman herself to make the arrangement. Did her cousin agree to this course of action?

  She sealed the envelope at once before she could change her mind and pulled on her shawl and gloves to take the two letters to the post-box on the corner rather than place them in the silver tray in the hallway. Well, it is done, she thought, the scheme has been devised and its execution begun. It was to take place in six days’ time. They would make their way to an unknown location in an unknown part of the city by themselves, alone and unsupervised. No one would know their destination nor their objective. And if this meant covertly, if temporarily, releasing her cousin from her uncle and aunt’s house whilst she was in deepest mourning that was all to the good.

  And when they met the spiritualist woman—

  But she had not quite considered this part of the scheme.

  ‘Let me take that to the post for you,’ said Bill, coming downstairs, and if his sister had looked at him as if to ask whether he had been waiting there all this time for her to appear, he would have lied and said no.

  ‘I can manage,’ she said; his presence clearly not welcomed.

  ‘Then let me walk with you,’ and he took up his coat and hat and held open the door, ignoring her obvious unwillingness for company.

  ‘I return to Oxford tomorrow,’ he said once they had come down the front steps and had walked almost halfway along the mews.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  Of course she knew. And this was not the reason he had waylaid her. The post-box on the corner loomed into sight and he slowed, eventually coming to a halt. ‘Look here, Dinah.’ But now that he had her attention he did not know how to begin, or even what it was he wished to say.

  They had not spoken together for any length of time since the awkward conversation in the drawing room on his first day back. It troubled him though he could not put his finger on why. Her odd question to him before their mother’s dinner party was a part of it, so too his unguarded, perhaps rather thoughtless, observation at their aunt’s house about Roger’s decision to go to war—though one could not have known at the time of saying it that Roger had been killed. If one had, obviously one would not have dreamt of saying such a thing. But it had been unguarded, certainly, and yes, perhaps a little thoughtless.

  This then was what he wanted to say to Dinah.

  ‘Look here, I think it was incredibly brave. Roger, I mean. Going off to war like that. Defending the Empire and everything.’

  Dinah rounded on him and her eyes were furious. ‘No it wasn’t brave. It was stupid. Stupid and utterly pointless and nothing will come of it, nothing whatsoever. It was all for nothing.’

  Her words and the fury in her face shocked him. ‘Well, but. Come on! I mean to say—’

  ‘And you don’t even mean what you say. You don’t think it was defending the Empire and you don’t think it was brave! You think it was stupid. And you are right! YOU ARE RIGHT!’

  Dinah turned away from him and set off back the way they had come, her arms held tightly around her slender frame, almost running, and though he could not see it he knew she was crying. And she had not even posted her letters.

  Bill waited for a time at the post-box in case she returned but she did not. Clearly her letters were not urgent. But it hardly mattered as tomorrow he returned to Oxford, though it seemed his departure was of no consequence to any member of his family except himself. Wel
l, so be it. Oxford awaited him. That was where he belonged now. In the meantime he was unsure how he would pass the time.

  At a very late hour that same evening, and long after the last curtain had fallen in the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue and Drury Lane and the last carriage had returned its occupants to their homes at Chelsea and Mayfair, the dingy passages and mean little laneways of the City crawled with nocturnal life, though only those who had business at this late hour chose to be out in it.

  In Half Mitre Street one man had business though he did not advertise the fact, almost striking a match to provide a moment’s illumination then thinking better of it, so that his presence, one shadow in a much large shadow on a moonless night, remained undetected. The offices of a large railway company opposite which he crouched were dark and silent and had been so since he had arrived perhaps a half hour earlier. As he waited and watched, in the spot where the railway company thugs had beaten him senseless and some of his blood still stained the pavement, he felt nothing, thought nothing.

  Earlier that night, a Saturday night, in the public bar of the Green Bear at Whitefriars Street, in the shadow of St Paul’s and close enough to the river that you could hear the cries of the wherrymen, Thomas Brinklow had looked on as a cloudy brown solution in a tankard was slammed onto the pitted wooden bench before him.

  ‘Dodger’s Double Porter. Best in the borough,’ declared the landlord in a tone that discouraged disagreement.

  Thomas regarded the liquid with suspicion but as the landlord was a bristling hulk of a man with a pugilist’s nose and blackened teeth and who spat onto the sawdust at his feet, he kept his opinions to himself.

  His senseless, one-man assault on the house of the railway gentleman five nights ago had failed and he had fled moments before a police constable had arrived. He had not returned to the street nor dared show his face much outside of his lodgings. What he had hoped to gain by his drunken incursion on the gentleman’s house he still did not know, indeed he was not at all sure he knew who this man was who had done such a thing. It was not the Thomas Brinklow who had boarded a train with his little girl to travel to the fair that distant Sunday afternoon. He had a thought to throw it all up and return home. But there had been no word from his wife and without that he stalled. He was too ashamed to return with his failure weighing so heavily. And with his face looking like this.

  Then a letter had come this afternoon. The letter was from his wife and said she had gone to a neighbouring town to stay with her brother and his wife, and when he looked—because up to that point he did not quite believe it—the letter was postmarked Shrewsbury. She would stay with her brother and his wife, she said, for a time. For a time? He had not known what this meant. Jenny was better at writing than he and had been since the days of the Sunday school. Her thoughts and ideas became words on the page in the way his never did. But he did not know what she meant now. He understood only that his wife blamed him for their child’s death.

  The letter had come third post and now he found himself seated in the public bar of the Green Bear. It was a Hellish sort of place: spit and sawdust on the floor and gin-soaked harlots who stank of the gutter, and swaggering, tattooed mariners with scarred faces and missing limbs who pulled a knife on you as soon as looked at you. Its very name was a warning to him: what kind of place was it, he wondered, that had green bears? It was fantastical. It was frightening. He did not know why he was here.

  He pulled the tankard towards him and poured half of it down his throat in a single swallow. The beer choked him and turned sour in his stomach.

  ‘Not to your likin’, duckie?’ inquired a woman sliding into the bench beside him.

  ‘Tastes like badgers’ piss.’

  The woman snorted and her breath came straight from the bottom of a gin bottle. ‘They must have rum badgers where you’re from,’ she replied and she peered knowingly at him. ‘And where are you from, handsome?’

  He was not handsome, not with this face, and he knew exactly what she was. ‘I’ll thank you to leave me be and mind your own business.’

  Instead of being put off the woman leant closer and leered at him. ‘You’re a long way from home, ain’t you? Lookin’ for work? Or somefing else?’ and her hand reached beneath the bench, finding his knee and sliding up his thigh.

  Her touch sickened him but it forced him to raise his eyes to meet hers. He saw a sharp little face framed by tight curls that cascaded untidily over bare shoulders inadequately covered by her gown. The gown was of indistinct colour, cut very low at her neck and showing skin reddened by firelight and drink. He saw a hard-lived face but not the hard living of the mill girls and the factory girls of his home. This was another kind of hard living that he did not know and did not wish to know. He thought of the Sunday school he had attended so many years ago and of the short-sighted spinster who had read them stories of Noah and Moses and Jonah. This woman made him feel unclean. He wished she would leave.

  She did not leave and Thomas swallowed more of the foul beer as a way to avoid her gaze. He had made a fool of himself coming to London and he had made a fool of himself five nights ago at the gentleman’s house and his scratched and bruised face and hands showed the evidence of his stupidity—of his failure—and he slid his hands beneath the table. He could do nothing about his face.

  In his pocket the letter from his wife burnt a hole in his jacket and in his heart.

  ‘You know nowt about me or my life,’ he responded roughly to the woman’s suggestion, pushing her hand away.

  ‘Perhaps I don’t.’ She gave a little shrug and fell silent and seemed to give him up as a bad job. He saw in her face a flicker of despair and then of relief and it occurred to him she was much younger than he had first thought, much younger than he, though she spoke to him as though he were a boy. These contradictions unsettled him and he stood up, knocking back the remaining porter in a rush that made his head spin, and left.

  Outside a foul mist that had risen up from the river and the smoke from a thousand, perhaps a million, hearths had turned the London street into a landscape dense with shadows and terrors and Thomas wavered on the doorstep of the public house.

  ‘Off back to your wife and your job, then, are you?’

  The woman—she was really just a girl—had not given him up or she had decided it was time for herself, too, to depart. Either way, here she was. He had made no mention of a wife or a job and he had no wish to divulge details of either to her. Her presence, so close to him in the doorway of a public house, turned his stomach though there was not, he realised, so very much that separated them in the eyes of God.

  He would make his way back to the lodging house and in the morning he would make a decision. He would decide what to do.

  The woman pulled him into a passageway and began to fumble with his trousers. The porter, he realised, had been stronger than he had given it credit for.

  ‘My wife has left me and I have lost my job,’ he said, in answer to her question, but she no longer seemed concerned with his personal life.

  On the street outside the railway company offices at a very late hour that same night, Thomas decided he had waited long enough—was unsure what it was he waited for—and began, now, to get to his feet only to duck back down again as the nightwatchman shuffled into sight swinging a lantern that cast crazy shadows from one side of the street to the other. The man shuffled past and his light grazed Thomas, then it was gone and after a while his footsteps faded too.

  Minutes past but the man did not return and Thomas slid out of the shadows and moved on silent feet towards the office, reaching the doorway and bracing himself. With his jacket protecting his arm he smashed the small leadlight pane above the lock on the door with his elbow and in the choking and dense London night air the sound was muffled. He reached through the broken pane and undid the lock, flung the door open and wedged it with his foot.

  At his feet was the bottle that was to be his instrument of destruction: a squat brown beer bottle, Dodge
r’s Double Porter, retrieved from the passageway behind the pub and still a third full. He picked it up and struck a match to light the spill of twisted paper that was wedged in the neck of the bottle. The match flared and for a moment Thomas saw his own hands, pale and ghostly, the hands of some awful apparition. The spill caught at once—it was fashioned from cheaply made notepaper: the letter his wife had written him—and it burnt with a whoosh that took Thomas by surprise, and he flung his head back instinctively. Regaining his wits he lobbed the bottle through the open doorway into the office, where it landed and exploded.

  At once carpet and window drapes burst into flames, illuminating the room. At the rear of the office a door was flung open and a middle-aged man—the gentleman in the tall hat and frock-coat who had attended his daughter’s funeral, though now the man was hatless and in his shirtsleeves—came out, only to stop with a cry, throwing up his arms to shield his eyes. Another figure was behind him in the doorway: a very young woman, her face aghast, clasping a dress to her breast because she was otherwise entirely unclothed. The man leapt forward, dragging the drapes from their runners and stamping on them to put out the flames, and the girl put a hand to her face, which had been ripped open by a shard of exploding glass.

  Thomas saw all this though it must have passed before his eyes in a second, two seconds, no more.

  It had not occurred to him there might be folk in the office at this hour.

  The girl began to scream, the blood spilling from her cut face, and she pointed straight at Thomas. The man saw him too so that for an instant their eyes met before Thomas turned and ran from the building. He ran full-pelt down one passage after another, tripping and falling and getting back up. The throwing of the firebomb was where his plan ended; he had not thought out an escape route. He had not, in fact, imagined the time after the attack at all.