A Winter's Love

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Had Gertrude really said those things? he wondered now, or did he only remember them because the shoe fitted even though it pinched? Gertrude’s blind woman would have denied Thomas à Kempis, have flung him across the room. But he was no longer denying Thomas à Kempis; he was denying himself.

  He sat up in bed, shivering with cold, and looked at Emily. Her face was calm, its lines of care smoothed out; and in her sleep she smiled.

  Why?

  Usually when he looked down at Emily before turning out his reading lamp, before plunging downwards into the dark well of sleep, her face was tight, strained, as though sleep were an effort, as though staying asleep took muscle power, will power.

  Why was she smiling? Why was her hand curled gently beside her cheek as relaxed as the petal of a flower? He touched one of her fingers and in the cold room it was warm.

  The wind roared down the chimney; the floorboards creaked; the snow was brushed from the garden by the mad broom of wind, swept from drifts, flung wildly against the house.

  This is a winter in limbo, lost in the cold, frozen in the waste, the waste frozen into space, animation suspended, validity ended, walking through my daily duties like a ghost, not feeling, not caring, not daring to care.

  The only direction from here is down. To get back into the only way of life that for me makes sense I must step down.

  And perhaps Emily and Gertrude and the blind woman are right and I should do it and have the courage to care, to plunge into suffering instead of pulling away from it. The only way to cross the river is to jump in and when I am on the other side maybe I can start living again. And if I don’t start living again I will have lost more than myself.

  In her sleep Emily laughed, actually laughed aloud, and then stretched, her body moving warmly against his. After a moment he turned off the light.

  She wakened to Abe’s kiss, his mouth against hers, ardent and vital. She opened her lips to him and his hand cupped her breast. In the darkness she could hear the sound of his breathing, quick and harsh, his hand moved searchingly over her thigh.

  She opened her eyes in the dark, her mind awakening with her senses. It was not Abe; it was Courtney.

  Why?

  Why tonight after the long winter weeks of near-abstinence?

  Oh, Court, not tonight!

  Was she like a bitch in heat?

  She could not turn away from him. She had never turned away from him and tonight of all nights after that immediate instinctive response she could not pretend any of the things that it might otherwise be possible to pretend and that she had never pretended. No. Her pretense must be completely the opposite.…

  After a moment it ceased to be pretense.

  Then when it was over, when he was asleep, his face like a child’s pressed against her, his breathing peaceful and relaxed, she lay awake in the dark. She could hear the slow deep notes of the church clock. Four. The night was black and unrelieved. Outdoors the trees crackled with the cold. The wind rebuked the house. There was a crack like a gun’s report as an ice-bound branch snapped in the wind.

  And Emily lay in bed beside her husband feeling like an adulteress.

  Four

  They caught glimpses of the glacier from the little train that took them to it, but their first real view was from, the rocky cliff that loomed above it, hemming it in on one side as the forest hemmed it in on the other. The sight of the great, crumbled, jagged, turbulent sea of ice was like the slap of a wave of cold water against their chests, and they caught their breaths.

  Kaarlo was familiar with petrified oceans like this, Emily thought; he was as at home on a glacier as a sailor at sea, more so, because many sailors cannot swim, and know the element of water only through the intermediary of their ship; but Kaarlo knew the mountains and their seas of ice directly through his body. It was an alien sight to Emily, this glacier, and an exhilarating one. She reached, unthinking, for Courtney’s arm at the same moment that she was wanting Abe to be there to share the experience of the day; and perhaps at the same moment he and Kaarlo were climbing over a sea of ice, and her heart froze with fear for them. For the first time she knew how Gertrude felt each time Kaarlo went up the mountains. Kaarlo’s father had been killed on Mont Blanc and this was something Gertrude could not forget each time Kaarlo went out, no matter how small a climb it might be. “I swore I’d never be an aviator’s wife,” she had once said angrily to Emily, “and now I’m a mountain guide’s mistress. How dumb can you get?”

  They clambered down the snaky path that was cut in zigzags down the cliffside, and stood side by side on the surface of the frozen sea. Then they moved away slowly, each alone, even the children separate, no longer seeking contact, because here was a sea that did not encourage human communion; it was too isolated and too huge, and too demanding in itself.

  The ice was churned green and yellow and colorless, and in places it was quite brown. Not until he had clambered over great frozen waves and come to one of the crevasses did Courtney see the icy blue colors he had anticipated. The crevasse was narrow but it went down so deep that it was impossible to see to the bottom of it.

  The only accident in the mountains that winter had been on a glacier: a guide was taking a small party of German tourists for a simple climb, nothing dangerous, but one of the men would not stay with the others, and fell and was killed. It happened that Courtney had gone with Emily and Connie and Gertrude that evening to the Splendide for an apéritif, and they were sitting there quietly, he stirring extra suger into Connie’s lemonade, when the news came in that there had been an accident. Kaarlo was out that day with a party, and Gertrude went dead-white but did not say a word; and neither Courtney nor Emily spoke, even to say that perhaps it might not be Kaarlo, because Gertrude knew this, and it was not their fumbling words for which she was waiting. “What is it? What’s the matter?” Connie asked anxiously, and Marcel, the waiter who always took care of them, placed another glass in front of each of them and a citron pressé for Connie, he also silent, and then the outer door swung open, letting in a gash of cold black air, and one of the guides came in with it and stood just inside the door beating his hands together and stamping his feet and looking around at the people at the bar and at the small tables. Then he crossed the room to them and everything seemed to stop until he said to Gertrude, “It is a German in the party with Etienne,” and went out again, and then Gertrude got up and they followed her out of the café and climbed with her the slopes up behind the chalets to stand with her waiting for Kaarlo until they saw him coming and knew that she no longer needed them.

  Courtney wandered slowly along the edge of the narrow and bottomless fissure, a wound that went deep into the earth, that penetrated below the extremity of ice, below the surface of the earth, that descended to the fires in the womb of the earth, a crack that was a scar in the shaping of the earth.

  The cold wind hit against his face and blew back his hair, and he looked up and saw Emily, aloof and apart, wrapped in her dream, standing with her back to him, peering into a cave formed of ice. Behind her, just behind her, was a large crevasse. Courtney’s heart somersaulted. One step backwards and Emily would be lost in subterranean caverns of ice.

  He was afraid to call, for fear that she would step backwards in the direction of his voice. Quickly and silently he approached her. She was still peering raptly at the colors in the cave. He jumped across the crevasse, catapulted into action, pulling her roughly away from it with him. Caught in his arms she leaped in terror, such a leap as a startled mermaid caught unaware might have given.

  Still holding her with one hand he leaned against a boulder of ice and realized that he was dripping with sweat.

  “Court! You frightened me! What’s the matter?” Emily cried.

  “You frightened me! Look.” He pointed to the crevasse behind them. “You were standing on the very edge of that. One step and you would have gone down.”

  “Oh—” she said. “I—I’m sorry. It was stupid of me to—” She loo
ked around wildly for a moment, saw that Virginia and Mimi and Connie were safe, and that Virginia was staring at her standing there in Courtney’s arms, and repeated, “I’m sorry, Court. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  He released her from the close embrace in which he had been clutching her into safety. “Come on,” he said, roughly. “We’ve had enough of this. Let’s go up to the bistro and have some lunch.”

  In the small washroom of the restaurant Virginia and Mimi cleaned up, saw that Connie did not sit on the toilet seat, and that she washed her hands properly.

  “Though Clare says the possibility of getting a venereal disease from a public bathroom is so remote as to be almost negligible,” Mimi said. “It’s simply a matter of personal fastidiousness.”

  “What’s a vereal disease? Is it like measles?” Connie demanded. “What’s fassigusses? Is it like chicken pox? I’ve had chicken pox and I was very, very sick.”

  “It just means ladies keep themselves clean and tidy,” Mimi said. “Now dry your hands properly, Constantia Plum, they’re chapped enough already.” She turned to Virginia. “I say, Vee, I don’t suppose it’s worth mentioning, but you don’t intend to say anything to anybody about, you know, what we saw yesterday?”

  Virginia stopped in the middle of zipping up her ski jacket and looked at Mimi coldly. “Of course not.”

  Mimi looked slightly embarrassed, an unusual reaction. “I mean you do seem to tell your parents everything and I don’t think it would be a very good idea. And I was thinking about Sam. He’s involved in a way, too, you know, and it might bother him, and we most certainly weren’t meant to see it, and it’s strictly their own business—” she looked at Connie and spelled, “your m-o-t-h-e-r-s and Mr. F-i-e-l-d-i-n-g-s, not ours.”

  “What are you talking about?” Connie demanded, furiously frustrated at being, as usual, left on the periphery of whatever fascinating thing it was the two big girls were involved in. “What did you see?”

  “Two dogs having a fight,” Virginia said.

  “M-o-t-h-e-r spells mother,” Connie said. “Mimi spelled something about mother. I’ve known how to spell m-o-t-h-e-r for years and years and years. What was Mimi saying about my mother?”

  “She’d have been upset if she’d seen the dogs fighting,” Mimi said. “Come on, Connie, put on your mittens and let’s go. I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, put a wrinkle in your tummy and use it for a washboard,” Connie said rudely.

  The restaurant had cold stone floors and innumerable draughts, but the leek soup and paté maison were delectable and the portions generous and they ate heartily. They sat and talked and looked down at the sea of ice and Courtney and Emily drank coffee, and then they played word games while they were waiting for the train to take them back to the village.

  “I love my love with an A,” Mimi said, “because he’s aboriginal. I hate him with an A because he’s avaricious. His name is Aloysius, he lives in an abattoir in Afghanistan, and I feed him on avocados.”

  “I love my love with a B,” Virginia said, “because he’s beatific. I hate him with a B because he’s barbaric.…”

  —I love my love with an A because he is ardent, Emily thought, sipping the dregs of her cold coffee. I hate him with an A because I love him only that doesn’t begin with an A. I hate him because I adore him. His name is Abe and he lives in America and I feed him on adultery in thought if not in deed—

  “Come on,” Courtney said, “here’s the train.”

  It was a day of near-accidents. They ran for the train and Virginia slipped and fell head-long over a small embankment just as a sleigh drawn by two horses came dashing up, and it seemed as though she must be crushed under their hooves and there were excited screams from passers-by and the driver of the sleigh pulled the horses up so abruptly that they reared, but Virginia was not touched; no one was hurt. Emily and Courtney stammered thanks and there were excited descriptions of the accident in French and German from various onlookers, and then they were all on the rickety local train that had waited, puffing enormous clouds of filthy smoke, until the excitement was over.

  While Emily was in the kitchen fixing dinner Virginia came in and stood watching her.

  “Mother—”

  “What, darling?”

  “Could I have a couple of aspirin?”

  “Why, Vee?”

  “Oh, just my time of the moon. I guess bouncing off that embankment this afternoon must have brought it on a couple of days early and it seems to have joggled me up a bit. I thought some aspirin might help.”

  Emily went to the cupboard where she kept their small stock of medicines and shook two aspirins into the palm of her hand. “Here, Vee. Sit down and I’ll have a cup of hot tea for you in a moment. That will help, too.”—And this probably explains her depression last night, she thought in quick relief.

  Virginia sat down, leaning forward a little, her arms folded over her stomach. Looking obliquely at Emily she said, “I’m sure Mimi’s parents must be fascinating, and they lead exciting sorts of lives, but I’d much rather have you and daddy.”

  “Would you, darling?” Emily asked, taking the kettle from the back of the stove and setting it over the hot coals to boil. “I’m glad you would because I’m afraid you’re stuck with us.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any—any togetherness in their family. I don’t mean just Jake being away on tour a lot and Clare staying in Paris because of the lab. I mean they don’t—they don’t seem to be married the way people ought to be married.”

  “Oh?” Emily asked. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know whether Mimi says things just to shock me or whether it’s true, about her mother’s lovers, oh, and she said something once at school about what’s-her-name—the dancer, oh, Mikhailova, being one of Jake’s mistresses, but I think that was just to set the girls on their ears. But it’s not like a family, mother. Even when daddy went to Washington during the war and it was six months before he could find a place to live and send for us we were still a family. You weren’t dashing around having lovers because daddy was away. I don’t think I would have liked it at all if you’d gone around having lovers. I don’t think I could have stood it.” Still sitting in her crouched position she looked up at her mother, but Emily was pouring boiling water into a teacup and adding sugar and a slice of lemon, so rather lamely Virginia finished, “But Mimi’s parents, they seem to be so busy being violently themselves they dont’t have time for each other.” And as Emily still stood by the stove stirring the tea, she said, “We thought we’d go see Madame de Croisenois for a few minutes. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Emily said. “Gert enjoys your visits. Here’s your tea, darling. Drink it while it’s good and hot. It’ll make your tummy feel better. I’m not so terribly sure Mimi’s good for you. She likes to think she’s grown-up and sophisticated and so she continually feels she has to say things she thinks will shock us to prove to herself how grown-up she is. I doubt if her parents lead nearly as wild lives as she’d like us to think.”

  “If Mimi isn’t good for me, what about Madame de Croisenois being good for you, then?” Virginia asked. “She likes to shock people, too, doesn’t she?”

  “True,” Emily said. “But then I’m older than you are and supposed to have acquired a few more powers of discretion. Drink your tea, Vee.”

  Madame Pedroti, impelled by who knows what strange magnet, by what odd twinge of conscience, what unacknowledged desire for absolution, was paying one of her unwelcome visits to Gertrude. Or was it none of these things, but simply a knowledge that she could hurt and frighten Gertrude that caused her to drop in at the chalet so frequently of an afternoon?

  Gertrude hated her and at the same time was fascinated by her, as one is fascinated by a fat, well-fed snake; hated her and disapproved of her and at the same time listened avidly to her juicily expectorated gossip.

  She knew that at one time Madame Pedroti had scornfully called Gertrude bemused by the chasseurs alpins, that before
her body became quite so ponderous she was said to have given Henri de Coisenois privileges that did not generally go with a suite of rooms at a winter sports hotel (though this Gerturde did not believe; Pedroti at her best had never been Henri’s type), and heaven knew what Pedroti was saying to her little clique now after her visits to the chalet that housed this particular ménage à deux. Gertrude rebuffed her, rebuked her, made it clear by casual rudeness that she was unwelcome; but her illness of boredom was so great that she listened to the other woman, and Madame Pedroti knew that she listened.

  “And they say that Thérèse Berigot is pregnant by our dear Kaarlo’s cousin Pierre,” Madame Pedroti was saying. “However, I really think she’s simply putting on weight. One does, you know!” And she laughed gaily. “And where is our dear Kaarlo?”

  “Off for a climb with Abe Fielding,” Gertrude said shortly.

  “Oh. I thought he might be giving Mrs. Bowen a skiing lesson.”

  “Mrs. Bowen has not had any lessons for some time.” Gertrude tried to control her anger, saying furiously to herself—It’s your own fault for listening to her vicious tongue in the first place. You’re putting yourself in her power, you fool, and you know it—and so does she.

  “A strangely attractive man, Monsieur Fielding. Perhaps when you’re feeling yourself again he might interest you—if he is still at liberty.”

  “Probably won’t be,” Gertrude said.

  “I’m not so sure. I can see that he’s a man of very definite and particular tastes. Obviously anyone as well off as he is could have remarried at any time he wished. I believe his wife is dead?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Gertrude said indifferently. Gossip from Madame Pedroti she might receive, but she would not give the fat old slitch the satisfaction of getting any in return; the arrangement, if she was to retain a shred of pride, had to be one-sided.