THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER

by MARY HOCKING

  She turned stiffly, like a soldier, and faced the mirror. The great twisted tangle, which greeted her every morning and which shielded her from the cool inspection of first light, was gone. What had always been a subsidiary something in the centre round which the abundant hair cascaded now stood out boldly, each feature clarified as though an equation had been resolved overnight. She saw eyes set too close so that they seemed to be crowding the long, patrician nose which appeared understandably not to approve of the full mouth and heavy jaw. It was as though she had spent years sculpting blindfold and now was presented with a head quite unlike the work of her imagination. The face expressed clearly its dissatisfaction with what had happened to it. It was also tremendously sad, as though it had had a right to expect something better.

  There was a knock on the door and Sophia came into the room. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a tone which permitted a negative response.

  ‘You have eyes,’ Anita said miserably.

  ‘I’ve brought my scissors – perhaps I can tidy it up a bit. At least you’re lucky that it’s so curly.’

  ‘It’s not the hair that worries me; it’s the face.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘And the neck. Look at the length of that neck. I look like Alice after she drank the potion. My head’s just a little blip on the end of a stalk.’

  ‘You can wear a scarf until you get used to it.’

  ‘And it’s very stiff, my neck. It’s not accustomed to the feel of air and last night was no time to start exposing it.’

  Sophia picked up the eiderdown and wrapped it round Anita’s shoulders. ‘It’s cold in here. Let’s go into the bathroom. Nicholas is out and Florence is still asleep.’

  ‘Were you with my father all night?’ Anita asked as they passed Konrad’s room on the way to the bathroom. ‘How is he?’

  ‘The same. Nicholas sat with him half the night.’

  ‘I’d like to be with him this morning.’

  Sophia succeeded in giving some shape to the shorn head, but Anita complained, ‘I look like someone who’s come badly out of a major operation.’

  ‘What is it that you don’t like? Is it what you see – or is it the image which will be presented to other people that troubles you?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Anita was looking in the mirror, turning her head from side to side, her eyes screwed up as if she dared not confront the image. ‘It frightens me – like a doppelgänger.’

  Florence rose like a cork on water, physically none the worse for her experience of the night before. She was convinced, so rested did she feel, that in some miraculous way she had surmounted her troubles – more than surmounted, had conquered them. She had gone out into the wood like a knight errant to pit her strength against a dragon, and she had slain it. In this triumphant frame of mind she pulled on her dressing gown and went to the bathroom, pausing at the top of the stairs to call ‘Happy Christmas’ to Sophia and Anita whom she could hear talking below. When she had washed she went into Konrad’s room. ‘It is Christmas morning, my darling,’ she said. He did not open his eyes, but it seemed to her that his breathing was easier, if rather shallow.

  She sat beside him and took his hand in hers. ‘We must pray together. You can recover. All things are possible.’ But even as she said this she became less sure – as though by speaking the words she had fallen into one of those traps so randomly distributed in the path of people who seek to slay dragons. She was visited by the notion that had come to her when she first arrived here, that she had entered a world where the commonsense everyday rules no longer applied. A world of no-sense. A world, in fact, horribly like that depicted in Konrad’s paintings.

  She tried to compose herself for prayer. In spite of many disappointments, she had always been on good terms with God, able to talk to him sharply in her youth about the way his Son had preferred Mary to Martha – ‘I’m the kind who will raise a family and keep a home going, without my kind there wouldn’t be a Mary to sit at His feet’; and as an adult, to explain seeming waywardness – ‘I have to give; it’s all a matter of giving. If I get pleasure out of it, that surely doesn’t make it wrong?’ But now, just when she had been feeling so exalted, the flow of communication abruptly dried up. Either He was no longer listening or there was something she could not put into words. It was unusual for her to recognise such a lack in her ability to articulate; but as she sat looking at Konrad she became aware of something wrong that could not be diagnosed, like an indigestible substance heavy in her stomach that obstinately refused to be sicked up. She decided to sing instead of praying. Perhaps it was the view from the window that made her choose ‘In the bleak midwinter’. She returned to her room feeling chastened.

  As she dressed, memories of other Christmases came unbidden to her mind. Arrival here, at her grandmother’s cottage, her eyes eagerly seeking the crib in the hall. She had wanted all the figures in at once – the whole gorgeous impact of it – and had never understood why the Wise Men had to wait until a time when her enthusiasm had waned before they made an appearance. As she grew older she had come to like the word Epiphany but had not been reconciled to the waiting.

  Her grandmother had not approved of Christmas trees and so there had never been one, only a candle at the window; but the forest trees had made good this lack. How friendly the great firs had seemed then, planted there for her delight.

  Ever since they were very small, until the death of her grandmother when Florence was eleven, the children had performed a Nativity play. This had included the proclamation to Mary because Florence always insisted on being the Virgin and a decent part had to be found for Sophia. So Sophia as the Angel of the Annunciation had rather more in the way of tinsel and spangles about her costume than Florence was allowed. As the years passed Florence had come to wonder if she had made the right choice. Her cousin Martin had played Joseph and the shepherds and each of the Wise Men. When Florence had protested that this was unfair her mother had pointed out that she could not relinquish her care of the baby in order to play other parts. Her grandmother had said, ‘Martin is a boy,’ which meant that it was appropriate for him not only to play the male roles, but to hog the stage as well. Sophia had hovered unconcerned above this controversy, representing the angel host in a satin bedspread. Florence resolved that when she herself had a baby she would not let it prevent her playing as many roles as she chose.

  She remembered, as she put the finishing touches to her hair, how, after they had taken down their stockings and had rushed into their parents’ and grandmother’s bedrooms to display their treasures and then been told they were to keep quiet while the grown-ups performed all the tedious tasks essential to their toilet, she had tiptoed down the stairs.

  The little hall and the rooms leading off it had had the hushed expectancy of spaces on a stage, awaiting the appearance of the actors. At any moment, the door would open and a story would unfold. The sitting-room was the centre, the source of the magic. It was so tidy that Florence was overawed, as she was on the rare occasions when she saw her mother and father in evening dress. Every vase and carefully placed ornament seemed to glisten like jewels. Someone had come down very early and lit the fire: the flames flickered and the logs crackled to an unseen audience. On the side tables and on the window-ledge were boxes of dates and peppermint creams, bowls of walnuts and brazil nuts, round wooden boxes of Turkish Delight. Christmas roses formed a garland for a small portrait of the Virgin and Child. A heap of fir cones sprinkled with jack frost supported the candles in the centre of the window. All these things anticipated a great event which never quite happened, though each year, beyond the time when she was too old for such fantasies, Florence hoped for the knock on the door and the strange woman standing there seeking shelter for herself and her baby, which, her grandmother assured her, had been known to happen in the forest.

  Once she had told her priest about this and he had said, ‘That kind of Christmas is for children’, and she had pointed out to hi
m that Jesus had said ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ He had had nothing to say to that. She had not been lucky with priests. In the films of her youth a character stumbled into a church in need and there was this homely priest with a smile-wrinkled face played by Spencer Tracy and in no time their problem had been resolved. Or it was Henry Fonda and the script was by Graham Greene and he was a failed priest with nothing to offer except his own agony. In her times of need all Florence seemed to get was Henry Fonda without the shared agony. People didn’t listen to her, that was the trouble; although one exasperated man had had the temerity to say that she didn’t listen to him but came equipped with her own solutions. Oh dear, what had come over her? Here she was, arguing with herself on Christmas morning when any moment she must go down to breakfast during which Anita would provide argument in plenty.

  Anita provided not only an argument but a shock. Florence had always maintained that putting up one’s hair was a sign of maturity. Cutting it off was another matter altogether. ‘What possessed you to do that to yourself, I can’t imagine,’ she said.

  ‘You said we had to have a rope.’

  ‘I have no recollection of saying anything of the sort. Your face is too long for that style. You don’t look like my daughter.’

  ‘Not bad,’ Anita said. ‘Two out of three. You forgot to mention how hideous Ingrid Bergman looked in For Whom the Bell Tolls.’

  They were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. ‘My turn,’ Anita said.

  ‘I seem to have heard the phone several times this morning,’ Florence said to Sophia.

  ‘A number of people have been taken ill with some form of food poisoning.’

  ‘What do they expect from us?’

  ‘Penitence, I think.’

  ‘How absurd.’

  Anita came back. ‘Mrs Prentice with a further bulletin. In a period of recollection during the night it came to her that none of us drank the egg nog.’

  ‘How very stupid. The woman obviously has a weak stomach. I recall thinking what an unhealthy colour her face was when she arrived. But, of course, we must visit.’

  ‘You may visit. I’m going to see Terence.’

  ‘I suppose these people’s doctors have been informed?’

  ‘I think it’s safe to say that few of the doctors in the neighbourhood are enjoying a quiet Christmas with their families,’ Sophia answered.

  Anita began to collect the crockery. ‘The only reason we haven’t had a visitation is that telephone communication with the health inspectorate appears to have broken down.’ As she went out of the door, she said, ‘And how you can go out visiting when Father is dying, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘One’s children can be so cruel,’ Florence said to Sophia. Then, seeing that Sophia was about to follow Anita, ‘Don’t go rushing away like that. We haven’t had a moment together since I arrived.’ Sophia sat down again, but offered no conversation.

  ‘I can’t stay with Konrad for long,’ Florence said, as though answering unspoken criticism. ‘I just can’t, Sophia. He lies there without apparently being aware of my presence, yet he doesn’t seem to be doing his dying at all passively. Instead of my comforting him, as soon as I am with him he disturbs me – more than disturbs: contorts, dislocates, everything jumbles in my mind and goes out of focus. I haven’t said anything about it before because I don’t want to upset my children. The young are so fragile. But it has been very hard for me to bear and it’s getting worse. It was particularly bad this morning, when I felt perfectly composed until I went to sit beside him. He must have grown up in a more chaotic state than I realised. I’ve sometimes felt since his illness that he has never had more than a rudimentary grasp of how a society such as ours functions. He isn’t able to put all the bits and pieces together and make something intelligible out of it. He has always been rather like a child sent out on an errand who has no road sense and doesn’t understand traffic signals, but now there seems to be a positive orientation towards disorder.’

  ‘Whereas you see society as a well-lit stage, with stability, law and order as the furniture and props which enable people to move about confidently and pursue their aims?’

  ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’ Florence had not expected anything quite so succinct from her sister.

  ‘Isn’t there always turmoil, but at certain times and in certain places we are less aware of it?’

  ‘I might have known it would be hopeless talking to you. You have always been subversive.’

  Sophia, face cupped in hands, regarded the marmalade pot with puzzled concern. ‘I wonder where the lid has got to. Now, where did I last see it?’ She was wearing a misty blue turtle-necked sweater surmounted by what looked to Florence to be a long grey sack with slits for arms and neck.

  As she looked at her sister, Florence was aware of anger always simmering inside her, an anger which sometimes boiled up unaccountably. Ever since she could remember, Sophia had looked as if she had started late for an appointment the purpose of which she had already forgotten. It astonished Florence that despite this she had never actually come to grief. She recalled that years ago, when Sophia had given up her job as a silversmith in order to come and live in the cottage, she had said to Konrad, ‘Not that I wish her any harm, but it does seem a perverseness in life that someone can take so many unwarrantable risks and never be any the worse for it.’

  ‘That sounds as if you did want something to happen to her,’ he had replied.

  ‘I would just like her to know that actions have consequences.’

  And yet, they were not unalike. There were times, brief flashes rather than occasions, when Florence was aware that at some level they understood each other perfectly. This was not a comforting insight.

  ‘You need to do something with your hair,’ she said. Hair was important to Florence, an index of health and general sanity. ‘You live a very unorganised life and if you don’t take yourself in hand you are going to end up one of those dotty old women who scarcely knows night from day, walking barefoot and living on herbs and nettle soup.’

  Sophia licked the marmalade spoon.

  ‘I’m not suggesting you dye your hair. But there are measures one can take. I had thought of having my hair dyed – just until all the strands have made up their mind what they’re arriving at. But I’ve noticed it gives people such a bad colour when the hair is touched up and the skin is past that. So I compromise by running a comb through tea, which gives it a faint tobacco colour.’

  Sophia said, ‘And you will grow into a well-preserved old trout.’

  These words haunted Florence long after Sophia had forgotten the image of a dotty, barefoot old woman. As she stumbled through the snow on her way to visit the Prentices, she was quite afraid she would come across a pond and see mirrored in its glassy surface a corseted grotesque so renovated that nothing remained of the original human person.

  Thomas Challoner gave Frances a generous allowance and never enquired – nor was interested in – how she spent it. He was not, in fact, very interested in Frances, whom he found rather boring. This did not mean that he had no feeling for her; he was touched by her solitariness and apprehensive as to what would become of her. He had tried to encourage her to make friends with local people and it was thanks to his efforts that she had taken a part¬time job in a local bookshop. In some ways his attitude to her was akin to his approach to certain books which, however worthy of respect and therefore to be absorbed dutifully, failed to kindle his imagination.

  Today, however, Frances was claiming his attention on a trivial matter and Thomas, who thought a little triviality in Frances was no bad thing, set himself to oblige. She had bought a dress and had put it on for his consideration. ‘I rushed in and got it yesterday while Nicholas was working through Florence’s order. I’m not sure it’s right now. What do you think?’

  Thomas, aware that this was the standard female reaction to any article of clothing
purchased, proceeded warily. ‘The colour is good on you.’ It was a bright orange, a colour Anita could never wear, which was presumably a bonus, since Anita would be the only other young woman present at lunch.

  ‘You don’t like the style?’

  It had a sleeveless bodice with a dropped waistline and a lot of fluting and other paraphernalia in the skirt. Thomas thought it was the kind of dress in which chorus girls would have performed the Charleston.

  ‘A bit fussy here and there,’ he hazarded.

  ‘I could take the bow off and the ribbon.’

  ‘Perhaps you could wear the ribbon round your neck?’ She looked so bony and, although this was the fashion, he judged that her purpose on this occasion was to attract Nicholas, rather than to compete with Anita. He could not imagine that even a man so remote as Nicholas would be attracted by a display of skin and bone.

  ‘I think a long scarf would be better,’ she said.

  ‘There was a rather threadbare bead shawl in the dressing-up trunk at one time. I remember Margery wore it when we had a fancy-dress party here one Christmas and she was a Spanish dancer.’ He thought the shawl would cover the sharp-boned shoulders as well as the neck and breast-bone. Thomas liked softly rounded shoulders on a woman.

  ‘We’re going to look in the dressing-up trunk,’ Frances called to Andrew who was playing football in the hall with Jasper; but Andrew went on lecturing Jasper, who could not be made to understand that it was only in rugby that one was allowed to run with the ball.