THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER

by MARY HOCKING

  The big, high-ceilinged room, lit only by a lamp, was shadowy. But it was tears, not shadows, that blurred Frances’s face and tempered the severity that gave her features something of the fixity of an icon. Now, no longer becalmed, different emotions chased across her face with the unpredictability of an April day.

  Jasper moaned.

  ‘Drink your water,’ Frances commanded.

  He refused to take his eyes from her. She bent down and picked up his bowl, holding it for him. Hastily, he licked the tears from her face before drinking from the bowl. Her hair fell forward across his furrowed brow. ‘It’s no use getting yourself in a state,’ she said. ‘What’s done is done.’ She shook her hair back, her face transformed by exultant gaiety.

  Thus Nicholas saw her as he came cautiously into the room. Jasper growled deep in his chest. ‘It’s all right,’ Frances soothed both man and beast.

  But it was not the dog that had startled Nicholas. To someone who prided himself on passing through, like the American Indians, leaving the landscape as he found it, the change in Frances was deeply disturbing. Yet had he not wanted to touch and see what happened.’

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘He won’t bite you.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. There can’t be a dwelling within five miles’ radius where he hasn’t made his displeasure known.’

  She herself had made a surprising amount of noise. Like a creature under enchantment, who must incorporate the fullness of experience in one encounter, she had passed with rapidity through the stages of love-making, nervous stiffness and gritty determination merging into playfulness and provocation followed by a startlingly sudden surrender. Her passionate response had been relayed by a series of unearthly howls from Jasper on the landing. Nicholas looked at her warily. She was pouring coffee and crying steadily. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him. ‘It’s only that I don’t seem to be able to stop.’

  There seemed no doubt that from her point of view it was all right. Her tears were like rain in sunlight.

  Nicholas bent his head over the cup, uncertain how to proceed. The uncertainty was perilous.

  ‘I’m happy,’ she assured him, wiping away the tears, her fingers lingering on her cheeks, the feel of her flesh new to her. She seemed charmed as if she had just had her ears pierced, eagerly contemplating the more exotic adornments she could now display.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said drily.

  ‘No, really, I’m happy.’ Her forefinger traced the line of his cheekbone and rested on his lips. ‘I’m happy, Nicholas.’

  He flinched and she said softly, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the sort of person I am. I should have warned you. I’m not the confiding type – and I’m not a settler, or any of the things that go with being a settler, such as reliable, patient, faithful to a particular place or plot or person.’

  ‘But that’s the sort of person you’re not. You do it all the time – in your books, when you’re interviewed. Do you realise that? You always paint a picture of what you’re not.’ She spoke very gently because she was going to help him to a more positive attitude. ‘Whereas . . .’ She reached out and took his hand, turning it palm upwards. ‘Shall I tell you what I see?’ She glowed with the tender desire to please.

  He snatched his hand away. ‘Frances, I’ll be leaving here after Boxing Day.’

  ‘Yes, I know there isn’t much time to talk.’ She composed herself to listen, her shining regard fixed at a point between his eyes. This was disastrous: he had not intended there to be much in the way of talk. How to explain that what to her represented a beginning was, in fact, the end? He was not good at explaining; his previous affairs had not necessitated it.

  She cajoled, ‘Why so solemn?’ The intense grey eyes had learnt to tease.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could leave here,’ he said. He had intended this as a statement made with a firmness only lightly tempered by regret. It came out as a question.

  ‘No,’ she agreed, almost absently, as if this were not an issue.

  He was nonplussed. ‘If I have to go and you have to stay, I don’t quite see where that gets us, do you?’ He was conceding something with everything he said.

  The wind had dislodged a few autumn leaves from the pile of logs in the scullery and now they skittered across the floor. Frances leant towards Nicholas. Her thin body glimpsed in the opening of the dressing gown was more erotic than when she was stripped. In the light of the lamp, the flesh had a dusky bloom which made his fingers itch. The dog came forward, snarling. Nicholas said, ‘We’d better go back upstairs.’

  The house was cold and the temperature was dropping as the sun went down in a spume of crimson. They sat side by side on the bed, the duvet wrapped around them. She nestled close to him, cheek resting against his. ‘I have to stay here for Andrew’s sake. But that needn’t matter because you’ll want to travel to places I probably couldn’t go to even if I was free to travel.’ Although she spoke tentatively there was no doubt that she was giving him permission for a few away trips. Her fingers ran lightly over his body.

  He said brusquely, ‘And we should go on like that indefinitely. Is that what you had in mind?’

  She was still as an animal suddenly scenting danger. He should have finished it then, but he wanted to extract some kind of submission from her and let the moment pass. She said, ‘Only for a few years, until Andrew is older. You wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Never mind about me. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that you have a life of your own to live?’

  ‘But how do I know this isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not something you can let other people decide for you.’

  ‘But other people do decide things. I couldn’t leave Thomas and Andrew.’ She eased her hand on the nape of his neck, coaxing. He thrust her away, and getting up went to the window. Ice was forming on the inside of the pane. She followed him, tripping over the edge of the duvet. He was at once upset and pleased by her agitation.

  ‘Thomas has been so good to the boy, but he’s not domesticated; he couldn’t manage on his own – I don’t suppose he’d be allowed to. Some busybody would complain to Social Services. You do see that, don’t you?’

  He said impatiently, ‘The boy could go to boarding school.’

  She drew in her breath. In the frosty light her eyes glinted sharp as broken glass. ‘His mother leaves him, his father commits suicide, his grandmother dies; I come along for a while and then tire of it. So, pack him off to boarding school. That seems fair to you?’

  ‘Life isn’t fair.’

  ‘Andrew is not going to boarding school,’ she said on a rising note. ‘I have promised him.’

  ‘How very young you are.’ He put a finger beneath her chin and saw the pulse that throbbed in her throat. ‘You see things in black and white.’

  She jerked her head to one side. ‘Some things are black and white. People just blur them when they get older because it’s more convenient not to see too clearly.’

  ‘Well, it’s no business of mine. I merely suggest you’re throwing your life away.’

  ‘On people, though – not on desert sands and a few moth-eaten camels.’

  There was a long silence. It was as if something they had wanted to contain had escaped into the room. She said, ‘I’m sorry, but you have to admit you’re not all that realistic yourself. You go travelling in search of a place or primitive people which will reveal your true identity, or some such piffle.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. While all the time it is waiting for me here at home, where I started, or some such piffle.’

  ‘There’s no need to be angry just because it’s your life we’re talking about now.’

  ‘Of course I’m angry. Who do you think you are to talk to me like this? What have you made of your life so far?’

  She said with the dignity of a school prefect, ‘I’ve accepted obligations.’

  ‘Obligations!’ He picked up his trousers and began to dress. ‘You’ve found a bolt-hole
.’

  ‘Obligations, Nicholas.’ She darted in front of him, trying to distract him from his purpose. ‘What are you going to do about your mother when your father dies?’

  He pulled his sweater over his head and said, his voice muffled, ‘My mother is well able to look after herself.’

  ‘Not for half an hour, I’d guess.’ She plucked at his sleeve, ‘It’s your mother that’s your problem isn’t it, Nicholas? I’d help you deal with it.’

  ‘You would do what?’ His face was white as salt.

  ‘I’d be willing to take care of her as well as Thomas and Andrew.’

  ‘And what do you think they would have to say about that?’

  ‘If it didn’t suit them they’d have to make their own arrangements.’

  Nicholas, looking into her upturned face, saw her more clearly than he usually observed other people. Although she was pleading with him, he was aware of her strength. One day, perhaps not far distant, she would become a forthright, uncompromising woman who would give more than it might be comfortable to receive. ‘You and my mother wouldn’t get on,’ he said. ‘You’re both formidably capable.’

  ‘I’m capable, she’s not.’ Suddenly her store of energy was exhausted. She slumped on to the bed, crumpled face thrust in hands. ‘I don’t think I can make it back to Sophia’s. You’ll have to apologise for me.’

  ‘What do you imagine they’ll think if I come back alone and say that?’

  ‘What they’re thinking anyway.’ She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘Does it matter what they think? I don’t care about anything but you. Oh, Nicholas, what have I done to spoil things? What have I said?’

  He screwed up his face, unexpectedly touched, but she thought he winced at the banality of the appeal and said, ‘If you feel you need to explain, you could say I proposed to you and you turned me down.’

  For a moment, no longer than a heartbeat, and yet it seemed as if it was for ever, he saw this offer she had made not as something ridiculous, but as if it were arrival at the end of a journey, the glad recognition of a place long sought, a gated city. But gates close at night and cities have walls. He hesitated, his eyes already seeking a more distant horizon.

  Frances said, ‘Or you could just say we walked too far into the forest and got lost.’

  ‘It’s snowing quite heavily,’ Nicholas said gratefully. ‘I thought Frances should go home since we passed the house on our walk.’

  ‘What will happen to the pony?’ Andrew demanded.

  Anita tapped her teeth with a fingernail. ‘That’s a point.’

  Oh, to hell with the pony! thought Florence, who had spent an exhausting afternoon playing in the snow with Andrew and Thomas and the pony.

  ‘He can go in my shed,’ Thomas offered.

  ‘And I can lead him there.’

  ‘No, I think you should ride him.’ Thomas said this quietly as if having given careful consideration to the matter, but there was no doubting his authority and the boy did not argue.

  Florence was about to offer tea before the party set off when she saw that Sophia was standing half-way down the stairs.

  ‘I think you had better come,’ Sophia said.

  Florence’s mouth popped open and her face collapsed like an empty pea pod. Anita put an arm round her mother’s shoulders. Nicholas came behind her, an equerry’s distance apart.

  Thomas said, ‘Don’t worry about us. We’ll see ourselves out.’

  Florence stumbled on the first step; after that she negotiated the stairs as carefully as a blind person.

  ‘We haven’t said goodbye to Tobias,’ Andrew said.

  ‘You’ll see him again soon.’ Thomas wound a scarf round the boy’s neck and tucked it in his waterproof jacket.

  ‘Where’ve they all gone?’

  ‘It’s where we’re going we have to think about. Have you got all your presents? We can put them in these two bags and the pony will carry them.’

  ‘It’s not anywhere nice where they’ve gone,’ Andrew said, resigned to answering himself.

  Thomas opened the door. There was no wind and the snow fell soft as moulting feathers as they moved into the darkness.

  When the door had closed behind them, Tobias came and sat by the sitting-room fire, erect, paws between haunches. The candle in the window, the greenery arranged beneath a little statue of the Virgin, gave a gentle air of festivity, the awareness of a nativity.

  Sophia had not drawn the curtains over the window and the room was so dimly lit that they could see the lacy pattern of falling snow. Firelight flickered on a wall. Everywhere movement, except here where Konrad lay.

  Anita held one of his hands, Florence the other. Sophia and Nicholas stood at the foot of the bed. There was no rhythm of breathing now, only an occasional breath like an afterthought. The face was peaceful. Each of the faces in the semi-circle around him was briefly touched by that sense of the fullness of life which comes with its completion.

  Some time after the last breath, Florence kissed the calm brow and made the sign of the cross. She said drily, ‘I can’t pray.’ Anita put out her hand and closed the eyes. Sophia went to the chest of drawers and drew out a napkin.

  Later, in the kitchen, Anita said, ‘The undertaker will never get here in this.’

  Sophia said, ‘I can do what is necessary, if one of you will help me.’

  There was silence while Anita and Nicholas looked at Florence. Then Nicholas turned and went out of the room with Sophia.

  Florence remained standing by the window watching the snow mounting on the ledge. After several minutes, she said, ‘Tomorrow I shall want an explanation of that boy with the dancing bear.’

  Chapter Four

  The house seemed full of Konrad. They all noticed it in their own way.

  Florence discovered that it was no longer possible to keep him at bay. He was not out there, he was within her. And much, much younger than she, in his prime. He had such energy – not the energy which is dissipated, as was hers, in constant busyness, but the energy which is a fact of nature, as primitive as a wayside spring. Once, she had thought to drink from that spring.

  When they were children, Sophia had run away once or twice a week – she had called it having an adventure. This had aroused uncharacteristic passion in their mother and father. Florence, who would have liked the attention but not the experience of stepping beyond the controls, had listened at night to her sister recounting her adventures and had envied her. ‘You should come, too,’ Sophia had said. But Florence had refused. When they were older, Sophia had said, ‘A moonlit night beckons, an unlocked door invites. You should say yes to life.’ It was the first time Florence had heard this phrase, now sadly shopsoiled, and she had always regarded her sister as its originator. In her own way, Florence had since said yes to life on a number of occasions, but always in carefully controlled situations where consequences could be calculated and risks limited; she had, in fact, become something of an expert in risk limitation. The problem with Sophia was that she never sought to control situations to which she said yes. When Florence taxed her with this she had quoted Rilke, ‘ “Let life have its way; life knows best.” ’

  ‘I don’t know about Rilke,’ Florence had retorted. ‘But my experience has been that life needs constant pokes and nudges and the occasional knee in the privates to stimulate action.’

  ‘You see living as a masculine function?’

  ‘I don’t see much chance of it without a man.’

  She had expected Konrad’s energy to transform the external world for her. The external world was where Florence’s hope lay. For her, the symbol was the reality; she really believed in the hidden valley, the lost city, the magic mountain. Konrad had never understood this. He didn’t like travel and had no wish to go abroad. He, who had seemed so foreign, who was to have been the gateway to a more richly coloured world, had turned out to be totally lacking in imagination, rooted in the everyday of life. She had taxed him with this.

 
‘Why can’t you go in search of places to paint?’ she had said. ‘It’s all out there – we should go to Venice, the Vienna Woods, the Taj Mahal’ – how she longed to be one of those who referred to it casually as ‘the Taj’ – ‘the rose-red city half as old as time . . .’

  ‘All fantasy,’ he had shrugged. ‘You and Nicholas are like blind people: you dream of fantastic places, Nicholas goes in search of them. You never see what is before your eyes.’

  ‘I couldn’t settle for this being all there was,’ she had retorted contemptuously, making a Chekhovian gesture to indicate the smallness of Chiswick.

  ‘All!’ He had been genuinely amazed. ‘But it is so strange, all around you, don’t you see?’

  There had been nothing in the way he had said this of the wonder which she associated with strangeness, rather a kind of terror. His paintings suggested he was unable to walk down a street in the assurance that the scene would stay in place until he reached the object of his outing, the pillar-box on the corner.

  ‘If that’s how you see things, no wonder you don’t want to travel,’ she had commented, on viewing one painting. ‘Each time you turn your head you expect to see everything rearranged.’

  He had been excited and clapped his hands and said he had not known she understood this.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she had shouted. ‘It’s all nonsense – worse, madness.’ It had been after this that she had complained about the number of paintings in the house. ‘If you wanted a woman who could live in an art gallery, you shouldn’t have married me.’ This had touched him. ‘I hate the galleries, too,’ he had said humbly and after that the paintings gradually, over a period of time, disappeared.

  Yet, although she saw madness in his paintings, he himself had seemed massively calm, a great rock against which all the anger and hysteria generated by Florence and Anita broke in harmless clouds of spray. ‘He is there,’ she had told herself. ‘He completes the picture.’ She had become reconciled to seeing this as his role in the family. But now, in those uncomfortable moments of clarity which can come with the grey of dawn, she saw that it was he who had held their world in being. It seemed that the terror had purged him of the small anxieties, the petty vexations which grind down with the years. Never had Konrad appeared to be ground down. Nor did he seem to have any sense of oppression; whatever had happened to him in his early years, he had no idea of himself as a victim, no one whom he sought to blame, no urge to punish. She had a picture of him, as she lay watching the sun begin to bruise the ashen sky. She saw him seated by the window of their suburban sitting-room, gazing benignly over the mundane architectural chaos of Chiswick. His big head tilted sideways, the eyes little pouches of humour, the mouth composed as if a jest had recently escaped his lips, he looked not so much as if he felt at home in his world, but as if he had come to terms with its foreignness. A woman came into the room and Florence waited, with a thrill of fear and awe, to see herself walk quietly to the window and take her place opposite Konrad. They would talk as they had never talked before. And then the woman, who had seated herself, turned to the light and Florence saw that it was her sister, Sophia.