A Spell of Winter (12 page)

‘Or,’ said Mr Bullivant, ‘you could stay. It’s very cold out. I can get a message to your grandfather.’ He had a telephone. He could arrange for a telegram to be sent. It would be no trouble. Everything could be found for us.

‘A hot bath first? And then dinner. I’ve a claret you might like, Rob. And perhaps you’d take Starcrossed for a hack along the lanes for me in the morning. He wants exercise.’

‘I want my exercise now, I’m afraid,’ Rob said smoothly, ‘and a telegram would alarm our grandfather.’ He wasn’t boyish any more, he was an adversary. I wondered if Mr Bullivant saw that as clearly as I did, and understood why it was so.

There might never be another time. This was perfect: the snow, the night closing in on us. The bathwater would be hot, deep and scented. There’d be no question of rationing because Kate could only carry so much hot water up the stairs, and Rob hadn’t had his bath yet. No shivering in a shallow skim of water that was lukewarm by the time it was poured. And the sheets on his beds might be silk. What a pity it was impossible to ask. Or if not silk, then linen so thick and glassy that getting into bed was like slithering into a cream-laid envelope. But Rob would spoil it. There was no point staying if I was on edge all the time, waiting for what he might do or say. I remembered how he’d struck our father with the branch. I’d always wanted Rob to be with me so much more than I’d believed he could want to be with me. Now I hardly recognized the new sensation of wanting Rob not to be here at all.

‘So I can’t tempt you,’ said Mr Bullivant. ‘Well, at least let me lend you a lantern, so I can think of you having some light on your way back.’

Thinking of people when they’re not there – it’s one of life’s great pleasures, isn’t it?

He stood up, looking down at us. Most of the sandwiches were uneaten, in spite of Rob. They’d be thrown away, along with the dinner we might have had. Suddenly I knew that he would have ordered it to be prepared, just in case.
The waste of it,
Kate harped in my head. But nothing was less important than money in this house. For a moment the thing that might have happened was as clear and real as the thing that was going to happen, then we got up from the sofa.

Eight

Rob stopped on the path. I’d been treading in his footsteps, using the shelter of his body like a coat. Walking had become dreamlike, one foot after another. Mr Bullivant was in my mind. George Bullivant. I saw him reach up to sweep a layer of snow off Diana’s arm, then I saw him pouring out for me a thin golden stream of tea, and buttering a muffin to put on my plate. He had seen my mother, stood beside her and talked to her. I could have gone on walking all night, not feeling the cold, letting pictures rise in my mind. I have always loved journeys, because they absolve me from action. But Rob stopped and we were nearly home.

‘Let’s not go back yet,’ he said. His voice was eager, conspiratorial. It was the voice of our childhood and here in the snow it was time out of time. Rob was in the same dream as I was. I wondered who came rising up into his mind, over and over. The lantern made blunt gold splashes on the snow in front of us. The wind was getting up and it blew piled snow off the branches on to our coats. I looked at the footsteps behind us and the blank page ahead. No one had come this way but ourselves.

We were just a couple of hundred yards from the house. We had walked back between the shelter of the hedges, our boots squeaking, our lantern light filling the hollow of the lane. We were the only creatures out in the night. The birds were roosting, fluffed up behind ramparts of snow. I peered through the hedgerows as we passed, half expecting to see stoats changed to ermine, and the white-tipped tail of a fox, but there was nothing. The cold air sighed around us, stinging my cheeks.

We were by the orchard. On our left was the close lacework of the trees, their branches striped black and white like the skunks’ tails in Rob’s
Picture Almanack of the World
. Just here was the place where the wall had collapsed into a pile of soft yellow stone years back. This was the oldest part of the orchard, where a thicket of burly apple trees grew close together, unpruned, bearing fruit on their highest branches. We used to scramble through the gap in the wall to fill a sack with the big, winey apples, easily bruised. They never kept. They were always furred white before we could eat them all. We dared each other to dig our fingers into their rottenness.

These trees were not picked any more. It wasn’t worth a man’s time, with the business of setting up the ladders. Leaves and branches fell where they would, and fruit clung on through autumn until the frosts. Even now, in the middle of winter, finches fed on a few wrinkled yellow apples.

The orchard lay still in its sheath of white. Rob’s breath puffed towards me and clouded the glass of the lantern.

‘Come on, let’s go this way,’ said Rob. His face glistened as he pointed into the trees.

‘It’s not a path. It doesn’t go anywhere,’ I said.

‘Yes it does. Come on. We’re going to make a snow-house. This snow’s perfect for it – we’ll never get it like this again.’

I remembered. Years ago there had been three warm winters. The first one began just after the terrible summer when we went to see Father. Everywhere we went in the house, doors squeaked shut against us. The house was restless with the lies we were telling our neighbours. Grandfather led the campaign, and Miss Gallagher was enlisted to add her voice to the rise and fall we could hear from the cold halls and passages. We were barred and left outside to swallow whatever story we were given. But if they knew how to talk, we knew how to listen. We would find out what had happened.

Rain spattered against the windows like a disappointment, and there was an epidemic of whooping cough in the village so we were forbidden to go there. On our own day after day we lolled in the window seats and longed for snow. We planned what we’d do when it came, as it was sure to come. We’d harness Jess to our sledge and ride her to the North Pole. We’d take supplies: dried meat, stoned raisins, cocoa. And when we got there we’d build a snow-house and stay until spring came. Rob had a book about Eskimos with coloured illustrations that showed small squat men, faceless in fur hoods, cutting blocks of packed snow and laying them together like bricks, circle over circle, closing to a small round hole at the top to let the smoke out. The next picture showed an Eskimo family. The wife was chewing sealskin to soften it so she could stitch it into shoes. The baby lay in a papoose, wound tight as baby Jesus in his swaddling clothes at Christmas. Outside, in the breathless silence of Arctic nights, the husband crouched by an ice-hole, spearing fish. We stared at their lives, so purposeful and so different from our own.

‘That’s what you’d have to do, Cathy,’ said Rob, reading the text, ‘chew off the blubber.’

‘What’s blubber?’

‘Pure fat,’ said Rob, knowing I cut away every shred of fat from my meat. If Kate was in a bad mood he would eat it for me. ‘It says here it’s the same colour as candle wax. Think of that, Cathy, thick strips of yellow blubber to chew whenever you feel hungry. I wonder what it tastes like.’

I made drawings of our snow-house. They were neat plans, showing where we would eat, where we would sleep, where we could carve out the space for our entrance tunnel. We never called the house an igloo, because it would have removed it too far. Igloos were distant and exotic and no longer our own, but a snow-house sounded possible.

‘A green winter makes a full churchyard,’ everyone said. The sky stayed dull. We stopped hoping as warm rain leaked out of the overfull clouds, day after day. In the night a hushed splatter against our windows masked the voices downstairs.

We went half-heartedly to the woods and built a dam instead, but Rob smashed it before it was done. I remember how sad I was that year when the first celandines opened flat to the sun and I knew winter was nearly over. It was hard to believe it would ever come back.

Father would never come back. He had consumption. He went to a sanatorium but it was too late. All the doctors in the world couldn’t do anything for him. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men … that was one story. We gagged on it as we’d have gagged on yellow blubber.

I knew about the stories we told to other people, and the stories we knew. My father had held me close in the rose garden, and kissed me. He had cried and a doctor had told him to drink milk as if he were a little boy. Rob had hit our father with a broken branch and made the side of his head bleed. It didn’t need to be talked about to be remembered. If I told that to a girl like Livvy, how would she ever understand it?

In the end we agreed that the snow would never come. Our life was dull, like the sky. ‘You live in the past,’ Kate said. ‘You live in your grandfather’s time.’ But she was wrong. The past was not something we could live in, because it had nothing to do with life. It was something we lugged about, as heavy as a sack of rotting apples.

‘We’ll have to use our hands,’ said Rob.

We floundered over the wall. My coat skirt was heavy, its braid clogged with snow. ‘You know where there’s the little clearing?’ I said. We held the lantern high and shadows flared and ran backwards into the hollows under the trees.

‘Just here,’ said Rob. He reached up and hung the lantern from a branch. Light steamed up faintly from the white ground.

‘We’ll have to stamp the snow down flat first,’ I said, remembering the book. We paced out a circle and began to tramp the ground with our boots, crushing the bramble stems, grass, dried Michaelmas daisies and cow-parsley stalks which had made tents of snow for themselves. We swept up armfuls of snow and scattered them, then packed it all down to make a level, icy floor. It took so much snow.

‘We’ll never be able to make the walls,’ I said. ‘Look how much it takes just to cover the floor, once it’s packed.’ We’d never achieve that glassy, perfect brickwork.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Rob. ‘We can build up the walls with branches. There’s all this fallen stuff we can use.’

We uprooted fallen branches and brushwood from their sockets in the snow. Snow showered in my face. It stung for a second but I was hot with the work, so hot that I peeled off my gloves and dug out the branches with my bare hands. Rob was laying down the first outline of the walls, branch on top of branch, brushwood stuffed in between the layers, snow packed in the crevices.

‘If there’s another fall, it’ll cover all the gaps,’ he said. He banged down stakes of wood into the frozen earth to support the horizontal branches. The thud and shock echoed out into the frozen night. I was working as hard as him and my body felt light and invincible, as if I could dig for ever, find anything under the snow, build all night long. I wasn’t even out of breath.

‘Look, Cathy, the moon,’ said Rob. He sat back on his haunches and looked up at it. It was pale and unclear, surrounded by flakes of cloud, but the night sky was breaking up and its light would grow stronger. The coming storm must have blown out before it reached us.

‘We shan’t get our snow.’ The swollen half-circle of moon shrugged off cloud as we watched. Soon it was riding high, bright edged. Our lantern shone less clearly and the whole orchard began to swim into focus in the moonlight.

‘Doesn’t it look as if something’s just going to happen,’ I said.

‘It always does,’ said Rob slowly. ‘Then you wait … and nothing happens.’ He turned back to packing the snow with his hands, plastering it against the thatch of twigs. We had ruined the smooth white of the orchard floor. Moonlight dragged on its rough surface.

‘There,’ said Rob, standing up. He clapped his gloves together and snow flew off. The walls were nearly waist high, and vertical. ‘Now all we have to do is lay more branches across the top, for a roof.’

All we have to do is
… I smiled. How often I’d heard Rob say that when we were making bows and arrows out of holly wood, or climbing over the roof lashed together with washing-line, or building a tree house, or shooting squirrels, or taming wild kittens.
All we have to do is
…

‘You go first,’ said Rob. I crouched down and peered inside. When I had imagined the snow-house I had thought of entering it through a tunnel of ice, with blue light glowing through the walls, but this house was dark inside, and it smelled of earth and rotting wood. I bunched up my skirts and coat and crawled through the gap. The floor was freezing. Surely it was much colder in here than outside: a dull cold that worked through my clothes and made me shiver.

‘Are you in? What’s it like?’

‘It’s dark. Pass me the lantern.’

But there was no waxy glimmer of ice, even when Rob gave me the lantern. We had plastered our house with snow on the outside, but inside there was the rough surface of branches and twigs. There was mould on the branches where they had lain on the earth. The smell was mushroomy. Rob’s head and shoulders filled the entrance.

‘Move over, Cathy, I’m coming in.’

I moved aside, tucking up my legs. There was just room for us both. Rob turned like a dog turning in its basket and faced me. The lantern shone on his face. His nose wrinkled.

‘Smells a bit, doesn’t it? Must’ve been foxes in among that fallen wood.’

‘I think it’s just the mould … but isn’t it freezing?’

We stared at each other. For a moment mutual deception held us with its old grip. Ten years ago we’d have kept it up, never let one another know how disappointed we were. It had been a point of honour never to say that the messes we cooked over camp fires were burnt to glue, or that our bows and arrows wouldn’t shoot straight, in spite of a day’s patient whittling with Rob’s pocket-knife. But we were grown-up now. Rob looked at me and his face quivered with laughter.

‘In fact, it’s pretty disgusting in here, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps if we had something warm to put on the floor – How do you think Eskimos can bear to sit on the ice?’

‘Oh, I’m sure they don’t, not really. How we used to think all that stuff in the book was gospel, though!’

He was wriggling out of his coat. ‘There you are. Sit on that. If you move up, there’ll be room for both of us.’