A Spell of Winter (13 page)

‘You’ll freeze –’

‘No, all that digging’s made me warm.’

But I opened my coat. There were yards of material in it; it would nearly wrap around both of us. Rob shuffled up close to me, and a spasm of shivering ran through my whole body.

‘It’s a good thing you don’t still get your chests,’ he said. ‘Kate would kill me for having you here. Come here, I’ll warm you up.’

I felt his voice rather than heard it, like a vibration passing straight from his body into mine. He drew the coat tight around us both, putting his arm round my shoulder and pulling me close. The warm, familiar smell of his skin drowned the dankness of our snow cave.

‘It’s getting warmer.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s quite nice in here, really, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Are you glad we didn’t go home?’

‘Yes.’

His arm was tight on my shoulder. I could feel each separate finger, and its pressure. ‘Cathy?’

‘Yes?’

‘What was he talking to you about all that time?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘He must have been. All that time I was with Starcrossed, you were with him. I came in once but there was nobody in the room. Just the tea things, so I went back out to the stables.’

‘We were only looking at his paintings. It didn’t take long.’

‘I shouldn’t have left you alone with him.’

‘I didn’t mind.’

‘Yes you did. You asked me not to.’

‘I know, but that was before.’

Rob was silent for a moment. Then, ‘Before what?’

‘Oh, nothing special. Only, I know him better now.’

‘Better? Just today?’

‘Well, you know how you get to know people. A day can change things. Like it did with you and Livvy, last summer.’

I needled him, seeing how far I could go. His breathing changed.

‘That’s different.’

‘Why?’

‘Livvy’s your age. And she’s a girl. Bullivant must be – what? Nearly forty.’

‘He’d need to be, to have made all that money,’ I agreed maliciously.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I do. And I can’t think why you’re being so pompous.’

‘You’re my sister. I don’t want to see some Bullivant making a fool of you.’

‘It’s not like that. Did you know, his name’s George? George Bullivant.’

‘It would be. Just the sort of name he would have.’

‘Don’t be silly, Rob.’

I thought of Rob dancing with Livvy, dancing with Kate. Now I was dancing. But when he next spoke Rob’s voice was different.

‘It’s not so bad after all, this little house. Are you warm enough now?’

The tickle of his breath was on the side of my neck. I was warm enough now, and the ends of my fingers were tingling.

‘You know, Cathy, we oughtn’t to marry.’

‘I’m not thinking of marrying.’

‘Yes, but you will. Someone’ll ask you, and then you’ll think of it. Some brute of a Bullivant.’

‘Oh, Rob.’ I smiled to myself in the dark. For once I felt immeasurably older and wiser than my brother.

‘Yes, but you do see, don’t you? Why we oughtn’t to?’

‘No, I don’t. No more than anyone else.’

‘Because of our children. Look at their grandparents. One mad and one bad.’

‘You can’t say that.’

‘Why not? Why not say it? It’s true, isn’t it? Is that what you’d want for your children?’

‘Rob, is any of this, any of what we’ve had, what anyone would want for their children?’ I was angry. My words spurted out as if they’d been waiting years to be said. There was more, I knew it, a hot angry jet of it. What were we doing? What sort of life had we? And now here we were playing some ridiculous game in the snow in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, when I could have slept in one of Mr Bullivant’s silken beds. Did other people have this insane drive to destroy what was best for them, and cherish what was worst? Was that what our father had given us?

‘I hate him,’ I said. It was one of those things you say before you know you are going to say them, then find as soon as they are said that they are true.

‘Who?’

‘Father.’

My anger and hatred boiled in me. If it could take shape it would be a fire that would melt the snow-house to a puddle.

‘Why did he have to do it? Why did he have to leave us with all this – mess and greyness? Grandfather and Miss Gallagher. If he hadn’t gone – if he hadn’t done it – just because Mother left –’

The back of my throat ached with tears. I was gagging on what hadn’t been said. ‘She wasn’t worth it!’

The beautiful phantom I had made of her shrivelled like a pricked toy balloon. Her hair was grey, her white skin raddled. Her lovers were bored with her, glancing at their watches as she told stories of her past. The lukewarm Mediterranean slopped at her feet. She had given us up for this smell of cigars and mimosa, for a voice at her ear and someone to put her wrap around her when the night breeze strengthened. She was a spoiled, stupid, pettish woman who thought less of her children than the cat does. I would not listen to what Mr Bullivant thought of her. I would hug her to me like a disappointment.

‘She just couldn’t stay, that’s all,’ said Rob. ‘There’s no right and wrong about it.’

His voice was cold and sad. The story of my parents shrank away under the touch of it. They’d loved one another, but not very much and not for very long. There wasn’t enough there to make a tragedy.

‘It’s all right,’ said Rob. ‘Don’t think about them. They’re not what matters. But we mustn’t make that kind of mistake.’

His finger curled behind my ear, stroking and searching. ‘It’s all right, Cathy,’ he said, to the rhythm of it. ‘It’s all right.’

I’d seen a baby in the village whose mother had died of fever four days after it was born. A neighbour was trying to feed it on sops of milk and sugar, but it wouldn’t take them. Old Semple came up to the house to ask my father if he could obtain a proper feeding bottle for it from the town. The baby was crumpled and puny and it cried all the time, a thin, creaking cry. One old woman said in its hearing that she didn’t think it would live. It shrieked and deep round creases sprang from its mouth to its eyes. Its skin flushed purple and the scream rattled in its throat. The woman holding it touched its cheek and it turned blindly to her, its mouth rooting in air, its eyes squeezed tight over tiny shaken drops of real tears. It was silent for a second, rooting for the touch of its mother’s nipple. Then it broke down again into desolate screaming.

My mouth was like that baby’s as I turned to Rob. I didn’t know what I was feeling for. The smell and touch of it were beyond my imagination. It was like looking for the memory of a happiness I might have experienced once.

We met with our wet, searching, open lips. Everything I had seen a thousand times I now learned by touch. The graze of his skin against my cheeks because he hadn’t shaved since morning. The taste of his saliva, the shape of his mouth arching to meet mine.

The smell of the walls. Mould, damp and penetrating iciness. The smell that Rob said was fox but which might have been the seeping juice of a three-days-dead rabbit. The cold rough plaiting of branches at my back.

‘It’s like a grave,’ I thought as Rob let go of me. We couldn’t move away from one another because there was no room, but he was suddenly as far from me as he’d been close a few seconds before, his mouth straining on mine, his teeth biting my lip as I cried out. As for what had happened between our bodies, I hadn’t got the words for it. My legs ached where he had forced them up and apart. But something else had happened too. In the middle of it I’d felt myself give way, warm and liquid, opening my legs wider and wider so that he could plunge into me again and again, each stroke making me shiver. That was after the first panic when he was forcing himself against me and I was small and tight and dry and he couldn’t get inside me, and I panicked more, hearing his desperate breath in my ear. If we hadn’t been in the cage of the snow-house I’d have bitten and fought and shoved him off. I’d have run. He wasn’t Rob then, he could have been anyone. And the words he used had nothing to do with me, nor had the frantic kisses and snatching at my breasts and my hair. He couldn’t get near my breasts anyway, they were so well wadded in my stays and my thick winter bodice. It was easier to drag my skirt up. But when he was inside me he was Rob again, my brother, remembering who I was. We’d gone too far then to do any pretending.

‘Cath – Cathy, Cathy – are you all right, am I hurting you?’

It was like when we cut our wrists and rubbed the blood until it mixed and no one could have told which was his, which was mine. But we cut too deep and there was too much blood, dripping in heavy dark drops on to the nursery floor. It hurt then, but I said it didn’t, and I suppose he did the same.

When Rob was inside me he groaned as if I were hurting him, and knotted his fingers in my hair. I was half turned on my side and my hip ground into the icy floor. We had slipped off Rob’s coat and I didn’t know where the door was. The snow-house seemed suddenly huge, ballooning around us, stabbing us with pangs of freezing cold which were so sharp they might have been flames.

Then it was all over. We weren’t Rob and Cathy any more. We were two cold, aching lumps of flesh, crushed together and wanting to be separate. His weight hurt my left arm and I felt something slow and sticky trickle out of me and down my leg. He sighed and rubbed the back of his hand over his face. For a moment I thought he was crying. How were we going to get home without speaking to one another, because if we once started to talk about this what more would be uncovered? How were we going to throw words across the gulf of what had happened? It had gone too far. That baby in the village: I couldn’t remember if it had lived or died.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Rob. I laughed aloud in relief.

‘You’re always hungry!’

‘Yes, but now I could eat anything. I could eat Miss Gallagher.’

It was an old fantasy of ours. How would we cook her to make her edible? Long, slow roasting after a judicious period of hanging in the game larder? Or should she be cut into small blocks of flesh and casseroled in the ashes overnight? And how should she be flavoured? We could never decide how she’d taste.

‘Like a mackintosh when it’s been rolled up and put away wet.’

‘Like the sweat on cheese.’

‘If we had a fire, we could cook something,’ I said.

‘If we had something to cook, we could make a fire. You’re cold, Cathy.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re shivering.’

‘Not because I’m cold.’

‘I know that. I know everything about you. Even the way it says in the Bible. I told you we ought not to marry.’

A pang of fear went through me. Had all this happened because of that? Because of Mr Bullivant, and the way Rob had watched us standing together at the fountain? Because of the empty room when he came in from the stable? Had he thought something needed to be stopped?

‘And I told you I wasn’t thinking of marrying Mr Bullivant.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of him,’ said Rob, in a voice of pure surprise. I hesitated, wanting to ask more, then I let him convince me. We were so alone now. If I couldn’t even believe Rob then I’d be bricked up on my own with what we’d done.

I know everything about you
. He knew more of me now than anyone, and I knew more of him. More than Livvy, more than Kate. It left us alone together, a shipwreck with our secret that dragged at us like treasure. The flame in Mr Bullivant’s lantern was guttering. Time to go home.

Nine

But we had to bring home what we’d done. That was the difficult part. The snow-house and the frozen orchard were time out of time, separate. What happened there could be hidden. But as soon as we came indoors I got frightened. I’d never felt that kind of fear before, except when I woke up after a bad dream, my nightdress cold with sweat and my heart hammering in my throat. When I climbed the stairs I thought that I was shedding clues like drops of blood. Anyone could track me down. If Rob came and sat by me on the oak settle in the hall, the way we’d always sat, roasting ourselves at the fire, I thought we were too close. I kept seeing us together as if I was a third person, watching, spying, guessing.

The brush of a shoulder, the touch of his hand, his whistling. There was no barrier of skin or space between us. I felt myself flush and sweat. My heart made my blood hiss in my ears. I thought it was over as soon as it happened, sealed away in the musty silence of the snow-house. But now I couldn’t make it stop happening, and Rob didn’t want to.

He came to my room, not the first night but the second. I was in my nightdress in front of the looking-glass, plaiting my hair. It was much warmer and I’d been listening to snow thinning to watery soup and running down the drainpipes. It was a dark, thick night, with no stars. Kate had gone to bed early with a bad head and a cup of ginger tea. Grandfather had gone over to dine with Mr Bullivant, and he’d be back late after a game of chess. These days he often talked to me about Mr Bullivant, watching my face, raking my body with his bright, hooded dark eyes.

‘Cathy,’ said Rob. He was behind me, leaning over, playing with the pins in my shell box. I looked into the glass and saw him smiling there. Our two faces were side by side. Suddenly I saw why people said we looked alike, in spite of the difference of colouring and sex. Mirrored we looked out at the world in the same way. He had always come in and out of my room like this, fiddling with my hairbrushes, perching on the side of my dressing-table, flinging himself full-length on my bed. Behind us in the looking-glass there was the bed, oblong and tight-tucked. It looked as if it were floating between the floor and the ceiling.

‘Cathy,’ he said, putting down the pins and watching my reflection. I saw his mouth move. He was smiling.

‘Why shouldn’t we always live here?’ he asked, his voice soft and wheedling. ‘We could be like Harry Callan and his sister. We could have a cottage like theirs on the edge of the village.’

The Callan cottage looked out on the fields and the woods beyond. Nobody could peer in through their windows. No one was ever asked to cross that threshold. Harry Callan would not even have another woman in his house to nurse his sister when she had pneumonia and he had to sit with her day and night until the crisis had passed. Perhaps he was right. Liza Callan got better, and the doctor said not many could have brought her through it the way Harry did. I thought of the Callans walking to church, Liza dumpy in her good black, Harry parched and fierce.