A Spell of Winter (16 page)

‘Kate has other fish to fry, I dare say,’ she answered.
I dare say
. It came across with ugly boldness. She was admitting things too: how Kate had never liked her, how she wasn’t really welcome in this house, how the love she’d tried to pour out on me had been thrown away like waste water.

‘All the same, let’s have some. We’ll go and sit down.’

But she wouldn’t leave the hall. She must have been thinking it over beforehand, imagining the scene, painting it in the colours she wanted. She was like a child colouring neatly between the lines and hoping for masterpieces.

‘No, thank you, Catherine. I’m not staying.’

But she wasn’t going either, and I was stuck there with her in my dirty boots and muddy skirt, wiping loose hair out of my eyes. She looked me up and down. How she always exaggerated everything. Her life was theatre, bad theatre. Her trusty steed, her scarab pin, her love of secrets behind closed doors, her little way of pursing her lips over words that had almost slipped out. What a liar she was. I had had enough.

I wanted to tell her to shut up, let us alone, get out. She knew nothing. Nobody had ever touched her or wanted to. I’d had enough of her sliming her trail over our lives. She stood there rocking slightly from heel to toe like a huge, useless doll, and I wanted to push her, see her keel over and knock her head on the hard stone hearth, singe her hair in the flames. I wouldn’t help her, not if she had her head in the red heart of the fire. I knelt down and pushed the poker between the logs, dislodging a shower of sparks and the smell of apple wood. The last load of wood had come from two James Grieves we had lost in the gales. I breathed in the smell of the smoke. Of course she didn’t know anything. How could she? On Isley Beacon we’d been higher than anything but a hawk. It was just her old jealousy. She was sick and yellow with it. I jabbed the poker in hard and levered two logs apart until they sent up new bright flames. I thought of how she’d held my hand and led me through The Sanctuary to where my father was, and I shivered with revulsion. She’d enjoyed that too. I remembered her fingers rearranging my petticoats, tucking in, scrabbling at the lace. Thank God I was out of that long tunnel of my childhood. She had had her time.

I glanced up over my shoulder and caught her looking at me. She was drinking me in, and she went on boldly even when she saw me looking back. She’d got me at last, she thought, and I belonged to her now. Everything had changed and I was where she’d wanted me all those years. She put out a long hand and touched my hair.

‘Catherine …’

I shrank away from her. I would have knocked her hand off but I didn’t dare. Yes, she knew. Somehow she’d spied and watched and she’d got what she’d always wanted. She could hold me where she wanted now. You are dirty, her eyes said, and I shall make you pure. The most frightening thing about her had always been the lies she told herself.

‘It’s not right for a young man to be hanging around at home. Your grandfather ought to send him away to work for his living,’ she said. ‘He needs knocking into shape. He ought to go to sea,’ she added wildly. Visions of the future she could visit on Rob rose like goblins in her eyes. Storms at sea, a ship rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Rob clinging to the railings – a wave breaking over the decks, a sickening lurch, a cry no one heard, the ship sailing on while a tiny figure tosses in its wake, growing weaker and weaker … She could do it now, she believed. Through me she could get rid of Rob, the way she had always wanted.

‘Why on earth would he want to go to sea? None of us ever has.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, with heavy satire, ‘of course not. It’s good enough for the finest men in the land, good enough for my second cousin the Admiral, but not good enough for you. You’d rather go elsewhere, like your precious father.’

She had always been sentimental about men in uniform. Her nonsense was making my head ache.

‘Your father,’ she said, ‘
he
went somewhere, didn’t he? Did you know they wanted to send him to Bedlam?’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said, ‘and I don’t want to.’

‘Oh yes, they did. But your grandfather stopped it.’ Her words dropped on me like little balls of spittle. She spoke quietly and conversationally, and no one passing through the hall would have guessed what we were talking about. I didn’t feel like laughing at her now.

‘Your father was a moral lunatic,’ said Miss Gallagher. ‘Do you know what that means, Catherine?’

‘God knows!’

She paused, torn between her automatic desire to defend the Redeemer’s name (‘She treats God like a pawnbroker,’ Rob said) and her hunger to move on to better meat.

‘I had hoped, Catherine, never to have to speak to you on the subject, but I know my duty now. I should never have kept the truth from you all the time,’ she continued, with an involuntary smile of pleasure. She would have got her phrases out of one of the novels she loved, tales of virtue rewarded and the flowering of beauty in plain, poor women. I saw her rolling the words over on her tongue in her narrow bedroom, rejoicing because at last she’d made her chance to use them.

‘I knew about that, anyway,’ I said.

‘Did you, Catherine? I wonder,’ she said, looking at me with amused pity. She would have rehearsed that too. Then she poked her neck forward with a jerk, ugly but effective, like a blackbird stabbing at the head of a worm as it emerged from the wet soil. Her eyes pinned me. ‘Have you ever thought what happens to a servant who gets herself into trouble?’

‘She gets married, I suppose.’

‘Oh, you innocent!’ she trilled, letting it hang between us that innocent was certainly the last thing I was. ‘Not always, Catherine. The asylums are full of such girls. They are moral idiots, not fit to live among decent people. They need to be taught the difference between right and wrong. I visit one such place quite regularly, you know. Of course I have never talked to you about it.’

But now you can, I thought.

‘Not many people know about them,’ she went on, ‘but charitable people contribute funds. The inmates wear a uniform. I helped to design one.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Really, Catherine, I should hardly have thought that was significant. As long as their bodies are covered. Though I flatter myself that I know something about clothes.’

I looked at her long swathes of dustcoat. You are a monster, I thought. How she would love insinuating herself into any institution, sipping tea with the matron and gently recommending further punishments. How she would love walking up and down among girls who might have been pretty once and were now on their hands and knees scrubbing flags with big chapped hands.

‘The matron of St Agatha’s is a particular friend of mine,’ said Miss Gallagher. ‘Moral idiots,’ she repeated, with light, particular emphasis.

‘That doesn’t mean anything to me,’ I said.

‘Oh, doesn’t it? I thought it might. Your grandfather would know what it meant at once, after his terrible experience with your father.’

Chill was licking at my heels. No matter how much wood we piled on, all we ever achieved in the hall was a blaze on our faces and a desert of cold behind. She knew and she was going to tell our grandfather.

‘You don’t look well.’

‘I’m tired. It was a long walk. And I haven’t changed.’

‘Oh yes, Catherine, I think you have,’ she said, looking at me with her head on one side. Then she became practical again, the friend of the family. ‘You must have perspired and it has given you a chill.’ She looked at me as if she could see the pores of my skin and smell my sweat. ‘Shall I ask Kate to fetch hot water for your bath?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘I could stay while you have it.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Gallagher,’ I said, and I smiled appeasingly, ‘I’m not Feeling awfully well.’

‘
Eunice
. How many times have I got to tell you? After all, you are grown-up now. We’re both women. Eunice. Perhaps it is one of those times? Have you got your visitor?’

I felt as if she were running her hands over my body.

‘Oh you silly girl! You don’t need to be shy with me.’

She had creaked into horrible playfulness. We were girls together, talking about female intimacies.

‘If Rob
does
go away,’ she said, lingering over the idea deliciously, ‘I could come and keep you company. I’m sure your grandfather would not object, if you asked him. And you need someone to help you with your clothes, if you’re going to have all these parties and gaieties. Won’t it be fun?’

We were in the future tense already, not the conditional. I knew all about how language was put together from hearing Rob’s Latin as he struggled to learn his tenses and declensions. I could feel my way to the right answers swiftly, as if a path lay between them and me. She was so sure of herself now. Stupidly sure. She really thought it had been that easy and it was all over. I would give in and Rob would go like a lamb. Oh, she’d juggle us all. Yes, she’d frightened me, but now her big face was silly with the prospect of happiness.

‘I must go upstairs. I’ve got a pain,’ I said. She looked at me with maternal satisfaction, like a mother who loves her child the more when it is sick and scabby, hidden away from other eyes. Then she reached out the back of her hand and stroked it down my cheek. I jerked sharply away and rubbed my flesh where she had touched it. Her hand fell down to her side and she looked at me with tiny hating eyes.

‘Touch pitch, and you shall be defiled,’ she said. ‘You’re filth, Catherine. You are walking in the darkness. It is the evil spirit in you that makes you turn from me. But I shall rescue you in spite of yourself, Catherine. I know my duty.’

She was rapt. I had given her more happiness than she had ever imagined. The prospect of my redemption glowed before her face, brighter than the fire. It was perfect: she could hate the sin, and love me. She scarcely saw me go out, leaving her there.

‘She knows,’ I said, and watched the pupils of Rob’s eyes shrink to pinpoints.

‘How? How can she?’

‘I don’t know. She just does.’

He sat back on his heels on my bed and whistled softly through his teeth.

‘The old devil. She’s been after you since you were born.’ Sss, sss, sss, went his whistling, and he actually smiled, his cheekbones rising mockingly.

‘She’s a monster. You don’t know half of it. You’re to go, and she’s to move in with me and help buy my clothes.’

‘Help buy your clothes!
That’ud be the worst of it. Do you think she’d find you a nice coat like hers?’

‘It isn’t funny, Rob.
She knows
. She’s going to tell Grandfather.’

‘Keep your hair on, Cath. She wouldn’t dare. He’d get rid of her the way he got rid of Susan and Tommy Linus. Besides, he wouldn’t believe a word of it.’

‘Wouldn’t he?’

‘Of course not.’

‘She says he would, after Father.’

‘Did she actually say that? Threaten you?’

‘No, not quite … but it’s what she meant.’

‘Mmm.’ He was frowning now, tense. ‘I always said she was mad.’

‘We’re moral idiots, that’s her line. She could get me put away for it.’

‘That’s absurd. She can’t do that.’

‘She could. There are asylums for it. Father nearly went to one, why not me?’

‘You don’t believe she could, or you wouldn’t be talking about it like that.’

He was right, of course. Just by talking her over between ourselves, the way we’d always done, we were weakening her. We’d annulled her between us many times.

‘But it’s different this time. She really means it. She is mad, or half-mad, anyway. That’s why she’s dangerous.’

We’d always laughed at her. Her clothes, her scarab pin, her long teeth and her cloying love for me. But all that mockery hadn’t changed anything. She was still here, as durable as rubber, and she came and went in our house as she wanted. She hadn’t changed. In her grotesque way she had the same power to want as Mr Bullivant had, and to go on wanting long after anyone else would have given up. We had never taken her seriously.

‘She’s the hare and the tortoise,’ I said.

‘She can’t be both at once.’

‘No, we are the hare. We think we’re so far ahead of her. We’re young, we’ve got everything. We bound off for a bit then we lie down in the sun and shut our eyes and forget about her. But she won’t be forgotten. She just keeps going, plodding on her track.’

‘Funny things, tortoises,’ said Rob, ‘the way they move. If you watch them all the time they don’t seem to make any progress. But if you go away then come back after a while, they’ve always gone out of sight. And they’re the devil to catch in the long grass.’

‘Yes, that’s it – that’s what I mean. She’s like that.’

‘So what are we going to do about her?’ He said it lightly, as if it was a game.

‘Make her go.’

‘Make her go? And how do we do that?’ Hazel flecks swam in his eyes. I could see every grain of colour and the way it thickened into patterns, raying out through the iris like a dandelion clock.

‘I’m sure there’s a way.’

He laughed. ‘She’s not the boy in the wallpaper, Cath.’

The boy in the wallpaper had lived in a narrow frieze of pattern until nightfall, when he came out and slipped between the bars of my cot-bed. He had gone on coming for years. At first I liked him, but his stories ballooned bigger than shadows and I couldn’t control them any more. He told me about the burned ladies who always wore veils of deepest mourning over their faces. And when they drew them off, slowly, there were no faces at all, only greasy knobs of melted flesh with two eyes sitting in the middle. There were the Noink-Noinks who squeaked whitely, like mice, only high up. At night they all came to me, flocking and twittering.

I was six when Rob killed the boy in the wallpaper. I’d woken again, sweating and grovelling at the bottom of my bed. My nightdress clung to me in urine-soaked folds.

‘I’ll kill him for you,’ Rob promised. ‘I’ll wait for him tomorrow night and when he comes I’ll kill him.’

‘How will you?’

‘I mustn’t tell you. You’ll have to hide with your head right under the blankets and promise you won’t look out. If you do he’ll win and he’ll kill me.’