A Spell of Winter (18 page)

‘The puppy’s lost,’ I say, but Father doesn’t take any notice.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he says. His voice is tight and quiet. ‘What we’ll do is we’ll just walk a little way along this hedge, it’s not very far, and then we’ll get to the gate and over it, then it’s only down one more field and through a bit of the woods, then home. That’s not very far, is it? We can manage that. Oh God. Help me. It’s all right, Cathy, I’m all right. Wait a minute. We’ll just get our breath. Father’s out of puff, that’s what it is. Oh no. Oh no. Not very far. Nearly home now. Over the field. That’s all. Just keep going straight on.’

But we aren’t moving. Father sinks slowly into the tangle of wet, coarse grass under the hedge. I can’t see his face any more, only the top of his head. Then he lets go of my hands and covers his face. He wraps his arms tight round his head and curls up in a ball, as if he is going to sleep. He is making strange noises, like crying or laughing. Behind me I can hear the puppy getting close. I turn round and there he is, pushing his way over a tussock of grass. He needn’t have climbed over it, he could have gone round. He is shivering. I pick him up and hold him close to me. He curls up like Father and tries to lick at his neck, but he can’t reach it properly. His body keeps giving little jerks in my arms.

‘It’s all right,’ I whisper in his ear, ‘don’t be frightened. We’re going home in a minute and your mother will look after you.’

In a little while the puppy feels better. We start playing a game where I stroke his head and he rubs his ears up against my hand. He likes that. Then out of the corner of my eye I see the gun where Father has dropped it. It is pointing at us.

Never never let your gun
pointed be at anyone.

I ought to move it. Even Father would want me to move it, I argue with myself, but when I glance at him he’s very still. He won’t even know. I stand up with the puppy in my arms and tiptoe towards the gun. I tiptoe in a careful circle until I am behind it. Then I put the puppy down on the grass.

‘Keep still!’ I tell him. ‘Guns are dangerous.’

I kneel down in the grass and slide my hands underneath the butt of the gun, making sure it is pointing away from me. There is the trigger. That is where the shot comes out. Very gently, very quietly, I lift it. After all I’m only going to turn it round so that it is pointing into the hedge. I’m not doing anything bad. It is very heavy. I can’t hold it at all the way Father does. I brace myself and lift the weight of the gun on to my shoulder.

But my back is to the hedge. The gun is pointing not at the hedge, but at Father. I shift it. It is slipping on my shoulder, hurting me. I’m afraid I’m going to drop it. The puppy wriggles round my feet.

‘Cathy!’

It’s the breath of a voice, no more. I’ve been too busy trying to control the gun to notice Father. But he’s up, uncoiled on his hands and knees staring at me and the gun which is pointing straight at him. I’m going to swing it round, only it’s so heavy. Father’s face is white, streaked with mud.

‘Cathy! Don’t move now. Keep perfectly still. I’m coming round to you.’

I stand perfectly still. The sun glints on the gun, the puppy wriggles warmly against my ankles, and my arms tremble with the weight. Father edges very cautiously round the grass, watching me all the time. Then he is at my shoulder, lifting the gun. There is a sharp, fierce smell coming from him.

‘I’ve got it now, Cathy,’ he says. ‘Step aside.’

I step aside.

‘Are you all right now, Father?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I was ill for a bit, that’s all. Like your mother and her sick headaches. But I’m better now. And what in God’s name were you doing with this gun? How many times have you been told?’

‘It was pointing at me,’ I say, beginning to cry, ‘and you were asleep and you always told me –’

‘What did I tell you?’

‘Never, never, let your gun …’ I sob and hiccup. But I can’t finish it.

‘Pointed be at anyone,’ says Father, and he swings up the gun and points it at a cloud in the bright autumn sky. ‘There now. Watch this.’ The gun kicks his shoulder and the bang comes, splitting the sky into thistledown. I shut my eyes and ask,

‘What did you hit?’ but Father laughs. ‘Nothing. I was only pointing at the air. Come on now. Let’s go home.’

‘What about Lucy’s puppy? He’s not very well.’ And father looks at the puppy just as he usually does.

‘Poor little beggar. He’s played out. You can carry him if you like.’

I glow with pleasure. I’m not usually allowed to carry the puppy, because he hasn’t been wormed yet. But, ‘Aren’t we going to Silence Farm, Father?’

‘Oh – Silence Farm,’ says Father as if he’s forgotten all about it. ‘No, Cathy, not today.’

I think of the bitter tea and the dark parlour with its slippery chairs, and the rabbits in the lane.

‘No, Cathy!’ says Father. His voice is beginning to sound funny again. Quickly I take his hand, holding the puppy cradled in my other arm.

‘I don’t really want to go there anyway,’ I say. We walk quietly most of the way home. Father helps me over the ruts, and at the end of the muddy part he wipes my boots clean with grass.

Just before we come to the wood he says casually, glancing down at me,

‘No need to tell anyone we didn’t go to Silence Farm, Cathy.’

‘No, Father.’

‘We’ll forget about it.’

‘Yes, Father.’

I know he means all of it. The puppy and him curling up under the hedge and me holding the gun. Already I am not quite sure if any of it has really happened.

‘This little fellow’s cut his paw,’ says Father, ‘we’ll get it bound up before Lucy sees it.’

I smile. Lucy is the fussiest bitch, John says, it’s a wonder she can bring herself to bear a litter of puppies, still less do what she has to do to get them. I squeeze the puppy and he looks up at me anxiously, his puppy-grin showing white needle-sharp teeth.

It was cold inside the counterpane. How many other days had dropped clean out of my memory? What had I lost? He told me to forget, and I forgot, not because I was obedient but because I was afraid. My shoulders were hunched high and my breathing was tight.

‘Cathy will do as she’s told.’

‘You didn’t see what happened.’

‘You didn’t hear that, did you, Cathy?’

‘We’ll forget –’

‘Yes, we’ll forget …’

‘… all about it …’

My body trembled, as if it knew things I didn’t know.

Thirteen

I’d had two hours of sleep after the dawn came, and my head ached. When I drew the curtains my eyes stung. In the mirror they were small, washed out as if I’d been crying in my sleep. The winter light was harsh this morning and my clothes were scratchy as I pulled them on, shivering. Rob shouldn’t have left me alone. We had to be together now. When his face on my pillow twitched with dreams, I could almost read them. They were my dreams too, my nightmares. I was entering him, going through the walls of skin between us. I thought of the inside of his brain like honeycomb, pale golden. I was a bee crawling through the chambers where he thought, my wings clogged with honey. We used to pretend to remember a life before we were born, when we played in our mother’s womb together. And how I was sad when he left before me, leaving too much space, forcing me to grow without him. I almost remembered seeing him swim away over the threshold without me. I grasped his heel but he was slippery. He was gone.

We had to be together now because there was nowhere else to go. We needed to drowse together, fitting one to another and lapsing in and out of sleep. My heartbeat slowed to the pace of his, and I seemed to feel a larger heartbeat enclosing us both.

But he wasn’t at breakfast. There was a half-eaten fried egg in his place, and a cup of coffee he hadn’t even touched. His chair was shoved back. He’d be down again in a minute. I poured tea for myself and watched the stream of it wobble with the shaking of my hand. The hand looked like someone else’s, not mine. I could not predict what it would do next. I was very tired, that was all it was.

Kate came in and started to bang plates together.

‘He hasn’t finished,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t had his coffee yet.’

‘He won’t be drinking it,’ said Kate. ‘She came to fetch him. They’re going riding.’

‘Who?’

‘Livvy Coburn, who else would it be that could make Rob go off without finishing his breakfast?’

‘Have they gone?’ I asked, my hands clumsy, knocking my tea so it slopped. His coffee was still warm.

‘You might catch them,’ said Kate, eyeing me ironically, ‘if you run.’

‘It’s just there’s something I needed to tell Rob …’ I wouldn’t run, not in front of Kate. I walked to the door, stiff, my thighs rubbing against one another, my face set in a little smile.

They were on their way out of the stable yard. The sun was on them as they sat big and powerful on their horses. They stretched down their necks and looked at me as if they were part of another race, Livvy on her beautiful cosseted mare and Rob sitting on a horse I didn’t know.

‘It’s Starcrossed,’ said Rob. His face turned to me, a glitter of evasion which I couldn’t read. ‘Mr Bullivant sent him over for me to exercise.’

He belonged there on Starcrossed, his back straight but not stiff, his thighs against the powerful muscle of the horse. The two of them shone.

‘When are you coming back?’ I asked.

He looked at Livvy, and she said, ‘I must be home for one o’clock. There are people coming for luncheon. But my mother wants you to come too, Rob. Starcrossed can go in our stables. Isn’t he an absolute angel, Catherine?’ she asked, and she laughed and leaned over to pat Starcrossed’s neck. Her touch was slow and caressing, and she glanced over her shoulder at Rob, her laughter still bright in her face. She was blonde, pink-tipped, immaculate. I wondered if she knew why she suddenly wanted him. No, she acted on instinct. She might look remote, but Livvy was as intuitive as a fox. She knew when her belongings slipped out of her grip.

‘Stand back, Catherine,’ said Livvy in her thin sweet voice. ‘She strikes out with her heels.’

But I wasn’t going to let them go like that. ‘Rob,’ I said, ‘what about Miss Gallagher? You said you’d do something about her.’

‘When I get back,’ said Rob. ‘It’s all right, Cathy, forget her. She’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Oh, she’s a sweet old thing really,’ said Livvy, ‘but quite batty, of course. You don’t mind her, do you, Catherine? She likes
you
, you know.’ She smiled at me kindly, offering me Miss Gallagher as if she were worth something. Or did she believe that Miss Gallagher was all I was going to get, because deep down where Livvy could see and I couldn’t, we were alike?

Livvy’s mare skittered, her hoofs flying, and I backed into the stable doorway. Released, Rob touched Starcrossed with his heels, and the two of them turned to go, the sunlight flowing on the horses’ flanks like water.

There was a drip drip from a tap someone hadn’t quite turned off. In the doorway dust curled slowly up a beam of sun. The stable floor was matted with dirty straw. It ought to have been swept out, but John was ill and Rob had left it. He should have been working here, not out riding with Livvy. There was too much to do and the place was falling apart. I was sick of it suddenly, sick of the way we lived and of my own passivity. My body itched with impatience and I seized John’s broom and began to sweep. I heard the sound of hoofs behind but I wouldn’t turn. He couldn’t see me from the yard, he’d have to come in, ducking his head and losing the advantage of being on horseback. I knew it would be Rob, come back to make things right with me so he could enjoy his day with his mind at ease.

‘Cathy!’

‘Mmm?’ I said, sweeping so hard that a cloud of sour dust went up in his face, ‘What?’

‘Stop it, I can’t talk to you when you’re whisking about like that.’

‘It’s got to be done. This place is a pig-sty. You ought to have done it.’

‘All right, I know, I know. Listen, I’ve only got a minute. I told Livvy I’d forgotten my whip. Listen. Don’t be like that, Cathy. I had to go when she came over specially. It would have looked strange if I hadn’t.’

‘Yes, of course. So you had to go. Why did you come back, then?’

‘You know why. Because I – ‘

‘Because you?’

‘Because I had to.’

I glanced up at him as I swept round him. ‘Mind your feet. So you went because you had to and then you came back because you had to. That’s very interesting but where does it leave me?’

I was hot, sweaty, exhilarated. With the broom in my hand I felt strong.

‘You’d better go,’ I said. ‘She’ll wonder where you are. That stuff about the whip won’t fool her for five minutes. Go on, go to her. You know you want to.’

I had never felt so powerful. He stood there not knowing what to do. I felt my smile stretch across my face. ‘Go on. I don’t care.’ And I didn’t. I was big and coarse compared to Livvy but I was strong. When there was a job to do I could do it. I could clean out these stables and more besides.

‘What about her?’ he asked, hesitating in the doorway. I knew he meant Miss Gallagher.

‘I’ll deal with her. You’d better go, Livvy doesn’t like waiting.’

No one else came to interrupt me. I kilted my skirt into my belt and heaped the dirty straw in the yard. Winter flies crawled slowly, almost asleep. They looked blind. If we’d let that straw lie much longer there’d have been maggots in it. I forked it on to a barrow, then wheeled load after load to the midden. I fetched John’s zinc bucket and swilled down the cobbles with clean shining arcs of water. I put fresh hay in the mangers and spread new straw for bedding. When it was done I leaned in the doorway. The thin January sun felt warm. Wisps of new hay blew about and the wet cobbles glistened. A wood pigeon purred on the roof as if it were summer and I stretched myself until my bodice creaked. There was a burning ache at the base of my spine.