A Spell of Winter (32 page)

But he talked to me now, at night after we’d eaten, when there was one candle on the table, or only the firelight, and we sat with a bowl of nuts to crack and a glass of wine. He poured out my wine faultlessly, so that it swelled to the brim but never spilled. He poured me one glass, then another, and pressed me to take more.

‘Take another glass of wine, Catherine. You must keep up your strength.’

In the mornings my head felt light and distant, with an ache in it which soon worked off in the cold air.

‘There are only the two of us,’ he said once. ‘We must –’ and then he mumbled some words I couldn’t hear.

‘What did you say?’

He sat bolt upright, his heavy-lidded eyes shooting out their fire again as they rarely did now.

‘Only the two of us. We must –’

He stopped again. I swallowed my wine, looking away to help him.

‘C
HERISH
!’ he shouted. ‘One another!’ and he looked at me like a hawk about to plunge on my heart. But I knew him now.

‘Yes,’ I said, and I put out my hand and laid it over his. It was warm: that surprised me, how warm it was.

We ate our nuts. ‘Did you walk in the woods today?’ I asked.

‘I walked to Silence Farm,’ said my grandfather. ‘Why, I don’t know. A fool’s errand if ever there was one.’

The path was quite overgrown. I wondered how he had got there, thrashing down dry hemlock with his stick, forcing open the tangled field gate.

‘No one’s been that way for a long time. I saw a stoat kill a rabbit on the path in front of me as if I weren’t there. Didn’t see what it was at first – just the shape of it whipping at the creature’s throat. They’ve an instinct, you know, Catherine. They can sense the blood under the skin. Do you know, I half believed it would go for me too.’

‘How were they, at the farm?’

He picked up his knife. ‘Is there no fruit? You ought to have fruit. No, I didn’t go in.
This the war, that the war
. You know how they are there, half-starved for company. She’d choke you to death on cake if it’d keep you there talking another quarter of an hour. I came back through the woods.’

I’d seen him, walking slowly home, feeling ahead of him with his stick. ‘There’ll be fruit tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I gave six geranium cuttings for some dried figs.’

‘Good girl.’

I walked to Silence Farm. Oh no, I didn’t go in. I came back through the woods
. He was mostly alone, as he’d always been.

I hoped that sometimes he looked up at the bare branches and saw them suddenly clothed, I hoped that he listened and heard the tender rustle of leaves, so new they were still damp and crumpled from the bud. I hoped that he felt a sudden weight in his arms and looked down where the baby stirred and looked up, noiseless with wonder, into the spreading hands of a horse-chestnut.

It was the fourth winter of the war. The mare was dead and, though I’d hired a horse for ploughing, most of the land lay fallow. I’d had to let First Field go. There were eight goats now, though, and trade in the market was good. I had repaired the fencing round the paddock, and planted a new herb garden with pennyroyal and purple sage, spearmint, rue and rosemary. The wizard planted his own herbs but he always needed more, and we could make up bunches for market. I caught myself thinking how I would show it all to Theodore when he came back. It was impossible to believe that the men they said were dead were really gone, without a corpse to kiss or a funeral where we could see them folded neatly away into the soil. It was a trick, a magic hand wiping the landscape clean of young men. They had walked over a hill and vanished, so suddenly that they might come back just as they left, walking quietly along the lanes, a little older and more deeply tanned, speaking a few words of a language we didn’t know. Before the mare died I thought I heard Theodore once, close behind me, clicking his tongue in the way she liked. She turned her head as if she heard it too.

‘It’s not now we’ll feel it,’ said Mrs Blazer. She swilled boiling water and soda round a milk-bucket, then tossed it out in a long arc on to the grass. It stood on the grass for a few moments, then was sucked away. ‘It’s when this war’s over and they don’t come home. That’ll be the breaking-point.’

‘If it’s ever over.’

‘There’s a hole in the wire there. A fox’d get through that.’

‘It’s too small.’

‘Don’t you believe it. They can stretch themselves out like water when they want to.’

She went indoors to make tea for us. She’d made oat biscuits too, with the last dark smears of honey scraped from the comb. We were going to eat them with a bit of cheese. My mind ruminated on food as I knelt by the chicken-wire, plaiting one brittle strand into another. The wire was old and it broke easily. The work was too tricky to do with gloves on, but the wire hurt my fingers. There was blood coming up under the thin surface of my damaged skin. If I had a handkerchief, perhaps I could wind it round so the fingers were protected …

I heard boots crunch on the path. Too heavy for Grandfather. I looked up and he was standing there. My hands went out as if to push him away, as if he were the fox.

‘Hello,’ he said. He smiled, not quite looking at me. He was wearing dark clothes of a cut I didn’t know. Town clothes.

‘You’ve come back.’ I was cold from kneeling on the winter grass and I stood up slowly, rubbing little flakes of rust off my hands.

‘I didn’t write,’ he said. ‘I thought it was best not. I thought you might not see me.’

‘Where’s Kate?’ He’d taken off his hat and his hair was squashed flat. It was shorter than it had ever been and not conker-brown any more, just an ordinary brown like anybody’s hair.

‘Kate?’ he asked, his eyes blank for a second. ‘Oh, she’s not with me. I haven’t seen Kate for a long time. She married, you know. A widower. They have a son now.’

‘
Married?
’

‘Yes. Well, why not? She could have married ten times over in Canada. There aren’t enough women there. And he had some money.’

‘Did he?’

‘Well, not all that much, I don’t suppose. But it was a lot to Kate. I went to her wedding.’

‘You went to her wedding?’

‘Yes, why not?’

He picked little grains of frost out of the rotting fence-post. His hands were fine and soft, quite different from how they had been. My own looked rough beside them, my fingers thickened with work.

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Oh, all sorts. I worked in an office for a while, selling insurance.’

‘Insurance!’

‘Good God, Cathy, don’t sound so surprised about everything all the time. Yes, I sold insurance.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d go to Canada to sell insurance, that’s all.’

‘It’s a big thing there. All the farmers need it. They pay into policies against drought and so on.’

I wasn’t convinced. It came out too easily, as if it were something he’d read about rather than done.

‘Were you doing well?’

‘Pretty well, I suppose. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

‘You don’t have to be asked.’

‘I think I do.’

He stood there, his eyes uneasy but insistent. I kept looking at his hands. They had touched me: for nearly four years I hadn’t thought of how they’d touched me. But he was like another person in another skin, paler and softer than it had ever been. The slightly ill-fitting smartness of his black clothes, and the hat pushed jauntily to the back of his head, were stranger than Canada. He was here but it was too sudden and in my mind he was still far off in that little snow-buried town.

‘Come in then,’ I said, ‘but we won’t tell Grandfather yet.’

‘Why? Is he ill?’

‘No, not really ill. But you’ll see a difference.’

It was like the dreams I hadn’t let myself dream. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Mrs Blazer took away his cup and filled it before he had finished drinking. Dark patches flared in her cheeks and her hands flustered, eager to be doing but not sure what to do.

‘Is there any cake?’ asked Rob, sure that there was and it was only a question of which tin he should choose from. Pound cake or seed cake or gingerbread cut into squares with an almond sitting glossily in the centre of each piece. Once he’d known the rhythm of her baking and now he was going to pick it up again like dropped stitches.

‘There’s no cake,’ said Mrs Blazer. I saw her fingers yearn to feed him. ‘But we’ve some oat biscuits.’ She pushed the warm tray across to him and he took one, bit into it, laid the biscuit down again.

‘Try it with a bit of goat’s cheese,’ she urged him, but he crumbled the biscuit away between his fingers.

‘We can’t get the ingredients,’ I said, ‘with the war.’

‘Count ourselves lucky we don’t live in town. They’re queueing for margarine there, nasty stuff that it is,’ said Mrs Blazer, ‘and jam with wood chips in it for strawberries. Least what we’ve got here is clean.’ Rob got up and ran his knuckle down the row of pale green enamelled tins where she’d kept her baking. The little tin for shortbread, the big square one that was meant for weddings and christenings. They rang with an empty music under his hands.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

‘Things are different in Canada, I dessay,’ said Mrs Blazer, allowing a hint of criticism into her voice. ‘Shops full to bursting.’

‘With tallow and beaver skins and dried bear meat,’ said Rob, ‘but I’m here now.’

Are you, I thought. Under the table I nipped the pale flesh of my fore-arm and made a little sting. It hurt. Rob smiled at Mrs Blazer as he ran a finger under his collar, loosening it. It was a cheap collar, shiny where it shouldn’t be, but clean. It would have been washed over and over. I remembered Rob spoiling his starched white collars and chucking them on the floor while Kate chided him for his extravagance. He took other people’s time for granted then. Something had gone wrong; badly wrong. He was anxiously clean in his dark suit, and all the bloom of confidence had been knocked off him.

‘You’ll be hungry,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring you some hot water and you can wash while I go and tell Grandfather you’re here. He’ll need a little while to get used to it before he sees you.’

It was late. We’d dined together, Grandfather and Rob and I, becalmed around the table. Grandfather’s hands shook a little more than usual, but that was the only sign. I saw the effort of will he made to stop them trembling while he poured the wine. The first thing Rob had said to him, forestalling him, was, ‘I’m on my way to France. I’ll be gone tomorrow.’

‘What, dressed like that?’

‘Of course not. I’ve got to be trained first. Artillery.’ But he said it at random, as he had said insurance, as if it might not be true.

‘Are you really going?’ I asked him later, when we were alone in the hall, with the fire at our faces and the cold at our backs. Grandfather had gone to bed no later than usual, saying good night as if Rob had been gone for days, not years. I knew he would lie awake for hours, watching the laurels push at the window, listening for voices.

‘Yes, I’m going.’

‘But it wasn’t true about artillery, was it? You just said it.’

He stretched. ‘Where’s the sense of a commission? Might as well go in as a private. It’s all the same once I’m in the machine.’

‘But you can’t bear people telling you what to do. You wouldn’t be pushed around as much if you’re an officer.’

He shifted restlessly. ‘Everyone gets told what to do. Doesn’t make much difference who’s telling you.’

‘You could have stayed in Canada. No one would have known where you were.’

‘Oh well. It seemed to be the thing to do.’

‘That never bothered you before. Not when you went off with Kate.’

He looked at me. ‘Don’t go for a fellow, Cathy.’

I took the poker and stirred up the fire. ‘I cut these logs,’ I said, ‘and brought them in.’

‘It’ll be yours, of course, this place. Don’t think I don’t know that. I haven’t come back to take it away from you. Is that what you think?’

‘Of course not.’

He leaned forward and thrust the poker deep in the fire to heat. His hair was dry at the ends, badly cut and shabby brown.

‘Why did you come back then?’ I asked.

‘To see you, of course,’ he said, and took out the poker. Its end glowed red and then dulled over. He wrote his initials on one of the logs that was drying in the hearth. The first downstroke burnt deep but the rest scarcely charred the wood. ‘I wanted to see you before I went to France.’

‘You might not get sent to France,’ I said. It was too easy, all this. All he had to say was the word France and we would melt before him, forgetting or not daring to mention what he’d done. ‘They don’t take everyone.’

He looked round, his eyes blank with surprise. ‘Of course they’ll take me.’ He sounded like a man who’d walked for days to the edge of a cliff, bracing himself to look down, only to find the drop no more than a few feet which a child could jump. For a moment we were together, looking into the chasm of what he wanted. Not to think, not to decide, just to go blindly with a force as impersonal as the wind.

‘Don’t go,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t think you’re well. You look awful. Livvy’s father is on the Tribunal, he’ll fix something up for you. You could get a staff job.’

‘Livvy’s father! He won’t have any great love for me.’

‘She’s married.’

‘Everyone’s married. Kate, Livvy … What about you?’

‘You know I’m not,’ I said. Suddenly I noticed how my feet were planted firmly apart, warming themselves at the fire. I’d got out of the habit of noticing how I stood or sat. And my face was weathering too. Soon outdoor work in the winter would make the colour on my cheeks break into thread veins.

‘Funny thing, I always thought George Bullivant would have you. What became of him?’

‘He’s an orderly on a hospital ship.’

‘Good God. Who’d have thought it?’

Rob was silent, dipping the poker in and out of the flames.

‘He didn’t have to go, he’s over age,’ I said.

‘Very commendable, then,’ said Rob.

‘Don’t talk like that!’

‘Like what? Why?’

‘You sound … I don’t know. Sour. As if nothing matters to you. Don’t be like that.’