A Spell of Winter (33 page)

‘You’ve certainly changed,’ he said.

‘How?’

‘You see things.’ He spoke dismissively, as if what I had been was better than what I now was.

‘I’ve had to keep things going.’ It didn’t sound like much when I heard it through his ears. Others could go to Canada or fight in France: I would keep things going.

‘I can see that.’

He sat heavily, gazing straight ahead. I was longing to go to bed; every fibre in me ached for sleep. But there was a look on him I’d never seen before, like a disappointment.

‘Did you really go to Canada?’ I asked suddenly, before I knew I was going to ask it. He swung round sharply.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Cathy. How on earth else could I have sent you those letters?’

‘You could have got Kate to post them for you.’

‘You don’t know Kate if you think she’d do that for me.’

‘I don’t see why not. She did worse.’

‘She went away, that’s all. She never said she was going to stay here for ever.’

He talked as if ‘here’ was as unimportant as the Canada I no longer believed in. Where had he really been? Perhaps he’d sailed with Kate, then come back and struggled as a clerk in some city, London or Manchester, in lodgings where the landladies liked him for his voice and his manners until he ran short of money.

‘Aren’t you tired? I’ve made up your bed.’

‘No, I’m not tired. Besides, I don’t seem to sleep very well – it must be all this travelling –’ He shot me a look, half-teasing, then he asked, ‘Will you stay up with me, Cathy? I don’t like sitting alone.’

‘What do you do when you’re not here?’

‘Oh, there’s usually a chap to have a drink with,’ he said evasively. I seemed to see a small room with furniture that smelled of new varnish, and my brother sitting on the edge of his bed, absolutely still, frowning at his boots. Suddenly, decisively, he got up and walked straight out of the door without looking back. In the public house there would be a couple of chaps who half-knew him by name.

‘We could play cards,’ I suggested.

‘No. Let’s talk. You can tell me everything that’s happened.’

‘That won’t take long,’ I said. I had always let him look into my life through my eyes, but now there were things I had to keep from him. The long, mostly silent evenings with my grandfather had made a confidence between us which would not survive my talking about it to Rob. And there were a thousand details that could mean nothing to anyone else: the tar-washing of the apple trees; the way the Victoria plum had broken its branches with fruit last summer and we had scoured the countryside for sugar to bottle them … There were two bottles left, the big oval plums swimming in transparent syrup in a dark cupboard … The night the fox got into the hens and the morning a heron rose from its nest not fifteen feet from me while I fished in Mr Bullivant’s lake … The tasteless bony flesh of the carp … The day I had roped myself to the chimney and let myself down to look at the place where the tiles had come off in the gale. The rope had dug in tight to my waist and the world swung under me as I lost my balance, caught it again, hauled myself back up to the attic window, hand over hand … He hadn’t been there.

‘I’ll tell you something. I met the brother – Dodie. Kate’s uncle. The one who helped carry Joseph down the stairs.’

‘Did you!’

‘Yes, he’s still there, in this little house in Dublin. He has the table scrubbed white and he drinks half a pint of porter every afternoon. Just half a pint. He still never goes out, you know. God knows what he lives on. There’s a neighbour who brings a dish round in a cloth at midday. He went upstairs when he saw me, but he talked to Kate.’

‘So you saw the stairs where the arm –’

‘Yes. I couldn’t help looking at the floor, in case there was a mark.’

‘Was there?’

‘Of course not. Kate says he scrubs the flags every day. Can’t bear anything dirty near him. I suppose that started after all the business with Joseph.’

‘Fancy you actually seeing him …’

‘Mm. It
was
a bit odd.’

‘Theodore’s dead,’ I said abruptly, ‘and George.’

‘I know. I heard it in the village.’

‘Did you stop there first? I thought you’d come straight here.’

‘There was no one around. I should think I know more people in France than here, these days, dead or alive.’

He stood up and looked restlessly round the hall.

‘Remember how we danced?’

‘Yes.’

‘Those orange trees still going?’

‘No, they died last winter. We couldn’t spare the fuel to heat the conservatory, and the frost caught them. I cut them hard back but the stems were brown all through. Don’t tell Grandfather.’

‘He must have noticed, surely?’

‘He might have done. But he might have forgotten again,’ I said.

‘He didn’t seem gone in the head at dinner.’

‘He isn’t. It’s hard to explain.’ I thought of how the baby he’d reared by hand was more real to Grandfather now than the woman who was somewhere in France or her son who sat, a shadow, opposite him at the dinner table. And yet Grandfather and I had swum into focus for one another, when for years we’d been shadows to one another, feared or ignored.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Rob. ‘Listen, Cathy, I’m going to give this as my address. Is that all right?’

‘Of course it is. This is your home. You’ll come back here when you get leave.’

He touched my wrist. I looked down at the fingers which seemed to insinuate themselves into my flesh as if they belonged there. If I wanted he would come upstairs with me and sleep with me as if he had never been away. He wanted things not to have changed, because something had hurt him when he’d been out in the world, killing the glow that had been on him like the glow of a child that has always been loved. But he hadn’t always been loved, except by me.

I thought of the Canada I’d made for him in my mind: the house set in long swells of corn which beat like surf to the threshold, and Kate sitting on a patch of grass, a zinc bath on a stand in front of her, and a plump, wriggling child on her lap. It was always a boy. Kate scooped out a handful of water and splashed the child until he screamed in ecstasy. The warm wind blew over them, drying the child, lifting Kate’s hair, rustling the corn. Now Rob wanted to come back to me as if none of that had happened. And none of that
had
happened.

‘You’re right, I suppose I have changed. We’ve all had to. Things have been so different with the war,’ I said, and I watched his fingers, just perceptibly, lift. His face was still close to mine and I saw the familiar way the line ran from the corner of his mouth to his nose. Yes, it was already deeper, just a little. He reminded me of someone, or something that had happened before. Suddenly I had it. I saw my father lying under the sheets in The Sanctuary, so close I could have touched him, with that same hurt shadow in his eyes.

‘Don’t go,’ I said again, almost against my will, as if it were something I had to say. But he was quick. His gaze moved against mine and he knew that I no longer wanted what he wanted. He’d never ask again. The home he’d come back to didn’t exist, any more than the house in the cornfields.

He smiled and stretched as if he were ready for sleep, and said, ‘Oh, I have to go – I’m ruined for home. Isn’t that what they say?’

Twenty-two

‘I still think we should fetch Harry,’ said Mrs Blazer.

I stood up and peered again into my grandfather’s face. It looked no different to me.

‘Listen to him breathe.’ I listened. There was a rasp in it, louder than before perhaps, but then his breathing had been harsh and hoarse for days. He’d been caught in a sudden slash of cold April rain: a few moments later the sun was out, making the drops glitter like knives. But it wasn’t enough to warm him.

‘See his colour now. There’s been a change,’ Mrs Blazer urged. There was duskiness gathering on his face. Round his lips and nostrils the skin was as dark as a plum. She’d wanted to fetch Harry Shiner since yesterday; Harry, she called him now, though to me he was the wizard. And we’d had Dr Milmain out twice, though how we were going to pay his bill I couldn’t imagine. But I could imagine his anger if he found out we’d let Harry Shiner near my grandfather.
Old-wives’ tales and cottage cures and superstition. They’d still be hanging witches if we let ’em
.

‘All right. But no one’s to know he’s been here. Tell him that.’

‘Oh, he’ll say nothing. He’s the soul of silence,’ said Mrs Blazer proudly, as if the wizard were her belonging.

My Grandfather’s head jerked sideways as if someone had slapped him. He lay so still he seemed to have stopped breathing, then just as I got up, panicky, the bubbling creak began again in his chest.

‘That’s congestion,’ said Mrs Blazer. ‘It’s lying on his lungs.’

‘All right. Go and fetch him. Get him to come quickly.’

If he died, I thought, I wouldn’t even remember the last thing we’d said to one another. Something about beef-tea or bed-bottles, it would have been. Then he’d lapsed back into the sleep that stuck to him like glue. While Mrs Blazer was out, perhaps I could open the window. She wouldn’t have it opened, not a crack, because it would be the death of him. But it was May and the air was so tender that there were birds singing even in Grandfather’s laurel tree. I’d been in the room so long I couldn’t smell his sickness any more, but my head ached with it. I crossed to the window. I was only going to open it an inch, but as the sash started to move and new air blew in I pushed it up with all my strength and the dirty glass gave way to a panel of clean, sparkling air. A bumblebee droned close, swerved at the invisible barrier, lifted itself into the laurel’s yellow-green fresh leaves.

‘Cathy.’

I turned. He’d rolled towards me. His eyes were wide open, wider than I’d ever seen them, like a baby’s eyes.

‘Did you get your brother his coat?’

I didn’t know he even knew about the coat.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

‘I never saw it.’

‘The Army and Navy make up parcels for France. They sent it straight out to him as soon as they got the order.’

‘Good.’ After a while the bubbling wheeze grew louder and I saw he was trying to laugh.

‘No coat if he hadn’t –’

‘Hadn’t what?’

‘Gone in as an officer. No coat for private. Good thing changed his mind.’

‘Yes, it was.’

I’d spent on the coat the money I’d put aside to hire horses. Now I’d have to see what price I could get for timber this year … There wasn’t much else left to sell … except land.

‘Good coat.’

‘Yes it was. The best. Superior Quality British Warm.’

He was sweating heavily. Was that bad, or good? People sweated when their fevers broke. It had a strange, childhood smell to it, teasing at me. Then I had it: pear drops. We’d have to change his bedlinen again.

‘Do you want the bed-bottle, Grandfather?’

‘No. Water.’

He couldn’t sit up to drink it, but we had a feeding-bottle with a spout that Livvy had sent over. She was a VAD now, working in the convalescent hospital. It was good of her to think of us. Her groom had bent down, po-faced, handing me the feeding-cup without getting off his horse. How was it she had kept her groom? He was a fine strong young man, fit to be fighting. I put the spout to my grandfather’s lips and he sucked noisily, his eyes closed with concentration. There was a little brandy in the water, to keep up his strength, and a spoonful of honey. The liquid began to run out of the side of his mouth. He’d gone to sleep again, and the prow of his nose was sharp and white in his darkening face. I wondered how long it would be before they came. It wasn’t market day, so the wizard would be at home. He worked long hours making up his remedies, Mrs Blazer said. There was a skill to it like nobody knew. And then the sweets, which made good money in the greyness of the war: candied angelica, crystallized violets, peppermint drops. He could always get sugar from somewhere. If you wanted beauty as well as sweetness there was honey water and elderflower water, and eyebright cream to make the whites of tired eyes as clear as a child’s.

‘You ought to try it,’ said Mrs Blazer. ‘Shall I bring you home a sample?’

He’d gone a long way now, deep into his sleep. The summer air moved around the room, flickering patterns on to the walls and drying the sweat on his face. It couldn’t do him any harm, and I was very tired, too tired to close the window. I curled my feet under me in his big, uncomfortable armchair and shut my eyes. I heard the swifts skirling under the eaves.

When I woke they were both bending over my grandfather’s bed, one at each side, Mrs Blazer and the wizard. His broad back faced me. He was a big man, not as I had imagined, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, his hair so black it had blue in it. And young: I’d thought he’d be old. But when I turned I saw he was not so young. Fifty, perhaps, or more. He was a walking advertisement for his own remedies, his skin supple, his eyes clear and pale in his dark face, his hair still thick and glossy. His eyes shifted around the room, taking it all in, fixing on nothing. He rummaged in his pockets and brought out a brown paper bag, untwisted it, shook out a few white lumps.

‘You melt this, see, over a flame. Would you have a little dish, and a lamp? Then he’ll breathe easy.’

Mrs Blazer took the white stuff reverentially, and hurried away.

‘We’ve been rubbing his chest with eucalyptus balsam to help his breathing,’ I said. ‘I thought you might bring some remedy he could swallow.’

It seemed to me that if you went so far as to call in a wizard, he ought to do something more than you could do yourself. Perhaps there were other brown paper bags rumpled up in his pockets.

‘There’s no need for medicine,’ he said.

‘But he looks worse to me. That’s why we sent for you.’

‘Come here.’

He had a strong animal smell, like the fresh sweat of a horse mixed with herbal mustiness. His body was huge and safe at my side.

‘Now if you look down at him, see those little speckles round his mouth and nose, coming up under the skin.’

They seemed to spread as I looked.