A Spell of Winter (37 page)

BOOK: A Spell of Winter

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I’ve stopped imagining ways he might have died. It doesn’t help. I can’t go there with him. But I still wonder how hard it was. Did he walk, then crawl, and then shrink back to nothing but a cry in the darkness? Nobody came. I would have come. Nothing would have stopped me. But I was picking apples in the orchard I’d made mine, carrying baskets of them home to store in the house that was mine too. I’d left no room for him.

There were always the two of us. There are two of us now. He hears our mother’s heartbeat, just as I do. A hard bump, then its echo. Her flesh fans out the sound into our soft bodies. He heard it before me. He feels the warmth of her and smells her skin. He will leave her body before I do, and he’ll be there, waiting for me, making sure I’m never alone. We slipped like fish over the lip of our mother’s body. He waited for me. He waits again.

The white down covers us both like a wing, and the noise of the gulls and the approaching storm covers the sounds I’m making.

George doesn’t come up the ladder to look for me. After some time I push away the
plumeau
and get up. My mother hasn’t got a looking-glass, so I wipe my face on the sheet and push back my hair. On the floor in the corner of the room there’s a white china jug and bowl, with some water still in the jug. I dip in my handkerchief and wash my face with it, then I recall something Kate used to do when we had fever and I let the water drip on to the insides of my wrists. Each drop cools me. Where did Kate learn all these things? She was a child when she came to us. Fourteen is nothing, though to me she was a woman. It was from Kate I learned how to be a woman, though I didn’t know what I was learning. I see her hands, working. Her voice, telling me of things she saw that no child ought to have seen. Then her laugh and the mocking smile in her long eyes. It doesn’t matter how many respectable photographs Kate sends me from Canada, I shall never believe in them. I’ll always see her alive, laughing at everything, moving with her own sure grace.

The floor creaks. These cottages are built to lie low to the earth, to resist the wind by yielding a little each time it blows. Downstairs George is seated comfortably at my mother’s table, reading. He looks up and smiles.

‘It’s one of her stories,’ he says. ‘Quite good, I think. Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Doesn’t look as if she’s coming back just yet, does it? Shall we go up to the house and have a look? Even if she’s not there, Marc and Isabelle ought to know where she is.’

Outside the wind snatches at my skirt. Sand is blowing up from the low dunes and whisking across the grass. No one will hear us coming.

‘I’ll just use your mother’s privy,’ says George, and disappears. I might as well use it too, I think, considering all the bushes I’ve had to crouch behind since we came to France. When I go in I can smell his urine, quite strong but not unpleasant. It’s strange to live so closely with him, but I am getting used to it more quickly than I would have thought possible. The privy has a big wooden seat over a hole. The walls have been washed white years ago, but the whitewash flakes wherever I touch it. There is dark-red valerian growing out of the top of the wall, where the light comes in. My mother has spiked sheets of paper on to a nail. There’s writing on one side: her manuscripts I suppose. I like the mixed smells of earth and carbolic and urine and the sea. I tear off a piece of paper.

And then the nurse blew out the candle so all Emily saw was the glow of the fire
.

‘
That’s not the end of the story,’ said Emily. ‘Tell me the re

I wipe myself with the paper.

Rain scuds in from the sea. Bars of rain move fast, gaining on us as we run towards the farmhouse. The door is open.

‘Go on,’ says George. ‘We’ll get soaked if we stay out here.’

We step through the low doorway, ducking our heads. There is no one in the long narrow kitchen which runs back into shadows. A heap of fire sends out petals of flame, and a black kettle has been pushed to one side of the hearth.

‘They’ll be here soon.’

Wind funnels through the doorway. I watch white curtains of rain shudder as they rush in from the sea. Then I see a figure, head down, hurrying to get out of the rain. A woman. The wind buffets her clothes as she runs the last few yards up the path. She stops in the entrance, not seeing us. She bends down, unlaces her boots and kicks them off.

We stand still in the shadows as she comes in, pushing back the hair which has blown all over her face. I notice her hands first, mud-stained and as broad as mine. Then her face. The hair she smoothes isn’t black any more. It is grey, grey at the roots. The grey is pushing up into the dark mass she wears knotted at the nape of her neck.

She is smiling to herself. She reaches into her pocket and tosses something into the air. There is a flash of yellow. She presses her thumbnail into its skin and I catch the small explosion of volatile oils.

The air floods with summer. Against a screen of leaves the lemons hang, dipped in shade. It is noon. The sky burns white and no one moves. I hear the croak of a frog huddled by the water tank, the stir of a bird in the leaves, a shimmer of cicadas in the valley below the lemon grove.

She turns, her eyes lively, friendly. They don’t see many people here. Then she stands quite still.

‘Catherine,’ says my mother quietly. One hand goes up to her hair, holding it back. This is my mother. For a moment my beautiful mother with her long white fingers, her hair like ink, her perfect, averted face stands between us, filling the space across which we must touch. Then I blink and the slide of my tears across my eyeballs washes her away. Here is my mother.

I look at my mother’s face, her lively eyes still and watchful, her body a strong column in its dark dress, her face which is not beautiful at all but is like my own.

My mother stands facing me, waiting to see what I’ll do, or say.

Again, like a flood of icy water, I see her not staying by me, not watching my body grow tall alongside hers, not measuring my head as it comes to her shoulder, her chin, her eyes. I see my hungry body fitting itself against my brother’s. I see the long dark corridors where I ran as a child with Kate’s stories flapping at my heels. I see the body of a dead man break into flower, and the trees of home swaying like arms that have laid down their burdens. I see Miss Gallagher’s lips moving in greedy speech and my brother hurling a hard-boiled egg like an arrow against death.

The wind howls but my mother is near to me, next to me, her eyes only inches from mine.

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