A Spell of Winter (6 page)

But it was summer and the smell of roses licked at us like the tongue of an animal. Miss Gallagher’s fingers pecked at my back. She was a huge crow which had settled on me, wanting to drag me away.

‘Cincie!’ she panted. Her hands were stiff with rage. ‘He’ll soon send you the way of his precious Cincie.’ I had never heard her talk like that, her voice thick and coarse as if she hated us all. Her hands batted at my dress, swiping off rose petals. Her words snaked into my ears and clung there, stickier and stronger than Father’s desperate kisses. I twisted out of her grip and there was Rob, his white face bent as he finished the knot in his string. He had dropped the branch. He looked at me and I took his hand and he held on hard as we walked away down the sunbaked path together, leaving Miss Gallagher and our father to tidy away what had happened.

Four

The door opened. I knew it would be Kate, so I didn’t move to cover myself.

‘What are you sitting here in the dark for?’ she asked from the door. Her shadow sprang out on the opposite wall, big and comforting.

‘It’s not dark. There’s the fire.’

I spread out my hands to the rosy tissue of flame. I had kept my fire in all afternoon and its heart was molten and bright.

‘And you in your chemise. You ought to get dressed. It’s dinner at eight and everyone’s upstairs, changing.’

I looked round at the glow of Kate. The house was full, and she was in her element. This was what she thought life should be like. She had had enough of our long, quiet, visitorless days, and she’d told me so often since I began to grow up and to be the one who held the key that could open our house to light and music and dancing.

‘It’s only right – he’ll do it for you, if you ask.’

He
was my grandfather. It was true, he would do as I wanted, though it never fooled me into thinking I was anything in his heart compared to Rob. I was too like my mother, and so he couldn’t love me. He’d given my mother everything, even the fine slender upright Englishness of Father. But my mother had shown her true colours and she’d given everybody the slip, even her own children.

It was because of Kate that we were having our dance at last. Kate was the one who had made all these lights pour out, softly golden, from the rows of upstairs windows. They splashed down on to the terrace stone, and the house hummed with voices, the clink of hot-water cans, the slap of doors and hurrying feet. Young men with cold bright cheeks had been fetched from the station and now they were wrestling with too-tight collars in front of every mirror Kate could find. Clouded, silvery looking-glasses, propped up where the light was good. The trap had met each train since one-thirty. The girls had come the day before, to give their complexions time to settle before the dance. It was so cold that some of them had arrived with their faces blotched candle-yellow and purple. Then there were pretty girls in furs, their heads dark and sleek as ash-buds and their noses pink from the cold. They pulled off their gloves and laughed and bent down to sniff the tubs of white hyacinths in the cold hall. Later they’d go exploring the edges of the woods, and the spiky geometry of the rose garden. I went with them, but they always wanted to turn back before we were out of sight of the house. There was always someone playing the piano, and whoever it was it sounded the same: hesitant, faulty phrasing, then a rush and ripple of notes. There was always someone winding the gramophone in the conservatory. It played until my head ached: ‘Bye-bye Daisy’ or ‘Solitude’. But they were all the same tune. That was why I’d come up to my room after tea, thinking I’d go down soon. Grandfather would be looking round the room and asking where I was. But Rob was there, that was enough. He was the one who had dragged the gramophone into the conservatory, and they were wearing in the soles of new dance slippers on the cold black-and-white tiles while the gardenias gave out more and more perfume as the air grew warm. Rob had scratched the soles of Livvy’s slippers with his penknife, fine criss-cross scratches to stop her from falling.

Everywhere smelled of lavender polish, gardenias and the tubs of forced hyacinths old Semple had brought in two days ago so their flowers would open, perfect for the day. And there was a smell of warm, excitable flesh. I caught the note of each body. There was Livvy’s cool, greenish-blondeness, nearly as scentless as water, the Avery twins’ blend of
papiers poudrés
and their own sharp foxiness, the dark Ellenby boy who smelled of warm brown paper. Rob was a mixture of new bread and gun smoke. Even today, he’d been up and out into the woods with his gun as soon as it was light. I looked out of my window and saw his steps go black as the frost softened.

Everything was ready. Our life was put away so it would not spoil the party. The dark wicked spikes of Grandfather’s cacti had been pushed back so they would not catch on the girls’ dresses and tear them.

I looked at Kate’s strong white arms, bare to the elbows. She’d been running up and down with hot water since tea.

‘Have they got everything they need?’ I asked. ‘Did you remember to put out the violet soap?’ Kate held up her hands to me and I smelled the violet on them. Her hands were rough but in this light all I saw was their broad shapeliness. Her hair had gone into close damp curls from the steamy water she’d carried. She was near and I breathed in the familiar Kate smell of cotton and soap and sweat. My Kate. She was twenty-nine now. I had grown up and Kate was no longer just a pair of powerful, pummelling arms, a warm, wide lap and a rustle of half-understood gossip and sweet names and slaps. She was a woman.

Eileen had gone. Her mother had had female troubles after the birth of her last child. She couldn’t walk, or lift, or turn the mangle for the washing. I was thirteen when Eileen went. It got mixed up in my mind with the griping pain of my first monthlies and the certainty that everyone knew and could trace the bulge of stitched rags under my skirt. I didn’t want even Rob to know. But Kate made nothing of it. She whisked away my rusty bundles to boil clean in the laundry, and brought me a vile-tasting cup of raspberry-leaf tea to ease my cramps. She stood by the bed, arms folded, looking down to make sure I drank it all, with the ironic, impersonal expression she always had when she was outwitting illness in either of us. Pain floated in my stomach like a tight hand suddenly unclenched.

‘Kate,’ I said, sipping the stuff slowly to keep her there, ‘what happened to Eileen’s mother?’

‘Well, now. It’s her female parts paining her, a bit the way you are at this moment. Only she’s had eight children, and she was getting too old for it. She should never have had this last one, but catch Eileen’s Da leaving her alone for five minutes.’

‘Eileen said she couldn’t walk.’

‘No,’ said Kate, ‘what should be held inside her has slipped and it keeps her from her walking.’

I waited, but she gave me no more details. I thought of the tight, springy cleft of my own body and I tried to imagine it loose and sagging. I lay there under the thick white sheet and loved the feel of my own body, hurting but undamaged. I would never have eight children like Eileen’s mother, never let myself be lame and limp for anyone to catch. I would run fast.

I knew where babies came out, but how they did it I could not imagine. I knew the pain was terrible, like with a cow when the calf got stuck. I had seen John plunge his arm up to the elbow into a bellowing cow to turn the limbs of the calf twisted up inside her. I had seen the bloody streaks and strings from the cow running down his arm. I tried to imagine someone doing that to Eileen’s mother. The thought of it made me squirm sideways and squeeze my legs tight together.

‘Yes,’ said Kate sardonically, ‘you’ll have no troubles, if you keep like that.’

‘Can’t they – put it back again?’ I whispered, out of the huge curiosity brimming in me.

‘Oh, with cutting and stitching they could do it, I dare say,’ said Kate in her usual bold voice. ‘But would you let a man do that to your own flesh and blood? No surgeon’ll take his knife near Eileen’s mother. ‘Eileen will nurse her – anyway, she’s worth ten of any doctor. If her mother binds herself up tight things’ll go back as they should. Only she’ll never be able to do for her family again, and so we’ve lost Eileen.’

She said it like that, ‘we’ve lost Eileen’, tasting the drama of it on her tongue the way Kate always did, even though I knew she really felt it too. She had cried when Eileen went, up in her attic when I was supposed to be in bed. But I was listening at the bottom of the attic stairs, rubbing the rough drugget with my bare foot, caught there, knowing she wouldn’t want me, not now. Where would Kate be without Eileen to sleep with in their white attic, and sit with over the fire after we slept, and go out with on their half-days? How would she trim her hat without Eileen to look and judge; how would she choose new ribbons from the pedlar to thread through bodices and petticoats without Eileen to tell her when a pink was too harsh or a blue drained the colour from her lips? They kept the pedlar in the kitchen drinking tea while they turned the heap of ribbons over and over, choosing. But no one was ever going to see them, I thought …

When Eileen left I couldn’t imagine what the house would sound like without the constant running-water ripple of Kate and Eileen calling, talking, ordering, reminding one another of things they had forgotten. And the night-time murmur of their gossip, like water clucking over stones. We got used to it, of course. Kate talked to me more. I was growing up, as she said, and Rob was away at school, so there was just the two of us. For years Kate was my ally against Miss Gallagher, who still came to teach me French and Geography and watch me with her small, hot eyes, cannibal eyes. Miss Gallagher had a bicycle now. ‘My trusty Pegasus’, she called it, patting the saddle. She sat bolt upright, pedalling so slowly the front wheel wobbled. The sight of her coming up the drive drove Kate into a frenzy.

‘Will you look at the sight of her. And that one skirt she wears all draggling there in the dirt.’

Kate’s scorn made her almost ugly. If she’d had Eileen there they would have blotted out Miss Gallagher with their laughter. I never defended Miss Gallagher, although I knew how she still loved me. Her love frightened me. She would have wrapped herself round me like a rubber mackintosh and kept off the rest of the world, if she could. It was a great day for her when Rob was sent to school. But there was always Kate, fresh as a summer night after a thunderstorm, twitching the clammy shelter of Miss Gallagher away from me. I never forgot how Kate raged and shook me when she caught me once praying with Miss Gallagher, both of us on our cold knees on the oilcloth, trying not to sneeze because of the fluff under the bed.

Miss Gallagher had talked of nothing but the dance for weeks. She had pored over patterns and swatches of silk, taking off her glasses to peer for flaws in the weave even though I told her they were meant to be there. She had wanted to be there when the dressmaker came to fit me.

‘She’s coming up tonight, to see me when I’m dressed,’ I said to Kate, standing up and smoothing down my chemise and petticoat. I loved myself half-naked, and the way the fire shadows made a rich tunnel of darkness between my breasts. If I could have gone down and danced like this now, it would have been worth while,

‘Who?’

‘Miss Gallagher,’ I said, knowing Kate knew already.

‘I thought you were to call her Eunice,’ said Kate, ‘now you’re seventeen and you’re a young lady.’ I smiled at the wealth of disbelief Kate put into the last two words. At my age she had been working away from home for five years.

‘Eun–i–ke,’ I said, ‘not Euniss. It’s Greek.’

‘That’s what she tells you, is it? The Greeks would turn away their eyes for shame at the sight of that one. Well, if I were you I’d put something decent on yourself before Yewneekay gets here, then. Where’s that dress?’

‘Hanging up, where it was. If it hasn’t fallen down. It’s so slippery.’

‘You don’t deserve to have nice things,’ scolded Kate, ‘the way you treat them.’

I shrugged. ‘I’ll never wear it again after tonight,’ I said.

‘Don’t you be so sure of that. The money this is costing we’ll all be walking naked by next winter,’ said Kate. ‘And now I’ll get your hot water. Mind how you wash your arms and shoulders. And under your arms. Think of him breathing in when you put your arms on his shoulders in the dance.’

Firelight warmed the fine down on my forearms while I waited for her to come back. Thank God I did not have thick dark hairs on my arms, the way Miss Gallagher did. If I had, I would have got Rob to singe them off with a match-flame, no matter how much it hurt. Though Kate said you could melt a puddle of wax and spread it on your skin and once it was hard it would bring off the hairs with it. She knew a girl who did that before her wedding-night, because she had hair all over her legs, like a monkey. Thick, black, silky hairs. Beautiful if they hadn’t been on her legs. And then she had to go on destroying the hair in secret, all her married life. Imagine that, said Kate.

In a minute she would be back with the water. I was late. Everybody would be ready except me, and I was supposed to be there to welcome them in my rose-pink dress, first at dinner, and then at the dance. But it felt far off, and the lapping of the fire was more real than anything.

It was Rob who came in, not Kate. He was dressed but for his collar, which flapped loose.

‘I can’t get at the studs, Cathy, do it for me.’

He had mangled the stiff collar, trying to force it.

‘Haven’t you got another one?’

‘I had three. This is the last. You can make something of it, can’t you?’

I stood up, pushed the collar into shape with my fingers and fixed the studs. It was all right unless you looked closely, the way Livvy would look with her cool, fastidious eyes. I held him back and stared at the unfamiliar black-and-white column that shaped his body instead of shaping to it like his soft everyday clothes. There was a red raking line on his neck where he’d dug the collar into the skin, but it would fade. He put up his hand and fingered the collar uneasily.