A Spell of Winter (7 page)

‘Is it spoiled?’

‘It’s fine. No one will notice.’

I picked a speck of white cotton from his jacket and turned him round. He was perfect. He smiled suddenly, forgetting about the clothes. At once they began to look right on him, the way Rob’s clothes always did.

‘Aren’t you going to get dressed?’

‘Kate’s bringing my hot water.’

‘My eye,
you’ll
be late,’ he said gleefully, as if he was ten again. Then his face changed. I felt his look move over my breasts and shoulders, where the firelight polished my bare skin. I stepped back a little. The door tapped as Kate pushed it with her elbow, the way she did when she was carrying the heavy water cans.

‘You’d better go down. One of us ought to be there. Grandfather –’

‘Yes.’

Kate was studying him, judging the effect of black and white against his brown skin. He had parted his hair in the centre and it lay flat, close to his head, but I knew after ten minutes’ dancing it would spring free, or else he’d forget and run his hand through it and the careful parting would be gone. Kate nodded. He looked right, not like me.

‘Quick and wash now.’ She turned to me. ‘We’ll have our work cut out with that hair of yours.’

‘Why should she put it up?’ said Rob, to provoke her. ‘Isn’t it better the way it is?’

Kate looked at me and laughed. She was seeing the rosy light on my bush of hair and half-nakedness. She always said to me that I didn’t pay for dressing. I would catch a husband better with my clothes off; the pity was that things didn’t work that way. Or else I needed better clothes than I had ever had. The way my skirts and blouses came back from the dressmaker made my breasts and hips look lumpish, like something big and soft packed into parcels and dented with string. I used to wonder if the Miss Talbots had got the measurements wrong when they cut out the pattern; they made all my clothes. But Kate said, ‘It’s not the measurements, it’s the way they cut the cloth. They’ve no eye for the hang of it.’

The Miss Talbots hadn’t been let near my rose-pink silk. I had gone up to town for the fitting, and the dress came back in a white, flat box full of tissue paper, to be shaken out by Kate and tried on me in the glare of a sunless winter day. I only looked in the mirror once. The dress was not part of me. It hung like something pegged out on a line.

‘A pity there hasn’t been a death in the family,’ said Kate. ‘With your skin you’d look like a queen in black. Black velvet,’ she repeated, eyeing me, ‘and a black velvet ribbon round your neck. And then something in your hair … diamonds maybe …’

But the light rose silk hung off me like a frill on butchers’ meat.

‘You want something moulded, like this,’ said Kate, showing me with her hands. ‘It should be tight round your breasts. After all, you aren’t a piano.’

I laughed. The pleated silk bodice did look exactly like the pleating on the back of a piano.

‘If we had a death, we wouldn’t be having the dance,’ I pointed out.

‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘at least wear black velvet in your mind. That way you’ll hold yourself better.’

It was time to get dressed. I turned to the wash stand and picked up my sponge. I swept the warm violet-scented water down my arms and let it trickle into the folds of my elbows, then washed my neck, ducking down so that water would damp the corkscrew curls at my nape. Rob lounged by the fire, spreading his hands to make them into red starfish against the flames. Kate brushed past him,

‘You’d better be getting yourself downstairs,’ she said, ‘or someone else will be taking her in to dinner.’

Kate didn’t like Livvy. She never used her name if she could help it, only ‘her’ or sometimes, mockingly, ‘Miss Olivia’. She thought Livvy was sly. It was just the way Liwy looked, her greenish-blonde flesh, her coils of hair that were bright like the moon, not the sun, her pale, slanting eyes. Kate had never bothered to get to know Livvy.

‘If that’s beautiful, you can call me a kettle,’ she said.

Livvy made me think of hyacinths. She was waxy, like they were, with the kind of scent that you could not get out of your mind once you had smelled it. She was cool and perfect. Her furs were like the dark sheath of earth from which the white hyacinths grew. The real, clodded earth of the fields and woods never came near Livvy.

Rob got up and stretched, making wild shadows on the ceiling. Kate ducked under his arm, giving him a push towards the door.

‘Get on with you, I’ve her hair to do yet, and that dress to get on.’ The draught flickered between my shoulder blades as he shut the door behind him.

‘Sit down so I can get at you,’ instructed Kate as she pulled my hair loose for brushing. The brush would never go through unless she lifted my hair and swept it through from underneath.

‘You’d think the black would come off on your fingers,’ Kate grumbled. It was hard to make my hair shine, though the fire brought out glints of red and gold in its blackness. The strong, sure tug of the brush in Kate’s hands was almost the oldest thing I remembered. And the blue sparks in the dark nursery at night.

She rubbed in some pomade to soften it, and brushed again. There would be no sparks tonight. The violet pomade masked the smells of hair and skin, as the violet soap had done. I wanted to wash it off.

‘It’s going up beautifully,’ said Kate in triumph, as her quick fingers twisted, knotted and pinned. I felt my head grow heavy, and the cool air struck my neck. The knot of hair pulled my head back. Kate fluffed curls loose on my forehead, wetted her finger, ran it round the inside of a curl so it would lie as she left it.

‘Look at yourself!’ she told me. I saw the rich slope of my shoulder, the heavy, cloudy knob of hair, the line of my cheek and jaw.

‘It’s a crime to put that dress on top of it,’ said Kate, but I stood and lifted my arms and she slipped the silk over my head, holding the dress like a tent so it would not touch my hair. There was a brief moment of pleasure as the cool stuff slithered down me, then it settled and Kate twitched at the folds, fastened the neck, pulled the skirt straight. I stood still, not bothering to look in the mirror. I knew Kate was looking for me.

‘Hmm,’ she murmured disappointedly.

I glanced and saw how the rose-pink drapery bulked out my breasts and made the mass of hair above it look suddenly too dark and clumsy. The skirt was not right either.

‘It’s the devil of a dress,’ exclaimed Kate, looking as if she would like to tear it off me.

‘It’s what they all wear, it doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Think of black velvet. If they’d even put some black velvet ribbon, say here, across the neckline …’

‘It would only make it worse. The silk is too light. It would bunch it up even more.’

‘Yes, you’re right. Now if Eileen was here …’ said Kate in frustration. Eileen was the one for clothes. She would have done something about the silk, if only to make sure it was never bought. Kate could do anything with hair, but though she could see in her mind’s eye just how the black velvet of her imagination would look on me, she could not cut out and sew the way Eileen could.

‘Grandfather will like it, anyway,’ I said. Kate smiled back. For once I would look like Grandfather’s version of the young girl growing up in his house.

‘And Miss Gallagher will be in raptures,’ I added.

‘God, girl, you’re right. Get yourself down to the company before she comes creeping up the back stairs to paw you.’

The fire shuffled softly as the coals collapsed inward.

‘Put more coal on, Kate, I’ll want it later.’

‘You won’t want it. You’ll be dancing till dawn.’

‘Oh yes? With the piano tuner?’ I said, smoothing the raspy pink pleats. I caught hold of Kate’s hands.

‘Waltz!’ I said. Kate often danced with us when Rob and I practised with the gramophone. She took the beat and lifted me into it, and we were off across the floor of the night nursery, breaking up firelight and shadows in a waltz that became a gallop and ended in a dizzy stop by the door.

‘Down those stairs. Now!’ ordered Kate, pointing, and I went.

Five

I looked down into the pool of the hall and saw the dancers flicking like white carp under water. There was Livvy. She saw me and called up, ‘Catherine!’, turning her mermaid face to me and half-smiling the way she did.

‘You look lovely,’ she said, but she wasn’t thinking about me.

‘Are they going in to dinner?’ I asked.

‘Yes, your grandfather was looking for you.’

There would be a partner picked out for me, to take me in and sit on my right hand and make me talk and smile. I knew who it would be: Mr Bullivant. I would find myself placed close to Grandfather, where he could hear what I was saying and make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself. He had never trusted me. That was why he had his eye on Mr Bullivant. Mr Bullivant was new in the neighbourhood and he had money. He was not like the others round here, who were so proud of being the same as one another and just the same as they’d always been. He was like Grandfather, but richer, younger and I think even hungrier, though that was deeply hidden.

No one cares what they say in front of children. We’d known we were different. It was in the gossip at children’s parties, wafting over my head while I struggled with a lump of sweet cake.

‘He’s getting to look
exactly
like an old pirate. All it needs is the patch.’

‘You wouldn’t remember when he first came, would you? His hair was black as the inside of your hat.’

‘Quite Spanish.’

‘And the way he used to carry that child everywhere in his arms!’

‘The man from nowhere, d’you remember? That’s what we used to call him.’

‘Poor Charlie.’

‘Like a lamb to the slaughter.’

Charlie was my father. The slaughter was being married to my mother.

‘Someone should have said something to him.’

‘Yes, but you never
know,
do you? These things take time to come out.’

‘The little girl’s awfully like her, isn’t she?’

‘Awfully.’

There was never enough money. We had the land Grandfather had wrested from God knows where, and we sat on it as if it were an island. Mr Bullivant had bought land too, three times as much as my grandfather. He too had no connection of blood with this place. He would ride over and ask my grandfather’s advice and they’d sit drinking stone-dry sherry together and drawing plans in the library. Or, rather, my grandfather talked and Mr Bullivant drew plans, and the one had no connection with the other. Mr Bullivant wasn’t a friend, because Grandfather had no friends, but he was always welcome in our house. If he married me I would be taken care of, close but out of the way, as Grandfather preferred me to be.

I stared at Livvy. She was wearing white satin and she had no colour at all, from her pale, close-coiled hair to her white slippers. There was a sheen on her like the inside of an oyster shell. She was what every girl here hoped to be, but no one else would ever look like Livvy. She put two fingers on my arm and I felt their coolness through my gloves.

‘Are you going in with Rob?’ I asked. She hesitated.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said. If she had not been so beautiful her childish voice would often have grated on me. Her eyes, that never quite fixed on anyone, swam wide as she turned away, showing the perfect shallow curve of her cheek and jawbone. Suddenly she smiled. Her cheekbones lifted. Another door opened on another room of Livvy’s beauty. But that was an old trick of hers. She would make you catch your breath.

‘Isn’t this fun, Catherine?’ she asked.

I wondered if she really thought so. Once Grandfather gave me a porcelain vase, so delicate that the fine strokes of colour on it were like veins in skin. It was for violets, because I had brought him a bunch of cold, white sweet violets twined with ivy, and he had been pleased. It was Rob who had the gift for doing things like that, not me. I’d been afraid to bruise the violets with my hot fingers when I had found them, a white splash in the bank, sweeter than common violets. I kept the vase for a long time, until one morning my looking-glass swung forward and swept it off my dressing-table, so that it smashed on the floor like an egg and showed the brown water stains inside it.

Grandfather leaned over the table and gripped my wrist. I started, and realized that he had been talking to Mr Bullivant while I sat silent, staring down the table at Livvy next to Rob. Mr Bullivant smiled at me. I heard the echo of the words I hadn’t listened to, and realized he’d been inviting me and Rob over to Ash Court. He had a new billiard table and perhaps Rob would like to play. Yes, he had money and everyone knew it. In the four years since he had bought the estate he had poured out thousands on it. I wondered if he knew how people talked and judged, or if he cared. He did not look as if he cared. He sat at ease, not bothering with most of the neighbourhood beyond politeness.

Grandfather had a pile of shells on his plate and a little heap of white, plump Kentish cob-nuts. He had cracked them for me. I knew why he was doing it now, showing me attention, showing that I had value so that Mr Bullivant would value me more. Tonight I was his granddaughter and he would prove to the world what he was doing for me. This dance was mine, even though I didn’t want it and it cost too much. He smiled the tight, cornered smile that was all I ever got from him, and I thought of Kate’s grandfather and the man whose body came apart as he fell down the stairs, then I held out my gloved hand and took the nuts. I wondered if he had cracked nuts for my mother when she was a child. However hard I looked at my grandfather I never saw my mother there. I was looking for the wrong things, perhaps. Mr Bullivant was talking of planting a cherry orchard. There would be Morellos for preserving, and Whitehearts, and he had a scheme to net the young trees in a new way against bullfinches. Perhaps Rob and I would come over and look at the plans he had prepared.

I never saw my father again, after that one time at The Sanctuary. He fell under a horse. Perhaps it was a cart or a dray and the great hairy hoof of the cart horse swung out and caught him on the temple. It could happen like that.
Never walk behind a horse, Catherine.
They told me that as soon as I could walk. I saw the hairs on the horse’s fetlock and the sharp yellowy edge of its hoof, and the metal shoe glinting. Or it was a carriage horse, high-stepping, with a wide wicked eye in spite of its harness. Its hoof would flash and my father would fall and the next horse would be caught in the traces and my father would go down as the horse rolled on the ground, crushing him as it struggled to find its feet, and its hoofs struck sparks from the air. Or perhaps it was just one horse, stepping out airily on a summer morning, its rider thinking of nothing, touching its flanks lightly with the whip, breathing in the damp blue air collected under the limes, when my father …