Born of Woman (12 page)

The light was fading now. The scarlet shriek of the sun had left only an echo behind, a last whisper of pink and silver before night closed all around it. Towards the east, the hills were grey and shadowed, the sky swooping down to kidnap them with cloud. Colour seeped out and cold crept in, jabbing its icy fingers through her clothes. There were long streaked furrows on the snow, more grey in them than gold now. Tiny noises stained and blurred the silence, so faint they were only shadows of shadows themselves.

She turned to face the house which was fading into the fading hills around it, save for the sheen of snow and one dim lamp glowing through the window. The bedroom was in darkness. She hoped Lyn was asleep, not lying waiting for her, too hoarse and cold to sleep. She crept back in, tugged off her boots, switched off the light in the sitting-room. The fire still lit up the room, as if all the red and gold of the vanished sun had been thrown into the grate. She damped it down, then went upstairs to Lyn. He was lying diagonally across the bed with half the covers tangled on the floor, breathing hoarsely and irregularly with little shuddering gasps puncturing the in-breaths. He had drawn the curtains, but the moon had slunk between them and was playing chequers on his face.

He looked sickly with his eyes shut. His eyes were the feature that made him come alive. They were large, dark and angry in a face quiet and plain without them. She could never have described their shade—that burnt, blackish, brackish lava colour—assumed it was unique in all the world until she saw his mother's. His brows were fine, but often kept drawn down as if he were warding off the world or shutting out the sun. His eyelashes were lavish like a child's—a sort of luxury in a face otherwise ascetic—a pale, almost sallow face, with too many hollows in it. He had straight soft hair—child's hair—the same uncertain brown as Matthew's sons. Matthew's hair was darker, yet both men had some slightly foreign look about them, as if they were two black lambs in a field and flock of white.

Jennifer longed to take Lyn in her arms and reassure him. He looked feverish, uncomfortable—younger than he was, as if all that he had felt and suffered had gone inwards to his soul and left his face untouched by it. His hands were long and thin, the fingers fidgety and nervous. Even now, they were twitching in his sleep. Although he was a light-boned man, lean and almost gaunt, when he was up he seemed to tower above her, be living on a different plane. She could never own him, never understand him, was frightened sometimes that she had even married him.

When she had first met him, he had been wary and unpredictable. Men in books courted you with flowers and compliments. Lyn had wooed her with his strangeness, his unexpected passions about things, his endearing combination of shyness and intensity. He never kissed her, never asked her questions. The nevers grew into a need. A need to stop him brooding, make him happy, make him kiss. She loved him for the things he wouldn't do, but once they were married, the nevers grew more menacing. He kissed her now (incomparably), but supposing he never wished to own a house or sire a child or break free of brother Matthew? The first year hadn't mattered. It was an escapade, a joyride, an escape from both their mothers. Now, ironically, both those mothers were dead and it was Lyn himself who seemed to tie her down. She had to admit a certain streak of restlessness—resentment even, a longing for a proper home and children.

He was breathing painfully, a hoarse rasping sound which almost hurt her own throat. She would go and fetch the vaporiser. Despite his refusals, he probably wished he had tried it, but was too proud to change his mind. She crept downstairs again, stood at the cellar door. The light from the window opposite sent splintered shadows down the steep stone steps. She shivered, glad she had kept her coat on. It was damp in the cellar, a different and more dishonest cold from the bracing one outside, one which lured you down and then slowly squeezed in after you and stripped all the warmth and comfort from your limbs. There was a smell of must and age, as if all the centuries had crumbled into a pot pourri, made not of petals but of time.

She loved cellars, attics, glory-holes—anywhere where history crouched in corners and cobwebs wreathed old lives. Hester's house had history stamped right into it, like letters in a stick of rock. The Scots had burned and pillaged it when they had skirmished from the border. The Wintertons (more Wintertons) had shored it up again. There had been a fire in 1780, a major rebuilding in 1822. Bits and pieces had been added or subtracted until, when Thomas took it over, it was a sturdy, self-opinionated house with farm buildings and outhouses clinging to its skirts. Hester had pared it down again, allowing barns and stables to fall into disrepair or be annexed by the Forestry. But the cellar remained inviolate, safe beneath the staircase in the very centre and foundation of the house. Any passing history had dripped and dribbled into it, left stains and footprints there.

Cellars were unusual in the hills. Even when it was possible to dig them out of the shallow rocky soil, the need was seldom felt for them. The weather was too raw to justify cold storage. Yet this dark and secret cellar was somehow in keeping with Hester and her house.

There was no electric light down there, so Jennifer fetched a paraffin lamp and watched its pale sickly beam turn humped and shadowy shapes into living objects. A dark blur became a baby's cradle, hand-carved and set on rockers. She touched one end and set it rocking. Huge shadows lurched across the wall. Beside it stood a wooden butter-churn, shaped like a beer barrel and mounted on a stand, its handle wreathed in cobwebs. There were more exotic cobwebs all along one wall, little specks of flaking plaster trapped in them like snowflakes and glistening in the lamplight. She had only been in the cellar once before, and then Lyn had called her back. It was as if he wanted everything to fossilise at the time of Hester's death, nothing to be touched or salvaged.

Surely an old tin vaporiser couldn't hurt? It was there, where she had left it, in a crate of books and jumble. It wasn't even as dusty as the other things around it, and there was a box of matches ready in the carton. Had Hester used it for a recent cold? Hester suddenly loomed nearer—coughing, shivering, left alone to die. They should have insisted that she came down south to live with them, but you couldn't insist with Hester, any more than with Lyn.

Jennifer set the vaporiser on an upturned box, checked the wick, poured old and sticky fluid into the container. The first match didn't strike. She tried a third, a fourth, a fifth, went on striking automatically. The tenth match took her by surprise. She jumped as its fierce and tiny flame cut a halo through the gloom. She lit the nightlight, placed the metal cover over. In only minutes, the powerful antiseptic smell was seeping through the cellar, nervous shadows from the nightlight entangled with the softer ones which fluttered round the lamp.

Strange that Lyn had never seen a vaporiser. She had always assumed they were an essential part of childhood like Sunday School or jellies. He had never had those either. She had made him a jelly in a rabbit mould on their first wedding anniversary. He had been so enchanted, he'd refused to put a spoon into it, and it sat there on the sideboard slowly shrinking. In the end, it had sprouted greyish mould. Her childhood had fairly
glowed
with jellies, fat Victoria sponges with little silver balls on, warm and sticky gingerbread men.

As children, they'd been far apart, both in age and geography, yet they had both been only children; both had old, careful mothers who kept the rest of the world away, as being too hazardous in her case and too invasive in his. He had never seen his father; and even before hers had died, he had been distant and unapproachable. Neither of them had had anyone
young
around, no one carefree or impetuous. Was that why they had married—to reassure each other, to carry on that same silent suspicious way of life? It was time they changed it for a noisy, normal family—pets, children, friends—challenge, even risk.

She ought to go up to him now, take the vaporiser, settle down to sleep. Yet she was reluctant to leave the cellar, to lie quiet and rigid in a narrow bed beside a restless husband when there was so much to explore. She glanced around her. Trunks and boxes veiled with dust, abandoned furniture, piles of newspapers. Stone shelves with cobwebby bottles stacked across them—perhaps old and priceless claret; a hat-stand made of antlers, a wooden milking-stool. She could spend hours down here, prying and probing, rescuing things, restoring them. There was a tattered patchwork bedspread she perhaps could mend and clean, a stone hot-water bottle—that would do for Lyn; a set of wooden butter moulds. Even solid everyday objects looked exotic in the shadows.

She picked up the lamp and moved a little further in, where the ceiling crouched down lower and the shadows were double-layered. Two leggy spiders scuttled across the floor. At the very end of the cellar was the largest chest of all, battered but still handsome, a wooden one, maroon with metal edges. On top of it stood a cardboard box full of broken coat-hangers. She lugged it off, revealing a brighter patch of colour underneath where it had protected the chest from grime. She tried the lid. It was locked. She shouldn't really force it. She felt guilty suddenly, snooping around the bowels of Hester's house. Except it was
their
house now. Even without the Will, it would go to Lyn as Hester's only son and heir, and if it were his, then it must be partly hers as well. It wasn't that she was greedy or acquisitive, just craved for continuity, something with roots, history, solidity, something which Matthew hadn't bought and parcelled out to them.

She fiddled with the clasps, which remained firmly shut. She remembered seeing an old wire coat-hanger flung on one of the tea-chests. She went to fetch it, wrenching it out of shape so she could use it as a tool to force the lock. It wasn't easy, but it gave at last. The lid creaked open and she smelt the fusty mouldering smell which gets trapped in old school halls or lingers in the folds of ancient velvet curtains or is sold at auctions or pressed between the pages of old books. The chest was packed with books, old and faded ones with leather covers. She picked up the very top one, blew the dust from it.
Annals of the Ancient County of Northumbria
by the Reverend Matthew Winterton. (Winterton again. And even a Matthew.
Reverend
Matthew—he'd love them all to call him that!) A bulky vellum-covered book with yellowing engravings of churches and castles, pele towers and sheep stells. She sat on the floor, clutched her coat more tightly round her, opened the book and read. ‘The Northumbrian character is a proud and lawless one—a product of his history. His shire has long been a scarred and bloody battle-ground where it was not just a wasteland. He is more often a raider or a rebel than a settled church-goer.' Jennifer smiled. Her husband matched his shire.

She leafed through the pages, looking at the pictures. Except for the forests, the landscape had hardly changed. She stopped. There was a drawing of Hernhope, spreading in all its glory as a farm. She hardly recognised it. It was not only so much larger, then, but more important and alive. Animals were grazing all around it, children playing on the steps, men with buckets in the yard—all frozen in immobility and yet still busy, still involved. She longed to put it back like that, colour it in as she had done as a child with the black and white engravings in her Bible. Flesh out the children and the animals, add Lyn himself sketching in the fields.

She was glad Lyn had started drawing. It wasn't just the swallows he had sketched—he had made studies of the landscape, hurling it on to paper, distorting all its lines. She didn't understand why he had made it look so threatening, the hills rearing up to crush him, the sky darker than the trees. Yet she felt excited by his work, the swift nervous way the charcoal streaked across the paper, sometimes snapping, so that he swore and used the stub. The results were nothing like these gentle tranquil pictures in the
Annals of Northumbria
, with their smiling skies and quiet and well-tamed fields.

She snapped the book shut and picked up the next one, a leather-bound journal with
Game Book
tooled on the front in gold italic. Inside were handwritten records of all the local shoots arranged in columns, each signed underneath in wavering copperplate. She tried to make the name out—R.B. Winterton. Was that Lyn's father? No, he was a ‘T', and later. This was dated 1896. There were little spaces for all the different game birds—grouse, partridge, teal, pigeon, pheasant. She remembered the pheasants dazzling across the road the day they travelled up here; Lyn telling her they were bred only for the shoot. It no longer seemed so cruel. R. B.'s gentle, kindly, sometimes humorous comments made it just an innocent diversion.

She could see the damp burnished mornings, mist on the hills and the trees beginning to turn, Mr Winterton striding out with his guns and game-bags, then returning home for a nap and partridge pie. September shivered into Christmas. Chilblains, blizzards, warm corpses steaming in the frozen air, Mrs Winterton ready with hot punch and plucking knife.

She leafed towards the later entries—pages scanning decades—nineties, nineteen hundreds, twenties, thirties. Now it was 1934 and ‘R.B.' had changed to ‘T'. The writing was smaller, almost spiteful.
‘A very poor season for everything,'
he had written.
‘The weather wet and inclement for weeks on end. Hardly worth going out at all.'

That was the year his wife Susannah had died, Matthew just a bundle in a shawl. Thomas's bereavement had affected everything, even the game birds and the weather. Had he come in from the shooting and found only Hester scowling and aloof? No welcome from a young and pretty wife. After that bitter scribble there were no more entries. Grief had silenced Thomas Winterton's guns. Nor had his children taken them up again. Both sons had slipped away.