The Winter Children (16 page)

She is in the kitchen again, while Olivia does the bedtime story for the twins. In a moment, she’ll be back, and then it will be the usual dynamic: the three of them round a table, eating
Olivia’s food and talking brightly, or intensely, or laughing, or sharing experiences. But they won’t be able to say what really lies at the heart of everything. Olivia is in the dark.
Dan has chosen to wipe it from his mind. Francesca holds the power of havoc in her hands.

Doesn’t he realise I could undo everything if I chose?

Perhaps he does and that’s why he’s so afraid of meeting her eye.

Francesca sits sipping her wine while Dan washes up the dishes from the children’s supper. There is a dishwasher, but he seems happy to fill the sparkling white butler sink with water and
suds and do it by hand. She watches him, his broad back inside the blue T-shirt he’s wearing, the way his firm body fills his jeans. A tremor of lust pings through her, catching her unaware.
Her attention has been so taken up by the children that she hasn’t noticed Dan in the way that she usually does, but suddenly she is almost convulsed with the old longing for him: he’s
tall, firmly built and masculine, strong across the shoulders and solid where he should be. She thinks of Walt, older now, sagging and paunching. His kneecaps are wrinkled and his buttocks droop,
and his belly hangs heavy with a fatty pouch in front.
Not that he was ever exactly an Adonis.
Dan has always inspired a lust that’s all the stronger for its simplicity. She finds him
irresistible.

Along with the desire, which jolts through her, leaving an empty yearning in its wake, she feels a twinge of the old anger at being condemned to a life with Walt when it could all have been so
different. Quickly she suffocates it, reminding herself of the old mantra:
It was my choice. It was what I wanted.

She takes another sip and says softly, ‘Dan?’

He turns slightly in acknowledgement. ‘Yes?’

‘I just wanted to say . . .’

He stiffens, then turns back and continues washing up. ‘Yes?’

‘Well . . .’ She lets the word hang in the air for a moment. ‘You know what we need to talk about.’

‘I’m not sure I do,’ he says quickly, defensively.

So I was right. He’s convinced himself to forget the truth.

She will have to talk to his back. But maybe that’s best. Perhaps it works better for both of them if they
don’t have to look into one another’s eyes when they let the secret out.

‘You’re not to keep me out, Dan,’ she says in the same soft voice, removing any hint of menace from her tone. ‘I don’t want much. Just to see them now and then.
That’s all. Don’t deny me that.’

He says nothing, but there is a tension across his shoulders and the angle of his neck.

‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine. I’m happy with that. But don’t stop me from seeing them. That’s all.’ She sips her wine again.
He still says nothing.

And then, at last, he mutters, ‘I understand.’

She smiles, even though he can’t see her.

A moment later, Olivia is coming into the room on a sigh and a smile, and their evening can begin.

1959

Alice likes to make her excursions on Friday nights. Julia wonders if it is because that is the evening when there is a special service in chapel, with candles lit and the chamber choir singing
an anthem. There is a vaguely romantic air to the whole thing, and Julia thinks that perhaps it gets Alice in the mood.

But when she asks, Alice says it is only because that is the night that Roy says he will see her. Friday is pay day, and a lot of the men go down to the pub in the village to spend whatever part
of their earnings they’re not sending back to Ireland. That means the caravans are usually empty and no one is there to spy her sneaking into Roy’s.

‘What about the other chap?’ Julia asks. They are in the library, supposedly working on their Latin, but actually whispering as quietly as they dare, hoping not to rouse Miss
Johnson, who sits several shelves away at her desk by the door. ‘The one we saw at the building site.’

‘Oh.’ Alice raises her eyebrows. ‘Donnie. The Cliff Richard one. Fancy him, do you?’

Julia blushes. ‘Of course not.’ But she has been thinking about him. The hollow cheeks, the sharp blue eyes and the greased-up quiff with the hair separated into stiff dark tresses
that look like the sagging bars of a cage. ‘Anyway,’ she says quickly, as a distraction from her pink cheeks, ‘I’m surprised you still want to go and see him, after that
time.’

Alice ignores her, suddenly absorbed in her second declension conjugations, her eyes hard with annoyance. She doesn’t want to talk about the time that she came staggering back through
the canvas sheeting, into the passage where Julia was waiting.

‘What is it?’ Julia hissed when she saw Alice crying, her hand clutched to her face.

‘Roy was angry with me,’ Alice sobbed as quietly as she dared. ‘Because we went to see him working.’

‘I told you we shouldn’t have gone,’ Julia burst out before she could stop herself. ‘It was obvious he didn’t want you shouting and waving at him.’ Alice
sobbed again and Julia stared at her compassionately, feeling rotten for telling her off when she was in this state. ‘What did he say?’ she asked, trying to remember to keep her voice
down. ‘Did he shout at you?’

Alice sniffed, and tried to muffle her sobs. They subsided into small hiccups. ‘Not at first. He was all right at first. We drank some whiskey and we had a laugh and then . . .’ Her
blue gaze slid to Julia and then away again. ‘Well, you know, we messed around. But Roy started talking about us coming to the site. He’d drunk quite a lot of whiskey and he got ever so
angry. I couldn’t quite understand why he was so cross now, after he’d been so nice to me and said such lovely things. But he was. He shouted, and said I wasn’t to risk his job like that again, and didn’t I understand what was
wrong with it and then he . . .’ Alice choked again on a sob and took her hand from her cheek. In the dim light, Julia could make out a shadow along Alice’s face. ‘He hit
me.’

Julia gasped. ‘Oh my goodness! Alice, he didn’t! That’s terrible . . . I can’t really see it, we’ll have to take a look in the light.’

‘It doesn’t hurt as much as it did at first,’ Alice said miserably. ‘It was just a slap, I suppose. Not so very bad. Is it awfully noticeable?’

‘I think so. Come on, let’s go to the lav and take a look.’

They crept upstairs in the familiar way, but took a detour to the girls’ lavatories on the first floor, where they dared to turn on a light and look in the mirror.

‘Golly,’ Julia said as they both stared at the bright livid mark stretching over her cheekbone.

‘Maybe it will be gone by morning,’ Alice replied, gazing at it with a kind of horrified fascination.

‘I don’t think so. It’ll probably look worse. What will we tell Miss Allen?’

They turned to look at one another, each reading the other’s fear in their eyes.

Alice had stopped crying, her hurt evaporating in the face of this crisis. She said stoutly, ‘I’ll tell her I fell out of bed, right onto my face.’

Julia giggled because it sounded rather funny, and she tried to imagine someone falling onto their face. It was ludicrous. Alice’s lips twitched and then she laughed too, but without much mirth. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell her I hit the chest of drawers on the way down.’

‘That’s better,’ agreed Julia. ‘Come on. We should get back quick as you like.’

So in the morning, Alice told Miss Allen that she had bashed her face on the drawers and Miss Allen sent her to Matron for a cold compress, although by then the redness was speckled with blue
and purple, with yellow climbing up under Alice’s eye, and there wasn’t much to be done but wait for it to heal.

Julia was so relieved. She hadn’t wanted Alice to be hit, but perhaps she now understood how stupid it was to risk everything for a man like Roy. And for two weeks, Alice didn’t go
to the caravan on a Friday night. When she told Julia she was sneaking out again, Julia was horrified.

‘But he hit you!’

‘No he didn’t, not really,’ Alice replied loftily. Her memory of the evening had faded with the bruise. ‘Well, not much, and I had annoyed him. Besides, he’ll be
sorry now, he’ll be missing me so much.’ She smiled to herself and her eyes sparkled, as if envisaging some private pleasure that would be enhanced by her absence. ‘I want to see
just how badly he is missing me.’

‘Don’t go,’ Julia begged. ‘You’ve left it this long. They’ll have finished that blessed pool in a bit, and then they’ll go away and you can forget about
him.’

Alice turned to Julia, her blue eyes cold. ‘But I don’t want to forget about him. Don’t you see? He’s the only thing I’ve got in my life that’s mine, and I don’t want to lose him. You don’t have to meet me if you don’t want to. I don’t care.’

But Julia wasn’t able to lie upstairs in the dorm wondering. She was afraid now that one day Alice might not come back, and so she played sentry, guarding the entrance and waiting for
her friend to return, the scent of whiskey and cigarettes hanging around her. Roy was very happy to see Alice again, and apologised for the blow, and there was no question that Alice would not
go again. As long as the builders were there, she would continue her forbidden jaunts.

‘You do fancy Donnie, don’t you?’ Alice whispers suddenly, looking up from her Latin.

‘No, I don’t,’ Julia shoots back.

‘Oh, you do. No need to pretend, I can see it written all over your face. Why don’t you come with me next time?’ Alice’s tone is suddenly wheedling. ‘I’ll ask
Roy if Donnie can stay back in the caravan, and I’ll bring you, and we can have a party.’ The idea has taken hold and she bounces slightly in her seat. ‘Oh, go on, it’ll be
fun.’

‘No!’ Julia exclaims more loudly than she meant to.

Miss Johnson looks over from her desk, and stands up so she can see over the shelves. ‘Quiet, please! Silent study.’ She disappears from sight as she sits back down in her chair.

Julia drops her voice to a whisper again, as she bends over her book pretending to write. ‘I wouldn’t be such an idiot.’

Alice smiles. ‘You never know. You might like it.’

I don’t know why I’m doing this
, Julia thinks as she follows Alice through the canvas sheet that leads out into the building site where the new pool will one day stand.

‘Mind the hole,’ Alice whispers. ‘It’s pretty big.’

It’s cold as soon as they step through into the darkness, and a chill, hard wind is blowing. It’s early November, and the weather has turned from autumn towards winter, though there
are still leaves being whisked from the trees, and the grounds are thick with dank, rotting piles of them.

‘It was easy when it was lighter,’ Alice grumbles, ‘and before this hole got so bally big.’ She pulls a torch from her dressing gown pocket and shines its small beam at
the ground so they can find their way. ‘Come on, follow me. I know the way pretty well.’

As they pass the great dark pit, Julia glances into the cavernous shadows. It’s taking forever to burrow out the tons of soil to make the pool. It’s hard to believe it will one day
be a clean, shiny, tiled rectangle, full of bright blue water. She imagines herself gliding downwards through the turquoise warmth, kicking out her legs, her arms pushing her forward as she nears
the bottom. Then she shivers, afraid she might fall in if she’s not careful.

‘Hurry up, slowcoach!’ Alice is full of excitement that her little dream of a party is coming true. She’s even put on a frock under her dressing gown. Now they are beyond the
site and heading out towards the fields behind the school where the builders have their caravans, separated from the main buildings by a thick hedge. The caravans are barely visible from the school
itself, which is no doubt the plan, but there is an easy footpath to the living quarters made by the stomping boots of the workmen as they tramp through the mud at the start and end of each day.

Really, it’s not so hard to get there
, Julia thinks with surprise. Each time Alice set out, Julia imagined her on a kind of quest, passing through dark forests and over dangerous
terrain in order to reach her destination. But, in fact, she’s only had to tiptoe along this path and be taken straight to the caravans. The only downside is the cold and the disorienting
effect of the darkness.

She shivers as another gust cuts through her dressing gown and cotton pyjamas and whips her skin with cold. A picture of her parents comes to mind: they sit on the terrace of their house in
Cairo, her mother fanning herself and complaining of the heat while her father sips at his gin and tonic, and reads the newspaper, a cigarette held in the fingers of one hand. What would they think
if they could see her now, out in the darkness, sneaking off to meet some Irish builders?

It almost makes her want to laugh, in a ghoulish fashion. They’d be apoplectic. And so disappointed. What would Alice’s parents make of it all? Julia can’t imagine. The chilly
beauty who arrives in a large car to collect Alice at the end of term seems like a statue of marble coldness. No wonder Alice wants to seek out warmth, even if it involves such risk. Or maybe,
because it does . . .

They pass through massy shadows that rustle and move – the large hedge that borders the field of caravans. Now the torch beam falls on large curved shapes, like a herd of huge, silent cattle. The caravans, empty while the occupants are drinking in the pub. Only one shows the glow of a light behind a square of curtain.

‘That’s the one, that’s Roy’s,’ Alice says excitedly. ‘Come on!’

Julia is afraid now. What has she done? What is she saying by going into that caravan? That she is like Alice, ready to drink whiskey and do all the other things Alice does – whatever they may be?

Why am I here?

It’s partly because she has never been able to say no to Alice, whose powerful methods of coaxing and ordering by turn have always impelled Julia to obey eventually. But it’s more
than that. She wants to protect her friend, and there is a strong impulse in her that believes her presence will be a buffer between Alice and danger, though how on earth that could be, she
doesn’t know. She is fourteen and dressed in trousers and a jumper over her pyjamas that have ponies on them. Some kind of guardian angel she is!