When Nights Were Cold (29 page)

Peter appears with two glasses of brandy, presents one to me. He slips into the hall and returns with his little suitcase. The brandy is good. I used to rub it into my feet to soothe them. Now it warms my throat and I think it will help me with Peter, with conversation. He settles under the lamp, takes a pile of papers from his case and sorts through them. It is some sort of typed manuscript and he shuffles the leaves, stacks them neatly with a certain fuss, as though they make him proud.

His eyes flick around the walls of my room. He makes a few notes on a slip of paper.

‘You hide in your dark, dusty house. I can understand it. I left my village three days ago and already I'm homesick. I don't like the city at all. I would have been very lonely in a hotel tonight.'

Peter puts on his spectacles and studies his documents. I don't feel afraid. In fact, I like him being there but I won't hurry. I have papers of my own.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It might do the job. I have written so many times I can no longer guess what will work best.

Just after Armistice Day, Mother caught influenza and was in her bed for a week. Dr Sowerby spoke to Catherine, for I refused to see him, and warned her that young, healthy people were vulnerable to this virus and that we must be careful. We took no notice, sat with her every day and we were fine. It was very different from the last time Mother was ill.
I hope I get better. I was enjoying myself,
she said in a small voice.
I'd just started to live again.
Then she seemed to recover a little, was able to come downstairs and sit with us for an hour or two one evening. She complained about the dreary colours of her bedroom so Catherine and I went to the shops the following day for curtain material. For some reason Mother decided to go into the garden while we were gone, perhaps to see if she was well enough for a stroll and some fresh air. Mrs Delaney looked out of her window to see Mother slumped on the garden seat, her neck uncomfortably twisted. The neighbours' cat perched on the arm of the bench, put its head forward to sniff at her face and she did not move. Rheumatic fever had weakened her just when her spirit was strong again. Catherine and I slept in Mother's bed that night top-to-toe and, in the hours when we could not sleep, we whispered memories and held each other for comfort.

We buried our mother in the churchyard, with Father and Freddie, and spent the next days sitting in the garden because we could not stand to be in the house.

Catherine and I continued to take care of the lodgers and, after a year or so, I began to teach the odd class at my old school. Our schoolfriends were beginning to travel again, going to tea dances, cutting their hair short and throwing their corsets to the wind. We did not do these things. We had no part in this new London but stayed in the safety of our home. Routine had got us through the war and routine would keep us going. For a while we wanted nothing more. We took an extra lodger and gave the cook her notice. Sarah came every day and we employed a new girl, Mabel, to help on laundry day.

Frank came to my bed most nights. I would lie with my back to him until I felt the mattress tilt and then I waited for him to wriggle a little and get comfortable. His feet were always freezing and I would say,
Don't touch me with those feet until you've kicked the ice off.
He would laugh and put his arm around me, let his hand rest on my hip. I would tell him what I had done that day, the little incidents at school or at home. He listened and smiled. I would check his fingers for flecks of colour, to see that he had been painting. Then he would tell me about his life and this would coincide with my medicine having its effect and so his stories would be strange and wild. I would fall asleep no longer thinking of him but heading off for a distant, stormy slumber. With Frank at night, there were no questions. During the day I asked myself why he did not write to me.

I thought that Catherine and I would live like this for the rest of our lives, and consider ourselves fortunate. Four years passed where nothing much happened and then I discovered that Catherine was paying visits to Dr Sowerby I saw her enter his surgery one morning when I was walking to school. Later, when I asked about her day, she said that she had not left the house. I began to watch her and saw that she was seeing him once a week or more. I feared that she was gravely ill and looked around the house for medicines or some clue. I searched the bathroom and her bedroom, even looked under the piano lid and inside the stool, but found nothing.

‘Are you all right, Catherine?'

‘Yes, why not?'

‘You're not injured in any way?'

‘No.'

‘Or ill?'

‘Why? Are you going down with something? I thought you seemed pale.'

The following afternoon, Catherine announced her engagement to Dr Sowerby. I was in the dining room planning meals for the following week.

‘I know you're surprised and you don't really like him, but he wants me to be his wife.'

I gazed at her and this time I knew that it was true.

‘Do you love him? He's rather old, isn't he?' Dr Sowerby's nasty, cold voice murmured near my ear. I saw his heavy black suit, his plodding gait as he trundled up and down our path. I could not imagine how they had come together, had any sort of conversation that could have led to a proposal.

‘Don't envy me, Grace. He's a husband.'

‘If it's what you want, then of course I'm glad but—'

‘He'll look after me and you can have the house to yourself. I just want not to be in it any more. I'm so thirsty for something different—'

Dr Sowerby had known Catherine and me since we were children, but his Catherine was a mild and demure knitter and pianist, not the wild, confused girl we knew in private. Catherine was much better nowadays, since Mother's death, but she was not properly connected with herself or things around her. She was capable of sitting on the front-door step for three hours or more, looking into the sky, then denying that she had ever been there. She looked after the lodgers but never found work outside the house because she was not able to keep time or talk much to strangers.

‘As long as this isn't some trick of his to have you locked away in some dark institution, I'm happy for you.' I took her hands and squeezed them. ‘At least you'll be nearby.'

‘He says he never wanted to lock you away, just help you get better from your illness. No, but we're going to live in Edinburgh in a year or two. Is that – is that all right? He's retiring and wants to live there near his brother. He says it's beautiful. I want to go so much.'

‘Of course you must go. You don't have to ask me.'

I continued with my list. Asparagus, sausages, sugar, ham,biscuits, mustard, stout. I must ask Sarah to finish cleaning Mother's room and move her things up to the attic. We also needed soap and salt and vinegar. I scribbled the words onto the paper as panic rose in my throat. Edinburgh? Catherine had hardly been outside London. And to go so far with such a man?

A lodger banged a door upstairs and a crackle ran down through the walls. Sarah was cooking and the place smelled of cabbage. Everything was rotten and I was still here.

‘Grace?'

I turned. Catherine leaned against the door, wrapped her fingers around the doorknob. She seemed so young, not a woman of thirty-seven but a girl of eighteen or twenty. Our lives had gone back to front. I had given up on doing much with life, whereas Catherine was still waiting for it to begin.

‘Will you be all right?' I asked.

She nodded.

‘You've been steadier since Mother went, happier. What if such a change has a bad effect?'

‘It just – just seems as though I might as well. I think I could be better in a different house with new things around me.'

‘I suppose you can only find out by doing it. Then we must celebrate.'

We dined that night on oysters in aspic and sirloin steak. We discussed Dr Sowerby Catherine would not agree that there was something sinister about him but did not claim to love him either. Nonetheless, we had a glass of sparkling wine and toasted the news.

‘Such good fortune.' She made a pile of salt at the side of her plate and swirled a pattern in it with the prongs of her fork. ‘I want it to be a beautiful house with gardens and flowers. I want views of the city from the bedroom windows and space for me to have lots of gowns and hats.'

‘And George?'

‘He'll play golf and go walking in the hills. We'll get along.'

Catherine lay on the settee reading a serialized story about a young woman and her romance with a cheerful, whistling Tommy. She had a bag of peppermint lumps on her lap and ate them one after another. I sat in Father's chair and opened the newspaper. My eyes fell on a familiar name that immediately made me think of Father.

‘Good lord,' I said. ‘The younger Peter Taugwalder is dead.'

‘Who?'

‘From the Whymper expedition. The son of the older Peter Taugwalder, who was also there. He climbed the Matterhorn a hundred and twenty-six times in the end, according to this. And I never did it once.'

‘Do it now then. Why don't you write to Cicely Parr and go together?'

‘No, no.' I smiled. ‘You have no idea. It's much too difficult for me. I've had no practice.'

‘Being married and living in Edinburgh is difficult and distant but I'm going to do it.'

‘Even the easy mountains seem distant now.'

‘In that case, climb the easier mountains, but do it. Go to the Alps again.'

Parr's reply arrived a few days later. She would come with me and it would be a delightful way to remember dear old Locke and Hooper. I showed the letter to Catherine at breakfast.

‘Look. I wish I hadn't had the idea now. I haven't spent time with her for years. I can't imagine how we'll get on. We still haven't quite sorted out that business of her wall and the ice axe.'

Catherine buttered her toast neatly, licked the knife.

‘If she's unbearable you can always push her off the top. No one ever need know. Doesn't that sort of thing go on all the time on expeditions? Everyone must hate each other after a few days, even if they didn't to begin with. I say it's best to be with someone you dislike in the first place. You have less to lose. Would you pass the treacle?'

I tightened the lid, turned the tin onto its side and rolled it along the table to Catherine.

‘Good shot.' She caught it without a blink, opened it and dropped a large pool of treacle onto her toast. ‘We're orphans, so we can make our own adventures and nobody can stop us.'

Catherine replaced the lid and sent the tin rolling back to me. She rested her elbows on the table and, from somewhere, my mother's voice came to me.

‘What's on the table gets carved, Catherine,' I said.

Catherine laughed. ‘But I'm going to be Mrs Sowerby, the doctor's wife. You can't tell me anything.'

Peter leans towards me. ‘When I read through my notes and look at you now – I – well, all I can say is that it's a huge honour to be sitting here with you. Of course, one can easily see why the trauma has affected you this way.'

‘I expect one can.'

‘To be involved in two Alpine deaths. Tragic.'

‘An awful coincidence, when you look at it that way.'

‘Too much misfortune for one climber.'

‘I have always felt that.'

‘Unless, of course, there was a connection between the two.'

‘I have explained so many times why that is nonsense. One accident and then another, separate accident. Among mountaineers, it's not such a strange thing, as well you must know.'

He takes a clean sheet of paper from the bottom of the manuscript and notes down our conversation in scratchy pencil. An image flashes up and replaces him for less than a second, but it is vivid. It is the boy from the Monte Rosa Hotel, writing something at the desk in the lobby. The same forehead, eyes, mouth.

‘You should learn Pitman's shorthand,' I tell him. ‘Peter, have we met before?'

He lifts his head and his glasses do a little bounce on his nose. ‘Do you think it is possible?'

‘Perhaps you have always been in the hotel business?'

He raises an eyebrow. ‘You mean—'

‘The Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt. You were the young boy who comforted us when Hooper was dead, but we never knew your name.' I am excited now and my voice sounds loud and high. ‘You were always in the lobby when we came and went. I know it.'

‘Yes.' And he could be lying but I'm sure he is not. ‘Yes, you're quite right. Well done. I worked there and I've never forgotten the tragedy, as you can imagine.'

‘Why didn't you say so?'

‘I never expected you to remember me and, if you did, I thought you wouldn't believe me.' He blushes to the roots of his hair. ‘And – this will seem strange to you since I let myself into your house without invitation – I'm rather shy.'