A Place Called Winter (12 page)

Harry stole glances at Ursula as the reading progressed. Characteristically, she had chosen a hard, upright chair rather than sit with the rest of them, who had sunk into armchairs or shared sofas. She was listening intently but was quick to leave at the end, and he caught the disappointed look Gideon cast towards her as she slipped out. Harry chose not to linger either; he was overwhelmed by sleepiness again, and the Giggler had been inspired by the reading to whip out a pack of Tarot cards and proposed to read everyone’s future, the kind of thing that made Harry nervous.

A man stood before him in bright moonlight. They were outside the little Bethel cabin, which was how Harry knew this was a dream, but the image was as clear as in real life and the threat as intense. He was a big man, a giant almost, blocking Harry’s view of the moon. Harry knew him at once by his distinctive meaty smell and the mocking tone of his voice. He leaned in closer and said something so repellent that Harry let fly a punch to his jaw that sent him sprawling.

He landed heavily, knocking his head on something as he went down. Seeing him spread-eagled there, briefly vulnerable in the moonlight, stirred lust as well as fear, which made the fear worse.

Harry knew the only hope was to drag him to the river before he regained consciousness. He seized him by his boots and began to tug him over the grass, but, of course, the boots came off in his hands. So he took him by the feet, having feverishly tugged off his socks for a better grip, and carried on towards the river, even though he knew it was hopeless. The feet, big and bony and hot, felt impossibly intimate in his grasp and the body heavier and heavier.

Then, for a second, he knew the man was no longer unconscious but was watching him, smiling at his pathetic efforts before going on the attack. The feet lashed out, as fierce as fists, and soon Harry was sprawled on his back, winded, and the giant was straddling him, pinning his wrists with one hand and gripping his neck with the other. He bent to sniff him, his nose grazing his cheek and the side of his neck.

‘When I’ve killed you,’ he said, almost tenderly, ‘I’ll fuck you, real hard, for old times’ sake. And then I’m going to fuck your wife and kill her and then, I reckon, I’ll fuck your little girl.’

He woke shouting, to find he was in a muck sweat with the top sheet somehow twisted crazily about him. Moths fluttered around his still lit lamp. He remade the bed, climbed back into it, established that the dream had been just that and turned the lamp out. But now he couldn’t sleep because a tremendous wind had blown up out of nowhere and was causing his loose screen door to tap with maddening irregularity. He slipped out of bed again and opened the inner door so as to fix the screen door back against the outer wall of the cabin.

The wind had made the night magical. There were stars, but the air was full of the sound of rattling leaves. Moonlight picked out the river’s stealthy motion. He watched for a while, reminding himself that he must go for a bath in the morning. There were quaint ladies’ and gentlemen’s bath houses built beside the river, and he had heard the Giggler say that someone lit the stoves at dawn so the water was always beautifully hot by about nine.

Then he saw a door open. It was the one to Samuel’s cabin – the last in the crescent of them laid out on the gentle slope down to the river. He stepped back into his doorway and watched as Gideon came out, returned a lingering embrace to the black man half in shadow, then padded away across the grass towards the house. Samuel emerged fully into the moonlight. He wore only pyjama trousers, with a blanket over his bare shoulders. As Harry watched, he lit a cigarette and enjoyed a lingering smoke, leaning against his cabin wall.

MOOSE JAW

A subject like this is generally held to be an unspeakable one, as it would soil both him who talks of it and those who listen.

George Drysdale,
Elements of Social Science and Natural Religion

Chapter Thirteen

He saw little of Troels for what remained of the voyage and only found out later he was spending time on the next deck down from theirs, where he had business with several of the migrant families Harry had glimpsed on the quay in Liverpool. The weather and seas grew calmer – or perhaps they were all acclimatised finally – and their fellow passengers began to gather for meals again. Harry found himself taken up by the ladies in black, respectable Torontonians who were indeed in mourning, having returned to England to bury a father. They had recruited a card-playing parson and needed Harry to make up a four for bridge.

When Troels reappeared, he was once again in the thick of the only slightly chastened English puppies. He caught Harry’s eye, even raised an unsmiling glass to him, but Harry began to wonder if he was regretting his boisterous friendliness of the night they dined
à deux
. Then Troels found him in the crowds on the deck, when they finally came in sight of land again.

Had Harry considered, he wondered, the suggestion of learning farming skills for a few months or a year even, before taking up his homestead? When Harry said that he had indeed and that it seemed eminently sensible, Troels said that in that case a plan had taken shape. En route to the prairies – ahead of the puppies, who were to linger in Toronto, wasting their allowances – he planned to visit a cousin by marriage, who, having only daughters, always needed a hired hand on his farm.

‘You don’t wish to see Toronto, do you?’ he asked with an off-putting air, and Harry, whose conversations with the card ladies had made him want to see Toronto very much, lied and said certainly not, he was keen to save his money and be on his way.

Which was how, within a day of their landing in Halifax, he came to be boarding a train with a one-way ticket to a place called Moose Jaw.

The train was a shock. The card-playing daughters had declared it
marvellous
but had never actually ridden it and, he suspected, valued it as much for its symbolic value. The train was colonisation, civilisation even, embodied in steel, timber and two steam-belching locomotive monsters. It needed two of these, Troels assured him, not only because of its great size and weight but because of the distinct possibility that not all the snow in their path would have thawed yet.

There was a large first-class section but Troels vetoed this at the ticket office, saying it was for rich tourists and fools and that they would be better off merely visiting it for meals. Instead they were housed in one of a long, long sequence of carriages apparently adapted with the express purpose of settling the western prairies as cheaply and swiftly as possible. The seats were wooden, as unyielding as any church pew. Beds folded down like so many outsized tea trays from cupboards ingeniously cut in the ceiling. These beds were almost immediately taken up, either in simple preference to the wooden seats, because men and women were exhausted after sleepless nights in even greater discomfort below decks, or for fear that, with such a crowd on board the train, there would not be enough berths available come sundown.

At either end of each long carriage was a stove. These stoves never went out and were rarely without some passenger frying chunks of fatty sausage on them or cuts of other, equally anonymous meat. The air was thick with the scents not just of cooking, but of dirty clothing, alcohol, tobacco and underwashed person. They had been told to stow all luggage, clearly labelled, in the luggage vans, but inevitably there were things people were too nervous to part with, so there were bundles and boxes in every direction, clutched in laps or used as footstools or even pillows.

Schooled in conformity, and flustered by Troels’ impatient efficiency, Harry had stowed everything except his passport, money and the agriculture manual. He had read the last through once already and now, mistrustful of its confident simplicity of tone, began reading it again, alert to crucial detail he felt sure he must have missed first time through. His attention strayed repeatedly. There was a constant hum of conversation around them, much of it in languages he did not know, which made it no more distracting than birdsong, but his eyes were drawn to people.

More specifically, they were drawn to relationships. The majority of their fellow passengers were men between twenty and forty, some of them clearly travelling with a brother or father, but there were some women with children too, and these wives and grandmothers were the focal points of small, ordinary family dramas – the telling of stories, the soothing of anxiety, the imparting of wisdom, food or punishment – which seemed to Harry heightened in their significance for being surrounded by so much undiluted masculine harshness. He was not the only man watching these scenes with a kind of hunger. When a wizened old Welsh woman sang a lullaby to her grandchildren, the whole carriage was briefly hushed and there was such an audible sigh of appreciation when she had done that she laughed, self-conscious suddenly, and did not sing again.

Troels did not read and paid little attention to the men and women around them. Sprawled directly across from Harry, who had let him face the direction of travel because he said he felt uneasy when facing ‘the wrong way’, he ate up the passing landscape with his eyes as though willing it to move by more swiftly. He was a tour guide of no charm and few words. Where the pattern of dark forest and eerie lake gave way to human habitation, he would rouse Harry from his reading or reverie, knocking a knee against his and pointing out, with a faintly admonitory air, a place name or some dry detail in the way a man stored his straw or stacked his logs.

Harry tried watching the passing landscape too, felt he should as he had been lucky enough to secure a seat by the window and to have a measure of control over precious draughts of fresh air. Once they had left the bustle and dirt of Halifax behind them, however, he began to be overwhelmed by the lack of variety in the outlook of forest, lake and yet more forest, and the sense it gave of just how enormous and underinhabited his new country was.

He was not alone in this response. People exclaimed in their various languages at the size of the trees, the depth of the forest, the beauty of the lakes, and shouted when they thought they saw a bear or a moose. But they grew quieter and quieter as it dawned on them, perhaps, how unlike this landscape was to the imagery of golden wheat fields that had been used to lure them there, and they began to fear that Canada was nothing but forest, forest, forest, lake, lake, lake. They passed a section of wood where sunlight seemed barely to reach through the trees, and the ticket inspector pointed out that the sound they took to be birdsong was the calling of frogs. As his words were relayed, translated into Russian, Welsh, French and German, the carriage fell briefly silent and something like dread seemed to steal among them until an oblivious card-player broke the tension by laughing in triumph.

Though unused to the continent’s great distances, Harry was also aware that it would take them Canadian days, not mere English hours, to reach Moose Jaw, and that he needed to slow himself down, dull his senses a little and numb his anticipation in order not to find the monotony of the journey insufferable.

Periodically he and Troels would leave their seats – Troels securing their places by wielding stern-sounding Russian against the Ukrainians around them – and make the long journey through several carriages identical to their own, though each was colonised by slightly different racial groupings, to the relative magnificence and luxury of first class and the dining car. There they lingered as long as the harassed waiters permitted, even though the indifferent food served in high style put Harry in mind of condemned men and their last wishes. Beer was a shilling a bottle and he allowed himself two with each meal, one for thirst – because he did not care to drink the water on board – and one to help him doze when they returned to their hard seats.

With each passing meal, he became more and more conscious of his increasingly grubby, unshaved appearance. Harry had never been a dandy, but he had always been clean. He was mortified, on their second visit to the dining car, to find that his own fingers left an unpalatable grey streak on the white linen.

Come sundown, there were not nearly enough fold-down beds to go round. There were several children – who presumably had been counted by the ticket office as riding on adult laps – whose parents early on tucked them into beds, from which no adult had the heart to eject them later. Muttering that the next night they would insist on their rights, Troels commandeered their corner of the carriage and established a ‘bed’ on the floor between their seats, which he carpeted with their coats.

‘If we lie like spoons in a drawer, it will work,’ he said.

It was a coffin-like space and their feet and ankles stretched out into the passageway, where a careless passer-by might have trodden or tripped on them. Harry lay down stiffly, hesitant about being quite so close to his travelling companion.

‘On your side,’ Troels commanded, ‘so we fit.’

Harry rolled on to his side, facing away under the line of wooden seats.

‘There,’ Troels said, as someone dimmed the already dim carriage lights and a child began to whimper, and he threw his left arm heavily across Harry, pulling their bodies closer together. ‘Now we fit.’

‘Good night,’ Harry told him.

‘Sleep now.’ Almost at once, Troels’ breathing slowed and he fell asleep.

Harry remained awake, gaining an unlooked-for comfort from the weight of the big man’s arm around his chest but troubled by the tickling of his breath on the back of his neck and the knowledge that he was, in effect, sitting on Troels’ lap in a public space.

Chapter Fourteen

The farmer for whom Harry was to work was a Dane who had elected to move north from the American Midwest in search of cheaper land and better prospects when his older brother inherited the family farm in Wisconsin. His wife was a second cousin of Troels, and relied on him to bring her news of their wider family when he passed through, and rare treats such as European magazines and catalogues.

Troels found hired hands for her husband and for several farmers across the region. Inexperienced newcomers like Harry were ideal, he said, because they knew nothing and were keen to learn, so did as they were told without showing too much initiative. Initiative could be irritating to a farmer who liked things always done in a certain way. Troels did not hide the fact that this was a business transaction, for which his kinsman would pay.

Harry didn’t mind in the least. He saw the sense in learning farm techniques from an experienced farmer and hoped that the family connection, and being introduced as a sort of friend, might prevent his being too harshly exploited. Troels had warned him his accommodation would be basic and away from the main house.

Farmer Jørgensen had three daughters and no sons and, like all such farmers, was terrified that one of his daughters would be seduced by a penniless hired hand. Unless, of course, that hired hand proved to be a thoroughly good farmer, in which case he would become a useful son-in-law with prospects and no longer have to be paid a wage.

Troels was not a man who liked waiting and had planned that they would go directly to the Jørgensens on arriving at Moose Jaw. An accumulation of small delays, however, meant that they arrived far too late for that and had to arrange for a night in town.

Moose Jaw was far more developed than its age had led Harry to expect. It already boasted some large brick buildings – a school, a hospital, some hotels and a post office – and the station where they arrived would not have disgraced a small city back home. The buildings’ size and confidence only emphasised the raw, provisional nature of their surroundings, however: wooden shopfronts, more like fairground stalls than real buildings, streets of churned mud and worse, and everywhere vacant building plots carefully outlined with posts and wires but boasting as yet nothing but spring weeds. There was a certain bustle, the tinny sound of a pianola from inside a pub, but there seemed to be no more women in evidence than had been on the train or boat. Harry had not appreciated until now how much hats and dresses adorned a scene.

They passed across the street from the Dominion Lands Office, and it was dispiriting to see a cluster of men around its window, much like the one he had seen all those weeks ago on Piccadilly.

The hotels and inns were inexplicably busy, and there were no free beds at the City Hotel or the next place they tried. Finally they found one free room at the Maple Leaf. After days of not washing and having no privacy, Harry would have cherished a hot bath, a shave and a few hours of solitude in a quiet bed, and would gladly have paid whatever price was asked for them. He enjoyed a peaceful bath and shave, at least, across the corridor, lingering in the soothing grey soup until it began to turn cold. And while Troels took his turn, he lay on the half of the bed he had instinctively claimed, eyes closed, attempting to make out the words of an unfamiliar song some man was singing in a bar across the way, trying not to acknowledge the panic that had been stealing up on him ever since they disembarked from the boat.

They had brought only minimal luggage with them; most of it they had left in the care of the station for collecting the next day. Trained at boarding school to snatch what privacy he could, Harry had been scrupulous in taking from his bag only the articles he needed, and had replaced most of them tidily afterwards so as not to make a small room feel smaller still.

Troels had been under no such constraint, but seemed actively to use his belongings to make his mark upon the place and lay claim to more than a fair fifty per cent of its charmless yardage. Not only were his clothes scattered across floor and bed and shabby bureau, but the savoury, slightly meaty scent of him, not unpleasing but insistent, seemed to have permeated the room while Harry was in the bath. It felt like Troels’ room, into which Harry was intruding, an effect redoubled when Troels strode back in, humming, wearing only a towel, which he immediately tossed aside. He appeared to feel no embarrassment whatsoever at his prodigious nakedness, cheerfully chatting while he selected clean clothes from his exploded Gladstone bag.

They should eat steak, he said, almost certainly, since that was the best thing Moose Jaw had to offer, and with local beer, since whatever wine was on offer would be filthy and expensive. Then they should find women.

Harry reminded him he was a married man, but Troels waved aside his objection. Why had he gone to the trouble of shaving in a town full of unkempt beards? he asked in a bullying tone. Who else was he hoping to impress? Harry began to speak quietly about the maintenance of standards but let the matter slide. Troels, he was coming to understand, was a natural bully, and a man who often said things purely to goad a reaction from others but cared not a fig if one made no answer.

That their own hotel had already stopped serving food when they came down was something of a relief; the boiled cabbage smell in its hall and the purse-lipped little notices about noise, water usage and ‘visitors’ pinned to the back of almost every door did not inspire confidence that it was a place that understood pleasure. Instead, they found a noisy tavern – the one where a heavily bearded tenor was still singing sentimental songs – and were served steaks with fried onion and fried potato. There was far more meat than Harry could eat, but he knew he could count on Troels to finish it for him.

As they drank one beer after another, Troels made him talk about Winnie. Hoping that drink and conversation might postpone indefinitely the threat of
women
, Harry made himself sadder and sadder evoking Winnie’s quiet charms, her prettiness, her sly wit, her kindness as a mother and ingenuity with a needle and a bolt of silk. Troels seemed so keen to hear more about her that Harry began to fear the insanely confident Dane would no sooner have settled him as a hired hand than he’d be sailing back to Twickenham to woo her for himself.

Then Harry began the story of Pattie’s adventures on the stage, which led someone who had overheard to exclaim that her picture was on display. There was an incongruous screen, a thing that belonged in a boudoir, not a bar, which was presumably used to cut down the draughts on bitter nights in winter. It had been painstakingly papered over with pictures cut from some London magazine, all of them of actresses or noted society beauties, Gaiety Girls being prominent among them. The eavesdropper, who was plainly drunk, insisted on dragging the screen across to them, spreading the word as he did so, so that a small crowd of inquisitive, burly men arrived at the table with him.

‘So?’ Troels asked. ‘Which one is she?’

And there, thank God, she was, unmistakably voluptuous in a cluster of coyly draped flower maidens, smiling with her mouth slightly open, her creamy, almost muscular shoulders breaking free of a gauzy wrap.

‘Can she sing?’ Troels asked.

‘She can hold a tune,’ Harry conceded. ‘But it’s not a voice to fill a theatre.’

‘Does it matter?’ someone else laughed. ‘She can fill a dress!’

‘She have a feller?’

‘She . . . she has an admirer,’ Harry told them, and thought, with nostalgic affection, of Notty and his habitual expression of mild bafflement. ‘A minor aristocrat.’ He stuttered slightly on the M.

‘Oh,’ someone else said, mimicking the accent Harry never thought of himself as having. ‘Only a m-m-minor one! Dear me!’

‘He gonna marry her?’ another asked.

‘I . . . I doubt it,’ Harry said, with a pang at his disloyalty, and bit his tongue rather than mention gold watches and villas in Pangbourne.

The men then fell to assessing the girls glued to the screen – their hair, teeth, breasts and, in the saucier pictures, legs – in a way that made Harry think of his father roughly tugging apart a horse’s velvety lips to examine its teeth.

Troels slipped away during the discussion, which made Harry realise how dependent he had already become on his insistent control. Were the other man to have melted away into the night, it would have been days before Harry regained the ability to make decisions for himself.

‘Time to go,’ Troels now called, across the men’s banter.

‘We need to pay,’ Harry told him, standing.

‘It’s done,’ Troels said, and headed out, giving no option but to follow.

The night air was sharp and soberingly clean after the fug indoors, and reminded Harry he wanted sleep not women, but Munck had done his research and paced ahead.

‘They’re nice girls,’ he said. ‘Friendly. Irish. Recommended,’ and he turned down a side street that was abruptly residential. There were low wooden houses, some with small verandas or large porches, where log piles seemed to take precedence over rocking chairs. A dog barked. Most houses were already in darkness. In the window of the one Troels approached was a lamp with a pink glass shade, an ugly thing like some fleshy orchid in a winter garden.

Troels knocked on the door. Harry hung back.

‘I really think . . .’ he began at last, but the door opened and a motherly woman in an approximation of evening dress waved them in. She did not introduce herself or ask their names, used, perhaps, to visitors who spoke little English. She gestured to them to sit on chairs that were lined along one wall, as if in a dentist’s waiting room, tossed a log into a pot-bellied stove, then settled across from them in an armchair, where she opened a novel, licked her finger and turned a page.

A baby cried nearby, then fell silent with disturbing abruptness.

Troels was far too tall for his chair, which squeaked beneath him as he tapped a foot impatiently. When a door opened and a man came out buttoning his shirt, Troels fairly jumped to his feet, but the woman flapped her hand to make him sit again and it occurred to Harry that perhaps it was she, not the visitors, who had no English. The other man let himself out and walked away, whistling the same song Harry had heard from their bedroom earlier. Troels sighed so heavily Harry felt it through the floorboards.

Then one of the inner doors flew open again, the woman nodded, and Troels sprang up and went through it. Before his silhouette quite blocked the doorway, Harry saw past him to where a skinny girl, little more than Kitty or May’s age, it seemed to him, was arranging herself on a bed improvised from packing cases. She turned towards the door a face devoid of expression.

As soon as Troels had closed the door behind him, Harry seized his opportunity to escape, taking his leave of the reading woman with a stammered apology as he fumbled some coins into a little brass saucer apparently set out for the purpose. Retracing his steps to the hotel, thanking his stars he had pocketed their key before Troels had, he found he was in a kind of terror, so walked slowly to the end of the main street and back again until his heart had stilled.

He fell asleep within minutes of climbing into their creaking bed. When he woke, in darkness, it was to a commotion he realised was Troels dropping on to the mattress beside him.

‘You left early,’ Troels said, putting out the light.

‘Yes. My heart wasn’t in it,’ Harry told him.

‘You did well. She was too thin and, I think, diseased.’

‘Ah.’

‘I left too. Sleep now.’

Harry had observed on the train that Troels was a man seemingly capable of sleeping by effort of will. ‘Sleep now,’ he would say, and he slept. Far from slipping back to sleep himself, Harry was now utterly alert, roused by the consciousness that he was sharing a bed with a man so big he had to hook an arm over the bed’s edge to stop himself rolling against him. Exhaustion overcame him eventually, but he seemed to lie there, wakeful, for an hour, smelling the mix of sweat, steak and soap that radiated off Troels’ skin, aware of his every breath and shift of posture.

Light was filtering through scrappy curtains into the room when he next opened his eyes.

Trying to move slightly, he found that Troels had flung an arm across him and had pushed a thigh so firmly against one of his own that it was possible to tell that, even had he come to bed in his long johns, he was no longer wearing them.

Assuming it was a mistake born of sleep that would mortify Troels when he woke, Harry hooked his arm over the mattress edge and made an effort to haul himself slowly free. He had thought the other man was fast asleep because his breathing was so heavy, so jumped when Troels held him all the harder and said clearly,

‘No you don’t.’

The pleasures he had tasted in bed with Browning had been deep and sometimes bruising, but never violent. What Munck proceeded to do to him was savage and degrading, without affection or even curiosity. The pain was so intense that he felt torn open. When Munck suddenly thrust into him, the burning sensation was so intolerable, he cried out, at which Munck slapped a gagging palm across his mouth so that he had to fight for breath. He bit in response, which only saw his mouth clamped the harder and the assault intensify, as though Munck found invitation less exciting than resistance. In the confusion of extreme pain, fear and being only half awake, Harry believed he was about to be murdered. The ordeal was all the more horrible for his treacherous body gaining an animal satisfaction from it, which Munck could not fail to notice.

But then, with a few final thrusts and a furious Danish curse, it was over.

Munck rolled off him and got out of the bed. Harry made himself turn towards him; if he was to die, he would look his killer in the eyes at least. But Munck barely glanced at him as he snorted, ‘Huh! Too tight! You’ll be better at it next time,’ and tugged a towel about himself before slouching across the landing to wash.

Which was when Harry saw the red streaks where Munck had been wiping himself on the bed sheet as he spoke.