A Place Called Winter (6 page)

Frank’s train was late, and this seemed to fluster him out of all proportion. Harry assured him, lying, that he hadn’t been waiting long.

‘I must catch the eleven forty-five back to town, which means we now have barely thirty minutes,’ Frank said.

‘Follow me. There’s a perfectly good hotel nearby. You seem upset, Frank.’

‘I’ll explain once we’re sitting,’ Frank said shortly. He looked more than usually wan, the more so for being in such holiday surroundings.

Harry ran through all the possible bad news that couldn’t have been put into a letter, and could only think of sudden death – one of the girls drowned in a silly boating accident or Robert crushed by a tram – but he couldn’t see why Frank, least of all Frank, should think to spare Winnie’s feelings by secrecy in such a case. By the time they were seated in a corner of the hotel’s palm court – where, mercifully, the usually tireless little band had yet to start playing – Harry was every bit as jumpy as Frank.

It was awkwardly early for them to know quite what to order. A waitress brought them two glasses of lemonade and a little pink plate of biscuits. Frank ate two biscuits in rapid succession and drank most of his lemonade. He was sweating, and not from heat.

‘Frank, for pity’s sake, what is it?’

‘The sure thing,’ Frank said.

‘The Wakefields shares.’

‘Yes. They’ve plummeted. Haven’t you been keeping tabs on them?’ The brow furrowed on Frank’s feminine, rather nun-like face. If ever he had children, they would find his disappointment hard to bear.

‘Well I did at first, but then they did so wonderfully well.’

‘And you didn’t cash them in the way I said you should?’

‘I . . . You only said I could, Frank, not that I should.’

‘Damn and blast. You’re not a child!’

Frank never swore.

‘Down to virtually ha’pence a share since yesterday,’ Frank said. ‘I checked on my friend, the one who told us all to buy them, and it seems he’s fled the country, having neatly dumped all his holdings on the market while the price was at its peak. Harry . . . I’m so very sorry.’

‘Not your fault,’ Harry assured him. ‘Anyway, they’ll come up again. Shares always do.’

‘Not this time.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Just how much of your capital had you sunk in it?’

Harry told him, and he swore again.

‘I’m a bloody solicitor,’ he said. ‘Not a stockbroker. Why were you taking my stupid advice?’

‘It was good advice. Very good advice. My fault for not having got out last week. How about your mother?’

‘No better than you.’

‘Does she know?’

‘She trusts me. I’ll have to tell her.’

‘She’ll have Pattie married to money in a jiffy. Just you wait.’

‘How can you joke at a time like this?’

‘Sorry. It . . . it just doesn’t feel very real.’

‘It will when you next have bills to pay.’ Frank glanced at his watch and sighed. ‘I leave it to you how you tell Winnie. The most obvious solution will be for you to give up the lease here and move in to Ma Touraine. I can move in to Barry’s room and that leaves you Winnie’s old room and mine. Or there’s a sort of coachman’s cottage over the stable. Far nicer than it sounds; at least there you’d have an element of privacy. I know how Winnie will miss that. But the move would save you any domestic expenses until . . . until things improve.’

‘Yes. Of course. Well. Thank you. We’ll see, eh?’

‘I must go.’

Harry threw down some coins for their lemonade, thinking as he did so how unreal money had always seemed to him, like counters in a game. The relentless little band had arrived and were tuning up as he hurried out after Frank.

He insisted on shaking Frank’s hand as he saw him off.

‘Kind of you to come down to tell me in person,’ he said.

‘The least I could do. Is Winnie well?’

‘Yes. And the baby.’

‘Phyllis.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’ll consider what I said?’

‘Of course.’

And Frank turned away with entirely characteristic abruptness.

Heading back through the ticket barrier, Harry was lightly bumped by a serious young woman running for the same train, book in hand, glasses like bottle bottoms.
Elfine!
he thought, with a little surge of affection for the prickly young man who had just taken such trouble to break bad news.

Since boyhood, probably since his mother’s death, he had periodically indulged in fantasies of being liberated by catastrophe. War would descend around him, or revolution, plague, earthquake, tidal wave, something elemental and huge that would shatter all certainty and stability and leave him suddenly, dizzyingly free.

Since becoming a husband and father, he had noted how the fantasies had shifted to become brutally local and specific. He would return from a night away to find Winnie and Phyllis – and the maids, naturally – dead from an overnight gas leak. Or turn the corner on to handsome South Parade, as he did now, to find a mayhem of shouting crowds and firemen and a smoking crater where their house had stood. The images that came to him were appalling. He assured himself they were a symptom of love, no different from a mother’s fearful imaginings when her children were out of sight, but he kept them to himself.

Winnie was standing in the conservatory, dandling the baby in her arms to show her the view of the sea. She laughed and waved Phyllis’s chubby little arm to him as he came up the path.

Since her confession on their honeymoon, he had decided he owed it to her always to be equally honest in return. He would tell her over lunch.

Chapter Six

Telegraph boys in London were a common enough sight. Smartly uniformed, often with the cheek to go with it, in Harry’s mind they belonged, nonetheless, to that less tidy class of labouring men, of grooms, navvies, gardeners and builders. Theirs was an urban tribe whose busy physicality, as he strolled by, could leave him feeling rebuked in his idleness, even as it drew his gaze. This was perhaps particularly the case with the telegraph boys, since Harry led a life quite without urgency, so had never received a telegram and thought it unlikely he ever would.

In the soft nursery scenes of Herne Bay, where it seemed no communication was so insistent it could not be made by letter, telegraph boys were a rarity. Seeing one bicycling swiftly along the front, Harry assumed he could only be bringing exceptionally bad news – of tragedy or financial ruin – to some unlucky neighbour, so was shocked to see him lean his bicycle against his own garden railings and march up the garden path.

The telegram came from Mrs Wells and said simply:
Please come at once
. Assuming there must have been a family death, although there was no black border, he replied that they would catch the next train they could, then hurried upstairs to the nursery to alert Winnie.

Winnie had inherited her mother’s tendency to worry. All the way from Herne Bay to Victoria, she rehearsed out loud the possible scenarios before them: a boating accident, although their father had seen to it that they all could swim; a heart attack – their mother had long suffered from palpitations; Barry slaughtered by savages in Basutoland. Or perhaps, which was harder for her to put into words, Frank or Robert had done something wrong at work and now faced professional ruin or even arrest!

Harry soon gave up trying to reason with her, as it only made her the more fretful; he had learnt that at such times, although she would often voice her worries as questions, she was actually talking to herself, so that anything he said was in effect an interruption and thus an irritant. By the time they were on the branch line out to Strawberry Hill, Winnie had made herself so tense that she had stopped talking entirely, and they travelled in silence.

As they waited on the front doorstep, he could hear Kitty and May’s voices through an open window overhead, reciting some lesson for Madame Vance. Harry thought it might be capitals of the world. They sounded like their usual bouncy selves – geography was a favoured subject, perhaps because it suggested routes of escape from their Twickenham schoolroom – not like girls in a house oppressed by death.

When the maid opened the door, Mrs Wells was hovering in wait a yard behind her and swept them into the sitting room at once.

‘Oh my dears,’ she told them, drawing Winnie down on to a sofa beside her and holding out a hand to Harry, as though she needed the support of both of them to cope. ‘Thank God you’ve come. The strain! I’ve told nobody yet. I only found out with the breakfast post, and the boys had already left for work, of course. And I could hardly tell Julie and the little ones.’

‘What is it?’ Winnie asked. ‘Who?’

Mrs Wells looked her firmly in the face and released Harry’s hand so as to take both Winnie’s in hers.

‘It’s George,’ she said.

Winnie let out a stifled cry. Of all her siblings, her favourite was the only one for whom she had imagined no awful fate that morning. George was so healthy and fearless; nothing bad could possibly happen to George!

Harry recalled that George had been invited to be a bridesmaid at a smart friend’s wedding, which meant travelling all the way to Gloucester for the last three nights. There had been much associated fuss in the preceding weeks, first over Winnie’s discreet remaking and fitting of the dress the bride’s mother had sent from some country dressmaker, and then over the vexed question of whether it was appropriate for George to travel so far unaccompanied. The wedding had been on Saturday. After spending Sunday in some splendour as the family’s guest, George was due back at Ma Touraine that evening.

He sank into a nearby armchair and pictured, in the instant, George’s happy face as she teased Winnie on the veranda that first afternoon of their acquaintance, and thought of Jack, so far from them in Chester and so isolated socially. Jack would be devastated.

Since Harry and Winnie’s marriage, nothing but inconvenience had come in the way of Jack and George continuing their friendship. Although Jack had moved away to take up his new work in Chester, it was understood that there was a keen sympathy between the young people, and Jack had confided in Harry that he planned to ask her to marry him as soon as he was in a position to offer her a home. He did not say as much, and Harry did not press him, but Harry assumed they were harmlessly writing to one another all the while.

The fond couple had been briefly reunited a month ago, when Jack came to Herne Bay for the baby’s christening. (With a touch of loving artfulness, Winnie had invited both him and George to be godparents.) Although doubly chaperoned – Phyllis’s adoring grandmother had come to stay, too – they had spent hours in each other’s company and would have exchanged all manner of confidences.

Harry looked at the tears glistening on his wife’s kind face and had decided he must travel to Chester in person, to break the news that very day, when Mrs Wells said,

‘I don’t know whether to cry or laugh. I’ve spent the morning doing both. I’m quite drained.’

‘But . . .’ Winnie started.

‘She’s eloped,’ Mrs Wells told her. ‘The little goose is married.’ She glanced at Harry with a hint of flirtation. ‘We now have two Mrs Canes in the family. Here. You must read for yourselves. I’ve read them so often, and they’re such very sweet letters, I shall be overcome all over again if I try to read them aloud.’

While Winnie, he could see, was mastering her irritation that she had been so upset for no reason, her mother fumbled behind a tapestry cushion beside her to bring out an envelope from which she extracted two letters, one suggestively wrapped about the other, and handed one to each of them. They read in silence, as the chanting of the girls’ lesson continued to reach them from overhead, then exchanged them with a smile.

In one, Jack apologised for the shock but explained that George and he were deeply in love, impatient to be man and wife, and loath to put their families to any fuss or expenditure. Banns had been duly read in his parish church in Chester, over preceding Sundays. Yesterday George had joined him at the church, where they had been married, with friends as happily startled witnesses, and Mrs Jack Cane had moved into her new home. In the other, shorter letter, George assured her family that she loved them all but was unable to contain her love for her dear Jack and was now the happiest woman alive.

Giddy with relief at having finally shared the news, and apparently also reassured by Winnie and Harry’s happy reactions that it was unreservedly good, and not a cause for worry or shame, Mrs Wells insisted on opening a bottle of champagne forthwith, and summoned Julie, Kitty, May and Madame Vance to enlighten them, allowing them a glassful each in celebration.

She was predictably nervous of Robert’s response to what was, after all, a subversion of his authority, but her fears proved groundless. Leaving Winnie
en famille
for a couple of hours, Harry took the letters to Lincoln’s Inn and set them before the brothers. Just as he’d expected, Robert preserved his dignity by harrumphing a little at the young people’s cheeky subterfuge but was swift to admit that they were very well suited, that Jack was plainly a hard worker with good prospects and that, at a time when the household needed to reduce its outgoings, he was delighted to have married a sister off sensibly at such minimal cost.

Hands were shaken and Frank cracked a joke that perhaps the next two should be enrolled in a ladies’ rowing club at the first opportunity.

Harry left the letters with the brothers and walked the short distance to his own lawyer. There he gave instructions that the deeds to a pair of their father’s houses be made over to Jack by way of a wedding present. The rental income was improving, was steady, and would help cushion Jack against the inevitable extra expense involved in keeping a wife.

It was one of his lawyer’s juniors who took his instructions, but as Harry was preparing to leave, the older man emerged to greet him and take him into his office for a quiet word. Harry’s financial affairs, he was told, had indeed suffered from his misguided investment in Frank’s sure thing. Was he certain he wanted to reduce his income yet further in this way? Harry insisted. He had a duty to his brother, but with marriage he felt Jack truly became independent, and he wanted to mark that transition with a significant settlement. In which case, the lawyer said, economies would need to be made elsewhere. With which he opened a gloomy file of figures and forecasts.

Travelling back out to Strawberry Hill to retrieve Winnie for the journey home, Harry wrote several drafts of a letter congratulating Jack, forgiving him the understandable secrecy, presenting the gift of property and welcoming George to the sparse tribe of Cane. The pair must visit, he insisted, as soon as was convenient. Either that, or prepare to receive visitors immediately.

Now that I can leave off any pretence that being your older brother has conferred anything on me approaching wisdom,
he confessed,
your marriage seems at once romantic and sure-footed compared to the one you both so kindly nudged me into. I have always been the more conventional and cautious of us two, and now am left feeling somehow the less manly. You are making your way in the world, Jack, standing in no man’s shadow, while I feel myself incomplete, barely formed, left behind you in an unappealing larval stage.

He scratched all this last paragraph out. Then he crumpled and threw the draft impatiently out of the carriage window and began afresh and in an unambiguously happy tone.

His confession drew to mind something similar he had hinted at to Dr Fiennes on one of their bridge evenings in Herne Bay, while they waited for the ladies to return to the card table.

‘I’m fifty next year,’ the doctor admitted. ‘I’ve brought countless souls into the world and ushered a good few out of it. I’ve saved lives and shattered them and still a part of me feels as though I’m not long out of short trousers. I cheer myself with the conviction that most men are pretending to a maturity they do not feel. They swagger and pose and grow beards to hide behind, but they spend most of their lives secretly afraid and ill-equipped, as scared of women as they are of one another.’