A Place Called Winter (9 page)

He often remembered now a chilling little exchange he had overheard between his cousins, the country ones who had so little to do with him. One had spoken with disgust of the way a neighbouring landowner beat his dog, and the other had sighed, ‘Yes, the man’s a brute, but it’s an outlet, I suppose . . .’

Chapter Nine

Harry had been at the theatre again. Under cover of supporting Pattie’s less than glorious but nonetheless continuing career at the Gaiety, he attended her first show there, and its replacements, assiduously, until he knew every banal song and facile dance step off by heart. The latest offering was the usual drivel and froth, no more profound than its predecessor, but the gentlemen of the chorus, fronted by Browning, had a rather daring number in swimming costumes. (Browning said these were damnably hot and itchy to dance in.)

Tonight, at short notice, Pattie had stepped forward to sing a solo for an actress who was ill. Harry had gone on his own because Winnie had a wedding dress to complete, and had rather enjoyed himself even though, to his consternation, Browning was nowhere to be seen. He called at the stage door afterwards to pass on his congratulations to Pattie. He sent up his card to her and couldn’t help noticing that several of the departing actors, including Cora Lane, seemed surprised to see him waiting there in the yellowish light.

The doorkeeper’s runner, a youth with angry spots, returned, handed him back his card and said he was sorry but Miss Wells was ‘suddenly indisposed’. Harry thought little of this: Notty was probably with her, and he had no doubt that by now, Notty had become her lover. Pattie, he suspected, was too much the sensualist, too little the tactician, and had misplayed her cards and found herself with a gold watch and a lover instead of a plump engagement diamond, a stable future and the remote possibility of a title. She now often
stayed with friends in town
rather than come home after a performance, behaviour that nobody challenged or questioned, perhaps for fear of what it might drive her to confirm. Mrs Wells and Winnie had taken to sighing when she was spoken of, and referring to her, as often as not, as
poor Pattie
. Notty still came to Sunday lunches occasionally, but any hope of marriage was a pallid, sickly thing.

Life in Strawberry Hill had become more comfortable in the last year, since both Robert and Frank had married. Robert had wooed and won a client’s wealthy widow and was living in pompous splendour in Richmond. Frank had found his Elfine quite unassisted, a bosomless bluestocking with no sense of humour, who matched him so perfectly she might have been bred for the purpose. They had taken on and restored a house Mrs Wells had inherited from her mother in distant Camden.

So not only did they all now have more space, but Harry was growing used to acting as head of the otherwise female household. There were times now, after a good lunch perhaps, and playing badminton with the girls on the lawn, when he felt his life richer than Browning’s, in his suite of bachelor cells, where the nearest grass was a public park and the nearest loved ones heaven knew where.

There was one room left lit when he came home. He thought nothing of this since it was a household custom always to leave a lamp burning in the sitting room at the front of the house to welcome anyone out late. When he had bolted the front door behind him and hung up his coat and hat, he stepped into the sitting room, thinking to put out the lamp, and found Robert in there, waiting in an armchair with a book.

‘Robert, hello. What a nice surprise,’ he said, though it wasn’t entirely.

Robert had jumped up as he entered, evidently nervous. From the smell of him, the glass of whisky he was drinking was not his first. ‘Please sit down,’ he said, not shaking the hand Harry automatically offered, but covering the awkwardness of not doing so by patting at his jacket pockets. He had not dressed for dinner.

‘Robert, is something wrong? Is it Winnie? Have you eaten?’

‘Do shut up and sit down,’ Robert said, his voice uneven.

Harry sat.

Robert remained standing, swaying slightly. Harry had rarely seen him drunk before and, being sober himself, was peculiarly sensitive to the older man’s tension.

‘Just answer me this,’ Robert said. ‘This one thing.’ He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and drew out a small, silk-covered notebook that Harry did not immediately recognise, as it was appearing so much out of its usual context. ‘Is this handwriting yours?’ He fumbled the little book open to a page where Harry immediately identified one of his pornographic messages to Browning.

Harry hesitated, wondering by what grotesque accident such a thing had travelled from the obscure Jermyn Street flat to his brother-in-law’s sweaty possession. He was glad he had drunk so little earlier; even so, he needed to choose his words with a care he was not sure he could muster. The fear that had been rumbling in the background of his thoughts all year was threatening to make his hands shake. He discreetly clasped them to his knees, picturing policemen at the door of Ma Touraine, imagining the fuss, Mrs Wells nervously charming them and saying they must have made a mistake. It was not oakum picking or hard labour in a quarry he dreaded, he realised, nor exposure in a courtroom, but the unstoppable process by which his wife’s family and his brother would pass from bafflement to revulsion.

‘Who else knows?’ he asked, somehow managing not to stutter.

‘Is it your handwriting, man? Because if it isn’t, I must involve the police in a case of attempted blackmail.’

Harry nodded. ‘It’s mine.’ And now he stuttered. ‘I . . . I mean the bit you showed me is.’

There was no fire in the grate, simply one of the pretty paper fans Winnie made. Robert crouched down, tugged the fan aside so clumsily it would never sit right again and tore the little book apart. He lit a taper and set fire to the first pages, then dropped section after section to burn on top of them. The brief flare was merry and the lamplight seemed much dimmer when it had died down.

‘There,’ Robert said, returning to his armchair. ‘I never saw it and neither did you. The bloody thing never existed.’

For a giddy moment Harry thought that was an end to the matter, that some sort of gentlemen’s agreement had been arrived upon. But then he thought again about the strangeness of the book having reached Robert and knew that couldn’t be the case.

‘Pattie knows,’ Robert said at last, taking another swig of whisky. ‘And Notty, and a fellow gentleman of the company by the name of Pryde.’

‘I . . . I don’t understand.’

‘Your partner in sodomy, clearly unaware of what you had written in there, took it along to the theatre in the hope of getting a departing autograph from the lady whose engagement is soon to elevate her out of the theatre to the ranks of the outer peerage. I believe Winnie has made several gowns for her but I forget her name.’

‘Sylvia Storey.’

‘That’s the one. But before it could be handed over – and this was possibly the one blessing in a revolting business – Mr Pryde stole it from your Mr Browning’s dressing room and presented it to poor Pattie, demanding money for his silence.’

‘But Pryde is . . .’

‘One of your sort? I’ve no doubt. Which is why his instincts are so readily criminal.’

‘Did she pay him?’

‘Of course not. But Notty did. What were you thinking, man?’ His tone was almost kind.

Harry took a breath before he spoke, remembering Browning’s lessons. ‘I don’t suppose I
was
thinking.’

They sat in silence. The clock in the hall struck one.

‘What will you do?’ Harry asked at last.

‘Oh I shall do nothing,’ Robert said. ‘I’ve done my bit. You, however, will be removing yourself from this family at the first opportunity. I suggest you leave the country and don’t think of coming back. We shall look after Winnie and Phyllis. If you make over your remaining property to Winnie, she will at least have an income. You must tell her you have lost so much money through . . .’ here he paused minutely, ‘another bad investment that you have no option but to flee the country to seek your fortune. The Cape. Australia. New Zealand. There are plenty of places you could strike out for . . . if you were man enough. Where you actually go need not concern us.’

‘What if Winnie wants to come with me?’

‘She’s not the pioneer type, especially not encumbered with a child. But you must dissuade her. If you don’t, I shall have no option, as Phyllis’s godfather and guardian of her spiritual welfare, but to tell Winifred what I know so that the child can be protected. The same would go for Georgina and your brother. Provided you go, they need know nothing but that you have left to seek your fortune. Your . . . second fortune. I expect you to be gone within the week, although I would be far happier if you were to leave tonight.’

Although Harry and Winnie had not shared a bed for a while, he had her photograph and Phyllis’s beside his bed. They were paired in a little leather travelling frame she had given him the previous Christmas, although he was the least travelled man she knew. He held it in his hands a while, staring at the two sweet faces as men once did at little icons of their favoured saints, and knowing he was gone already, as far from them in outlook and prospects as he would soon be in location.

He did not sleep but found that the moment his head touched the pillows an unusual clarity of thought descended on him, and with it, an unexpected surge of gratitude to his unattractive brother-in-law, with all his second-hand thoughts and pompous, third-hand turns of phrase. Robert had been placed in an impossible position. To go to the police was to stain his family’s name and possibly risk his professional reputation. Not to go, to destroy evidence as he had done, and so let one blackmailer and two buggers escape justice, would always weigh heavily upon his lawyerly heart.

Harry knew what he was escaping. Since meeting Browning, he had become peculiarly attuned to the fate of those Robert would call
his kind
and who he had heard Frank refer to as
Wildebeasts
. Five years with hard labour. And everyone knew that the dire effects of working on a treadmill or in a quarry on the health of a man unhardened were such that even a year’s sentence was a shortening of lifespan. Since the furore over the Wilde trial, in his school days, court cases were scantly, if ever, reported, as though not to name a thing were not to grant it a reality, but they happened all the time. Browning had heard about them through what he called the
Nellygraph
, and had passed on horror stories with a grim kind of glee. With equal relish he would pore over reports of suicide – by drowning, razor or lye – convinced there were often clues that the wretches involved had been caught out but been granted a merciful interval in which to avoid a greater shame.

Harry was under no illusion that Robert intended mercy to no one but Winnie and Phyllis, but he was grateful nonetheless. He was also excited by, and frightened of, all the possibilities suddenly before him, and felt again the old tyranny of choice he had thought marriage had put behind him.

Phyllis would forget him soon enough, as he had forgotten his mother except for a strictly symbolic bedside shadow. She would be protected by a phalanx of grandmother, uncles and aunts.

Chapter Ten

Harry breakfasted with the younger girls, telling them how wonderfully their sister had sung on stage the night before, and how Notty and other admirers had hurled bouquets. (In fact her voice had sounded reedy and nervous, the applause had been scant and Notty’s bouquet the only one, but he wanted them to picture something happier.) Then he forestalled the maid and carried up Winnie’s breakfast tray himself.

To her he gave a more honest account of Pattie’s performance, knowing she would see through anything else. He asked about her evening.

‘Robert came unexpectedly,’ she said. ‘He wanted to see you and I’m afraid we were all so tired we left him alone sitting up for you. Was he still here when you got back?’

‘Yes. Money worries.’

‘Not again.’

‘Worse this time, darling.’

She threw him a worried glance and bit a corner off her toast.

‘I need to go away for a bit to, you know, make some money.’

‘Why on earth?’

‘Well, there’s no need to sound so incredulous!’

‘But what could you do?’

‘All sorts of things, if I can travel light and cheaply. Mine companies need clerks. I could even try my hand at tea planting. Or rubber. Or sheep in New Zealand.’

‘Are you quite well?’

‘I’m serious, Winnie. I’m heading into town now to ask around. See what I can find out.’

She smiled sadly and shook her head, and he realised with a spark of irritation that she scarcely thought of him as a man at all. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not sneering. Just a bit surprised. Oh, be an angel and look in on the nursery. Nurse may have forgotten that Phyllis has a doctor’s appointment this morning at ten thirty.’

The front door in Jermyn Street was propped open as usual. Harry slipped upstairs but heard the unmistakable sounds of a bona fide elocution lesson in progress – a woman enunciating,
She stood upon the balcony inexplicably mimicking him hiccuping
, in a way that sounded neither like a duchess nor a guttersnipe, merely artificial and actressy. He found a hard little chair on the next landing up and perched on it until the lesson ended and he heard Browning seeing the pupil out.

‘Have you a moment?’ he called out and Browning jumped.

‘Quickly,’ he said, retreating into his flat and holding open the door. ‘You can’t be here,’ he added. ‘Someone could be watching.’

‘No one’s watching,’ Harry told him.

‘How do you know?’

‘My brother-in-law burnt the evidence. There’ll be no further consequences.’

‘Other than two of us losing our jobs . . .’

‘I’m so sorry, Browning.’

Browning stopped looking quite so stern and planted a quick kiss on his forehead. ‘It could have been much, much worse.’

‘I’m so sorry. I thought you’d read what I’d written.’

‘I had no idea you’d ever written anything. Was it witty?’

‘It was absolutely filthy.’

Browning laughed. ‘Oh, I’ll survive. I think I’ll try my luck in New York. I’ve got friends there and they say a
genoowine
English accent goes down a storm.’

‘Ah. Good. Could I . . .’

‘Breathe, Harry. Deeper. Now. Let it out.’

‘Could I come with you?’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Well, I . . . I had been thinking of Paris, originally.’

‘I can’t speak French. I’d find no work except as a dancer, and I’m getting a bit old for that . . .’

‘I could support us. If we lived simply.’

‘I dislike simplicity. It’s rarely comfortable and usually cold.’

‘So let me come to New York with you. I’ll get a job. We could find a flat. Like this but a bit bigger.’

‘America’s laws are no different to England’s. Possibly worse.’

‘We could be careful, then. Two flats side by side.’

Browning laughed.

‘I love you,’ Harry said.

Browning stopped laughing.

‘I want to be with you,’ Harry went on, and all at once, now that this seemed possible and not just a married man’s pathetic fantasy, it was the truth and he wanted it with all his heart.

Browning turned aside to flick at a pile of papers. ‘What colour are my eyes?’ he asked.

‘Brown.’

‘They’re green. When’s my birthday?’

‘How should I know? You’ve never told me.’

‘How old am I?’

‘Twenty-five? Thirty? I don’t know. Does it matter?’

‘You don’t know me, Harry, any more than I know you.’

‘We can find out about each other, now we’ve time. A long boat trip . . .’

‘Christ, Harry! Listen to yourself. You’re not attractive when you plead. I preferred you married and unobtainable. In fact that’s how I prefer all my men. Men can’t live together like a married couple. It’s grotesque and whatever would be the point, even if they could? It’s not as though they’re going to start a family.’

There was a knock at the door and this time it was Harry who jumped.

‘That’s my eleven o’clock,’ Browning said. ‘Go.’

‘Browning, I—’

‘Go, Harry. Live long and prosper. I can’t see you again.’

‘But—’

‘I’m opening the door now, so for God’s sake dry your eyes.’

From Jermyn Street Harry wandered down through St James’s to the park and then up on to the Strand. He went into a chemist’s shop and bought a small bottle of laudanum and, because it looked alarming on its own, a packet of blackcurrant pastilles in a pretty tin. He leant against a shopfront, uncorked the bottle and sniffed the contents, which smelled of alcohol and cinnamon, then remembered the stuff had to be taken in water. There was a Lyon’s Corner House nearby, so he went in there and asked for a pot of tea and a glass of water to go with it. Experimentally he added just the recommended number of drops to the water and knocked them back.

It tasted bitter, rather unpleasant, but it was only right that death should. Given time and the right space in which to do it – a quiet corner of a park, perhaps – he could imagine tipping in the whole bottle and gulping it down. How much worse would it taste? And did it matter, since he’d be dying by then?

A current of warmth began to surge through him to the top of his head, and suddenly everything seemed to slow down, the bustle of horses and buses in the street, the chatter of people and clatter of china and cutlery at the tables around him. It seemed as though all the joints in his body relaxed, every ache, even the memory of how an ache felt, lifted away. He could quite easily have lain his head on the table before him and fallen asleep.

Then he noticed a crowd on the pavement opposite. They were milling around the window displays of a place that clearly had been a shop but now, instead of a shopkeeper’s name, announced
CANADIAN EMIGRATION
in large letters. Curious, doing his best not to slur his words, he paid for the tea, left the laudanum bottle behind, merely smiling at the nippy who called after him holding it up, and crossed the Strand for a closer look.

It took him a while to press through the crowd. There was a model of a farm – a pretty wooden house with a veranda and gingham curtains – surrounded by an ingeniously simulated field of golden wheat, and above it an announcement he could not quite believe, of free land. One hundred and sixty acres could be had, it said, for nothing but three years’ partial residency on them and what sounded like minimal work.

He read all he could of both window displays – the second had a similar announcement above a model train encircling a placid herd of identical cows – then pushed inside, queued to speak to a clerk and was sent away with a brightly coloured leaflet about homesteading in the
Last Best West
. It gave advice about shipping lines that sailed to Halifax from Liverpool and a list of outfitters who could equip him for the adventure. One of these was at the other end of the Strand, near the Savoy, as was an agency for the shipping lines.

The outfitter, already used to such enquiries, handed him a list that was remarkably like those he and Jack had to tick off when packing for school.
Dress suit
, he read.
Best tweed suit. Tennis suit. One cloth suit of ‘leather suiting’ and extra trousers for same. Three suits hard in wear. Cord trousers two pair. Ulster coat. Pea jacket. Mackintosh. Dressing gown (useful as extra warm garment in extremis). Flannel shirts twelve. White shirts two. Flannel pyjamas four. Winter and summer drawers – four pair apiece. Four vests. Twenty-four pair socks. Six collars. A cholera belt. An India rubber bath. Portmanteau for cabin. White cravats and cuffs. Cardigan. Two jerseys (Guernsey knit for endurance). Twelve pocket handkerchiefs. Six Turkish towels. Waterproof sheet (large and of best quality). Pair large blankets. Rug. Six pair dress gloves. Three pair hedging and ditching gloves. Two pair Canada mittens. A housewife with buttons, needles etc. including saddlery needles and waxed thread. One pair boots. One pair high boots. Dress shoes. Unnailed shoes. Slippers. Ambulance braces. Helmet of Jaeger wool.

He had absolutely no idea how Canadian mittens might differ from the English variety and was faintly alarmed at the prospect of a cholera belt, whatever that might be, but reading the list evoked the adventure pleasantly even before it was under way.

Had Winnie known the ugly truth, he could have backed away from her, weighed down by shame. He could not quite believe that, made worldly by the theatre and Notty, Pattie had forborne to tell her. Winnie had a quality to her, however, that made people withhold bad news. She had a family reputation for sensitivity, so
Don’t tell Winnie
or
Whatever will Winnie say?
were common refrains.

When he returned that afternoon, having booked as modest a berth as he could countenance and arranged for his strange kit to be sent on to await him at Liverpool in a new steamer trunk, and then called back at the Canadian Emigration office because he had thought of numerous questions to ask them, he thought it best to tell her exactly what he was about.

She had been laconic, even softly mocking, over breakfast, but, faced with a firm arrangement and dates and a ticket, she was distraught. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she kept saying. ‘I’ve driven you away. I’ve not loved you as I should.’

‘You’ve loved me as best as you could, which was better than I deserved,’ he said, and applied soothing variants of the phrase until the noise she was making brought in Mrs Wells and he was obliged to tell the whole story again.

He might have expected mother to react like daughter, but her response was rather sturdier. ‘Well I think that’s rather splendid,’ she said. ‘Living among all these petticoats is no place for a man, and out there you’ll be able to make something of yourself. You might even find gold. Or oil! And you can shoot us all fur coats!’

‘Mother, I’ll be planting wheat,’ he explained, ‘and maybe oats. I’ll be farming.’

But she still thought it was splendid and in turn helped break the news to little Phyllis – a thing he had been dreading – saying that Daddy was going off to the Americas to join the cowboys.

Phyllis was too young to have a sense of distance or time. Her parents were either with her or not, attention was either granted her or not. The idea of her father as a cowboy made her laugh, especially as her nursery maid had recently taught her that cows said moo, but at bedtime she was seized by a terrible panic and clung to him wailing that he was not to go. So of course he lied to her, saying he’d soon be back and that she was to be good for Mummy and not make a fuss. And his words left a painful lump, like an overlarge mouthful of apple, in his throat.

Over supper, the younger sisters were drily satirical. ‘But Harry, you
can’t
be a farmer!’ The idea clearly struck them as absurd.

‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘I love horses. Jack’s a vet now. Why shouldn’t I be a farmer?’

‘It’ll be such hard work, won’t it?’ Winnie asked, as though the idea had only just occurred to her.

‘Yes. At first. It’ll take some getting used to. And the weather. Out there, the winters are terrific.’

‘But there are wolves, aren’t there?’ Kitty said. ‘And bears!’

‘Don’t frighten Winnie,’ their mother said.

‘Not in the prairies. The man in the emigration office said the main problem would be rabbits – which one can always eat – and coyotes, which are only really a pest if you keep hens or sheep.’

‘Could we please just talk about something other than Canada?’ Winnie asked, quietly but firmly, and they all remembered she was about to become a grass widow and ate on in silence.

At bedtime she came across to his room and lay on his bed, leaning against the footboard opposite him. ‘I can’t possibly sleep,’ she said. ‘Not yet. I’m so sorry. It never even occurred to me to ask, but . . . do you want me to come with you?’

‘Heavens, no,’ he insisted. ‘I mean, of course I’d love your company, but it’s going to be tough at first, at least until I have somewhere to live. I’ll be roughing it. Sleeping in a tent. But . . . maybe you could join me after a while. Once I’ve a little house with a . . . a garden and a veranda and a cosy stove. First thing I’ll do is plant some roses.’

‘You’ll write?’

‘Of course, silly. Try stopping me.’

‘I’ll write every day. I warn you now.’

‘Just send me Phyllie’s pictures from time to time with little bulletins on the back.
New teeth coming through. Made dress for Clara Butt. Pattie to be duchess after all.
That kind of thing.’

‘Oh don’t be light-hearted. That makes it worse.’

‘Sorry.’ He tentatively held her small slippered feet, which were resting on the pillow by his side. ‘To be honest, given, you know, how things were when we . . . I didn’t think you’d care that much.’

‘Of course I care. No wife wants to be on her own.’

‘You won’t be on your own. Not in this house.’

She sighed at that, trying not to laugh, and fell to twining her dressing gown ribbon about her fingers. It was an extremely fetching dressing gown, of striking severity, made of oyster satin with a dark blue trim. She was sure to have made it herself, and all at once he felt how wasted she was on him, that she was really rather magnificent.

She stayed in his bed that night and every night until he left, not expecting him to make love to her and not clinging to him as Phyllis had done, but pressing close against him, as if for simple warmth and reassurance. He was disgusted at himself that he could sleep at all, for her tender touch made him feel like a murderer, but he was grateful for it too and slept soundly.