A Spell of Winter (27 page)

‘When Kate’s finished I’ll send her to you. She’ll help you undress.’

‘I’m not ill. I don’t need any help.’

He stood near to me but not touching me. ‘You’re not yourself, Cathy. You must rest. Go to your room and I’ll send Kate.’

‘I don’t want Kate. You come.’

‘I’ll have to talk to Dr Milmain.’

‘Grandfather can do that.’

‘No, Cathy. I need to get things clear with him.’

‘She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s clear enough.’

‘You mustn’t talk about it like that!’ He took hold of both my elbows and held me facing him, our faces close.

‘Like what? What do you mean?’

‘You don’t know how you sound. Listen, Cathy. Promise me you won’t talk to anyone about it. Not even Kate.’

I looked at him. He was fresh and beautiful from the winter night. I smiled but he didn’t smile back.

‘Let go of my arms,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Go to bed, Cathy. You need sleep,’ but his hands slackened and I pulled my elbows sharply down and sideways to break his grip, the way he had shown me when we were children.

‘There!’ I stood laughing at him. ‘I’ll go up, but you must come to me later.’

‘I can’t, Cathy. They’ll be here half the night. Dr Milmain and everyone. They’ll all be awake in the village. She’s dead, don’t you realize?’

‘I realize,’ I said.

My heart was as light as summer. It was all finished and gone and we could start again. I hadn’t hurt anyone. It was a summer morning and mist was thinning over the wood. In a minute Rob would wake in the bed opposite me and we would throw off our bedclothes and run out without stopping to dress. My thick night-plait would thud between my shoulder blades as we ran down the long rough slope of the lawn. Our feet would leave wet black prints in the dew and we would scare the deer feeding on tender shoots in the rose garden. There was the whole long day before us: the cool shadows splashed across the garden thinning to the heat of noon, the long afternoon in the shade of the mulberry tree, the blue twilight in the woods. Rob would carry me on his back across the bog by the pond where everything simmered and grew juicily in a soup of water and green treacherous ground. He’d tread down water forget-me-nots and wild peppermint, and make tiny frogs shoot sideways like stars.

But Rob was looking at me. Very, very slightly, without moving, he was shrinking back and away from me. He had that look in his eyes again and this time it was not unreadable, though it was a page that I had never read before. Always before when I’d looked at him I’d seemed to see a bit of myself there, looked after and held in love, and now I looked and looked and couldn’t find it. His eyes were open but they were closed to me.

‘Rob,’ I said, and he tensed, trying to guess his way ahead of what I’d say next. ‘Rob, where did Kate get the cashmere for her dress?’

He didn’t answer, but I saw a tiny contraction in his pupils. My brother was afraid of me. It was not for my sake that he wanted me out of sight, but for his own.

Eighteen

‘It’s never been my home,’ said Kate. I was talking to the back of her head as she knelt, packing layers of clothes into her tin box.

‘Wouldn’t you like a trunk?’ I asked. ‘There’s an attic full of trunks and we never use them. You could have one, I’m sure.’

‘No, metal is better. The damp can’t get in. There’s always damp on a ship, because the salt draws it. And I’d like to see the rat that could gnaw its way into here.’

‘Rat?’

‘Oh, there’s always rats. If you’ve a baby you keep it close.’

She stood up, rubbing her back, and kicked the corner of the box triumphantly. ‘There, you brute. I’ll be done with you soon.’

Her box was almost full. She had more clothes than I would have thought, and she had her own sheets too, which she had brought with her years before in case sheets weren’t provided for servants. We had sheets for everyone, so hers had laid clean and creased, put away for years in a brown-paper parcel. Dried fragments of sweet woodruff fell out of them when she shook them out. Then there were the things my mother had handed on to her: an air-blue silk with one of its breadths scorched by careless ironing, a white satin petticoat and a close-fitting plaid skating jacket. Kate had been going to make over the silk for years, but she never had. Still, she’d take it with her. It was good silk. She had packed her working dresses and aprons, her Sunday dress and her lace wrapped in tissue paper.

‘There’s the pin-cushion I gave you!’ I picked it up and squeezed its fat softness. I didn’t think she had kept it. It had her name embroidered on it in pink silk, and it was stuffed with sheep’s wool which I had gathered from the hedges and washed, because everyone knew that pins stuck in sheep’s wool would never rust. ‘Too good to use,’ Kate had said, and she had never used it.

The sunlight slanted in and showed up the bare patches on the oilcloth. There was a paler oblong on the wall where Kate had taken down her one family photograph. When I was a child she would bring it downstairs to show me when I begged her, and those stiff, set faces had become people to me, coloured by the stories Kate had told me so often that I almost believed they were my own memories. There was Joseph, alive and standing at his mother’s side, arms folded. Behind them a waterfall streamed and willows wept over a little rustic bridge.

‘Is that near where you live?’ I had asked Kate once, tracing the curve of the waterfall through the glass, but she had laughed. It was a photographer’s background, that was all, a painted cloth spread out behind the people on their chairs. You could choose the cloth you wanted. She remembered it well because there’d been an argument over whether they should have
My Rose Garden
or
Country Peace
. ‘It was bad enough to get us all in the one room for that photograph, Cathy. But I thought Joseph and my grandfather would come to blows over that backcloth.’ You would never have guessed it. The faces gazed out, empty and solemn, and I hardly recognized Kate.

‘God, it’s airless in here,’ said Kate. She pushed back her hair, went over to the window and unhooked it. It swung back and fresh cold air poured in, filling the attic, smelling of rain and new things.

‘You could tell with your eyes shut that it was spring,’ said Kate. She folded her cashmere over and over, trapping it in layers of tissue paper.

‘There, that’s it. I’ve only to put in my last things.’

I looked through the swinging window at the landscape of the roof. The flaws in the glass made the tiles cockle up like seashells. Kate was going across the sea, back to Ireland. She’d find work there easily enough; indeed she had a place half-promised, she told us. She looked round the almost empty attic exultantly.

‘You wouldn’t know I’d ever been here.’

‘Of course you would.’

I was tongue-tied. Kate was leaving and there was no arguing her out of it. She planned and packed with the rapid decisiveness I’d always loved, and I had to love the deft movements of her hands even now when they were acting against me. She had her railway ticket and her passage across the Irish Sea, and she would be met by her cousin, Aunt Kitty’s son. This time next week she would be lining drawers with paper and unpacking her clothes in a room I’d never seen.

‘I was sick as a dog when I came over,’ she said, stretching up her arms and laughing. ‘There was a woman with her children running wild on the ship while she called on all the saints to help her. I remember now those children’s feet thudding past my head. They hadn’t a pair of boots between them but their feet were tanned like leather. I wondered if they’d trample me, but I was past caring.’

‘You were only fourteen,’ I said.

‘That’s true. But I was a big girl. God, I can see it now, the tops blowing off the waves and those kids racing around the rails. Thank God we were up on deck. I’d have died below.’

The ship was real now, not us. She was still with us but we were going into the past, growing small like a country seen from a departing ship. Already she belonged to the rise and fall of the waves and the slap of the wind.

‘No, it’s never really been home. Well, you couldn’t expect it,’ she said again.

‘I suppose not,’ I said, smoothing down the neat oblongs of her packing. She would leave the lid of the box off for now. There was no lock, but she had a chain to wind through the fastenings, and a padlock for it. I stood up and walked over to the window where pale sun fell on my arms. I didn’t know the view from here because Kate had never liked us to come up to her room, but now she didn’t care. The room was nothing to her; it could be anybody’s. Soon there’d be just her striped, lumpy mattress on its iron frame, the peeling whitewash, the oilcloth, a couple of hairpins on the floor and the smell of Kate, fading.

It’s never been home
. But when I said
Kate
I was saying
mother
or
sister
, I wanted to tell her. It was always you in that space. You can’t go, because you’re taking too much of me with you.

‘You’ll be all right, Cathy,’ she said. Silence hung between us like a sheet we couldn’t fold. We weren’t easy with each other any more. She didn’t come to my room to help me brush my hair and tell me the gossip by firelight.

‘It was my mother’s,’ I said suddenly, ‘wasn’t it?’

‘What?’ asked Kate, so quickly that I knew I was right.

‘The cashmere. It was my mother’s, wasn’t it?’

‘You’re not thinking that I took it. Your brother gave it to me.’

‘I knew I’d seen it before,’ I said. It must have been bought before my mother went away, when she thought she’d have a dress made up from it, and then it had been left behind with all her other things. I must have seen it in her wardrobe, folded and wrapped, and that was why I’d half-recognized it when Kate wore her dress. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘It might as well be used.’

‘It’s not for you to mind,’ said Kate. She looked at me with an antagonism I’d never seen. She’d often been angry with me, but this was different, as if I were just another woman trying to slight her.

‘It suits you,’ I said to placate her. ‘Things ought to go to the people who can wear them.’

‘If I’ve any use for it where I’m going,’ said Kate, then she flushed.

‘Of course you will. More than you have here.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Remember that dress of mine – the pink silk? Wasn’t it awful?’

She smiled briefly. Then she looked hard at me. ‘You’ve a bit of colour today. You must get yourself out, Cathy. Away from here.’

‘That’s what Mr Bullivant says.’

As soon as I said it I remembered I must never say that name to her. But instead of growing angry she looked at me steadily, puzzling me out.

‘It wasn’t him, was it?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve thought so for a while. And you couldn’t say his name like that if it was.’

‘It was no one you know,’ I said.

‘You must forget it,’ she said. ‘I know you. You’re always carrying things inside you, where they do no good. And you won’t have me here to shake you out of it.’

‘I know. You don’t have to tell me.’

‘It’s better if I go,’ said Kate. ‘You don’t think it but it is. With me here you’ll stay the way you are for ever. Remember what I said when I’m gone, Cathy.’

For a moment something older and kinder than the Kate who was packing her box looked out of her eyes, then she slammed down the lid. ‘I’ll shut this up anyway – might as well. I’ve only my night clothes and my wages to put in it.’

‘I’ve got you something,’ I said. ‘A present.’

I had it in my pocket, in a small box lined with midnight-blue velvet. I held it out to her. She took the box, but she didn’t open it.

‘Go on, open it now. I want to see what you think of it.’

Reluctantly she undid the little gilt catch and the box sprang open. The ring lay there, dug into the blue velvet. The colour slept inside the opal, but as soon as it was held up to the light it would catch fire.

‘You can’t give me this.’

‘Yes I can. It belongs to me now.’

‘It’s your mother’s.’

‘No. She had it in her jewel-box but it was never hers. It was my grandfather’s – my other grandfather. You wouldn’t guess it was a man’s ring, would you? He had slender fingers, like my father. It was left to me when my father died.’

Kate took out the ring and tried it on the third finger of her right hand. ‘It’s too tight. My hands are ruined with work.’

‘It’ll fit on your little finger.’

She eased it over the knuckle and turned her hand round. The ring didn’t look quite right there. The milkiness of the stone showed up the reddening of her fingers, and the gold band was slightly too narrow for her broad, shapely hands.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I asked.

‘It is.’ She examined it slowly, twisting it this way and that. The heart of the opal flashed as if it had been put away only yesterday. ‘Some people say opals are unlucky, but I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘You ought to keep it for yourself.’

‘I’d rather think of it on you, going where you go.’

She looked at me and I knew she wanted it.

‘Go on, don’t be silly. I want you to have it.’

‘Then I will. You’re very good, Cathy.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m not at all.’

She brushed my cheek with her hand. It was the clumsiest gesture I ever saw her make, and I knew we wouldn’t kiss or cling to each other when she left.

‘I’ll wear it to keep it safe,’ she said, ‘but not until I’ve left here. I don’t want any talk.’

‘You’ll come back to visit us, Kate. It’s not so very far.’

Kate turned the ring again, her head bent over the stone. When she looked up at me she was crying. Her face didn’t move but her tears slid sideways, covering her cheeks. I wanted to comfort her but I didn’t think she wanted me to touch her any more.

‘You’ll come again,’ I repeated.

‘It’s not likely, Cathy,’ she said in a whisper, and she pushed away the tears with the back of her hands.

It had happened so quickly. We’d all had to go to Miss Gallagher’s funeral, naturally. There were no mourners from outside the village, and it was mizzling gently. The vicar stood with his boots planted firm in the wet, heavy earth, and rocked back and forth slightly as he droned out the words of the committal. He’d known her well, he said, but I doubted it. The box with Miss Gallagher in it went down slowly, rocking in its bands until it bumped to rest at the bottom of the hole. There was a faint sucking noise as the coffin settled. People glanced furtively at the sky. If it rained any harder it would take the dye out of their black bonnets. Grandfather was gesturing to me. I stared back, unable to work out what he wanted.