PENGUIN BOOKS
A SPELL OF WINTER
‘She writes like an angel and the compelling turn-of-the-century story she so skilfully unfolds in A Spell of Winter makes the emotions churn and tingle’ – Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail
‘It bears the distinctive lyrical beauty of its predecessors … Helen Dunmore is an unusually fine writer. There is a strong and sensuous magic to A Spell of Winter’ – Gill Hornby in The Times
The book’s rich imagery moves between the stark, harsh winter world that Cathy loves and the warm summers she loathes when the air is thick with the scent of roses and painful memories … beautifully written’ – Sunday Express
‘Her prose is poetic in its emotional range and intensity’ – Nicola Humble in The Times Literary Supplement
‘An understanding of love that defies all the old formulas’ – Options
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Helen Dunmore has published nine novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. She is also a poet, children’s novelist and short-story writer.
HELEN DUNMORE
A Spell of Winter
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 1995
First published in Penguin Books 1996
This edition published 2007
1
Copyright © Helen Dunmore, 1995
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 9780141933412
‘I saw an arm fall off a man once,’ said Kate. She turned the toasting-fork to see how the muffin was browning, then held it up to the fire again. We stared at her.
‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘it was in my grandfather’s house in Dublin. They were bringing my uncle Joseph down the stairs. Narrow, twisty stairs they put in houses where they’d given no thought to the living or the dead. You couldn’t get a coffin up them. But my grandmother had kept the body too long in the house. She was mad with grief, she didn’t want him to go. She kept putting more flowers in the room, shovelling flowers in on top of him to hide the smell. Then she’d be sitting with him all night long.’
‘Was that your grandmother O’Neill?’ I whispered to the flames.
‘Who else would it be? You know my daddy was the eldest of the twelve. But this one, Joseph, was his next brother and the favourite. If there was meat or meal, it would be Joseph got the meat.’
‘Did you know him before he was dead?’
‘Who’s telling this story? He was twenty-six when he died with a kick from a cart horse. How could I not know my own uncle?
‘Well now, Joseph must have been up there a week or more, with my grandmother lighting fresh candles round him and saying prayers enough to wear out the saints. No one else’s prayers were good enough for Joseph, only hers. I remember the talk in the house. We were giving scandal. It was the middle of summer, and hot. My mother wouldn’t go near the house in her condition, and the smell had driven everyone but my grandmother from the room. That was when it was decided that they would force her to have him brought down and taken out of the house for burial. She wouldn’t even see the priest, so it was my father had to go up and talk to her. But she wouldn’t listen. In the end four of them had to take her by the ankles and elbows, kicking and screaming to wake the dead. They shut her in the scullery until it was done.’
‘Did they lock her in?’
‘There was no lock on the door. My aunts sat in with her and there were two men set to guard it so she couldn’t burst out. But the noise she made was terrible. So it was left to my father to bring Joseph down, with only Dodie to help. That was his next brother after Joseph.’
We nodded. We knew about Dodie, who never held a job or went out of the house if he could help it.
‘They were bringing him down the curve of the stairs,’ said Kate. She laid the muffin down on the hearth and showed us with her hands how the men eased the body round the narrow top of the stairs. ‘There we were, all of us looking from the kitchen.’
I saw them in rows, Kate with her bold eyes staring the most.
‘And the noise of my grandmother from the scullery, with her shawl thrown over her head though that didn’t muffle the screeching at all. And then there was a smack where Dodie stumbled. I heard my father curse and the wall shook as the pair of them fell to their knees trying to get their balance and keep poor Joseph from falling. And we heard a terrible soft sound like the leg being sucked off a cooked chicken, and there was Joseph’s arm bouncing down the stairs to the floor below. It lay on the floor in front of our very eyes,’ said Kate.
‘What did it look like?’ asked Rob. His voice had gone growly with excitement. I said nothing. I stared at Kate, and I saw white strings like roots coming out of the arm as it bounced down the wooden stairs.
‘It had a silver shine on it,’ said Kate, ‘like the shine on money. But underneath the flesh was puffed up and purple. And the hand was swollen bigger than any hand I’d ever seen.’
‘Did they pick it up?’ I whispered.
‘Oh yes, they had to do that. You can’t be burying bits of a body here and there. But for a long while no one moved, and the only sound was my grandmother drumming her heels against the flags in the scullery. Of course she knew nothing of what was happening, nor ever did, for no one told her. Not even the youngest child that was there that day.’ Kate held her empty toasting-fork up to the flames, forgotten.
‘It was my aunt Kitty who picked up Joseph’s arm. She took one of the white baking cloths from the drawer and went forward and laid it over the arm. Then she picked it up wrapped in the cloth like a shroud and took it out of the house. As she went past us we saw a stain seeping through the white.’
‘Was it blood?’ asked Rob.
‘It was black,’ said Kate. ‘Black like tar.’
We sighed deeply. There was no sound but the puckering of the flames. The muffins were singed and dry, but who would want to eat them now? Then I thought of something.
‘But where was your grandfather, Kate? Wasn’t he in the house to make them bury Joseph befor
e his arm fell off?’ I knew that all twelve of them were afraid of their father, Kate’s grandfather. I could close my eyes and see him plain from what Kate had told me. A little, wiry, jockey of a man. He should have been tall, but he grew up in famine times when there was no food for a child to grow on, said Kate. His tall sons and daughters stood over him and he lashed them with the whip of his tongue as if they were slow horses.
‘He was away,’ said Kate. Her face closed up and we knew she would tell us no more about where her grandfather had been. ‘They got Joseph out of the house as quick as they could, and into his coffin. I heard Aunt Kitty say it was God’s mercy he didn’t fall to pieces entirely, there on the stairs. He had a quick burial.’
‘How old were you, Kate?’ asked Rob.
‘Oh, eight or so. A little younger than you and a little older than this one,’ she said, tapping my head. She leaned forward and poked the fire. ‘These muffins are like leather. Away down to the kitchen, Cathy, and ask Mrs Blazer for fresh.’
I hesitated. ‘Kate …’ I wanted to ask more, but I didn’t know what questions to ask. Was she going to tell Rob, when I was out of the room, because he was older? And besides, there was the long flickering passage, and the dark turn of the stairs to go down …
‘Well, are you going or not?’ she demanded impatiently. ‘It’s you that’s eating these muffins, not me.’
I moved slowly to the door. I looked back at Kate and Rob in the circle of firelight. A cold draught felt at my ankles. Kate’s strong white arms speared the dead muffins and tossed them unerringly into the wastepaper basket. She looked so sure and brave, even though she was the one who had seen the dead arm with her own eyes, when she was just my age. I wondered if I would be as sure as Kate when I was older, when my skirts were down over my boots the way hers were. I would wear stays then, like Kate, and have a shape that went in and out and made you want to put your arms tight around her waist to feel its narrow springiness. I was Cathy and she was Kate. We had the same name really. I was Catherine and she was Kathleen, but no one had called her that since she was baptized at two days old.
Mother was gone, and Father was away. There was Kate to look after us, and Eileen in the sewing-room, and the kitchen warm and humming with people. There was Grandfather in London. There was nothing to be frightened of here. The fluttering shadows only startled me because they were sudden, like moths’ wings.
‘What’s wrong with the girl?’ snapped Kate at the fire, and it snapped back a slim tongue of flame, as sharp as hers. I went.
One
It is winter in the house. This morning the ice on my basin of water is so thick I can not break it. The windows stare back at me, blind with frost. Inside my nest of quilts I am warm, and Rob’s coat presses down on me like two hands. I huff out my breath and watch it smoke.
I can see nothing through the frost flowers on the glass. I wonder if it is snowing yet, but I think it is too cold. It will only take a minute to rake out last night’s fire and build up a fresh pyramid. There is always enough wood. All I have to do is walk out and gather it. There are five years of rotting trees and fallen branches which have been left to lie in the woods.
The coloured cloth spines of our childhood books look at me. Grimm, Hans Andersen, At the Back of the North Wind. But to get something to read I’d have to skate across the icy sea of oilcloth between me and the bookcase.
I kneel up in bed and put on Rob’s coat. Its thick, stiff wool is becoming supple again from the heat of my body night after night. I put the sleeve to my face and sniff. The smell is still there, undiluted. The coat crushes my nightdress to my body and prickles my breasts. I button it up the boys’ way and feel about on the floor for my slippers.
The paper is dry. I put paper and kindling by the fire last night, so it will light with clean blue and yellow flames as soon as I put a match to it. I coil the newspaper sheets into little balls without reading a single word. They are old newspapers, covered in long, thick columns of names. I never look at them. Then I make a pyre of coils and balance the kindling into a tent around it. I was always the best at making fires. It’s an instinct, knowing where to lay the flame of the match so that it catches the draught and flares up against the rough, flammable cheeks of white kindling.
I hold my hands to the flames as they begin to jump. There is no wind at all in the chimney, and this has always been an awkward grate. The flames lose heart and shrink back into the wood. I spread out a double sheet of newspaper and hold it over the grate to make it draw. The paper sucks in and I plaster it tight against the edge of the fireplace. In a couple of minutes the fire stirs behind it and begins to roar. I wait until it glows big and yellow behind the paper, singeing the newsprint brown. It would be so easy to read what was written, but I don’t. Not one word. My fire is roaring like the big range down in the kitchens, which is never lit now. It has hunched there for months, dusty as winter soil. No one has blackleaded it.
I put down the paper, sit back on my heels and open Rob’s coat. The flames are strong and they make yellow shadows on my white nightdress. The milky cold of the room is beginning to thaw. Soon the windows will grow little circles of plain glass.
I am getting hot. Rob’s thick coat tents the heat. The smell is coming out more strongly now. Wool and sweat. Although I’ve brushed the coat I have never cleaned it. The earth smell is still there, like the smell on a bundle of tramp’s clothes you find in the woods.
Little prickles of heat run down my sides. I feel my face flushing, and I push back my heavy plait. I kneel up and wriggle out of my nightdress under the coat, the way we used to do when we were undressing on the beach at Sandgate, while Nanny knitted and watched. It is decent to dress and undress beneath a tent of bleached cambric. My nightdress slides into a small white heap. I tug Rob’s coat close around me. A row of spare buttons in the side seam presses into my hip. They will leave a mark on my flesh that will last under my clothes all day, secretly. He never needed to change the buttons. They are still held on with strong dark thread, the way they were when the coat was bought. The label scratches the top of my neck and the first bone of my spine. I remember how cool the air felt against the nape of my neck when I first put up my hair. I wore a white dress which I hated, and Rob came up behind me and touched the skin I had never seen.
‘It’s so white,’ he said. ‘It’s never had the sun on it.’
Then I twisted away from his fingers and picked up the skirts of my dress and ran down the staircase like a girl who could not wait to get to the party.
Now I move my body inside Rob’s coat, so all my skin will touch the lining which has touched him. My breasts tip forward, catching on the hairy wool of the coat’s opening. My fire dances and grows strong, stronger than the worn brown oilcloth, bought for hard wear, stronger than the iron frames of our two beds, stronger than the chain of the gas lamp over the table. I prop two dry logs into the flames and sit cross-legged, naked to the heat of the fire and the heat of the coat. I listen to the scuff of mice in the attics above me, the creak and settle of long rows of rooms beneath me, the cry of rooks beyond the frost-bound windows.
I never wear Rob’s coat out of the house. I put on my thick navy-blue wool skirt with red braiding, and my black squirrel jacket. A big red sun hangs above the trees, catching in their spiky branches. I walk up the rhododendron path and through the Spanish chestnut grove. I climb over the gate into First Field. It should have been ploughed by now so that the frosts can break up the big clods of earth into sweet-smelling, crumbled spring soil. There is an awkward turn here by the hedge and the plough always swings out in a curve and spoils the clean line of furrows flowing up to the horizon. In a frost like this I could have walked on the wave-like crests of the furrow without crumbling them. The earth is iron hard, the frost a week deep. But no one has ploughed. The Semple boys are gone. Next year it will all come right, old Semple told me, spitting out of the side of his mouth as he’s done since he’d had his stroke. He will plough the field
himself, he said, rather than see the land go to waste. But I know he never will.
The field is lumpy with half-remembered patterns of cultivation. It is fine soil, well-drained and rich. This is where we stood to shoot the pigeons that took the grain. They came out of the woods, never seeing us or remembering the deaths of a previous season. We must have shot hundreds over the years. Rank heaps of weeds blacken in the frost. The rabbits are bold enough to take the gun from your hand now, said old Semple. It will take years to root up the corn-cockle and poppies. We don’t need to call him old Semple any more, I think suddenly. There are no young Semples any more. George went first, then Michael, then Theodore. The Semple boys never had their names shortened, even when they were children in big boots kicking up the dust on their way through the lanes to school. They did not go to church with the other families in the village: they walked three miles across the fields to a tiny chapel where the same six families met week after week to share their passion for the Lord.
I think of the spittle running down the side of old Semple’s mouth and hanging in his rough beard. The beard is greyer than the hair on his head. It is a dirty ash grey, and bobbles of spittle tremble in it with the trembling of old Semple’s body. He has always been clean-shaven, but he will not let his wife shave him now.
This was where Rob shot the hare. It was bad luck to shoot a hare, they said in the kitchens even as they took it from us and exclaimed over its size and the fine roast it would make. He didn’t kill her cleanly. She came like running water over the rise in the field, her ears flat to her body, her big legs bounding in great sure leaps. We had only been after rabbits. Rob swung up his gun and shot her. We ran to where she was lying, big ripples running through her flesh as she felt the wound. She was hit in the back legs and there were white bits of bone bubbling in the dark mess of blood. She didn’t seem to know where she’d been shot and her body quivered all over as she struggled to make her legs run. Her lips were drawn back over her teeth.