THE WINTER CITY Read online

  Mary Hocking

  THE WINTER

  CITY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  To my mother and father

  Chapter One

  MONDAY MORNING

  I

  On the Monday it was cold still.

  In the first grey light the city was a dark hollow sunk without identity between the indifferent hills. Beyond the hills, the snow on the mountains glimmered a faint pearl against an ashen sky. The mountains ringed the city on three sides like a giant stone horsehoe; only to the east the land stretched away in a great plain.

  Gradually, in the bitter dawn, the city emerged, its outline blurred by a cobweb mist which hung above the frozen ground. Light thinned, the river appeared, motionless, a charcoal line threading through the valley, straddled by low stone bridges.

  On the east side of the river, narrow cobbled streets ran up towards the centre of the city. It was still, as though the pulse of the city had been crushed. Scraps of washing hanging along the stone walls were hard as iron, and a jagged crust of ice stood out like broken glass around the rim of a pump. In Government Square, the flag above the City Hall was furled in stiff folds, and along the broad avenues the trees stood stark and brittle, rigid in the grip of a frost that had killed their roots.

  To the west of the river, grey cottages straggled up a steep hill to a place where the road died into a stony track, and a wrecked monument crumbled among thorn bushes and scrub. Here, too, the winter air was cold as steel; yet the long stalks of grass which grew around the memorial bowed slightly, and dust trembled on the leaves of the thorn.

  Later, the movement found a faint echo in the city; in parks, beneath the trees in the broad streets, in a dishevelled garden in front of a block of flats off the Avenue of the Republic, the dead leaves stirred.

  II

  The first block of flats off the Avenue of the Republic was occupied mostly by foreigners attached to the various embassies. It was older and more solidly constructed than the block on the opposite side of the road, and there were curtains at the windows which, here and there, were bright and rather self-consciously gay, as though the occupants had tried to screen themselves from the chill reality of the city.

  The curtains which were drawn across the long window on the first floor were particularly exotic, with strong green, red and yellow motifs splashed indiscriminately on a black background. Usually these curtains were drawn back promptly at seven o’clock, but on this particular morning they remained closed although somewhere in the flat an alarm rang for a long time.

  It was half-past seven when Helen Jenner came into the living room. She moved across to the electric fire, switched it on and crouched before it, her hands outstretched, her pale oval face blank with the drugged indifference of a person who has just woken from a too-heavy sleep. To her right, at the foot of a clumsy, old-fashioned settee, an ashtray spilled its contents onto the dark-green carpet. Helen’s eyes rested on this débris dully for a moment or so, then a sudden awareness came into her face. She got up and went to the door at the far end of the living room.

  ‘Kate,’ she called. ‘I overslept. It’s half-past seven.’

  There was no reply. Helen looked across at the bottle.

  ‘Kate! Are you all right?’

  There were muffled noises and finally a voice, blurred, with a pronounced Canadian accent, answered:

  ‘I was drunk last night.’ The voice sounded disapproving.

  ‘Never mind. I’ll get the breakfast.’

  For a moment or so Helen became purposeful; she tidied a heap of records on the top of the radiogram, drew a side-table towards the fire, gathered up the ash-tray and the empty bottle. Then, with the empty bottle held against her breast, she paused, aimless, on her way to the kitchen. In the curtained room, neither light nor dark, she hesitated, turning her head slowly from side to side.

  In the murky half-light she saw the gaunt furniture, despairingly enlivened with incongruous contemporary cushions and drapes; the large, uncompromising sideboard with a few porcelain figures and glass animals marooned on top of it; the photograph of Kate’s parents looking very small on the heavy mantelpiece; the three van Gogh prints defiant on the dingy walls; and, finally, the curtains. The curtains, at this hour in the morning, seemed to represent an ultimate defeat. Helen put down the ash-tray and the bottle and went towards the window.

  As the curtains parted and the grey morning light seeped into the room, Helen drew her wrap closer round her. The air in the room was stale and she hesitated at the window, wondering which was the worst, the staleness within the room or the cold outside. She decided to risk the cold. She opened the middle window, her eyes screwed up and her body stiffened to resist the bitter air; the familiar scene came into view below, the dishevelled garden, the dead tree, the iron railing beyond, all smeared with a black rime of frost. There was a decaying mound of leaves at the foot of the tree; as she looked down she saw the leaves stir slightly. An animal must be hiding there; ‘poor thing’, she thought, and she waited for it to emerge.

  ‘Are you getting breakfast, Helen?’ Kate called from her room.

  ‘Yes,’ Helen answered absently, still watching the leaves.

  The movement was so faint. As she thought of the unknown thing which was stirring down there, suffering, dumb, she experienced a pain deep within her own body; it was a pain which she had felt once or twice lately, an agonized contraction of muscles long unused. Her thin fingers, purple with cold, gripped the window sill. The leaves seemed almost to breathe, a slow, agonized breath, that rasped from her own lungs.

  ‘For God’s sake, Helen! Are you getting the breakfast?’

  Kate, padding about her bedroom, picking up a shoe here and a slip there, received no reply. As she peered at her face in the mirror on her cluttered dressing table, she reflected that she was going to be cross if Helen did not do the breakfast. Her plump, solemn face stared at her from the mirror; the ruddy cheeks were a little pale this morning and the eyes were distinctly puffy, while the short, corn-coloured hair was dull and matted. Kate felt that she looked dissolute. Her head was heavy and there was a bad taste in her mouth. She picked up a brush and slapped vigorously at her hair until it moulded sleekly to her round head. She had been very drunk last night and she did not approve of drunkenness; therefore, she told herself, she must do the breakfast as a punishment and she must try not to be irritable with Helen. Just the same, when she crossed to the kitchen and saw Helen mooning away at the living room window, she could not resist saying:

  ‘You look as though you were greeting the bloody dawn.’

  Helen did not answer, and knowing that she had sounded aggressive, Kate felt guilty. Helen was enormously kind and generous and spent a great deal of time clearing up after Kate without any complaint; it was not her fault that she was so slow and had no understanding of the importance of time. Kate reached up and took a glass and a bottle containing salts down from a shelf. She poked her head round the kitchen door and said in a friendly tone:

  ‘Bloody Monday again!’

  Still no reply. Kate withdrew to the kitchen and drank her salts. As she moved in and out of the living room with the breakfast things she could see Helen still standing at the window, looking remote and other-worldly, like a Byzantine madonna. Helen was thirty-five. To Kate, who was twenty, this was a fascinating age; and Helen was a fascinating person, wise and, in an indefinable way, good
, but rather elusive. She had been married but her husband had died a few years ago, and this, Kate imagined, was probably the reason why she sometimes gave the impression of having withdrawn a little from life. Kate loved her, but was obscurely in awe of her.

  ‘Rise and shine!’ Kate said, banging the tray down on the table. ‘I’m going to bring the coffee in now.’

  She went to the window and looked over Helen’s shoulder.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘there’s a breeze at last! Look, you can see it ruffling the leaves.’

  She went back to the kitchen, humming to herself.

  Helen’s shoulders arched and a sudden spasm of shivering shook her body. She looked at the blackened leaves and the grimy street beyond along which one of the early morning trams trundled slowly, carrying a cold huddle of workers to the new factories on the outskirts of the city. Her eyes, travelling slowly upwards, registered the impersonal façade of the block of flats opposite, its monstrous grey honeycombed with small, uncurtained windows, and rested on the skyline. Above the confusion of roofs and chimney stacks, gables and turrets, a cupola rose; once, no doubt, it had glittered gold, but now it was blackened and without charm, serving only to remind her that she was in an alien city. Beyond the rooftops and the cupola, the sky was the familiar, sullen grey. Helen clenched her hands.

  ‘Helen, don’t you feel well?’ Kate’s voice was anxious.

  Helen turned slowly. She looked at Kate with a kind of vague astonishment, as though seeing her for the first time.

  ‘How can we stand this, Kate?’

  Kate’s mind fumbled guiltily with the details of the previous night; she wondered whether she had made a scene when she came back. While she was formulating an explanation, Helen swung her arm towards the window with a gesture that was clumsy and quite unlike her.

  ‘How can we stand this? Day after day, nothing but greyness and this murderous cold. And this room! This room, Kate, with the air so foul because we have to seal it up like a tomb . . .’

  Kate stared unhappily at the overflowing ash-tray and said:

  ‘Doyle and Paul Daniels came back with me and we smoked in here quite a bit last night . . .’

  ‘I don’t mind what you did last night,’ Helen answered sharply: a raw, defensive impulse made her add: ‘And I don’t like Paul Daniels; I don’t like him at all.’ She turned abruptly to the window; she felt confused, obscurely menaced by the implacable grey sky, and she cried: ‘Oh Kate, I should like to take a knife and make a great rent in that sky!’

  The words came out with a little gust of violence of which she immediately felt ashamed; it was a long time since feeling had surged up in this way.

  Kate fidgeted with the coffee jug and said awkwardly:

  ‘Well, do it tonight, Helen; it might enliven Rosamund’s party! But come and have breakfast now; England expects you to start doing your duty in just under ten minutes.’

  Helen gave a shaky laugh. ‘How silly of me.’ She came to the table and sat down, spreading her napkin on her lap in a deliberate way that exasperated Kate. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I’ve made you late again. You must go without me.’

  Kate had been shocked by the unexpected breakdown of Helen’s reserve. She sat frowning into her coffee cup, unsure of how she should react to the situation; while Helen, anxious to relieve the tension, began to speak with a nervous energy of trivial things.

  ‘What was it that you were telling me about Doyle? That he made you drunk? I thought that you were reforming him.’

  ‘It didn’t work out that way last night,’ Kate said stolidly.

  ‘What an irresponsible creature he is! And incalculable. One can never be quite sure what he might do . . .’

  Kate watched her. The light-brown hair, which Helen wore drawn away from her face, usually fell into loose curls at the nape of her neck, but this morning it stood out in a cloud around her head; there was a ragged flush of colour on her cheeks and her eyes were bright. She looked almost beautiful: but disturbing. Kate felt resentful; it was too thoughtless of Helen, who was usually so passive, to put on a performance like this at five-past nine on a Monday morning.

  ‘Perhaps you had better not come in today,’ she said, more abruptly than she had intended. ‘You look quite feverish.’

  ‘There’s so much work, we had quite a panic at the end of last week.’ Helen’s eyes wandered uneasily round the room. ‘And, in any case, I don’t want to be alone . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

  After that they did not talk much.

  III

  The porter opened the door of the Hotel Kapitol and cold air surged into the musty hall.

  ‘Good morning, Dr. Van Hals. Good morning, Mr. Daniels.’

  The Dutchman turned up the collar of his heavy coat. ‘When is the weather going to break, Victor?’

  ‘It is very cold still, doctor, but there is a breath of wind this morning. Also, my bones are aching. Maybe these are good signs?’

  The doctor went out onto the steps. ‘Maybe they are signs of something.’ His voice was tired.

  His companion was still standing in the doorway. He lit a cigarette, flicked the match away, and then looked at the long avenue with the bare trees. In the distance, a bell began to toll, for whatever purpose they tolled bells nowadays in this city. At one end of Avenue Kapitol, where it joined the busy Martin Zinnemann Street, a tram clanked over points. The man in the doorway looked in the direction of the tram. He was dark, with a lean, impatient face and a somewhat sardonic mouth. Cynical, perhaps a trifle vain; yet in the eyes, dark and too wise, there was a certain weary compassion.

  The doctor had turned into the avenue. He was facing away from the main road with the trams towards the square at the other end where some of the foreign embassies were situated. He called out, a little irritated at hanging around in the cold:

  ‘You have seen the view before, Paul.’

  Paul Daniels came slowly down the steps.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll go to the Embassy after all.’ He looked up at the sky, grey between the blackened branches of the trees. ‘Something has to break one day, and it might be today. I’ll take a walk in the city.’

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders. ‘You will find it the same as it was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day when you came here two years ago.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there have been incidents recently . . .’ Also, he felt that it was time that he visited the General again, but he did not tell the doctor this.

  The doctor stood watching for a moment as Daniels walked towards the main road. Daniels was a journalist, and a good one; he was probably as sensitive to changes in atmosphere as the doctor would be to the variations in a pulse. ‘Nevertheless,’ the doctor said to himself, ‘my own diagnosis would be that this city is dead, and the really bad thing is—it knows it.’

  But Paul Daniels could remember the city before it was dead. He thought about it now as he walked along Martin Zinnemann Street. He had been a student on long summer vacation; most of his friends had gone to Florence or Vienna that year, but he had come here, to this city, with a girl who was now dead and her brother. It had not been gay in the way that Florence or Vienna was gay. There had been poverty, there was always poverty in this country; there had been strife and brutality—private feuds, religious intolerance, political unrest, had for centuries been a part of the pattern of the life. Paul had come with standards of his own, prepared to judge. Yet he had carried away with him when he left a memory of the fullness of the life which, over the years, had reconciled him to its harshness because he suspected that the one was inseparable from the other.

  Now, waiting at a street corner in the deadening grip of the cold, he thought of the people as they had been. They were not an easy people to know even then, reserved and proud, lacking facile charm; but passionate, sometimes cruel, and full of immense vitality. It was that which had impressed him so vividly about this country, its vitality; the ferocity of the sun on white, dusty-roads and stone walls, the r
ough, powerful wines, the strident clash of colour in the brief season of the mountain flowers. Here, where beauty and squalor were so inextricably mingled, where love and tenderness, lust and violence, grew from the same roots, he had first become aware of the paradoxical nature of life. He would tell people, with that little touch of drama with which he tended to invest his feelings, that the experience of knowing this country had broken and refashioned him. Despite the dramatization, the feeling was deeply-held.

  Another tram rattled by. He looked at it as he stood waiting to cross the road. There was no glass in the windows and the few people inside looked cold and cheerless. Their clothes were drab. He experienced again the sense of personal outrage which he had felt when he first returned to the country two years ago: it was as though a part of himself had been obliterated. The tram stopped near-by and a woman with a small child got off. There was a baker’s shop on the opposite side of the road and she crossed with Paul and went towards it. An old woman, walking slowly away from the shop, shook her head. The two women stood together on the pavement talking, their faces with the high, broad cheekbones, looking gaunt and ugly. Paul heard the old woman say:

  ‘It is because we have turned away from God.’

  ‘I never cared for the priests,’ the other woman said, ‘but now . . .’ The child stared up at Paul as he went by, a long, unsmiling stare, neither hostile nor friendly.

  Paul’s mind registered, not the words which were insignificant, but the tone of the women’s voices; a new, raw tone which trembled on the edge of desperation. He turned to look back at them and saw that they had become the centre of a little group outside the baker’s shop.

  He continued on his way slowly; he was never in a hurry when he visited the General. The road, which was one of the main shopping centres, was straight and broad. At the far end the tower of the City Hall could be seen, rising solid and blunt from Government Square beyond. They were things at which the Party pointed with some pride, the broad avenues cut across the heart of the old city, and the massive City Hall with its great, square tower. Farther on, at the back of the City Hall, where the crooked roads ran steeply down to the river, there had been little reconstruction work; here the city had not changed greatly in many hundreds of years.