THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER Read online

  Mary Hocking

  THE

  VERY DEAD

  OF WINTER

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  ‘A cold coming we had of it,

  Just the worst time of the year

  For a journey, and such a long journey:

  The ways deep and the weather sharp,

  The very dead of winter.’

  T. S. Eliot

  Chapter One

  The beginning of the journey had been enchanting. Porcelain blue sky and the sparkling white canopy transformed dingy streets into fantasies of unimaginable purity and, passing out of the town, they came to broad fields where sunlight reflected a trellis of branches like veins across the snow. But as they drove, the small towns and villages, the farms, fields and hedgerows blurred, became intermittently discernible, and finally dissolved and there was only a moving whiteness against a grey background, as if a great speckled blind were being drawn endlessly down into a bottomless well.

  ‘Who says there isn’t a hell?’ Anita said.

  But Florence had kept a little store of excitement hidden away within her, and when at last the trees closed around them, she sang out, ‘There was a house, once upon a time, in a wood. Oh, I feel a child again!’

  ‘You’ve never stopped being one.’ Her daughter was in no mood for singing.

  ‘We used to come here every Christmas. It seemed quite magical.’

  ‘If you’ve said that once you’ve said it ten times since we turned off the main road.’ On either side branches heavy with snow reached over the path, poised like teasing boys to unleash their load when least expected. ‘I’m not convinced that was the main road.’

  ‘There were the radio masts; you saw them yourself.’

  ‘I can hardly see anything, the light is so bad. We should have set out earlier.’

  Florence rubbed at the windscreen with the back of her glove. ‘Aren’t those car tracks? That’s probably Nicholas.’

  ‘He should have been here hours ago.’ The windscreen wipers were having difficulty lifting their burden and each sweep left a thin powder encrusted on the glass. ‘I hope it’s not going to ice up before we get there. What a journey for poor Father. Why didn’t you drive him down here yourself?’

  ‘In this weather? If anything had happened what would I have done?’

  ‘What do you think Nicholas would do?’

  ‘If he can go up the Himalayas with a pack on his back, he can certainly carry his father through a snowy wood.’

  ‘If it’s as hazardous as that, why bring him here? It was you who came as a child, not he. This place means nothing to him.’

  The path twisted, boring deeper into the forest. Something darted in front of the bonnet and Florence braked cautiously. ‘What was that? It was too big for a fox.’

  ‘A deer, I expect. Or would you fancy a bear? Keep going! Once the engine stalls we’ll never get it going again.’ The car lurched as it bumped over stones and boulders concealed by snow but still a hazard. When they came to a smoother patch, Florence said, ‘Your father did come here once, before Nicholas was born. I thought he wouldn’t remember, but when I was packing his things last night I came across a little sketch he had done of the cottage.’

  ‘Who owned it then?’

  ‘My family, of course.’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it. The cottage didn’t feature much in the stories of your childhood.’

  ‘Your granny lived here until she had a stroke in 1961. Then it was sold – to pay for the nursing home.’

  ‘And?’

  Florence leant forward, peering ahead with pleated lips.

  ‘If you’re so reluctant to talk about this, why are we coming here?’

  ‘Sophia bought it back again. That must have been when you were ten.’

  ‘I remember. I was reading the Ashdown Forest books and I wanted to stay in a forest.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have let you stay with Sophia at that age.’

  ‘So why do we have to come now, when I don’t want to any more?’

  Florence was looking from side to side and did not reply. Anita persisted, ‘And what was so bad about Aunt Sophia – except that she gave up being a silversmith, which is hardly a crime – that I couldn’t stay with her? I’d be happier if you looked ahead while you answer.’

  ‘Sophia is very unpredictable. And it may not have been a crime to give up that job in London – the firm was very prestigious – but it was certainly perverse. I’d have had no idea what she might have got up to with you.’

  ‘You mean she might have abused me?’

  ‘Certainly not. People didn’t do that kind of thing then.’

  ‘In the seventies? How much do you bet me?’

  ‘Well, our kind of people didn’t do it. And, in any case, I always suspected she exchanged one craft for another.’

  ‘Witchcraft?’

  Florence steered the car towards what seemed no more than a thinning of the trees. The light gave way to a murky porridge which seemed all too appropriate to a witch’s hearth. Florence said, ‘I can see car tracks. I knew I was right.’

  ‘The fact that there are other lunatics abroad doesn’t prove anything.’

  The snow was thinner here and a stubble of briars thrust through the whiteness. Anita relaxed, grateful for this assurance of earth beneath. ‘So Aunt Sophia’s not a witch any more, is that it? She’s reformed.’

  ‘She is grown older and wiser.’

  ‘How do you know? You haven’t seen or spoken to her in over thirty years, not since my christening.’

  Florence did not answer. Anita said, ‘You just want her to have changed because it suits your purpose to come here. It’s you who believes in magic. You wave your wand and things are just as you wish them to be.’

  Florence began to hum ‘In the bleak midwinter.’

  ‘Why does it suit your purpose for us to come here now? Why, after all these years, do we have to come when Daddy is going to die and we’d all be better off in Chiswick?’

  Florence rubbed the windscreen and bent forward, her breath minting the glass. ‘I thought that Sophia should see him before . . .’

  ‘You can’t say it, can you? You can’t even say that he’s going to die. You’re so afraid. That’s why you’ve brought him here; so that you don’t have to manage Christmas alone.’

  ‘As I said, I thought Sophia should see him. After all, she is one of the family. And you’re wrong. I have seen her since your christening. She was at Great Aunt Edith’s funeral.’ She braked as sharply as the snow permitted. ‘Out you go, my treasure. There’s a branch across the track. It’s a good job one of us looks ahead.’

  ‘This is going to finish me. I’ve got my period as well as being nearly frozen to death.’

  ‘A little exercise will do you no harm. Your generation gives up much too quickly.’ As Anita fumbled with the seat belt, Florence gave an exclamation of impatience. She opened the car door and tumbled into a drift of snow at the edge of the track.

  ‘There’s no need to be in such a hurry. I’m coming.’

  ‘You had best stay there now. Move into the driving seat.’

  In the light of the headlamps Florence was revealed as a big, pear-shaped woman who moved majestically and spoke forcefully as if there were indeed bears to keep at bay. She bent down and dragged the branch out of the way; then capered about to show how pleased she was with her efforts. Anita called out, ‘Don’t imagine I’m going to carry you if you fall and break a limb.’

  Florence came panting to the car door. ‘Keep the engine running.’ She was aware
how much she irritated her daughter and deliberately repeated an overworked childhood joke. ‘I’m going into the wood to be a good puppy.’

  Anita sat with her brow resting on the steering wheel until her mother returned. ‘You do realise this track is going downhill?’ she said. ‘Is that what it should be doing?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’re not relying on your memory, I hope. Aunt Sophia did send a map.’

  ‘We took the first turning on the left, as directed.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  The car crept forward, both women staring anxiously ahead into what was becoming a very gloomy scene.

  ‘You must be prepared for your aunt to be rather odd,’ Florence said, ‘The clothes she affects . . .’

  ‘What do you mean “affects”? Does she do something other than wear them?’

  ‘You know quite well what I mean. In the country, I concede, a tweed skirt may not be so essential nowadays. Women do seem more comfortable in trousers – though why they wear jeans as tight as armour, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Armour wasn’t tight, just bulky.’

  ‘But your aunt used to dress like a druid, or . . .’

  ‘A witch.’

  Florence cast a sidelong glance into the trees as though something might be hiding among them capable of understanding human speech. The windscreen wipers had stopped. Anita pressed the water jet button but nothing happened. ‘I must have been mad to let you talk me into this.’

  ‘There!’ Florence cried excitedly. ‘To the right – a clearing. And a lighted window, surely?’

  Anita wound down the window the better to see. ‘There seems to be fencing along here. I nearly ran into a post.’ She stopped the car but did not immediately open the door.

  Florence said impatiently. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t come.’ Anita got out. The sky had cleared and it was bitterly cold. In the half-light she could see the low stone house which had once been three foresters’ dwellings, hunched beneath an overhang of snow. One weak light glimmered at a window. ‘I bet it’s freezing in there,’ she said apprehensively. ‘Does she have electricity? That looks like an oil lamp.’

  Beneath the trees another, even lower, building was just visible, a thumbline smudge on the snow. ‘Is that the hut where Nicholas is to sleep? It’ll be a home from home for him, won’t it?’

  The door of the cottage opened and a figure stood on the threshold, a lamp in one hand.

  ‘Like one of those spirits that greet the souls of the dead,’ Anita said.

  ‘Not with that lamp. Heaven is light perpetual.’

  ‘Who said anything about Heaven?’

  Anita sat on the edge of the bed. She couldn’t remember being so cold in a house before; the houses she inhabited were all centrally heated. Her survey failed to trace a radiator. The only hope of heating appeared to in the small fireplace. Anita was accustomed to seeing dried flowers in grates. Her mother, whose bones were well covered, would make light of the cold; but how did Sophia, thin as a wire, manage to survive? The gaiety of the eyes, glinting like mica in the pointed face, suggested that survival presented no problem. Incredible that these two were sisters. Anita could hear them talking on the landing.

  ‘I don’t remember it like this when we came here as children,’ Florence was saying.

  ‘Our expectations were different.’

  ‘I don’t believe it’s the same house.’

  ‘We aren’t the same people.’

  ‘And it’s so cold.’

  ‘Our minds weren’t preoccupied with heat and sanitation.’

  ‘The sanitation is in working order, I trust.’

  There was dim light from the oil lamp on the landing. If Anita turned her head she might glimpse them – Sophia in her element, grey hair cascading on to the shoulders of the voluminous patchwork gown which seemed not an affectation but so appropriate to her it would be difficult to visualise her otherwise; Florence, not enhanced, a brighter light needed to reveal the compact bulk of her.

  As they went down the stairs, Florence was saying, ‘You must be a Commoner now, since you own the cottage. Do you exercise your right of pasturage, or whatever it is? I used to think it such a shame that Granny didn’t have sheep and goats and several ponies. Not pigs. I wouldn’t have . . .’ Her voice faded away.

  Anita continued to sit hump-backed, fingers gripping the edge of the bed. She had been given a candle but had not lit it. It seemed to represent occupation, like a key to a hotel bedroom, and she did not want to be an occupant of this room let alone of this house. If it weren’t for the snow, and the fact that they had come in her mother’s car, she would pack up and leave. She stared down at her feet, mutinous and powerless as she had been most of her life. I am always finding myself pushed into a place where I don’t want to be, she said to her feet.

  It was getting colder. There was a respectable log fire burning in the hall and Sophia had said that tea would be ready soon; but once participate and one would become a player in this ridiculous charade. Anita was reluctant to move in case this led to performance. She was afraid. It was ridiculous, of course, but she was unable to dispel the notion that at some stage on the journey from Chiswick she had crossed a line dividing the adult world from the world which exists only in the anarchic minds of children. The little hunched-down house, the unlikely sisters, the dying man in the room at the turn of the stairs, the ghostly white trees beyond the window, all conspired to present an image of a place where things would not proceed according to any set of rules with which she was familiar. Anita relished having rules to break.

  Her mother would be of little comfort; she was only too eager to escape into another world during the time of Father’s decline. As for Nicholas, he would make off into the snow on any pretext. Already he was out on some absurd errand, fetching a ‘little man’ who would restore normal lighting. It would take more than a forest gnome to do that; the weight of the snow had undoubtedly brought down a cable and they would be in semi-darkness all over Christmas.

  Sophia, then – what could be expected of her in the way of reassurance? Anita considered Sophia, so much reported on, yet still unexpected. As she stood at the door to greet her guests, she had seemed to radiate energy of another order to that which Florence expended. When Anita crossed the threshold, Sophia had looked at her as if they already knew each other, and mischief had bubbled to the surface as she smiled her welcome. Anita did not like being known, she had enough of that from her mother. There were matters she kept hidden, one of which was how afraid she was most of the time.

  Dear God, if only the light would come on, obliterating all the shadowy corners!

  ‘Tea is served,’ Florence called from the foot of the stairs. She sounded exuberant. This was obviously the euphoric period of her reunion with Sophia.

  Anita got up. The act of moving, rather than her brain, told her where she must go.

  She had never known a fire in a bedroom and when she entered the room where her father lay she was inexplicably moved by the rosy light flickering on the wall. The tears, long held back, stung her eyes. The imminence of loss overwhelmed her. There was so much she had failed to share with her father, realms unimagined and therefore never explored which she would not enter now. How can you do this to us? she thought, looking at his sleeping face which was like a huge mask, pocked and discoloured by time. How can you go away, taking so much of you that we never knew?

  She had always found him easier than her mother precisely because he made no demands, attempted no forays into her private world. In her unrestful, agitated childhood he had been a great benign presence, comforting because always there, seeming to have just the resources needed to meet the events of her particular moment and nothing left to spare. She had thought: one day we will explore together, when I am older, when I am more confident, when I feel safer. He was the only person she would have trusted to lead her into a snowy wood on a December night
and he was powerless to help her now.

  She had told herself she must come into the room to see if he was all right, but she was not deceived: she had come to ensure that he was still there and in the hope that he might still answer her needs. It was herself with whom she was concerned, not the easing of his passage. ‘Being self-critical is no good to anyone if you are not prepared to do anything about it,’ Florence had pointed out on more than one occasion. How true, Anita thought, bending to kiss the hand that lay on the coverlet.

  As she made toast, Sophia said to Florence, ‘Anita is quite a beauty with that splendid mane of hair.’

  ‘A tangle of red hair doesn’t make a beauty; in fact, Anita’s appearance would be greatly improved were she to accept that the Pre-Raphaelite look is definitely for the early twenties and put her hair up.’ Florence’s pale golden hair started the day with good intentions, swept into a neat knob on the top of her head from which it spent the remainder of the day detaching itself. ‘Grooming is important when one gets older,’ she said, impervious to her own condition. ‘With that long straight nose Anita has quite the classical Greek look. All that is needed is some attention to her hair.’

  ‘Not so fashionable to be classical Greek, though.’

  ‘Oh, fashion! It’s fashionable for older women to make the worst of themselves now, pathetically trying to do what youth does best. I fail to understand why liberated women – so called – are so anxious to look like teenage sex symbols. Long hair is a folly on an older woman.’

  ‘Really?’ Sophia stared into her cup, considering this statement gravely as though her own hair were not in question.

  ‘Yes,’ Florence said. ‘Definitely a folly. But then Anita is immature. That’s why she chose educational, rather than clinical, psychology.’

  ‘You mean, she would have put her hair up had she opted for clinical psychology?’ Sophia asked demurely.

  ‘She could hardly deal with adults looking like a cross between the Blessed Damozel and Alice in Wonderland.’

  ‘But Anita is only just over thirty, surely. And perhaps this man Terence likes her hair the way it is.’