THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER Read online

  ‘He won’t want either of us once he sees a bed.’

  As it seemed that Tobias was the price which must be paid for Sophia’s presence, Florence contented herself with grumbling, ‘No one so far has expressed regret.’

  ‘Tobias lives for the present. He knows nothing of regret.’

  ‘He is a dumb animal, but his mistress can speak.’

  ‘I have learnt to share Tobias’s philosophy. And I did warn you. Tobias does not have retractile claws – it makes things difficult for him.’

  Once in the bedroom Tobias disappeared under the eiderdown. A smile twitched the corners of Konrad’s mouth. ‘My little hot-water bottle is come.’

  ‘He talks as though he is used to a cat on the bed.’ Florence turned a face crumpled in bewilderment to her sister. ‘How all this strangeness has come about, I don’t know.’

  Unintentionally, she had spoken of this strangeness as though it had been there before Konrad’s illness, a process; she had given it recognition. Sophia, watching her sister’s puzzled face, recalled hearing their mother say, ‘There is so much that Florence fails to understand. I sometimes wonder whether she is deaf or stupid.’

  ‘In any situation, Florence’s desires are paramount,’ their father had replied in that dry voice which sometimes betrayed a dislike of his children. ‘The sun orbits Florence’s globe. It makes any kind of objectivity impossible.’

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ Florence asked sharply.

  ‘Was I smiling?’

  ‘A horrid, sly smile. I should like to know what you find funny at this moment.’

  ‘I was thinking of our misspent youth.’

  ‘I fail to see the relevance of that to the present situation.’

  But Florence was aware that in her youth she had been prone to misconceptions, of which Konrad Müller was the prime example. She had married Konrad in 1953. He had come to England as a refugee in the 1930s and looked foreign, formed from a different mould than Englishmen of her acquaintance who tended to be long in body and head, whereas Konrad’s body was substantial without being fat and the head was big and round, the face broad with bluntly sculpted features. She was impressed by the sheer mass of him, A man like this, she had told herself, will go far. He was genial and would undoubtedly make a good travelling companion.

  ‘There was talk of the diplomatic service at one time, you know,’ she said to Sophia.

  ‘From him?’

  ‘I don’t recall if he actually mentioned it, or whether it was just mooted. I can’t have made it up. I wanted it very much – tours of duty in European cities, Moscow in the snow, Paris in the spring. Corpus Christi processions in Seville; but I still wouldn’t have made it up.’ She frowned, wondering how she could have so totally misjudged the situation, and then turned from analysis as was her wont. ‘You’re quite right. There is nothing to be gained from regret. I see now that that has been my philosophy as well as Tobias’s. Konrad went on working at the World Service and we lived an entirely uneventful life in Chiswick.’

  ‘And he was satisfied?’ The question was slipped in much as the child Sophia might have put out a foot to trip her older sister.

  Florence was surprised that it was Konrad’s satisfaction which should be the subject of attention. ‘Satisfied? Oh, who knows about satisfaction? To be satisfied implies needs and hungers, desires, dreams even. I have no idea if Konrad had any of these things, so I can’t say whether he was satisfied or not. He did not appear discontented.’ She looked at him, lying now with his eyes closed. ‘It happens a lot in marriage, Sophia, that the partners reach a certain point and realise they don’t want to go any further. I have never known much about Konrad.’

  There had been a time, at the beginning, when she had thought it would be different. He had seemed so unusual, without being quite other – an acquired taste, perhaps, but once acquired part of one’s normal diet, like aubergine and Angostura bitters. But he had remained a stranger. Not that he deliberately withheld himself; it was more a matter of not conforming to her expectations. Her expectations were absolute. There had remained throughout her married life a picture of a husband who was not Konrad. ‘I am not bitter,’ she said. ‘Bitterness never agreed with me, it lies on the stomach like bad wine.’

  ‘And Konrad?’ Sophia asked.

  Florence shrugged. The Konrad who should have been was encapsulated in a space within her, a kind of Shangri-La of the spirit; what had happened to the real Konrad she did not know. ‘I didn’t reproach him,’ she said.

  She saw herself as a practical woman. ‘Unhappiness suits me even less than bitterness.’ She had set about the business of happiness much as she would have assembled the ingredients for a cake, ensuring that the nutritional content was well seasoned with spice. She had a taste for company, particularly male. She smiled, remembering the societies she had joined and the pleasures unrelated to their raison d’être which they had afforded her. Konrad had stayed at home.

  ‘Konrad was never a joiner,’ she said to Sophia. ‘He spent a lot of his spare time painting on his own. He often went away on painting weekends.’

  ‘Do you like his paintings?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re good. He couldn’t have exhibited them. They’re quite unlike anything displayed at our local Arts Club.’

  Konrad lay concentrating on his breathing, which required an effort he was less and less inclined to make. He heard the two sisters talking but could not make much sense of what was said. He had always had difficulty piecing things together. Now, lying here in this firelit room, the past came before him vividly, but disjointed.

  He had been sent to England in 1937 when he was six years old. He never saw his parents again. He lived in Houndsditch with an aunt and uncle who had not wanted him but had not had the courage to refuse him. The experience had permanently disorientated him and he had great difficulty making a mental map of his environment – one street did not lead to another but existed in isolation. He was always getting lost. When the war came and the bombers broke up the patterns of streets he was cheered by this experience of a shared chaos.

  Florence was talking about her expectations. He remembered overhearing someone say that his had been a tragic childhood, but as no one had explained tragedy to him he had managed well enough. The people who looked after him, his aunt and uncle and teachers, did the best they could and he expected no more. In contrast to Florence, he was expectation free.

  He had done various jobs when he left school, including set construction and painting at a small local theatre where he struck up an acquaintance with a man who was eventually responsible for his entering the World Service. The BBC was considered a rather glamorous place by his parish priest. At a Christmas party he had introduced Konrad to a young woman. ‘This fellow has a great gift for languages. Sure an’ it’ll be the diplomatic service for him. Can you not see, with a great head like that, no doors will be closed to the man.’

  Florence said, ‘For years after I married him I expected that, having perfected his linguistic skills at the BBC, he would pass on to the diplomatic service.’

  It was only when asked by a friend at the Arts Club what Konrad had read at university that she finally accepted the reality of Konrad’s prospects. ‘St Vincent de Paul School, Mason Street, was his university,’ she had said and packed the diplomatic service off to Shangri-La.

  ‘Do you remember St Vincent de Paul, Mason Street?’ she said, bending over Konrad.

  He had done well at school. The perplexities of mathematical problems which were capable of solution appealed to him. He had a natural gift for languages. In his last year at school, when it was considered that some attempt should be made to ‘stuff a little culture into the beggars’, he painted. ‘It would not be true to say that he learnt to paint,’ his art master had written, ‘rather that he suffered instruction.’ Konrad gave a little rattle of laughter.

  ‘You see,’ Florence said triumphantly. ‘He remembers St Vincent de Paul.’

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nbsp; ‘His mind hasn’t gone,’ Sophia said. ‘He’s just very tired.’

  ‘He was rambling before you came up.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Florence could not now remember what had been said; only her unease remained in her mind. ‘I’m tired,’ she said, realising what a trying day it had been and how little concern had been expressed for her. ‘I’ve had a bad journey.’

  Sophia got up. ‘You must go to bed. I’ll wait up for Nicholas and Anita.’

  ‘Why did they want to go out on a night like this?’ Florence fretted as they went down to the kitchen.

  ‘I expect Nicholas has been out on many a worse night.’

  ‘Anita hasn’t. She’s very reluctant to exert herself at the best of times.’

  Sophia poured milk into a saucepan and Florence wished she could have examined the saucepan before it made contact with the milk.

  ‘Is this the worst of times, Florence?’ Sophia asked gently.

  ‘Only an unmarried woman could possibly ask such a question at such a time. My husband is going to die – letting go of life would be a better way of putting it. There is a treatment, you know. It would give him a little longer – I believe some people even have a couple of extra years. But he didn’t want it. I am surrounded by people who let go. Nicholas is brilliant. He got a first in geology. He doesn’t have to go off climbing mountains and drinking yak milk and sleeping in deserts. And Anita is wasting her time with Terence, who is also a time-waster.’

  Sophia handed her sister a mug of hot milk.

  ‘Is this mug clean? It’s very stained.’

  ‘Just old.’

  ‘And what becomes of me? They none of them think of that.’ Florence sipped the milk. ‘I haven’t heard you express sympathy so far.’

  ‘I am sorry for you, Florence.’

  There was a storm lamp on the table in the Challoners’ kitchen which threw a stronger light than Sophia’s oil lamps. Even so, Frances bent to make some adjustments – perhaps to cloak nervousness. Anita thought: she can’t live up to that striking appearance, so she is playing for time, while Nicholas is looking at her as if he had uncovered a rare mural. Sophia might have given us some inkling of what to expect! Dark hair brushed back from a high forehead disdained curl or tendril which might have softened austerity; beneath dark eyebrows wide grey eyes gave to the face the look of a person awaiting, if not actually experiencing, a mystical event; the mouth was full and firm. A face any film director would be happy to cast as a nun and few Reverend Mothers would want as a novice.

  ‘Would you like cocoa . . . or a drink, perhaps?’ Frances stepped back from the lamp but seemed uncertain where drinks might be located. Anita reflected how much she disliked women who didn’t know how to serve drinks.

  ‘Cocoa will do nicely,’ Nicholas said.

  Anita looked at him pityingly. What did he think he was going to get out of this – the thrill of entering a forbidden temple? As Frances heated milk on the stove, Anita studied her, making mental jottings – unusually composed for her age: although she is nervous she doesn’t allow herself to be hustled; emotionally reserved, but she can still look at Nicholas as if she is making a votive offering of this bloody cocoa; sexually unfulfilled, neither child nor woman. I wouldn’t want to deal with her and Nicholas certainly shouldn’t be allowed to.

  Frances put a mug down in front of Anita without acknowledging her presence. The faintest of half-moons beneath her eyes suggested that in later years she would become interestingly haggard; and haggard, certainly, were the clear eyes which focused intently on whatever it was that claimed their attention – on this occasion, Nicholas.

  ‘You must wonder why we are here,’ Nicholas said, accepting the cup from Frances who did, indeed, look wondering. He delivered the invitation and Frances said she was sure they would be glad to accept.

  ‘Thomas is out at a Commoners’ meeting, but I’m sure he hasn’t anything planned for tomorrow. Sophia did mention that her sister would probably want to have a party.’

  Anita wondered what else Sophia had mentioned and Frances answered as surely as if the thought had been spoken, ‘You’re the child psychologist.’ She did not say it as if it were a joke, but her tone did not suggest a profession to be taken seriously.

  ‘And you’re the explorer.’ Her eyes examined the reality of Nicholas. ‘I’ve read your books and heard you on radio and I saw you once on television.’

  ‘Only the once. I don’t go alone into the unknown with a camera crew trailing behind.’ His smile was so disarmingly self-deprecating and the creases around the eyes suggested such a wealth of good humour that it was difficult to understand why people were so often shy in his presence. Frances, Anita noticed, was now unsure how to proceed.

  ‘I find it difficult enough just getting shopping done in this snow,’ she ventured. ‘I can’t imagine self-catering in the Arctic.’

  ‘Neither can Nicholas,’ Anita interposed. ‘The Arctic is one of the wastes he hasn’t explored.’

  ‘I couldn’t cope with Christmas preparations,’ Nicholas assured Frances, ‘The assembling of all the goods would be beyond me. But I’m quite a capable porter, if you need any help tomorrow.’

  ‘But your mother . . .’

  This was acceptance, Anita realised, and intervened, ‘Most certainly Mother . . .’

  ‘A combined trip, then,’ Nicholas said, and before Anita could speak Frances replied, ‘That would be wonderful.’

  Jasper, despair of humankind etched in fold and furrow, had been slumped against the stove, drooling on to his paws. Suddenly, he sat erect, the sense of expectation so strong that Anita’s skin prickled.

  The kitchen door swung open and for a nightmare moment it seemed that something out of a circus stood there, an elderly man in miniature, the slight body enfolded in a long, grey dressing gown. The hair was so fair it might have been silver; the eyes were blinkered by enormous glasses which required a wrinkling of the nose and a lopsided hitch of the upper lip to keep them in place and gave to the face an appearance of pernickety studiousness.

  ‘Come in, Andrew,’ Frances said. ‘Friends have come to see us.’ It struck Anita that there were echoes here of her earlier reassurance of Jasper.

  The boy, whom Anita judged to be between six and seven, came forward a few paces and then stopped. The dog lumbered across to sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder, an ominous warning to potential evildoers

  ‘We’re lost in the wood, like Hansel and Gretel,’ Anita said to her brother, who seemed to her typecast for the foolish Hansel. ‘What will befall us next?’

  ‘It’s the other house that’s the gingerbread house,’ the boy said.

  ‘The other house?’

  ‘He thinks the cottage where you’re staying is the gingerbread house,’ Frances explained. ‘But you don’t think Miss Kimberley is a witch, do you?’

  The boy seemed reluctant to have words put into his mouth. The dog gazed at him with mournful eyes, sharing a conspiracy of silence.

  ‘The bad people in the fairy stories are so unconvincing.’ Anita was not quite sure at whom she was aiming these remarks. ‘They always give themselves away – too long a nose, too bright an eye. No intelligent child could possibly be taken in by them.’

  ‘I read a story where the witch did eat Hansel and Gretel,’ the boy said.

  ‘That’s not the usual version for children. How did you come by it?’

  ‘A boy at school. His sister gave it to him. He can’t sleep at night now in case the witch comes and eats him.’ This explanation of the plight of his schoolmate did not appear to disturb Andrew.

  ‘Do you sleep in those glasses?’ Anita asked.

  He gave her a sharp glance and looked away. Clear glass, she thought.

  ‘We’ve been asked to a party at the gingerbread house,’ Frances said. ‘Won’t that be fun?’

  ‘Is Jasper coming?’

  ‘No, Jasper is going to guard this house while we’re away. The ging
erbread house belongs to Tobias.’

  The boy’s face brightened at the mention of Tobias. This, Anita thought, is a child who has an affinity with threatening animals. Her reaction to him was a reminder that her understanding of children was not matched by a corresponding sympathy. She had studied child psychology because she had thought it might help her to resolve her own problems, but knowledge had not equated with healing.

  The boy said to Frances, ‘Is that lady going to be there?’

  ‘A lot of people will be there. I think perhaps you should go back to bed, Andrew. Do you want to take hot milk up with you?’

  His mouth twisted in knowing contempt. Anita’s fingers itched to strike him, so much did he resemble her childhood self confronting authority with the only weapon it knew. Frances’s response was to take him by the shoulders and march him out of the room. Jasper followed, presumably to ensure fair play. As they went up the stairs, Andrew said in a high, clear voice, ‘I don’t like that lady.’ In a few minutes Jasper returned and flung himself down by the stove, his brow more deeply furrowed than ever.

  ‘Hasn’t had a Baskerville to eat in months, poor old chap,’ Anita said.

  Nicholas looked at her, eyes squinting slightly as though the light from the lamp hurt. The whole face seemed to anticipate hurt. ‘Perhaps we’d better go.’

  ‘The fact that I haven’t made a very good impression on a disturbed child doesn’t trouble me.’

  He finished his cocoa and went to the sink to wash the mug.

  ‘You, on the other hand, seem to have made quite an impact.’ Anita got up and put her hand on his shoulder. The dog growled. ‘Oops! He’s only my brother – nothing going on that could possibly offend you.’

  Frances returned, looking flushed. ‘I’m sorry to leave you. Andrew gets a bit difficult at Christmas – it’s unsettling for him, I suppose – all the emphasis on family life and—’

  ‘Would you like us to wait until Mr Challoner gets back?’ Nicholas asked.

  ‘Oh no, I’ve got Jasper . . . not that he, of course . . . I mean, it’s kind of you, but it’s late and they’ll be expecting you back at the cottage and . . .’ She ran on in confusion, Nicholas interjecting an occasional ‘Oh no . . .’ ‘Not at all . . .’