Free A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore Page A

paths, while their bags went in the fly. The ground was so hard they could have walked in their evening shoes without spoiling them. Grandfather organized everyone, telling the girls to wrap their furs close, offering rugs for their knees and brandy for hip flasks. He was buoyant, in his element, his desire to have his house to himself again sheathed in an elaborate display of courtesy. An apple-wood fire flared in the hall as the door swung open and shut, and the sharp smell of apple-wood smoke blew out on to the icy terrace. We might not often open our house like this, but when we did there would be extravagant flames and flowers and hours of dancing. None of them would suspect the coldness at the heart of it as my grandfather waved to the girls’ rosy faces, turning to the house, misted by plumes of horses’ breath. I longed to have the house empty. Mr Bullivant had slept on the leather sofa in the library for a few hours and ridden home at first light. I half-envied him.
    ‘Where’s Livvy?’ I asked Rob.
    ‘I haven’t seen her,’ he said briefly. I wondered if the night had been a success for him. I’d seen her revolving in his arms, dance after dance – or, at least, for exactly as many dances as was correct, because that was Livvy’s way. But she was the kind of girl who could have her breasts touching a man’s shirt front and his hand on her waist and seem farther from him than ever. I thought how she might leave an ache in Rob, like the ache in your arm from stretching up to touch fruit just out of reach.
    ‘She’s tired from dancing, I expect,’ I said, with a false reassurance in my voice that went against the grain of the more complicated things I felt about Livvy, and Rob and Livvy.
    ‘Tired!’ he said. ‘She’s always tired, whenever –’
    He would have tried to kiss her. Maybe in the conservatory where he thought the heavy perfume from the hyacinth tubs and the half-dark would soften her. I knew just how she’d say it, ‘Oh Rob, I’m tired. I must go and say good-night to your grandfather. Didn’t I see Catherine go up half an hour ago?’ The words would have dropped like small, cold pebbles, not the fountain spray Rob dreamed of when he thought of Livvy. He wanted to bathe himself in her so he would come out dripping and newborn, the way Kate said a man could feel after he’d been with a Woman. I didn’t know what Kate knew, but I guessed there was rock in Livvy under all that pearliness, and Rob would break himself on it before he really knew it was there.
    ‘You’ve got to come to Mr Bullivant’s with me,’ I said.
    ‘Why? What is it this time?’
    ‘He wants to show me the plan for his cherry orchard.’ Rob laughed. ‘You ought to take Miss Gallagher. She’d soon scare him off for you.’
    ‘Say you’ll come. I told him we’d come tomorrow. He’ll give us lunch.’ No one we knew had food like Mr Bullivant’s. He had a cook from Italy who made pasta like kid-gloves, slippery with meat juice. Some people laughed at his food but I loved it. In the summer Angelo made a lemon ice so tart it was like biting into a plump ripe lemon and getting the spray of zest in your mouth.
    ‘But you’ve no idea what it tastes like when Angelo makes it from lemons which were growing on the tree an hour before,’ said Mr Bullivant. The lemons hung lamp-like behind flickering dark leaves, in the lemon house of Mr Bullivant’s villa in Italy. The earth was dry and in the winter there was the smell of the oil stoves which kept the frost from burning the lemon trees. The people there sent his lemons to England, packed in tissue paper in long wooden boxes. I had seen them and helped to force out the nails that held the lids shut on the fruit.
    ‘I’ll come,’ said Rob.
    ‘And you’re not to go off and leave us, the way you did last time when Mr Bullivant was showing us the wine cellars.’
    ‘The way you rushed on, there wasn’t time for a fellow to look at anything.’
    ‘Because