Free A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore Page B

you kept stopping to taste the wine.’
    ‘He said I could. Why do you think he had that tray with the glasses brought down, and the wine biscuits?’
    ‘You should have seen your eyes when you came up the cellar steps into the light. Black and swimming, like frogs’ eyes. And then you nearly fell up the last step.’
    ‘If you call that drinking –’ said Rob scornfully. He always had that card to play. I’d been nowhere and seen nothing.
    ‘We’ll go at ten. If it’s like this, we’ll walk,’ I said. I wanted to stride out across the field paths, not trundle along the lanes in the trap. I would wear my thick-soled new boots, and feel the swing of my heavy coat and the strong beat of my blood. I would hook my arm through Rob’s and lengthen my step to his. On the path the mud would be packed and frozen flat.

Six
    When they had all gone the fire in the hall died down. Ash blew across the rugs as doors banged open and shut. Grandfather had gone out and Kate, Elsie and Annie whisked about the house, tidying and polishing and moving back the furniture which had been taken out of the drawing-room for the dancing. The Semple boys came up from the village to move the piano and the heavy chairs. Little icy draughts teased my skin. My eyes stung from tiredness as I emptied flower vases and piled up heliotrope and white lilac for the compost heap. The flowers had wilted overnight, from the heat of our bodies and the fires. And then they’d been forced. Forced flowers never live long. They put on a show to deceive you. But there was a vase of early Lent lilies just opening. I touched the petals: they were cold, veined purple and green. I knew where they grew in the garden. If it snowed they would bud under its blanket, hidden, then with the thaw the flowers would stretch wide to the sun as if it stunned them.
    Rob had his jacket off and was heaving at the piano with the rest of them. They were all laughing, their teeth white. How red their mouths were. Where was Livvy now? I wished she could see Rob laughing as he hauled at the piano, not thinking of her.
    ‘Steady on! She’s tilting. Let her swing round.’
    A dull jangle came from the piano.
    ‘This ’ull want tuning,’ said Theodore, slapping its deep-polished side the way he would slap a girl behind a barn or in the warm sweet-breathing dusk of the milking parlour. Their chapel-going soon peeled off those boys, once they were out of their father’s sight.
    ‘Tickle ’er up and tune her,’ George joined in. ‘ ’Cos she won’t make her sweet sounds ’less you treat her right.’
    They all laughed, their faces red and shiny with sweat. Rob laughed like the rest of them. They hadn’t seen I was there.
    I walked away, into the conservatory. Outside the day was thickening to a dull yellowish twilight. Three o’clock. The dead stillness of frost had eased and I saw a flicker of wind cross the tops of the elms. It would be like this to the end of winter. The dark coming a little later each night, and the stubborn pushing of bulbs at the soil. My mother was walking on a long bright promenade by a purple sea. She did not write to us. Was her hair turning grey now? Was age putting a check on her blitheness? Did anybody love her any more? I saw her wind her hair in a white silk scarf, and then the breeze from the sea unwound it, coil by coil. She would stand and face the water: there would be a frigate, far out and lit up. The air would smell of salt and orange blossom. She would never come back to dig Lent lilies out of the snow and drag her skirts in the ash that blew across our hall.
    Now there was a figure standing beside my mother, dark and upright. He took her arm, turned her to him, gently fastened the scarf about her hair while she smiled past him.
    ‘My angel!’
    ‘Rodney …’ But she spoke absently. Rodney; no, the name was wrong. The sky faded. It was all rubbish, anyway. She only wore the scarf so that the loose skin of her throat was hidden. Soon