Half the World in Winter Read online

  Lord knows, they did not need another nasty accident in this house, thought Mrs Logan as she hauled the mildly protesting old man back into the room and made fast the window. And who, she tutted, had left the windows unsecured? Annie, the housemaid, was the most likely candidate, a girl whose grasp of even the most rudimentary concepts was limited. But as Annie had, last night, quit the household there was little chance of asking her.

  It was annoying, Annie quitting like that (here Mrs Logan tugged on the window fastening to assure herself it was secure) and only a month after Agnes quitting. ‘Too cold’! Whoever heard of such a thing? In other households, a girl came to the house at age ten and stayed until she either got married, was pensioned off or died. She didn’t stay five minutes then hand in her notice claiming the house was too cold.

  Mrs Logan turned her attention on the old man. The major was seated quietly in an armchair. A pleasantly attentive smile suggested he was happily awaiting her ministrations and, not for the first time, Mrs Logan wondered if the old man had even the slightest idea who she was. His small black eyes watched her with a keen intelligence that belied the aborted leap of death of a moment earlier and, were it not for the missing finger and the scar, he could have been any elderly gentleman sitting down to his four o’clock cup of tea and toasted muffin.

  The scar was hard to ignore. It snaked from mouth to temple, slicing the left side of his face in half. At its deepest point the groove was perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, and a vivid purple-red that changed colour occasionally when the major got upset. The shot that had caused this scar had been fired by a sharp-eyed Cossack at Balaklava in the autumn of ’54. It had penetrated his skull and a small piece of it was still lodged there today. What was left of the major following this encounter with the Cossack was this black-eyed old man who sometimes sat patiently awaiting his tea and sometimes attempted to leap from his second-floor window.

  It was to be hoped that the major was no more aware of his circumstances than a newborn baby was of its. And yet often he was quite lucid: a memory of childhood perfectly recalled, a fellow officer minutely described. But of the last twenty-six years he remained steadfastly unaware. He was Mrs Jarmyn’s uncle, her father’s younger brother, though he often greeted Mrs Jarmyn as though she were a complete stranger. Whom he imagined all the other people in this house were, the Lord alone knew. Still, he was always very polite when he ran into them.

  ‘There now, Major, all safe and secure,’ Mrs Logan observed, giving the window lock a final rattle. ‘We’ll leave the flying for another day, shall we?’

  Annie the housemaid had quit. But she had not left quite yet.

  On the floor above Major Randle’s room, in an attic with a steeply sloping ceiling that, for two years, she and Agnes had shared, Annie sat and contemplated her future.

  She had quit.

  It was not something she had thought she would ever do. Yet here she was on her final morning with her small bag already packed, and here was the chipped enamel jug she had daily washed from but never would again, and there the narrow bed she had lain in, shivering.

  Would she have taken this step had Agnes not already done so a month earlier? She wasn’t sure. They had talked of it, the two of them, in the dark when the family were asleep downstairs, and it had been Agnes who had first said she was going to quit.

  ‘But where would you go?’ Annie had replied, pulling the flannelette sheet up to her chin because with Agnes’s words a vast chasm, pitch black and bottomless, had opened up before her.

  ‘Don’t matter. Away from here. Away from her,’ had been Agnes’s reply.

  But these were just words. Anyone could say ‘I’m going to quit’, couldn’t they? It didn’t mean you were actually going to do it.

  But Agnes had done it. Annie had come into their room one Tuesday afternoon after lighting up to find Agnes jamming her few belongings into a battered old trunk, her face set hard and angry.

  ‘I’ve quit. Told ’em I’ve had enough,’ had been her explanation and Annie had stared at her, open-mouthed.

  ‘But why?’ Though she knew why, of course.

  ‘I ’eard her!’ was all Agnes would say. And truth be told Annie did not care to hear more.

  She shivered. They had both smelt the burning, smelt it every single day. The drawing room always smelt of burning. You couldn’t escape it. But what had Agnes heard? She had heard her. But what, exactly?

  Whatever it was, Agnes had gone and exactly where she had gone (‘I got a sister in Bethnal Green, she’ll help me. I’ll get another place, if I want one. Maybe I don’t want one’) Annie did not know.

  So Annie had gone on alone and though Mrs Logan had said another girl would be joining them shortly, the new girl wouldn’t be Agnes, would she? And in the meantime Annie was alone, upstairs in her room, shivering, her feet blue with cold, the major stalking the downstairs rooms and planning who knew what mischief.

  And the ghost. The ghost was in the drawing room.

  A creak downstairs made her gasp. It was the floorboards settling, just the floorboards.

  Last evening, when darkness had long fallen and the house was in shadows and the light from the lamp in the hallway had flickered in the draught, the master had ordered her to fetch something from the drawing room.

  She had stared at him, panic-stricken. They never went into the drawing room, and certainly never after dark, not even the family! But the master had said, ‘Annie, there is a book I require in the drawing room. Please fetch it for me.’ And because she had gaped at him, he had added, impatiently, ‘It is the Squires, girl. Squires’ Study of the Workings and Evolution of the Railway Steam Engine,’ as if knowing the title of the book might somehow make a difference. As if he thought she could read.

  She had fled his gaze and tried to locate Mrs Logan but Mrs Logan could not be located so Annie had found herself standing outside the door to the drawing room, in the dark, with the shadows flickering all around her and her hand that was raised to the door handle shaking so violently she wondered if she would be able to open the door at all.

  And that was when she had heard it: the whimper of a small child in terrible pain. Instantly the smell of burning was all around her, suffocating, smothering, choking her. She had shrieked and run for the stairs, had bolted for her room and when Mrs Logan had sought her out some time later, her bag was packed and she had uttered the words she had thought she would never utter: I quit.

  Mrs Logan had been furious, as well she might be, losing both her girls one after another, but there was nothing to be done about it. Annie had said she was quitting and quit she would and no amount of coaxing and reasoning and demanding was going to change that. And this morning the daylight and the sliver of weak December sunshine that crept in through the narrow attic window changed nothing—somehow it was late afternoon already. She had intended to leave first thing.

  Annie picked up her bag and left the room that she had, for two years, shared with Agnes, and scuttled down the back stairs. She had said her farewells to Mrs Logan and Cook already, and she had no wish to run into the family, especially the master.

  At the back door she put down her bag and pulled on her mittens. It was cold outside, she could already feel it. She unlatched the heavy bolt, picked up her bag and let herself out, almost falling over Mr Gladstone. Steadying herself she bent down to fondle his furry orange chin but, having spent an unprofitable night prowling the streets, Mr Gladstone was in no mood to be friendly and he shot inside and was gone. His dismissal was somehow final so that she felt an odd pang. The area steps were icy and she picked her way cautiously and stood at street level. There was a frost on the ground that the weak sunlight had failed to melt. A few remaining leaves, blown by the strong winds last night, were banked up against the railings. The plane trees that lined Cadogan Mews were quite bare now.

  She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and left the house.

  Cook, watching Annie’s departure from the basemen
t kitchen window, shook her head and rolled her eyes and made a tch! sound with her tongue.

  That one was as daft as the other one who had left the previous month, thought Cook, and she used the occasion of Annie’s departure to stop work and place her floury hands on her hips. And what the household was going to do now that both girls had upped and gone she did not know and she had an idea Mrs Logan did not know either, for all she said she’d have a new girl start in a day or two.

  What new girl? Cook wanted to know. No one had come to the house, no position had been advertised so far as she was aware. And what was they all meant to do in the meantime, she wanted to know, with meals to be prepared and on the table morning, noon and night and no one to help her except the boy who came mornings to deliver the coal? Well, there was nothing for it: Mrs Logan would have to serve.

  Outside Annie had paused at the top of the area steps and was now looking from left to right as though she had forgotten which way she was going.

  It was a pity, Cook decided as she resumed her kneading of the dough, that folk didn’t forget things more easily.

  It was the girl. The dead girl. It was all they thought about. And why? What good did it do? Hadn’t she lost four children herself in her time, and a husband too come to think of it, and never a word of it mentioned to anyone and hardly a thought either, all these years. Two dead in their cradles, buried before their first birthdays, poor little mites. One drowned in the river on New Year’s Eve, the last dashed beneath the hooves of a horse crossing Whitehall. As for Mr Varley—for there had once been a Mr Varley—he had perished off the Irish coast, shipwrecked during a freak storm en route to New South Wales, along with two dozen other souls, and never missed nor grieved for. All dead. All so many years ago she could barely see their faces now. The two babies so young she had to remind herself what she had christened them.

  She paused again, wiping a floury hand across her forehead. The kitchen was warm no matter there was a frost outside and ice already forming on the outside of the window.

  And look at Mrs Logan who’d lost her husband not so many years back and her newly married, you didn’t hear Mrs Logan making a fuss about a dead girl, did you?

  Satisfied at last with the texture of the dough, Cook squeezed it into three waiting baking dishes and slid them with the aid of a long wooden spatula into the range. The smell of baking bread would soon fill the whole house and, like as not, Master Jack would be down demanding a piece soon enough.

  He wouldn’t get any.

  Cook wiped her hands again and sat down with a sigh onto her rocking chair and reached for her pipe.

  Annie had gone, disappeared from view, and Cook instantly forgot her.

  As Cook predicted, the aroma of baking bread rapidly infused the house. It crept up the back stairs to the hallway, easily overpowering the fragrance from the winter jasmine Dinah had brought in from the garden and not yet arranged in a vase, and it seeped into the first-floor drawing room, neutralising, for a moment at least, any other odours that lingered there. Onwards it went, slipping beneath the closed door of Mr Jarmyn’s study, causing him to pause in his perusal of the accounts and, just for a second, forget himself.

  Gathering force, it surged upwards, reaching Uncle Austin’s room on the second floor so that the old soldier lifted his grizzled head like a ponderous, elderly spaniel and, for a fleeting moment, remembered another loaf of bread baking in another range in his mother’s kitchen fifty years earlier.

  The last place it reached was the schoolroom at the top of the house where Mr Todd, one-time Classics master at Harrow and long since retired but who (due to a poor investment decision involving a mine and a small South American nation whose name Mr Todd could no longer recall) found himself forced to give private tuition to the sons of gentlemen. The sons in question were Master Gus Jarmyn, eleven, and Master Jack Jarmyn, ten, and at this moment they were in the midst of a Latin translation. Or rather Master Gus was in the midst of a Latin translation, his pen gripped tightly, the nib poised and shaking ever so slightly an inch above the exercise book that had once belonged to his elder brother, Bill, his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth as he pondered the phrase iter itineris and wondered whether to translate it as ‘journey’ or ‘road’.

  By contrast, seated beside him, his brother Jack was recalling with exquisite pleasure the pictures from the book he had been reading the night before, an illustrated work charting the development of the English soldier and his uniform from the Normans to the present day. His reading the previous evening had brought him to the Hundred Years War and he was recalling, in minute detail, the armour worn by King Henry’s knights.

  As the smell of baking bread reached them, Mr Todd sat back in his hard little wooden chair and let out a contented ‘Ahh!’ Gus momentarily forgot about iter itineris and Jack briefly left the battlefield of Agincourt.

  The only part of the house the baking bread failed to penetrate was the bedroom of Dinah’s mother, Mrs Aurora Jarmyn. This bedroom, a large room on the second floor and overlooking the mews, was sealed from such intrusions. The door was shut and a thick, padded draught-excluder was wedged firmly along the bottom of the door, beyond which no light, no sound, no smell could pass.

  The curtains were not quite fully drawn so that a shaft of sudden and unexpected December sunlight struck the carpet and fell across Mrs Jarmyn, who sat in an upright chair before her writing table. A diary was open on her desk and she noted that it was the fifth of December.

  Six months had passed.

  She looked up, closed the diary. Laid her hands on the table. How could six months have passed?

  She placed the diary in her desk drawer and turned the key but made no move to get up. Mrs Jarmyn was impervious to the smell of baking bread that now permeated the whole house. But unlike her husband, she was not impervious to the cold that had crept into the very foundations of the house and would not be dislodged.

  She shivered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BOTH HER PARENTS WERE LATE for dinner.

  Dinah picked up her napkin, slid it from its silver ring and unfolded it on her lap, realising as she did so that she had left the winter jasmine on the hallway table and that the delicate flowers would, by now, have faded. She felt a small pang of remorse and her eyes flickered around the table wondering who might have noticed. Opposite her Gus was frowning in concentration at something, and she knew it could not possibly be winter jasmine that absorbed him so. Beside Gus, Jack was fiddling crossly with his collar, his face pink with his exertions.

  ‘And I jolly well have it on good authority that Old Toddy was quite wrong with that marking,’ Gus announced and Jack, to whom this statement appeared to be aimed, gave up on his collar and retorted with a huge shrug.

  ‘I don’t see that it matters either way. And on whose authority anyway?’

  ‘Bill’s. He said Toddy was a frightful old fraud with his Latin and that he only really knows Greek.’

  Jack now looked confused. ‘Weren’t we doing Greek?’ he asked, a doubtful look creeping over his face.

  Gus seemed about to reply to this surprising question from his younger brother when their mother joined them, coming in and seating herself at one end of the table, and smiling brightly at them all. Gus instantly closed his mouth.

  Her mother looked beautiful this evening, Dinah saw. It was a beauty that seemed to transcend every little horror and tragedy whilst retaining, somehow, a memory of each of those things. It made your heart ache at the same time as it made your spirits soar. She wore a shawl wrapped closely about her thin shoulders and long kid gloves in a soft ivory white which served, also, to hide the scar that disfigured her arm. Her mother slid slender arms around herself for a brief moment as though to hug herself and appeared to stifle a shiver. It seemed she must surely make some comment about the coldness in the dining room and Dinah felt the muscles of her stomach tense.

  Instead her mother said, ‘Well, my dears, and what have you all been up t
o today?’

  Dinah felt her muscles release and she spoke first as she, with Bill absent, was now the eldest.

  ‘I went into the garden this afternoon as I wanted to cut the first winter jasmine to make an arrangement.’

  ‘Did you dear? How lovely. But where are they?’

  Dinah thought of the flowers, probably wilted and faded by now, lying where she had left them on the little side table in the hallway. She would get Mrs Logan to remove them.

  ‘There were only one or two. It was too few to make a proper arrangement …’

  ‘Oh. What a shame. Perhaps you could press them?’ Her mother smiled brightly again.

  It was odd, Dinah realised, how her mother only smiled brightly now. She never just smiled. It was always this intense, almost fierce smile, a smile that dared one to contradict it. A smile that sent a chill through one. She made no reply to her mother’s suggestion.

  ‘Gus?’

  ‘Oh. We did Latin prep,’ said Gus, aiming a significant look at Jack. ‘We had a test and I did rather well although there was a point of contention when Toddy—Mr Todd—disputed one of my translations.’

  ‘Did he? Well, no doubt he knows best, dear, being a Latin master.’

  Gus flushed indignantly at this suggestion.

  ‘Jack?’

  Jack, who had returned to the problem of his collar, was caught out by her question and appeared to cast about for some suitable reply.

  ‘I’ve been reading about the British Army,’ he replied at last and beside him Gus rolled his eyes but Jack instantly warmed to this subject. ‘It’s really very interesting, Mama. Did you know the average French soldier at Agincourt wore thirty pounds of armour? Thirty pounds! Whereas the English bowmen wore virtually no armour at all and consequently they were quite mobile and that is probably what contributed to them winning. That, and their exceptional skill at archery,’ he concluded.