A Winter's Child Read online

  She wished to entertain again this year, to celebrate her birthday in May with a garden party as she had always done, to give a few little dances and suppers with a view to finding some eligible young man who might take her daughter Polly off her hands. And in these days of increased opportunities for gentlewomen, which made it almost impossible to get anything approaching a decent secretary-companion, it had already occurred to her that ‘young Mrs Jeremy’could be of great use.

  ‘Really – one had only a glimpse of her. One scarcely remembers …’ she murmured, closing her eyes the better to observe the perfectly retained image of the slender schoolgirl Jeremy had brought her, pretty enough if one cared for very dark brunettes, which Miriam did not, a quiet girl with serious, pansy-black eyes and a hesitant manner. Miriam, blonde, curvacious, effervescent, had not cared for that either. ‘Mother, this is Claire.’ And he had had no need to say ‘I love her’with those rich vibrations in his voice, his young face aglow, her young face veiled in a radiant wonder which Miriam had recognized – oh yes, how could one fail to know it? – but had never actually felt since one needed youth to sustain such total enchantment, and Aaron –. Ah well. Aaron had given her other things. And if it had troubled her that Jeremy had chosen a bride so unlike herself in every possible way she decided to ignore it now.

  ‘Mother – isn’t she wonderful?’ No. Miriam had not thought her wonderful. But if the girl should possess a capacity for devotion, as Jeremy had seemed to think – ‘She adores me mother. Aren’t I the luckiest chap on earth?’ – then why should she not now devote herself, in Jeremy’s absence, to his mother? What could be more fitting, or more natural? Indeed, what better compensation could the girl offer for her impertinence in insisting that that pathetic little wedding, over and done with in ten mumbled minutes, had made her Jeremy’s next of kin so that his personal possessions, his kit bag, his letters, his diary, the very telegram announcing his death had been sent to this wife of three weeks, instead of to her, his mother?

  Yes, compensation certainly was due. Miriam had always believed that. And, after all, if the girl could stitch wounds she could certainly address invitation cards. If she could drive ambulances it seemed reasonable to assume that she could collect one’s shopping, meet the London train for one’s parcels, take a firm line with inconvenient callers, turn her hand to any number of helpful, essential, tedious things. And Miriam – it went without saying – would be very kind to her. What a splendid idea. Not, of course, that she was ready, just yet, to own up to it and thus spoil her little game of power and pretence with Benedict.

  He had been a silent, surly child just five years old when she had married his father, tall for his age and with good bones but alarmingly thin and pale, his dark eyes with their oddly disconcerting stare reminding her that his life’s experiences, until then, had been made up of the death of one parent and the neglect of the other. Being only thirteen years his senior Miriam had decided to play the bountiful elder sister, envisaging a delightful relationship based on her generosity, his gratitude. She had wished only to charm and amuse him, and because, beneath the excellent manners, the unnaturally cool exterior, he had remained uncharmed, unamused, had simply allowed her to be good to him – because his father would have thrashed him otherwise – she had felt disappointed to begin with, then hurt, then acutely resentful, accusing him in her heart of deliberately fastening upon her the role of ‘wicked stepmother’, when she knew herself to be so suited in every way to play the ‘good fairy’. But the birth of her own children, who had instantly and obligingly adored her, had absolved her from all blame. The fault, clearly, had been Benedict’s and Benedict’s alone. He was not shy after all, as she had charitably pretended, but unsociable; not ungrateful precisely, but simply unable to appreciate all the pleasant things she had been so ready to do for him. Breathing a sigh of relief she had confined her activities thereafter to his feeding and clothing and had otherwise left him alone.

  But, now that he had become a man, now that her husband had bequeathed him to her as a rock to lean on, how reassuring, how very pleasant it often was to lean for the fun of leaning – just to see how far he would allow her to go.

  ‘Oh Benedict, don’t you see,’ she murmured, noticing with satisfaction that he had already glanced at the clock on her drawing room wall. No doubt he had pressing, profitable engagements that morning, men of substance with not much time to spare waiting for him in the oak-panelled office that had been her husband’s. Good. Then she would detain him for ten minutes and – if she managed it – would consider that she had won.

  ‘Forgive me, Benedict dear, but gentlemen do not always see the implications in these matters. The girl was a very prettily behaved little thing as I recall. But now …! Heavens – we cannot even be sure that she has been nursing officers.’

  ‘I imagine,’ said Benedict curtly, dryly, his eyes straying once again to the parlour clock, ‘that the anatomy is much the same.’

  ‘Oh that,’ she said, not in the least dismayed, a gesture of her plump hand relegating the entire question of male anatomy to a proper insignificance. ‘Dear boy, I was referring to the language – the attitudes – the things that a common soldier might be likely to say – or even do. You must know what I mean.’

  He gave a brief smile, understanding her, she thought, perhaps all too well. Not that she minded that. Dear Aaron, who had loved her, had been so terribly easy to deceive. Whereas Benedict, who probably did not like her much at all, was far less inclined to be impressed by the mountains she so loved to construct from any little molehill which came her way. Such a provoking man, always so aloof and sometimes quite disdainful yet so much more of a challenge. She smiled at him, her eyelids gently fluttering.

  ‘Dear boy – such a dilemma. I shall have to explain it so carefully to the others. At teatime perhaps?’

  ‘An excellent idea.’ And noting the sarcasm in his voice, these teatime discussions being her favourite solution to every crisis, she smiled at him again. Dear Benedict. She was such a trouble to him. He bore it so very impatiently. She rather prided herself on that. Yet, nevertheless, being still in the mood to make a little mischief, she found occasion that afternoon at teatime, sitting with her married daughter Eunice among the comfortable paraphernalia of silver tea kettle and flowered china, to complain of Benedict to his wife.

  ‘Nola, my dear, I don’t wish to raise a storm in a teacup …’

  ‘Of course not Miriam.’

  And looking at the blank, bored face of her daughter-in-law, Miriam knew that Mrs Benedict Swanfield was barely listening and did not care.

  That Benedict had married for money Miriam had never doubted and, indeed, could think of no other reason for choosing, some fifteen years ago, this particular bride, Miss Nola Crozier, a wool merchant’s daughter from Bradford, whose family in addition to money had a great many foreign and vaguely artistic connections, cousins who played Beethoven sonatas or attended universities in such remote places as Leipzig and Budapest; possessing a general disposition to speak foreign languages and indulge in foreign travel which had somehow made Nola herself seem alien and therefore suspicious to Miriam, not quite to be trusted.

  There had been no courtship. Nor had Miss Crozier of Manningham Lane in the wool metropolis of Bradford been brought up to expect it. Like Benedict Swanfield himself, the affair had been cool, dispassionate, successfully concluded. In the manner of industrial royalty – in exactly the way her father had married her mother – a wedding had been arranged, a diamond solitaire of appropriate value had been purchased, the size and terms of the settlement had been agreed, and Nola Crozier, educated at home by her mother to play the piano, to speak French and German and do very little else, had become Nola Swanfield, moving with her monogrammed luggage, her expensive trousseau, and – from the very first – her faintly scornful manner into High Meadows where she had lived ever since like an untidy, unpunctual, vaguely unco-operative guest.

  She was not in any conven
tional sense a pretty woman, certainly not by Miriam’s standards who, seeing beauty exclusively in tints of peaches and cream, ample curves, wide-set, startled blue eyes like her own and her daughters’, had from the start, been dismayed by the lamentable flatness of Nola’s bosom, the unfortunate hint of red in her hair, the sallowness – what kinder word could one find for it? – of her skin; and, perhaps most of all, by her odd partiality for plain, straight-skirted dresses in dull shades of mud and mustard and sage green. A strange girl who had become, at the age of thirty-five, whether Miriam cared to admit it or not, the exact type of woman referred to by every fashion magazine – now that the war had swept away the trailing draperies and tight corseting essential to the padded Edwardian silhouette – as ‘the very latest thing’.

  She was thin and brittle in her movements, her pale, pointed face and the auburn hair she wore low on her forehead giving the allure of a fastidiously groomed fox. She had narrow nervous hands, long, light green eyes, a straight flat-hipped, flat-chested boy’s body adapted by its supple anonymity to the displaying of the new skimpy dresses, ending a shocking six inches from a lean, silk-clad ankle. She wore waist-length ropes of amber beads, a miscellany of gold chains and medallions, long earrings, an embroidered headband bearing astrological devices around her forehead. She painted her eyelids, smoked Turkish cigarettes through a gold-tipped ebony holder, kept her eyes half-shut, her manner languid and faintly weary, her voice extremely low, neither rising nor falling but remaining on a single note which – at least when speaking to Miriam – held nothing warmer than monotony.

  ‘What has my husband done to upset you now?’

  She was not even faintly interested to know, thereby increasing Miriam’s pleasure in telling her, babbling on at some length, in fact, about the news she had had from Benedict that morning and the frisson she had experienced at the manner of its delivery.

  ‘I know the dear boy means well,’ she said, managing in spite of her large soft bosom to look kittenish and frail, and I do appreciate that he is always busy with very important matters, as gentlemen are. But just the same, Nola dear, I believe it was less than considerate of him to speak to me on such a delicate issue so abruptly … And she made a pretty little gesture of her plump arms and shoulders, displaying her billowing lace sleeves, her bracelets, her short pink fingers sparkling and helpless with rings, presenting herself to Nola as the woman she had herself created for Aaron, ‘pretty Mimi’to be handled only with the utmost love and care.

  ‘I dare say,’ said Nola, fitting a cigarette into her holder, her own fingers brown and brittle as twigs beneath the weight of emeralds and diamonds to which her status entitled her. ‘But then – I had forgotten Jeremy had a wife, Miriam. Does she matter?’

  It was not true, of course, merely an opportunity to annoy Miriam; although indeed weddings, as such, did not appeal to Nola. Brought up herself – and very carefully – to be a wife and mother, she had fulfilled all her obligations as she understood them, had made an excellent match in the socially and financially impeccable Benedict and, in the first three years, had even produced two children of the right sex, healthy and – the nurse had said – handsome boys who had soon gone away to school. She did not miss them. Nor did the fact that she was bored – with Miriam, with High Meadows, with the man who had married her dowry – in any way surprise her. High Meadows, after all, was Miriam’s house just as the sombre and ornate villa in Bradford had been her mother’s. And she had been bored there too. She was used to boredom and had developed her own methods of keeping it at bay. While under her mother’s roof she had filled in the ocean of slow-moving time by reading French and German novels in yellow paper covers and, during the fifteen years of her marriage, had taken up – with sudden passion and just as suddenly abandoned – music, painting in oils and painting in watercolours, drama, philosophy, pottery, Greek dancing, hand-printed textiles, the painstaking art of applying oriental designs to fans and screens and ebony boxes; had developed intense if intermittent enthusiasms for the Halle Orchestra, the Russian Ballet, landscape photography. And there were other games, more secret and sinister than all these, which she had learned to play.

  Weddings were not among them.

  ‘Nola,’ breathed Miriam, only pretending to be shocked, ‘you must remember.’

  Very little, in fact, of the young bride herself although rather more of the jealousy she had unwittingly aroused in Miriam, which Nola had observed with considerable amusement. ‘Your little boy has become a man,’ she had said wickedly, offering a deliberate taunt, replying with no more than a throaty chuckle when Miriam, moved to unusual honesty, had accused her of neglecting her own ‘little boys’.

  ‘There is a difference, Miriam dear, between mothering and smothering.’

  ‘Oh I see, dear. Is that why you go off to some music festival or other in Bayreuth or Vienna every time your boys are due home from school for the holidays?’

  But Nola, too subtle for confrontation, had shrugged, blinked her long green eyes, smiled. And there had been no Bayreuth, no Vienna that year – the first of the war – in any case, with the prospect of her cousins from Leipzig and Hamburg facing her cousins from Bradford and Manchester across a No-Man’s-Land of murder and barbed wire so real, so unthinkable, that she had decided to ignore it altogether. So that when somebody at Jeremy’s wedding had mentioned it, asking her through too much champagne how the Heinrich Croziers and the Henry Croziers were getting along together now, she had employed, as so often, the weapon of her shrug and drawled that in her opinion – as in the opinion of a well known playwright – the best thing both sets of cousins could do would be to shoot their respective commanding officers and go home.

  She remembered – very clearly – how shocked Miriam had been at that, how the young bridegroom had flushed and stiffened, how even Benedict her husband who rarely took much notice of her had raised an eyebrow in warning. But what of the bride? Inhaling her cigarette, Nola narrowed her long, light eyes in an effort of memory. Just a girl. And girls did not interest her, particularly when they were young and shy and proper. A boarding school miss clutching a wedding bouquet, she thought, mindful of her manners and her deportment, terrified of Miriam and so desperately in love with Jeremy that it had been – yes, what had it been? – comic, pathetic, enviable. Was that all there had been to her? Probably not. But Nola had had definite preoccupations of her own just then, with a certain technique for painting miniatures on ivory sticks and with a certain special friendship which had turned, during that wedding weekend, from riches to ashes. She was used to that too.

  ‘Come, Nola,’ persisted Miriam. ‘You must remember Claire.’

  Nola smiled, blinked once again through the curling haze of nicotine in which she lived, one narrow hand toying with the carved amber beads and the Egyptian amulets around her neck.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  Why indeed? But it was not Miriam who answered but Miriam’s daughter, Eunice Hartwell, who, being perhaps the only member of the family to believe in her mother’s frailty, rushed quite unnecessarily to her defence.

  ‘Nola, what a thing to say. And you don’t even mean it.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  Eunice shook an angry, flustered head.

  ‘What do I mean, Eunice?’

  She had not the least idea, nor – as she well knew – the faintest hope of extricating herself from any web into which Nola might choose to entangle her. Poor Eunice, thought Miriam, without precisely knowing why, except that one always thought of her thus. Poor Eunice, a somehow blurred and faded version of Miriam herself, pale yellow where Miriam was golden, plain light blue where she was sapphire, a woman of good intentions and abrupt rather startled manners, far too ready to rush to the defence of a husband who did not deserve it and most foolishly unwilling to hear a word of blame against the four unruly children she had borne him.

  Poor Eunice: a plain, passionate girl who had grown into an emotional, inelegant woman, giving her affec
tions clumsily, rashly and much too soon, having fallen in love at the first available moment with the first young man who had presented himself, a grand explosion of rapture, passion, adoration on her part – less, Miriam believed, on his – which had not only been ill-judged but final. She could love no one else. She had, from the beginning, insisted upon that. And being a woman who could refuse nothing to those she loved, she had remained fiercely loyal and almost slavishly devoted to her Toby through fifteen precarious years, a timid woman by nature who had, nevertheless, taken issue with both her father and her brother Benedict when, one after the other, Toby’s business ventures had failed; and had finally obtained for him, by sheer and frequently hysterical persistence, a directorship of Swanfield Mills.

  Poor Eunice; for Toby had not done well at the Mills, being a man of grasshopper inclinations who believed life should be lived pleasantly, easily, graciously, preferably over a fine old claret at the Great Northern Hotel or a champagne picnic at York Races, and had shown, from the start, a most aristocratic unconcern about the payment of bills. And, while Eunice herself remained not merely charmed but dazzled by all this well-bred, whimsical extravagance, her brother Benedict did not.