Read Online A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore - Free Book Online Page A

Kate, I’ll want it later.’
    ‘You won’t want it. You’ll be dancing till dawn.’
    ‘Oh yes? With the piano tuner?’ I said, smoothing the raspy pink pleats. I caught hold of Kate’s hands.
    ‘Waltz!’ I said. Kate often danced with us when Rob and I practised with the gramophone. She took the beat and lifted me into it, and we were off across the floor of the night nursery, breaking up firelight and shadows in a waltz that became a gallop and ended in a dizzy stop by the door.
    ‘Down those stairs. Now!’ ordered Kate, pointing, and I went.

Five
    I looked down into the pool of the hall and saw the dancers flicking like white carp under water. There was Livvy. She saw me and called up, ‘Catherine!’, turning her mermaid face to me and half-smiling the way she did.
    ‘You look lovely,’ she said, but she wasn’t thinking about me.
    ‘Are they going in to dinner?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes, your grandfather was looking for you.’
    There would be a partner picked out for me, to take me in and sit on my right hand and make me talk and smile. I knew who it would be: Mr Bullivant. I would find myself placed close to Grandfather, where he could hear what I was saying and make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself. He had never trusted me. That was why he had his eye on Mr Bullivant. Mr Bullivant was new in the neighbourhood and he had money. He was not like the others round here, who were so proud of being the same as one another and just the same as they’d always been. He was like Grandfather, but richer, younger and I think even hungrier, though that was deeply hidden.
    No one cares what they say in front of children. We’d known we were different. It was in the gossip at children’s parties, wafting over my head while I struggled with a lump of sweet cake.
    ‘He’s getting to look exactly like an old pirate. All it needs is the patch.’
    ‘You wouldn’t remember when he first came, would you? His hair was black as the inside of your hat.’
    ‘Quite Spanish.’
    ‘And the way he used to carry that child everywhere in his arms!’
    ‘The man from nowhere, d’you remember? That’s what we used to call him.’
    ‘Poor Charlie.’
    ‘Like a lamb to the slaughter.’
    Charlie was my father. The slaughter was being married to my mother.
    ‘Someone should have said something to him.’
    ‘Yes, but you never know, do you? These things take time to come out.’
    ‘The little girl’s awfully like her, isn’t she?’
    ‘Awfully.’
    There was never enough money. We had the land Grandfather had wrested from God knows where, and we sat on it as if it were an island. Mr Bullivant had bought land too, three times as much as my grandfather. He too had no connection of blood with this place. He would ride over and ask my grandfather’s advice and they’d sit drinking stone-dry sherry together and drawing plans in the library. Or, rather, my grandfather talked and Mr Bullivant drew plans, and the one had no connection with the other. Mr Bullivant wasn’t a friend, because Grandfather had no friends, but he was always welcome in our house. If he married me I would be taken care of, close but out of the way, as Grandfather preferred me to be.
    I stared at Livvy. She was wearing white satin and she had no colour at all, from her pale, close-coiled hair to her white slippers. There was a sheen on her like the inside of an oyster shell. She was what every girl here hoped to be, but no one else would ever look like Livvy. She put two fingers on my arm and I felt their coolness through my gloves.
    ‘Are you going in with Rob?’ I asked. She hesitated.
    ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said. If she had not been so beautiful her childish voice would often have grated on me. Her eyes, that never quite fixed on anyone, swam wide as she turned away, showing the perfect shallow curve of her cheek and jawbone. Suddenly she smiled. Her cheekbones lifted. Another door opened on another room of Livvy’s beauty. But that