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

was an old trick of hers. She would make you catch your breath.
    ‘Isn’t this fun, Catherine?’ she asked.
    I wondered if she really thought so. Once Grandfather gave me a porcelain vase, so delicate that the fine strokes of colour on it were like veins in skin. It was for violets, because I had brought him a bunch of cold, white sweet violets twined with ivy, and he had been pleased. It was Rob who had the gift for doing things like that, not me. I’d been afraid to bruise the violets with my hot fingers when I had found them, a white splash in the bank, sweeter than common violets. I kept the vase for a long time, until one morning my looking-glass swung forward and swept it off my dressing-table, so that it smashed on the floor like an egg and showed the brown water stains inside it.
    Grandfather leaned over the table and gripped my wrist. I started, and realized that he had been talking to Mr Bullivant while I sat silent, staring down the table at Livvy next to Rob. Mr Bullivant smiled at me. I heard the echo of the words I hadn’t listened to, and realized he’d been inviting me and Rob over to Ash Court. He had a new billiard table and perhaps Rob would like to play. Yes, he had money and everyone knew it. In the four years since he had bought the estate he had poured out thousands on it. I wondered if he knew how people talked and judged, or if he cared. He did not look as if he cared. He sat at ease, not bothering with most of the neighbourhood beyond politeness.
    Grandfather had a pile of shells on his plate and a little heap of white, plump Kentish cob-nuts. He had cracked them for me. I knew why he was doing it now, showing me attention, showing that I had value so that Mr Bullivant would value me more. Tonight I was his granddaughter and he would prove to the world what he was doing for me. This dance was mine, even though I didn’t want it and it cost too much. He smiled the tight, cornered smile that was all I ever got from him, and I thought of Kate’s grandfather and the man whose body came apart as he fell down the stairs, then I held out my gloved hand and took the nuts. I wondered if he had cracked nuts for my mother when she was a child. However hard I looked at my grandfather I never saw my mother there. I was looking for the wrong things, perhaps. Mr Bullivant was talking of planting a cherry orchard. There would be Morellos for preserving, and Whitehearts, and he had a scheme to net the young trees in a new way against bullfinches. Perhaps Rob and I would come over and look at the plans he had prepared.
    I never saw my father again, after that one time at The Sanctuary. He fell under a horse. Perhaps it was a cart or a dray and the great hairy hoof of the cart horse swung out and caught him on the temple. It could happen like that. Never walk behind a horse, Catherine. They told me that as soon as I could walk. I saw the hairs on the horse’s fetlock and the sharp yellowy edge of its hoof, and the metal shoe glinting. Or it was a carriage horse, high-stepping, with a wide wicked eye in spite of its harness. Its hoof would flash and my father would fall and the next horse would be caught in the traces and my father would go down as the horse rolled on the ground, crushing him as it struggled to find its feet, and its hoofs struck sparks from the air. Or perhaps it was just one horse, stepping out airily on a summer morning, its rider thinking of nothing, touching its flanks lightly with the whip, breathing in the damp blue air collected under the limes, when my father …
    Nobody told us. There has been an accident, Grandfather said, his face crumpled. He looked even worse than he’d done when our mother had left. An accident with a horse. Father had lived for two hours and then he had died. We didn’t go to the funeral.
    ‘You had chickenpox, Cathy!’ said Rob. I remembered the itch of the pox, like wool next to my skin in summer, and the way Kate dabbed calamine all over me while I lay