Winter. Christopher Nicholson

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      ‘I imagine that depends on its success. You must meet Mr. Harrison. He may well come down to see the play here – Wessex! Wessex, do stop that! Stop dribbling!’ he said, for the dog was pestering her for a sandwich.

      ‘May I give him one?’ she asked.

      ‘If you like.’

      He watched as she held out a sandwich. Wessex took it from her fingers with remarkable delicacy, given his usual propensity to snatch. She smiled.

      ‘I believe you spoil him.’

      ‘Ah, he is an old dog. He is too old to be spoiled.’ The old man was vaguely conscious of a desire to be in Wessex’s position, licking her fingers. ‘He likes you,’ he said.

      ‘I feel honoured,’ she said, ‘even if it is cupboard love.’

      He tossed out another compliment. ‘You are a favourite, Gertie. He likes you more than anyone else.’

      She left a little later, thanking him again as she put on her coat. From the porch he watched as she disappeared into the darkness.

      Once he had shut the door the house seemed unusually quiet, as if reflecting on what had passed. He stood by the grandfather clock, listening to its slow, measured ticks and the intervening silences, frowning slightly. He was conscious that he might have started a fire that would be hard to control. Should he have waited until the play had been performed at the Corn Exchange? What if it received poor reviews and Mr. Harrison changed his mind?

      Then he remembered his wife. Reluctantly he went up the stairs to her bedroom. Florence was lying on her bed, with the curtains undrawn and the lamp on the bedside table casting such a feeble light that only her head and shoulders were visible in the general darkness. Her back was turned to him, and as he stood in the doorway and regarded her still shape he wondered if she was asleep. But she became aware of his presence. She turned with opened eyes.

      ‘Has she gone at last? She stayed a very long time; it’s nearly six o’clock. You must be worn out. Did she bring her baby?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘I couldn’t face meeting her. She is always so healthy. I feel unwell even seeing her.’

      The old man gave a grunt. ‘She is much younger than you.’

      This was true, for Florence was a score of years older than Gertie, but it was also true that Florence’s health was far from good. She had a weak constitution and suffered not only from headaches and recurrent toothache, but also from neuritis, a condition caused by undernourished nerve endings, for which she took some large pills manufactured by a chemist in the town. Nor was this all: less than a month earlier, in London, she had had a surgical operation to remove a lump from her neck. It was to hide the scar that she had taken to wearing the fox stole, an object that the old man had never much liked.

      She was wearing it now. She sat up, pulling it tight round her neck. ‘It’s very cold in here,’ she complained. ‘What did you talk about?’

      ‘Nothing. Nothing of any consequence.’

      ‘Who was on the telephone? Someone rang.’

      ‘I didn’t hear it.’

      ‘It rang several times.’

      ‘One of the maids must have answered it. I never heard it ring. Perhaps it was a bird,’ he said, rather improbably.

      ‘Thomas, it rang at least four or five times, about an hour ago. Of course it wasn’t a bird. It was nothing like a bird.’ Her voice was suddenly severe. ‘I certainly didn’t imagine it. I must ask the maids.’

      ‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he said hurriedly, not wanting to upset her.

      There was a silence between them.

      ‘I can’t think who it can have been,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was Cockerell. He sometimes rings.’

      ‘Why would he have rung?’

      ‘I don’t know. He does ring.’

      The conversation was going nowhere.

      The old man returned to the drawing room. The fire was burning down – let it burn, he thought, she had gone, she was on her way back to Beaminster, there was no point in wasting more coal. Yet something of her presence remained, even now. The cup from which she had drunk still sat in its saucer, and the faintest smudge of red was visible on the rim. There it had touched her lips – and there she had sat! There – one of the sofa cushions was indented – she had sat only minutes before! Something else caught his eye. On the sloping back of the sofa lay a long black hair.

      With some difficulty he grasped it between finger and thumb and held it to the firelight. It trembled and swayed, stirring in the current of his breath like a living thing.

      One of the maids entered with a tray. She stopped short at the sight of him.

      ‘Excuse me, sir.’

      ‘No, no, go on.’

      He watched without a word as she cleared the tea things. Then he went upstairs to his study. He spread the hair on a sheet of white paper and turned up the lamp so that it shone as brightly as possible. In its light the strand of hair gleamed, thick and strong. A hair was merely a hair, but it was the kind of token that, in a romantic age, a secret admirer might have treasured – might have put in a locket and worn on a chain around his neck, and examined now and then when unobserved. According to the common view of such matters he was many years too old for that sort of thing, yet he was reluctant to throw it away. Why throw it away? Only a short space of time ago it had been part of her.

      On one of the book-shelves in his study was a small volume bound in green leather, containing the collected poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of English poets, there was no one whom he admired more than Shelley, a man of blazing courage and single-mindedness, ready to defy the narrow morals and social conventions of his age. The old man pulled down the book and turned its leaves until he reached the title page of a poem entitled ‘The Revolt of Islam’. A long and obscure work, little read nowadays but breathless in ambition and beauty, its opening section was a passionate address to Shelley’s young wife Mary, with whom he had eloped not long before. The section concluded with an image of the two lovers as a pair of tranquil stars, shining like lamps on a tempestuous world. It was on these last lines that the old man placed Gertie’s hair.

      As he closed the book and replaced it on its shelf in the bookcase he was conscious of a certain absurdity in what he had done. He was eighty-four! Too old! What a thousand pities that he and she had not met when they were both young. Had she been born earlier, or he later, ‘had time cohered with place’, what then might have ensued? How different their lives might have been!

      It was the type of reflection that often appealed to the old man as the subject for a poem: how different lives might have been in different circumstances. Picking up his pen, he dipped it in the ink-well and began to write freely.

      The old man’s interest in Gertrude Bugler was a complicated one, and he frequently found himself dwelling on her in the damp days that ushered in the start of winter. At one level, it might be said, he had always been an admirer СКАЧАТЬ