When Nights Were Cold (15 page)

Geoffrey resembled his older sister but was tall, a column with a puff of biscuit-coloured hair on top. He was a sweet, overgrown sort of boy who welcomed me cheerfully to their home, then teased Locke about her height.
Still not ready to grow up, my dear sister?
Horace was of medium height but stocky, dark-haired and dark-eyed. He had rough skin and a loud, full voice. It was no surprise that his most successful role so far had been as a pirate.

Locke sauntered to Horace, snatched his cigar from his hand, put it to her lips and took a deep drag, before putting it back in his mouth. Like an actress, she was aware of her appearance at each turn and from every angle, but there was humour in her affectations and she was never conceited. Horace kept his eyes on her, an almost-smile on his lips at everything she said.

The cigar smoke gave me a warm, exotic feeling and seemed to go pleasantly with the champagne. Locke's father told me that a friend of his, a theatre producer, had met Shackleton on a ship to Australia and they had put on a charity show for the other passengers. The producer was taking a production of
When Knights Were Bold
to Hobart, the play that had inspired his daughter's magnum opus.

And then we were in an upstairs room, white-walled and airy. The party murmured through the floorboards and I was still clutching my glass. Locke and Geoffrey disappeared into another room to find the costumes. There was much banging and cursing and after a few minutes they dragged a trunk into the room. It was filled with cloaks, shawls, fans, masks, jewels, wigs, swords and a gun. We were going to try out Locke's play,
Turn Back the Clocks!
I was eager to begin.

Horace played Charles and I played Caroline. Geoffrey took the role of Charles's best friend, and Locke played all the other parts. We followed the rough stage directions in Locke's script and we made up moves ourselves. It was comical and sometimes we couldn't speak for laughing. We added a shooting scene so that we could use the gun and this resulted in Caroline shooting Charles so that there was no possibility of returning to the old days as the play demanded. I thought this gave the story a satisfying conclusion, but Charles reversed the act by waking up from death, making the shooting part of his dream. He then shot Caroline and I enjoyed performing her violent death.

Locke came to my room at bedtime.

‘My brother likes you. Did you notice how he laughed at everything you said? He isn't usually like that. I think you might get along well together.'

I smiled in the darkness. I didn't know whether or not I could fall in love with Geoffrey – though I liked him – but the knowledge that he liked me was unexpected and sweet.

Now I was thinking of the strange encounter between Shackleton and the theatre producer. I imagined them performing some play together, with the whiteness of Antarctica as their backdrop, the whole world their audience.

‘Night then.'

‘Night, Locke. I liked your play.'

‘You shall be in it when it is performed, one day. You're a proper actress you know.'

‘Oh, I'd be no good. I want to do things that are real, not make-believe.' I shut my eyes and boarded the ship to Tasmania.

If only my family could be like Locke's.

The following day Locke and I took the train back to college.

Chapter Eleven

Frank swayed slightly on his feet, a willow in the mildest breeze. He blinked and scratched his nose. His head moved from left to right and then back, as though he were not looking at the painting but watching it. I backed into my hiding place at the gallery's entrance, a gloomy corner between the outer and inner doors. The air seethed with floor polish and library-book dust and I stifled sneezes into my handkerchief. I had slipped out of the lab early, left Locke to clear up my bench and invent an excuse for my disappearance. Here was Frank, not quite real now, slight in his morning suit and heavy black shoes. I imagined him as a character from some secret painting, a thoughtful gentleman pretending to examine paintings in a gallery as he waited for his lover who, unbeknown to him, watched from a dark place.

But Frank had come all the way from Oxford to see me. It would not do to make him wait while I spied on him. I opened my journal, as though I might be making a few notes for my next drawing class, and crossed the room with the feeling that there was no floor and I was swimming from my side to his. I tried to banish the thought of myself as his secret lover in case it showed on my face and appalled him. A kiss on the glove is no kind of promise, after all.

‘Grace.' In his nerves he gave me a smile that was too wide and looked odd on his narrow face, but I did just the same. ‘How nice to see you. How are you?'

‘I'm very well.' I grinned and nodded like a puppet.

‘Extraordinary place this. What a collection.'

‘Yes.'

He nodded too and his smile simmered down into something quite attractive. He gestured towards my journal and spoke in a low, secretive voice. ‘You've brought work to do. Are you sketching out a masterpiece of your own?'

‘Oh, no. It's just a – a prop to make it look as though I'm supposed to be here.' I snapped the book shut lest he see my inadequate efforts. ‘How are you, Frank?'

‘I'm well. Are you able to talk to me or is this awkward? It is awkward, isn't it?'

‘Rather.' I fingered the edges of my notebook. ‘We must just behave as though our meeting is a coincidence.'

‘Right you are. Of course.' He stepped back, raised his voice. ‘Goodness me. I hadn't realized that you studied here. Extraordinary.'

Two ladies in osprey-feathered hats glanced at us from the nearby still life of apples and pears.

‘Perhaps not,' I whispered. ‘We had better talk about the paintings. I'm not sure who might be listening. I mean, not that we're saying anything much but—' I gestured towards the painting. ‘Was this the one that you particularly wanted to see? It's considered especially fine, though I must say I can't bear it.'

It was a sentimental portrait of a little golden-haired girl on a swing, bluebells in her hand and a long-eared dog at her feet.

Frank laughed. ‘It was something to look at till you arrived but I was too conscious of myself to notice much about it. She's a smug little thing, isn't she? Let me guess your favourite. I've seen most of them now.'

‘I'm sure you can't.'

‘Oh, I think I can.'

He left me to make a quick circuit of the gallery, returned with a smile. ‘Yes, I know your favourite and you mustn't deny it.'

‘You seem very sure of yourself.'

Frank led me directly to a painting of a broken ship in Arctic ice. Polar bears prowled and surveyed the wreckage. It was a wild scene that provoked the deepest terror of Nature.

‘I remember playing at explorers with you and your father. And then you told me about your Society when we were in Wales. But it's more than that. You like its violence. And the loneliness. It's the wrong Pole, of course. I'm aware of that.'

I looked around to see if anyone had heard. The two feathered ladies were now standing beside a Millais, discussing it with the art tutor. I lifted my journal and pretended to be looking at some detail in the painting, checking it with my notes.

‘That's an odd thing to say, Frank. I do like it but that's because my father used to tell me about the Arctic Circle, about Captain Cook and Franklin. Polar bears are beautiful beasts, but because I like to look at them in a picture does not mean I'd like to get anywhere near them and be eaten by them. Or see anyone eaten by them. Great heavens. I didn't think that I was known as a person who likes violence and loneliness. Do you not look at this painting and see how bleak it is?'

Perhaps I sounded more indignant than I felt. In truth, I was merely embarrassed that he had exposed me so neatly.

‘Yes, yes I do. I'm terribly sorry, Grace. I didn't mean to say – I expect that what I meant to say was that
I'm
attracted to the violence and loneliness in it and I was attributing my feelings to you. I thought that we shared something, you see. I do think of you as someone attracted to the elements. Well, it's just that, when I used to come to tea, you were always charging off into the rain, when the others wanted muffins at the fireside. You seemed rather wild and your clothes were always a bit dirty with mud and now I'm being rude again and I don't know what's the matter with me. I apologize. I didn't want to offend you and now I see by your expression that I have just made matters worse.' He drew a sharp breath. ‘Grace, how is your father? Is he just as he always was?'

I liked to hear myself called Grace again. It was always Farringdon these days – Miss Farringdon from the lecturers – and it touched me to be called Grace. The North Tower bell began to toll and my friends would be putting their study things away, scrubbing the benches and heading for tea.

‘He's frail but, in the way that I think you mean it, he's the same. Actually, I haven't seen him for two months. I should visit but—'

‘Quite. Grace, I say, it's awfully good to see you again. I used to enjoy our talks when you passed my house sometimes. You always seemed so cheerful and hopeful, despite – well – sorry, I'm being rude again. You must think I came all this way with the sole intention of making impolite remarks, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have enormous respect for you and for your family.'

A scene lit up in my head as though Frank had popped a slide into a magic lantern. My family, in the drawing room, all frozen in a moment. Catherine was at the fireside, head bent over knitting needles, hair falling around her neck in copper coils. My father hunched under the standard lamp, elevated somehow in the little yellow coin of light, finger stump on the corner of the page of his book, ready to flick it over. My mother floated an inch or two above the carpet in the doorway, mouth open as though bringing some message. I remembered Frank on his last visit to our house, in the same doorway, his vain attempt to rescue Catherine.

‘So you're happy here at college. Good. And did you all enjoy your excursion to the mountains?'

The change of subject was a relief. With my family I was the stubborn, unhelpful younger daughter, but Frank saw me as an independent, adventurous young woman and it seemed quite easy to be the person that Frank admired.

‘Yes, and we're planning our next, and the next.'

‘Wilfred and I enjoyed ourselves magnificently In Oxford we're usually in a room talking to each other, or waving our forks over dinner, and that is very well; but we found that in Wales we might walk for six or seven hours and not have passed a single word, and not realized it either. It's a good thing for friends to do, isn't it?'

‘I think so. Now, Frank.' I leaned towards him for effect. ‘Wouldn't you like to travel to such a place as this?' I nodded at the picture. ‘Imagine. Not to be eaten by bears, of course, but to feel the terror of the landscape. You could paint it yourself.'

Frank shuddered, shook his head. ‘If you would lead the way, Grace, I might follow but I would hesitate to make my own way there.'

I was about to suggest that I would be glad to lead, but the moment was spoiled when Celia Horsfield entered the gallery with her mother and father. Celia was a few paces ahead of her parents, bleating loudly about which pictures they must like and which they mustn't. Her black ringlets bobbed and bounced as she moved. She dictated a particular order for circulating the gallery and reprimanded her father for setting off in the wrong direction. I was reminded of a comment Locke once made – that the women who don't want the vote are invariably the same ones who expect the trees and stars to bow to their wishes. Horsfield glanced at me, nodded, then fixed her eyes on Frank. Her eyebrows rose into a sly question. ‘Silly girl,' I muttered. ‘How inconvenient.' And I hurried out to the vestibule. A few minutes later Frank followed me and found me in my hiding place.

‘Grace, might we not find a chaperone so that we can continue this conversation over tea somewhere?'

‘I didn't get the principal's permission to have a visitor, so if I admitted to having one now you would be sent packing. Even brothers are frowned upon, never mind friends.'

‘It's a pity.'

‘Besides, I have studying to do, letters to write. I am very busy today.'

Frank tipped his head to one side, grinned. ‘Come down, O Maid, from yonder mountain height.'

I backed into the corner. Frank glanced behind him, saw someone coming and stepped away until they had passed.

‘Tennyson,' he said, when we were alone again.

‘What?'

‘My quotation just then. It was Tennyson.'

‘I know that.'

‘Sorry.'

We made our separate ways to the woodland behind the college and met by the pond. It was early evening, still light, but in that dark spot it was midnight. Frogs croaked and insects whirred above the water's creased skin. Strange crackles and plops echoed around the pond and the trees. Frank reached for some bit of leaf caught up in my hair, pulled it carefully away and discarded it at my feet, like an unwanted garment.

‘Won't do your reputation any good to go to dinner with the forest in your hair,Titania.'

I wanted to kiss him and almost did, but knew that I was supposed to wait for him to move first. Wind shook the trees and ran through my hair like soft fingers. It made me uneasy and a vague kind of anxiety made me stiffen slightly. He took my face in his hands, which was what I had wanted, but when he leaned to kiss me, I pulled back.

‘What?'

‘Catherine
,
' I blurted, before I could stop. And I meant it, but I didn't want to mean it.

Frank tried to mask his irritation with a smile. I wanted him to say that he would make it all right because, of course, I didn't want to stop at all, but he said nothing. I had got it all wrong. I turned and stumbled over the rough ground, through the trees to Main.