When Nights Were Cold (20 page)

Dearest Locke . . .
but what could I write to my friend? She thought that I was a fool and Parr a murderer.

Dear Miss Hobson,
my pen wrote. Yes, Miss Hobson would surely help. A job must be first. At the funeral Miss Hobson had been sympathetic to us all and had not seemed upset by the inadvertent burst of publicity we had given Candlin College. I continued the letter and enquired as to whether or not the teaching position in Bedford had been filled. A boarding school in another part of the country seemed just the place for me now. I could spend the holidays with Catherine and Mother but find some other kind of life for myself away from home. Parents and teachers would have read about the accident, but I could work hard and make them forget it. I put my letter on the hall table for Sarah to post.

‘Grace, is that you down there?'

‘Yes,' I shouted up the stairs. ‘What is it, Mother?'

‘Would you come and make me comfortable?'

Mother was propped up on her pillows, like an old-lady doll in her lacy bonnet, sipping pale tea.

‘The damp gets into my bones. It's miserable.' She clamped her lips together, sighed through her nose.

‘Would you like more blankets?'

‘They won't make any difference, just weigh me down. At least I have you back now. I trust you're staying this time. Not that I even know who you are any more.' She looked at me with reproach and a touch of suspicion. ‘That dreadful girl who took you all up the mountain. It goes over and over in my mind and I don't understand why you went with her. I always thought she was your friend and had a nice family who would be good to you, but she could have killed you as well. What a monstrous sort of person she must be. It's terrible to grow up an orphan, even a rich one, but her aunt and uncle might have shown her a better way.'

‘They're climbers too. I've told you that it wasn't Parr's fault and I don't blame her. I'm staying with you now, yes, until I decide what to do next.'

‘What do you mean,
do next
? Is your life a game of gin poker?'

My mother shifted her legs. Tea sloshed onto the eiderdown.

‘No, but I must have something to do with myself.' I reached out. ‘Let me dry that.'

‘Never mind. It'll dry by itself but my pillows keep slipping down. Would you put them up again?'

She leaned forward and the knobbles of her spine showed through her nightdress. I plumped up her pillows and set them behind her. She wriggled and huffed.

‘To be racing up mountains when we have been wearing black and remembering your father, and I have been so ill. It's extraordinary that we had no idea. You are certainly clever.'

Cleverness in our house was always an accusation, not a compliment.

The sky had cleared. Next door's three boys kicked a large ball along the street and their mother called out.
Don't come back inside till it starts raining again.

‘Despite everything, it's pleasant,' Mother said, eventually, ‘to have you here.' She shut her eyes and sighed again. A loose eyelash quivered and fell to her cheek.

‘You must have been lonely since Father died.'

‘Listen.' Her whisper seemed to scrape the sides of her mouth. ‘The house is so quiet. It's strange.' The garden sparrows made a faint descant to the voices of the boys playing. Mother shook her head, changed her tone. ‘Did you see edelweiss on the mountains?'

‘Yes, a few. And much prettier flowers too.'

‘A lot of saxifrage, I expect, and gentians. I like those colours, purples and mauves. I always wanted to see the Alps, though not to climb them, of course.'

‘You'd have to go up to see edelweiss. They don't grow on lower slopes.'

Hooper's family must have all her sketches now. I wished that I had just one of them to keep.

‘No, well, you could have picked one for me then.'

I perched on the mattress edge. The room was beginning to look shabby. The wallpaper had once been the colour of bluebells but now it was faded and soot-stained, a clouding sky. At the ceiling, it peeled off and curled away, as though the house were still growing, and outgrowing everything my parents had put in it.

‘It wasn't your fault, was it, Grace? You would have saved her if you could. You're a brave girl.'

‘I hope I would have tried if it had been possible, but she was behind me when she slipped.'

And Hooper began to fall before my eyes, turning over and over, a tiny version no bigger than my fingertip, tumbling through the air of Mother's bedroom, past the mantelpiece and towards the empty grate, and when my fingers reached out, sunlight caught her and she vanished. I blinked.

‘Mother, why don't your friends visit?'

‘I don't invite them. The neighbours despise me for being a widow.' She twisted her neck and screwed up her face in pain. ‘I despise myself.'

I took her hand and stroked her fingers with the tip of my thumb.

‘But they must understand that misfortune is nothing to be ashamed of.'

‘If my son – if Freddie had lived. Oh, it would all have been different. He'd be out working somewhere in London, bringing food to the table, making sure that we're all right.'

‘But we
are
all right, aren't we?'

‘Your father's investments haven't turned out well.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘A large sum of money has disappeared altogether. Mr Kenny always told him to invest in the railways and I thought he had, but it seems he didn't. We shan't starve but we shall have to be careful. Mrs Horton has gone so we just have Sarah now.'

‘I'll find a job.'

‘No, I don't think so. I'm ill, Grace. I need a daughter to look after me and Catherine won't do any more. I'm sorry about it but you'll see what she's like when you've been here longer. She just sleeps and sulks like a little girl. She's hopeless.'

‘Perhaps she needs more interests outside the house.'

‘Try if you like but she hasn't got any friends, as far as I can see. She has no ability to make any either.' Mother passed her teacup to me and I placed it on the bedside table.

‘I thought I would go away, to teach.'

She shook her head, slid down in the bed and pulled the eiderdown up to her chin.

‘You can't leave us now. You'll see how much we need you, and how lucky you are to have this safe, warm home and a forgiving family.' The bedsprings squawked as she rolled away from me and disappeared under the eiderdown.

Hooper's death had been in the newspapers, along with sensational and inaccurate accounts of the four foolish girls attempting to climb in the Alps and, inevitably, meeting disaster. I tried not to mind about the newspapers since what mattered was to give an account to Hooper's family and to Teddy, but it was painful to be criticized as though we had never seen a mountain or snow before. Our attempt to climb without a guide seemed to have sent the journalists apoplectic, as though they were all experts now. Women and men criticized us. They ignored the great climbs of Lily Bristow, Gertrude Bell, Annie Smith Peck, Fanny Bullock Workman, Mrs LeBlond, Lucy Walker and all the regular members of the Ladies' Alpine Club. One kind journalist pointed out that any mountaineer – even the most experienced of men – could be unfortunate enough to slip and fall and I was grateful to him. On the whole we were pitied, not blamed – it was the fault of universities and feminists for putting the idea into our heads, that such a thing might be done – but they were wrong in every way. We knew what we were doing but we were also, between us, to blame for Hooper's death.

The funeral was muted and confused, as though no one could understand how a quiet, feminine and sensible girl, who was embroidering pillowcases for her marriage, had ended up in a mountaineering accident. In my pew I dreamed up miraculous scenes where it was all a mistake and Hooper had not died. I remembered my argument with Parr about needing to rest but now I insisted that Hooper be allowed to stop, and so she survived. Locke, Parr and I stood together and sang ‘Abide with Me' in feeble voices. We avoided each other before and afterwards. It was agony to be three when we should have been four.

I left Mother to sleep. Catherine was waiting on the stairs. Her nightgown hung absolutely still. She had been listening. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, followed me into the drawing room, shut the door and held the handle behind her with both hands.

‘Grace, you mustn't think of leaving. I need you to stay here with me. Do you promise?'

‘Well – I can't promise. I'll stay for a while, a few weeks, until I have a job, but then I shall probably leave.'

‘But you can't find work if it means moving away. You see, I won't be here much longer so you will have to take my place.'

She knotted her hands together in front of herself, like a nervous child.

‘What do you mean?'

Catherine rubbed her check with the heel of her hand. ‘I can't tell you yet but I'm expecting to go away one day soon. You'll be Mother's nurse now, won't you?'

‘But why can't you tell me? Have you met somebody?'

Catherine's eyes darted around the room. ‘No, though I did see Frank Black a month or so ago.'

‘Ah, Frank. And how is he?'

‘I don't know. He was at his parents' house. I was visiting his mother for tea and he was there too. We didn't talk much but he was very pleasant, very amusing as he always is, you know.'

‘But why will you be leaving? Has it something to do with Frank?'

‘I can't tell you.'

She didn't seem to know what she was saying and I thought that it was something she had invented to keep me in the house.

‘Catherine, it's only fair that you should do whatever you want and I should help, but Mother does not seem so ill to me, just weak from mourning and getting used to things. What if we help her get better, encourage her to see that there's plenty still to do and enjoy?'

‘You're going to refuse me but you mustn't. We can't both be free, not while
she's
alive being ill, and I know that she's not even properly ill. That just makes it worse. She's decided to be ill until she dies but that won't be for years.' She turned and opened the door, stepped through into the hall and screwed up her eyes to glare at me. ‘It's your turn to stay, Grace. This is your life now because it has been mine. Goodnight.' She scurried upstairs, tripping halfway and clutching for the banister.

Miss Hobson replied to my letter. The position was not available, she wrote, and she was not inclined to recommend me for another. She gave no explanation. Perhaps it was because of the accident or perhaps it was because I had rejected her attempt to help me at college. It made no difference. Without a reference from the college, it would be difficult to teach anywhere. I must think of something better. I sat on the stairs with the letter, rested my elbows on my knees. I pictured Frank with the four members of the Society behind the window of the hotel in Wales, chattering around a table with cups and scones and teapots everywhere. Rain spattered the glass and obscured our faces as we laughed and shared our stories. There were no voices, just the bluster and slap of the wet wind from the hills.

Five or six thick cobwebs dangled from the recesses of the ceiling, fluffy black scarves and beards. I looked down at the dark walls of the hall, dusty photographs of grumpy ancestors and pictures of unvisited, bucolic landscapes. A vase of yellow flowers made the hall table pretty but it was jetsam on a miserable ocean. The wind rattled the panes in the door. I thought of Catherine on her bed, crying and dreaming of the day that Frank Black would beat down the door and rescue her.

And what was I doing there, in the middle of it all, Father? Don't look at me as if the answers are all mine to give.

A key in the front door. A creak and shuffling feet. It is Mr Blunt. His umbrella rustles, slots into the stand in the corner of the hall. His overcoat and hat come off, land on the hooks behind the stairs. He works in a bank and goes somewhere most nights afterwards, but I have no idea where. There is a pause as though he has noticed light from behind the drawing-room door, heard the chatter of the flames and coal. He is wondering whether or not to greet me. It is late. It must be the middle of the night and I don't care where he has been. I don't call,
Evening,
as I sometimes might, and he says nothing either, but pads up the two flights of stairs to his room, straining not to be heard. Goodnight, Mr Blunt. Threads of cigar smoke creep under the door and taint the air.

Chapter Fifteen

Locke visited. Her anger had not waned. She wanted us to tell Hooper's family about Parr and the rope, about their daughter's mountain sickness, that we had let her down and we wanted to apologize, but that Parr was mostly to blame. Now Locke had heard that Parr was writing her own account of the tragedy for a mountaineering journal.

I poured tea and offered her a scone. She waved the plate away.

‘It will be a tissue of lies, with no mention of the fact that she chose not to use the rope or that she drove Hooper to exhaustion. We have to tell everything before her story is accepted as truth.'

‘I don't know about this, Locke. What do we have to tell and to whom?'

‘Farringdon, don't stand up for her now. You simply cannot.'

Locke grasped the sugar tongs, dropped a lump into her tea and stirred it as though she were beating an egg.

‘I'm just not clear what good—'

‘I need to know that you will support me and that we shall be united on this. Of course I do not say that we were blameless in the accident. We weren't.'

I nodded. ‘Indeed. We should have listened when Hooper first mentioned her headache.'

‘But the responsibility is Parr's and she must take it.'

We sipped our tea. I nibbled a bit of scone but I had no appetite. Catherine moved around upstairs, opening drawers and cupboards. Sarah was in the kitchen, splashing water and clinking cutlery. I wished that something would happen to make Locke go away. She wanted to worsen a situation that was already bad and would cause more pain for Hooper's family. It irritated me that she would not let it rest, let Hooper rest.