The Wintering House · novella
5The Living Hand
I have said that I knew, and I did; but knowing a thing at eight o’clock in the morning across a good cup of coffee, in a warm room, with kind faces turned to you, is not at all the same as letting it into the house of yourself and giving it a chair. I had done the first. Through the whole of that December I did not do the second, and I will not pretend the failure was ignorance. It was appetite. I had been asked into the picture, and a starved woman does not examine the bread.
But the cold clear part of me had put up its head in the gallery at two in the morning, and it would not now lie back down. It had learned three names — Pargeter, Vane, Loder — and it wanted to know what a name is worth in that house, and where a woman goes when the paint on her is dry.
So I began, very quietly, to look. Not to flee — I want that set down honestly, for I did not yet dream of fleeing — but only to know, the way you will worry a sore tooth with your tongue while swearing to the dentist you feel nothing at all.
I began with Charlotte, because Charlotte loved to talk, and a woman who loves to talk will give you the edge of a thing before she knows she has reached for it.
We were in the warm room, and she was in the chair by the fire that was not her mother’s chair, and I was changing the water in the glass that was never drunk, and I said, lightly, with my back to her and my eyes on the walnut table, “Who kept the room before I came, Charlotte? Who did all this, before me?”
The talk stopped. That was the first wrongness — not what she said, but that the room, which was always full of her voice, went out like a snuffed wick. When she spoke again her voice had been arranged.
“Oh — there was a girl. Before you. A good girl.” A pause I could have laid a coin in. “Ellen—”
And then nothing. The name came to the very edge of her and she took it back, physically, I heard it, a small wet catch of the breath, the sound a person makes swallowing something scalding rather than spit it out and be seen to have had it in her mouth. She had begun to say a Christian name — Ellen — and had remembered, in the middle of the second syllable, that Christian names are for the living, and that in that house the living were four, and always four, and would be four when they put me in the picture.
“Ellen who?” I said. I did not turn round. I had learned, by then, that you can ask a house anything so long as you do not look at it while you do.
“She went,” said Charlotte. Brightly. Terribly. The house’s one answer, worn smooth as the newel-post by the number of hands that had gripped it. “She went to be married, I think. Or to her people. It was a long time ago.” And then, in a rush, before I could set another stone on the first: “You mustn’t let that fire get low, Agnes, she feels a draught so, she always has,” — she, the bed, the woman one floor of existence removed from the woman in the ground — and Charlotte got up and came and stood beside me at the glass, and put her arm through mine, warm and quick and pleading, and I let her, and I did not ask again.
Ellen. Miss Loder had been an Ellen once, before she was fresh paint at the edge of a canvas with a face I now knew had been frightened. I put the name away with the shawl, in the drawer with the permanent crease, and I went on tending the room; and that would have been the whole of that December, I think, and this a shorter and a colder account, if it had not been for the writing-slope.
The writing-slope stood on the walnut table, under the window, and I had dusted about it forty times and never once lifted its lid, because the room was a shrine and one does not open the drawers of a shrine. But a shrine is kept for someone who is coming back, and I no longer believed anyone was coming back, and a woman who has stopped believing has, whatever else she has lost, her hands free.
I lifted the lid on the shortest day of the year, with the fire red at my back and the moor white in the window, and I found what you would expect: pen, sand, a stick of black wax, a stack of paper gone soft and yellow at the folds. And on the top of the stack, finished, folded, sealed, and never sent, a letter.
It was addressed, in a strong upright hand, To my son Aldous, to be given him on his wedding morning.
I knew whose hand it was before I reasoned it, the way you know a voice through a wall. It was the hand of the wide humorous obstinate mouth in the picture. It was her writing, Mrs Ravenscar’s, the living Ravenscar, the one who had walked the ridge to Fellgate in a green dress and come home laughing with her hem in the mud — and I stood with it in my two hands and thought, with the last of the ordinary part of me, how sad; a mother’s letter for a wedding she did not live to see; and I very nearly put it back and kept the sadness, which is a soft comfortable thing to keep.
And then I looked at the ink.
I have addressed a great many letters in my life, being poor, and paper being dear, and a companion being a kind of secretary with worse pay; and I know old ink. Old ink browns. It browns from the edges of every stroke inward, until a black word written in a woman’s youth is the colour of weak tea by the time her son is grey. The letter was ten, twelve years old at least, if she had died when they said, when the fire in the warm room had first been lit for a woman who could no longer feel it.
The ink was black. Not brown. Black and even and lately dry, laid down in the strong upright hand not a season since, and where the pen had lifted at the end of your loving Mother there was the faintest drag, a little tail of wet-laid ink caught and dried, the mark a hand makes when it is writing quickly and means to write more.
I stood in the warm room with a dead woman’s fresh letter in my hands, and the fire ticked, and I understood — not as a horror out of a story, but as a plain fact of the household economy, the way I had understood the shawl — that in Wintering House the mistress did not merely have her fire fed and her water changed and her place laid. She was kept up. She had opinions still, and a hand still, and letters half begun for weddings yet to come; and somebody in that house sat at this slope, in this warm room, and took up her pen, and was her, and did it so faithfully, so lovingly, with so little sense of doing any wrong at all, that the ink had not had time to brown.
I did not hear Mrs Hale that time, because that time she did not come.
I put the letter back exactly as it had lain, tail of dry ink and all, and closed the slope, and stood a while with my hand flat on the cool wood of the lid, and found that I was not, as I had been in the gallery, afraid. I was something worse, that I did not have the word for then and have hunted for since. It was the feeling of a person who has been very cold for a very long time, and has been let at last into a warm room, and has just seen, in the good red light of the only fire in the house, exactly what is being burned to keep it lit.
That night I did not sleep, and towards three I heard, or thought I heard, the thing I could afterward never make anyone believe, though it is the smallest thing in this whole account and the one I am surest of.
My room was cold; my room was always cold. I broke the ice on my ewer at seven every morning of my life there. But I rose in the black middle of that night to fetch the shawl from the chair, and my breath did not smoke. And under the gallery door, along the whole cold spine of the house, there came the smell of coal smoke and the faint moving light of a fire that was burning — in the warm room, one floor up, along the gallery — a good hour before I would rise to lay it, and five hours after I had banked it down for the night with my own hands and watched the grey close over the red.
I went along in my nightgown. I did not take a candle; there was light enough coming under the door. And when I opened it the fire was up, and red, and freshly fed, a little coal at a time on the grey heart of it exactly as I feed it, exactly as I had been taught to feed it, blown to a steady red by someone who had knelt where I knelt every morning and done my office in the dark before me — and the room was empty, and the chair was at its exact angle, and the bed was made, and the glass was full, and there was warm coal dust, still faintly warm, on the hearthstone under my bare hand.
In the morning I asked Mrs Hale, plainly, whether she had laid the warm-room fire in the night.
She looked at me with her kind hands and her cold face over the porridge, and she said, “No, miss.”
I asked whether it had been Susan, or the boy, or Miss Ravenscar.
“No, miss,” said Mrs Hale, to all of them, and went on stirring; and then, because she was not a cruel woman, only a frightened one who had bought her warm death in that house with fifty years of not asking, she added, without looking up, in a voice gone very low: “Nobody lays that fire in the night, Miss Thorne. It’s best you don’t ask who does. It’s best” — and here she did look up, and I have never forgotten it — “you get used to it being laid.”