John Harding - Florence and Giles

One day in the tower, I lifted my eyes from my book, resenting this crazy, jerky four-minute way of reading and, through the window, saw a rook pecking at something in the snow. The scene was the perfect picture of a new state of mind I realised I had reached. The perfect white snow, the black rook a nasty stain upon a newly laundered sheet; for the first time I understood that there was nothing wholly good and nothing wholly bad, that every page has some blot, and, by the same token, I hoped, every dark night some distant tiny shining light. This hoped me some. The rook on my landscape was Giles, and all the suffering he might be going through, and all the suffering I endured from the great hole inside of me where he should have been. But the rook was one small black dot and the rest was all white. Did that not offer the prospect that most of my brother’s school life might be happy and carefree, with perhaps one or two small things he did not like? And yet, why had he mentioned not being homesick, except to reassure me? What could it mean but that he was?

Anyway, there were the Christmas holidays to look forward to when Giles would be home and I would be able to worm the truth from him, although what good that would do me I couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile I read all the mornings and some of the afternoons and then Van Hoosiered my way through the rest. Because of his restless and wayward limbs and the need to keep them from fine china, Theo was always up for getting out in the snow. One day I looked out my tower window and saw a bent figure trudging up the drive and almost went back to my book, for I thought it must be some delivery man and could not be he. This fellow appeared to be a hunchback with a great lump on his spine, but it fortuned me to watch him a bit longer and then the hump moved, leapt off his back and dangled from one of his hands and the rest of the shape organised itself into the unmistakable gangle of Theo and I was off, leaping the banisters and racing the corridor.

In the hall Theo opened the leather bag he was carrying with a flourish like a magician dehatting a rabbit. ‘What…?’ I cried.

‘Skates. Well, you have a lake out back, don’t you?’

Mrs Grouse was all concern. Suppose the ice crust was too thin and broke and we fell through it and drowned? What would she say to Theo’s mother then? I thought that seeking to concern us about her social difficulty rather than our own deaths was the wrong way to go with this argument, but I held my peace. Of course, nobody was worried about what to tell my mother. And significantly Mrs Grouse hadn’t mentioned any possible embarrassment with my uncle, for we both knew he would mourn such an event as a disencumbrance.

John fortuned at this point to be passing through the hallway on some errand and to overhear and intervene. He assured Mrs Grouse that he had skated on lakes in these parts every winter as a boy and that at this time of year the ice was at least a foot thick. He undertook to accompany us out there and, at Mrs Grouse’s insistence, check the lake’s surface very carefully ‘lest there be any cracks’, which caused John to roll his eyes and smile behind her back.

To my great surprise, especially after his previous slipping and sliding on the snow around the house, Theo proved to be an accomplished skater. Once he had those skates on he was transformed. From an early age, he’d had plenty of practice every year in Central Park, and was able to zoom around the lake at great speed, to turn and spin and glide, every movement smooth and graceful. He minded me of a swan, which is ungainly as a walker, waddling from side to side, and awkward as a flier, struggling to get off the ground and into the air, and then making a great difficulty of staying up there, but which on the water serenes and glides. I guess it was a great relief to Theo to be out on the frozen lake with nothing to collide with, no delicate side tables and fine china out to get him, no rug-trippery to untranquil his progress.

By contrast I hopelessed the task. My legs were determined to set off in opposite directions, my head had an affinity with the ice and wanted to keep a nodding acquaintance with it, my backside had sedentary intentions. But Theo kinded me and helped me; he was a different person, taking control, instructing me, commanding me as I commanded him on unvarnished land. And gradually, over a period of a couple of weeks, I began to improve, so that soon I was going a whole ten minutes without butting or buttocking the ice.

So it was that each afternoon I found myself looking up every page or so, instead of four-minuting, for I longed to see Theo upping the drive. And then, one day, he didn’t come at all. I was reading The Monk , making the hairs on my neck stand on end, shivering myself in the dead silence of the tower, when I looked up anxiousing for Theo and realised I could scarce see the drive, as the light was fading fast; I was still able to read, for my tower, being the highest and westernmost point of Blithe, is where the sun lingers longest. I put down my book and downstairsed. What could have happened to Theo? Why had he not come? True, it had snowed mightily that morning, but that had never put him off before. Had his tutor forbidden his visits? Had he perhaps some new work schedule that disafternooned him?

I found Mrs Grouse in the kitchen. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded crossly, adding before I could answer, ‘A note has come for you,’ and she produced an envelope that she opened, taking out the single sheet inside and unfolding it. She put on her spectacles and peered at it. ‘It’s from young Mr Van Hoosier,’ she said, and then began to read.

Dear Florence,

I am sorry I cannot come today. Asthma is my companion this afternoon. Doctor called, strenuous exercise forbidden. Please continue to skate and do a circuit or two for me.

The note ended with a poem:

To Florence I would make a trip

But asthma

Hasma

In its grip

I liked that. It wasn’t exactly Walt Whitman. But it was better, much better.

As she folded the note and handed it to me (although what she thought I, whom she supposed unable to read, could do with it, I do not know) Mrs Grouse said, ‘You must pay a visit to the Van Hoosiers, to ask after him. It’s what they would expect. It’s what a young lady should do.’

‘But…’ I was about to say I never visited anywhere, for I never had. Giles and I had never played with other children, for we knew none. This was one reason why I so concerned for him at school. But Giles leaving home and all the Theoing I’d had had changed all that. I saw that now.

‘Very well, I’ll go in the morning.’

And Mrs Grouse smiled and I could feel her eyes on my back as I walked off to the kitchen to ask Meg what sweet pastries she might have for me to take to Theo.

I don’t know when the nightwalks started, for I had had them as long as I remembered, and of course, of the walks themselves I recalled nothing, except the waking-up afterward in strange places, for example the conservatory, and once in Mary’s room up in the attic, and several times in the kitchen. I knew, though, how the walks always began; it was with a dream, and the dream was every time the same.

In it I was in bed, just as I actually was, except that it was always the old nursery bedroom which was now Giles’s alone but which I used to share with him, until Mrs Grouse said I was getting to be quite the young lady and ought not to be in a room with my brother any longer. I would wake and moonlight would be streaming through the window – oftentimes, though far from always, the walks happened around the time of the full moon – and I would look up and see a shape bending over Giles’s bed. At first that was all it was, a shape, but gradually I realised it was a person, a woman, dressed all in black, a black travelling dress with a matching cloak and a hood. As I watched she put her arms around Giles and – he was always quite small in the dream – lifted him from the bed. Then the hood of her cloak always fell back and I would catch a glimpse of her face. She gazed at my brother’s sleeping face – for he never ever woke – and said, always the same words, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’ and indeed, her eyes had a hungry glint. At this moment in the dream I wanted to cry out but I never could. Something restricted my throat; it was as though an icy hand had its grip around it and I could scarce get my breath. Then the woman would gather her cloak around Giles and, as she did so, turn abruptly and seem to see me for the first time. She would quickly pull her hood back over her head and steal swiftly and silently from the room, taking my infant brother with her.