A Week in Winter: A Novel

Maudie Todhunter poured herself some coffee, sliced the top neatly from her egg, and settled herself to look at her letters. A rather promising selection lay beside her plate this morning: a satisfyingly bulky package from the Scotch House, a blue square envelope bearing her step-granddaughter’s spiky writing, and a more businesslike missive stamped with an estate agent’s logo—which she placed at the bottom of the pile. She slit open Posy’s card with the butter knife and propped it against the marmalade before plunging her spoon into the rich golden yolk of her boiled egg. Posy’s writing required concentration, decorated as it was with tiny drawings and exclamations, and often heavily underscored.

‘Don’t forget,’ Posy had written at the side, so that Maudie had to turn the card to read it, ‘that you promised to think about Polonius. Mum’s saying that he’ll have to go to the Dacres. Pleeeze, Maudie!…’

Maudie shuddered. The idea of housing the boisterous Polonius, a large English mastiff, rescued by Posy during the Easter holidays, filled her with horror.

‘I am
not a
dog person,’ she’d told Posy severely. ‘You know that quite well after all these years.’

‘Well, you should be,’ Posy had retorted. ‘Taking Polonius for walks would keep your weight down. You’ve just told me that you can’t get into half your clothes. Anyway, it’s only for term times. I’ve made Mum promise I can have him at home for the holidays if I can find a home for
him during the term. Mind you, she’ll be spitting nails if she knows you’ve agreed to have him …’

Maudie chuckled appreciatively to herself as she spread marmalade on her toast. Selina had fought hard to prevent the alliance between her stepmother and Posy, but their mutual affection had been too strong for her. As soon as she was old enough to be independent Posy had spent as much time as she could with Maudie, ignoring her mother’s sulks, fielding her accusations of disloyalty, bearing with her ability to make life extremely tiresome. Posy was quite bright enough to know that Maudie might well house Polonius simply in order to irritate Selina and she was ready to go to any lengths to keep him.

Resisting such a temptation, Maudie opened the next envelope. Soft squares of tartan tumbled on to the table. Distracted from her breakfast, her coffee cooling in the big blue and white cup, Maudie caressed the fine woollen samples. She examined them closely, reading the descriptions written on the white labels which were stuck to each square: Muted Blue Douglas, Ancient Campbell, Hunting Fraser, Dress Mackenzie. They slid over her fingers and lay amongst the toast crumbs. Miss Grey at The Scotch House had done her proud as usual.

‘Something different,’ Maudie had pleaded. ‘Not dull old Black Watch. Have you still got my measurements?’

Maudie had been a customer at the Scotch House for many years, and her measurements were kept on file, but it was a while now since she’d ordered any new clothes. She’d been assured, however, that her file was at hand and that her order would be given immediate attention. Meanwhile, samples would be sent at once. Tall, with a generous, low-slung bosom and long legs, Maudie remembered with regret the good old days when clothes could be made to measure without costing the earth. She had a passion for the texture and colour of fabric: supple tweed in earthy shades, nubbly raw silk the colour of clotted cream, fine lawn shirts, crisp white cotton, soft, comforting cherry-red lambswool.

‘You’re so … so
understated
,’ Hector had said once, fumbling for the word. ‘Not like Hilda …’

No, not like Hilda who’d loved bright floral prints and fussy foulard frocks with pussycat bows; not like Hilda who held it an article of faith that a woman should make the best of herself at all times; who considered it an almost sacred duty to be good-tempered and forbearing at any cost. After a while, when Patricia and Selina made it painfully, cruelly clear that
she would never replace their dead mother, Maudie had made it almost a point of honour to be as different from Hilda as it was possible to be.

‘Be patient,’ Hector had pleaded. ‘They’re so young. It’s still raw for them and Hilda was such a wonderful mother.’ Everyone had wanted her to know it, voices lowered respectfully, eyes alert, eager for her reaction: a wonderful mother, a wonderful cook, a wonderful wife, a wonderful friend. Even now Maudie still struggled against the resentment which had festered intermittently for thirty years, corroding and insistent, clouding happiness, destroying peace—and now Hector was dead too.

Maudie gathered up the scraps of material and thrust them back into the envelope. Outside the window, on the veranda, sparrows pecked at the crumbs she’d thrown out earlier, whilst two collared doves balanced together on the bird table. She swallowed some lukewarm coffee, grimaced and refilled the cup with hot black liquid from the pot. The rain which had swept up from the west during last evening had passed away to the north and the sun was shining. From her table beside the French windows she could see cobwebs, glinting and sparkling, strung about the high hedges which protected the long narrow garden. A few leaves, golden and russet, were scattered on the lawn. The sun had not yet risen high enough to penetrate the dark corners beneath the trees, or pierce the shadowy waters of the ponds, but the big square living room was bright and cheerful. Soon it would be cold enough to light the big wood-burning stove; soon but not yet.

Maudie took up Posy’s card again. It was odd how the child’s personality flowed out of the thin spiky letters which carried the usual messages of affection, cloaked beneath sharp observations and teasing remarks; odd and comforting. She refused to allow any concessions to Maudie’s advancing years—‘I’m seventy-two, child!’ protestingly. ‘So?’ impatiently—and was now suggesting that Maudie should drive to Winchester to see her new quarters, meet her fellow students and share a pint or two at the local pub.

She laid the card aside and looked almost indifferently at the last letter bearing the Truro postmark. Far too early, surely, for the agents to have a
buyer. Moorgate still had the workmen in, although they were at the clearing-up stage as regards the house itself. Hector had always insisted that she should have Moorgate. The London house should be sold and the proceeds divided between Patricia and Selina; Maudie would have an annuity and Moorgate—and, of course, The Hermitage.

Here, in this colonial-style bungalow built at the end of the nineteenth century on the edge of woodland a few miles to the north-west of Bovey Tracey, she and Hector had spent their summers ever since he’d retired from the Diplomatic Corps. Maudie’s father, widowed early and a rather solitary man, had bought it for his own retreats from his desk in Whitehall, and Maudie had always declared that she would live in it in her turn if anything happened to Hector. Her friends had not believed her. ‘Extraordinary,’ they said, now, to one another. ‘Oh, haven’t you heard? Maudie’s gone native in a wooden bungalow down in the wilds of Devon … I know. I couldn’t believe it either. Mind you, she was always a bit odd, didn’t you think? Super fun and all that, oh, absolutely, terrific fun, but underneath … Not
quite
cut out for the motherly bit and I wonder if she didn’t give darling Hector a bit of a hard time. Well, we all
adored
Hector, didn’t we? Of course, you never really knew Hilda, did you? Oh, she was a
brick,
my dear. An absolute
brick
…’

Maudie knew what they were saying and revelled in it. Once married to Hector she’d acquired a reputation for tactlessness, for laughing at quite the wrong moment, for a worrying lack of respect for the hierarchy, whilst on the domestic front she was naïve. Dinner parties for twenty diplomats and their wives, organising bazaars, the children’s Christmas party were out of her ken. The men liked her—though some feared her—despite these failings. Those years she’d spent at Bletchley Park during the war and her subsequent appointment as assistant to a well-known research physicist in America lent her an odd glamour which some of the wives resented.