A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

apparently, because Harry’s father was dead and the buses, unlike the shop, did not have the family name on them. Besides, the perceived taint on the man’s money was only a pretext, she had come to understand; the real ban had come from her mother, who, while content enough to be amused by Tom Whitacre on a sofa, knew enough of the scrapes from which her sons had repeatedly rescued him to see that he was rather too like her late husband – a tyrant in the making and possibly a gambling philanderer as well.
    ‘And now I’ve ruined everything by telling you,’ said Winnie, almost laughing in her relief at finally unburdening her conscience. ‘You can pack me off home on the first train tomorrow morning and be grateful for what you’ve been spared.’
    ‘Don’t you love me at all?’ he asked, after the waiter had brought them each a little sorbet in a hollowed-out lemon skin.
    ‘Of course,’ she said, visibly shocked. ‘I love you very much. It’s just that I . . . I loved him first and, well, differently.’
    ‘More?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But. Aren’t you furious? Most men would be furious. I was told never, ever to tell you.’
    But Harry examined his feelings and found he wasn’t furious, simply sorry for her, sorry that she had been thus constrained, and darkly amused that her upstanding family had, in effect, so practised upon him.
    She gave herself to him that night at last, a little drunk, perhaps, but relieved too at having been honest with him. He was utterly inexperienced, unlike Jack, he suspected, and certainly unlike his mysteriously potent rival, Tom Whitacre, but he found it easier than he had been fearing. Clumsy at first, they went to it with something like abandon in the days that followed. Baedeker was left out on the balcony and not retrieved. He doubted he succeeded in erasing all thoughts of Tom Whitacre, who would surely forever hold the appeal of forbidden fruit, but he made her blush and gasp and giggle, and found she was smiling without quite the sadness he had so naively taken as her natural expression when they were courting.
    Before they set out for home, he bought her a choker of pearls, and felt far more married to her fastening them about her pretty neck in private than he had done sliding a ring on her finger before witnesses. She was expecting by the time their train returned to Victoria, and told him the happy news once their new doctor in Herne Bay had confirmed it.
    Winifred thrived in a home of her own, unoppressed by noise and constant company. She loved the sea. She read. She walked. She painted. They lived fairly simply, with only the housemaid and nursery maid living in. The cook came in each day, as did a girl to do the rough . They were befriended by the doctor and his wife, who taught them bridge. They went to church, though not to excess.
    Harry created a version of his bachelor life in the brisk, new setting, reading, walking, visiting the library and taking long rides. The one lack was the Jermyn Street baths. He had visited the local spa baths, where similar services were on offer, but the sound of women’s chatter carried constantly from the female half of the building, and it lacked the London establishment’s exotic charm and shadowy glamour.
    On his rides – which were often for as long as three hours, heading a considerable distance inland – he came to know the local farms and found he was developing his agricultural fantasy. The fresh-air routines and simple obligations of farming appealed intensely, but he had no idea how to begin. He assumed one had to be born to it. His maternal grandfather was born to land, of course, but born to it, not on it; he had done nothing to maintain his acres, trusting that to managers, agents and tenants.
    Harry began to feel useless. Walking up and down the small town’s promenades, to the clock tower or out along the pier, however smartly, he fancied the passing glances of men and