The Winter Ghosts Read Online Free

sights. She was already there. Waiting, for me.

On The Mountain Road to Vicdessos

    In the darkest days of my confinement in the sanatorium, then during my convalescence at home in Sussex, dawn was the part of the day I dreaded most. It was in those early hours that the barrenness of my existence seemed most starkly at odds with the waking world around me. The blue of the sky, the silver underside of the leaves on trees coming back to life in the spring, celandine and cow parsley in the hedgerows, all appeared to mock my dull spirits.
    Looking back, the reason for my breakdown was perfectly straightforward, though it did not seem so at the time. To those around me, to my parents certainly, it was peculiar - in bad taste, almost - to have waited so long before going to pieces. It was not until six years after George’s death that my battered mind gave up the fight, though in truth it had been a steady deterioration.

    We were at a restaurant not far from Fortnum & Mason’s to celebrate a. my twenty-first birthday. I can still remember the taste of the Montebello 1915 champagne on my tongue, the same vintage, as it happens, Fortnum’s had provided for the Everest expedition that year. But as we sat there in a brittle silence, Father and Mother and I, George was a shadow at our table. It was his presence that had made us a family. He had been the glue. Without him, we were three strangers with nothing to say. And here I was, the other son, sipping champagne and opening gifts, when George had never even reached his majority. It was wrong.
    All wrong.
    Was I the elder brother now, having lived longer than George? Had we exchanged places? Such thoughts, becoming ever more heated, spun round and round in my mind. The waiters glided past us in black and white. The bubbles of the champagne scratched at the back of my throat. The clatter of cutlery grated on my nerves.
    ‘Do make an effort, Frederick,’ my mother snapped. ‘Do at least pretend to be enjoying yourself, even if you are not.’
    ‘Leave the boy alone,’ my father growled, but he waved away the offer of a second bottle of Montebello.
    All I could think about were birthdays past, when George had made me laugh and brought me presents and transformed an ordinary day into something special. A red and white top when I was five. A bow and arrow at nine. His final gift to me, a first edition of Captain Scott’s The V oyage of the Discovery Vol I , with its blue embossed board cover, sent from France in December 1915, tied up in brown paper and string.
    That was it. The memory of that book. Having fought the truth of his death for six years, I gave in. There, in that plush and velvet restaurant, my mind came undone. Everything started to unravel. I remember how I put down my champagne flute carefully, deliberately, on the table in front of me, but after that, almost nothing. Did I weep? Did I disturb the fossilised ladies and military veterans by raising my voice or rolling my eyes? By breaking the porcelain or some other such pantomime? I can’t recall. Just the comforting haze of the morphine and the snow falling on London and the rattling journey by car as I was taken from Piccadilly to a private hospital outside Midhurst.
    In the sanatorium, Christmas and the New Year of 1923 came and went without me. Only when spring came and the mistle thrush outside my window began its fluty song, did the world shyly come back into focus. An hour a day, walking up and down in the airing court accompanied by two starched nurses, then only one. Then, outings that lasted a little longer and were undertaken alone, until, at the end of April, the doctors considered I was strong enough to be released into my family’s care.
    I was sent home. Father was ashamed of my lack of backbone, and was rarely there. Mother was no more interested in me now I was an invalid than she had been prior to my collapse. These days, I understand where her antipathy originated. I feel some pity for her.