A Place Called Winter Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Patrick Gale

  The right of Patrick Gale to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook in 2015 by Tinder Press

  An imprint of Headline Publishing Group

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 0532 2

  Cover photographs © Roberta Murray/Millennium Images (background), Zodie Hawkins/Trevillion Images (man)

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  www.headline.co.uk

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also By Patrick Gale

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Map – Grand Trunk Pacific Railway

  BETHEL

  Chapter One

  STRAWBERRY VALE

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  BETHEL

  Chapter Twelve

  MOOSE JAW

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  BETHEL

  Chapter Eighteen

  WINTER

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  BETHEL

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  WINTER

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  About the Author

  Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester before going to Oxford University. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End. One of this country’s best-loved novelists, his most recent works are A Perfectly Good Man, The Whole Day Through and the Richard and Judy bestseller Notes From An Exhibition.

  Praise for A Place Called Winter

  ‘Patrick Gale has written a book which manages to be both tender and epic . . . I loved it’ Jojo Moyes

  ‘Beautifully structured around the warmest of warm hearts, but it’s also run through with something new: a devastating chill of loss, fear and exile’ Louisa Young

  ‘A beautiful, sensitively told tale full of deep human truths and sadness, but hope too. He remains one of our very best storytellers’ Matt Haig

  ‘Patrick Gale has achieved a rare thing – a beautifully true novel that is as much about simple friendship as it is about love and passion. Even more rare, he has managed to tell a heartbreaking story without manipulating the reader. Enormously impressive’ Stella Duffy

  ‘One of the finest writers of his generation’ Barbara Gowdy

  ‘Its portrait of a gay man’s journey from the comfortable hypocrisies of pre-war England to the harsh purity of farming in Canada is absorbing, moving and beautifully written’ Amanda Craig

  ‘In this delicious novel of illicit love and bold reinvention Patrick Gale takes on a Great Northern American Adventure with all the fleet-footed grace of his much-loved British family sagas’ Armistead Maupin

  ‘Tender, heroic and heartbreaking. I savoured every beautifully constructed sentence, in a story rich in historical detail’ Hannah Beckerman

  ‘It’s a long time since I read a novel that made me care so deeply for the fates of the characters – their survival and happiness’ Patricia Duncker

  ‘Beautiful writing, gripping characters, and a final chapter that made me weep’ The Bookbag

  ‘An Edwardian Brokeback, utterly transporting and swoon-making’ Damian Barr

  ‘I thought it was an excellent novel – sensitive, humane and full of interest’ Andrew Miller

  By Patrick Gale

  The Aerodynamics of Pork

  Kansas in August

  Ease

  Facing the Tank

  Little Bits of Baby

  The Cat Sanctuary

  Caesar’s Wife

  The Facts of Life

  Dangerous Pleasures

  Tree Surgery for Beginners

  Rough Music

  A Sweet Obscurity

  Friendly Fire

  Notes from an Exhibition

  The Whole Day Through

  Gentleman’s Relish

  A Perfectly Good Man

  A Place Called Winter

  About the Book

  To find yourself, sometimes you must love everything.

  A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence – until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything.

  Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the golden suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before.

  In this exquisite journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. It is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.

  For Aidan Hicks

  Acknowledgements

  This novel would not have happened without the lively anecdotes, evocative photograph collection and half-filled exercise book of memoirs passed down by my late maternal grandmother, Phyllis Betty Ennion, the little girl Harry left behind. I apologise to her and her daughters for my outrageously fictitious filling-in of blanks, and to the shades of the real life Wellses and Canes, whose dignity this novel has traduced.

  Winter is a real place, though now an atmospheric ghost town. I am pleased to say that the acres Harry first ploughed over a century ago are still under cultivation.

  My heartfelt thanks to my editor, Imoge
n Taylor, and my agent, Caradoc King, for their invaluable support and expert judgement, and to my trusted readers, Penelope Hoare and Marina Endicott, for their keen honesty and shrewd suggestions.

  Thanks to the late Paul Slaymaker and to Jørgen Troels Munk Levring for the use of their names – names loaned in support of the charities Diversity Role Models and The Kaleidoscope Trust respectively.

  The research I conducted was partly funded by a grant from the Authors’ Foundation and greatly assisted by the hospitable generosity of fellow novelists Marina Endicott and Barbara Gowdy. Along the journey from East to West, I was much helped by Toronto Public Library and the library of Toronto University, Steven Maynard, Neil Richards, Alan Miller, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, North Battleford Library, and, unwittingly so, by Mary Luger, whose beautiful ranch near Hinton inspired the entirely fictitious Bethel.

  A novel is no place for a scholarly bibliography, but these are just some of the books that inspired me and that might in turn interest this novel’s readers:

  James Gardiner, Who’s A Pretty Boy, Then? 150 Years of Gay Life in Pictures

  Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain 1861–1913

  Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885–1914

  Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture

  Joel Braslow, Mortal Ills and Bodily Cures

  Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound, Sex, Violence, the Law and the Making of a Settler Society

  Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire, Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia 1849–1871

  Jean Okimãsis, Cree, Language of the Plains

  Heather Robertson, Salt of the Earth, the Story of the Homesteaders in Western Canada

  Susan Jackel, ed., A Flannel Shirt and Liberty, British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West 1880–1914

  BETHEL

  A violent and excited patient is forcibly taken by his legs and plunged head foremost into an ordinary swimming bath. He is not permitted the use of his limbs when in the water, but is detained there, or taken out and plunged again in the bath, until the required effect of tranquility is produced.

  L. Forbes Winslow, The Turkish Bath in Mental Disorders (1896)

  Chapter One

  The attendants came for him as a pair, as always. Some of them were kind and meant well. Some were frightened and, like first-timers at a steer branding, hid their fear in swearing and brutality. But this pair was of the most unsettling kind, the sort that ignored him. They were talking to one another as they came for him and continued to talk to one another as they fastened the muff on his wrists and led him along the corridor to the treatment room.

  He was the first in that day, so the echoing room, where even ordinary speech was magnified to a shout, was quiet except for the sound of filling baths. There were eight baths in a row, only three feet apart. From a distance they looked like ordinary baths. Close to, they were revealed as having a kind of hammock slung in the water.

  ‘I don’t need the hammock,’ he told them. ‘Or the muff. If you want me to climb into a bath and lie there, I’ll do it. I don’t need the hammock. Please?’

  Ignoring him, the attendants broke off from their mumbled conversation. One unbuttoned Harry’s pyjama jacket. The other undid the cord on his pyjama trousers so that they dropped to the floor.

  ‘This is to calm you,’ one said, as though reading out an official notice. ‘You’ve been excitable and this is to calm you down.’ He tweaked Harry’s jacket off his shoulders. ‘In you get.’

  ‘I’d much rather have an ordinary bath. Please, not the belts.’

  In a practised movement, one of them seized his ankles while the other took his shoulders and they tipped him and lowered him into the nearest bath so that he was held in the hot water by the hammock. The temperature was high but not unpleasant. It was the loss of control that was unpleasant. One attendant held Harry’s wrists in place near his waist while the other buckled a thick leather belt across his chest. They held his legs in place with a second belt, then they tugged up a thick tarpaulin cover, like a sort of tent, to enclose the bath entirely. There was an opening in this which they brought up around his shoulders and secured about his neck with straps so that as little steam as possible would escape. He was now held, immobile, in the flow of hot water with only his head on view.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

  The attendants wandered away, still talking. They passed two more attendants bringing in someone else who was shouting that they were trying to murder him. When the new man was undressed, he pissed on the attendant crouching in front of him and the ensuing fuss gave him the opportunity to run away. There were curses and yells from the corridor and whistles were blown, then came the muffled sounds of someone being kicked and sat upon.

  The man’s silence, when they brought him back in and secured him in the bath immediately next to Harry’s, was worse than any shouting. And when they left him alone in the running water, he twisted his head so as to stare at Harry, which was more disturbing yet. Harry gazed through the clouds of steam at the taps and the sea-green tiles, and tried to pretend he wasn’t really there.

  ‘I know you,’ the man said, quietly but insistently. ‘I know you I know you I—’

  He woke with a convulsion and sensed his own shout had roused him. He wasn’t in the dormitory. The dormitory had so many bedsteads crammed into it that some, including Harry’s, were in the middle of the room. The bedstead here was iron and painted white, but there the resemblance ended. He was in a small, wood-lined room, painted a calm sky blue and with thick white curtains across the little window. It was simply furnished. There was a rag rug beside the bed and a bedside table with a lamp and matches on it. His boots were on the floor and his coat on a hook above them. A suit that wasn’t his hung on a hanger on the next peg along. On a plain wooden chair was a neat stack of underwear, shirts and socks he knew were not his either.

  Wide awake now, he found water on the washstand in a jug and washed. He stared at his face in the little spotted mirror hanging there. A gaunt stranger stared back at him. He did not remember growing a beard, but, of course, where he had come from there were no razors and no looking glasses either: nothing to wound or inflame.

  Dressing in the spotlessly clean clothes, which fitted him so well he might have been measured for them as he slept, he made an effort to be calm. Breathe, he told himself. Remember to breathe. And he remembered another man’s voice telling him that very thing and had to sit abruptly on the little bed to compose himself, so acute and ambivalent was the memory stirred.

  Venturing out into dazzling morning light, he would have thought he had woken in a kind of heaven, were it not for the lingering sense that hell was flickering just out of sight, whichever way he turned his gaze. He knew he had been in hell. He had livid marks on his wrists and ankles where restraints had cut and bruised his flesh, and when he moved his back, it still ached from blows and kicks that had rained upon it.

  Earlier than that, before hell, his memories were more damaged still. These memories lay in rooms he couldn’t enter. In the quiet moments of lucidity between baths, he had approached them closely enough to sense they were wrapped in a grief so powerful that even to put his hand on the doorknobs would fry his skin.

  Now he was in a river valley with lush grass cropped by sheep and a couple of languid cows, running down to a broad, brown river on whose powerful current he had already seen several fallen trees sail past from left to right. Great ranges of blue iced mountains lay to either side, their lower slopes thickly forested. A church bell rang somewhere off to the left. The beauty of it, the intensity of the colours and the relative silence, overwhelmed him for a moment and he sat on a little bench to recover.

  He was not insane, although he felt sure the experience
of being treated as though he were would soon have deprived him of his wits had it continued much longer. He looked up, attention snagged by a buzzard’s cry. I know a hawk from a handsaw, he thought. It was an asylum, not a prison, where he had been, but he had been deprived of liberty, and, so far as he knew, without trial.

  The attendants had come for him as usual, after breakfast, and he had assumed that the endless, soul-eroding process of pacifying him by water treatments was to continue. He marginally preferred the cold wrap to the continuous bath, if only because it was administered in a smaller room where he had precious peace and quiet, provided he didn’t begin to shout out in a panic. If anything, though, it was even more constraining than the bath, involving as it did being tightly wrapped in a sheet dipped in cold water, around which were wound two more sheets, a rubber mat and then a blanket, before he was left secured to a wire bed frame, sometimes for three hours, quietly dripping first with water, then with sweat.

  Today, however, he wasn’t to have a treatment.

  ‘You’re going on a journey,’ one of them told him. ‘Young Mr Ormshaw has picked you to help with his research, so we need you nice and quiet.’

  They rolled up his sleeve and administered an injection that was clearly a powerful sedative, for by the time they had given him socks to wear and handed him back his old boots and overcoat, he was so foggy in the head that he couldn’t have spoken any of the questions that crowded his mind.

  His little cabin had a shaded terrace on one side of it. It was one of several such, clearly built from identical kits, arranged in a half-circle before a large log-framed house that resembled some fanciful idea of a Tyrolean chalet and on to whose veranda he half expected chorus girls to emerge in dirndls, holding hoops of paper flowers and singing of love and springtime.

  For it was springtime, which was presumably why the river was so mightily in spate. The greening woods behind him were full of birdsong and, sitting on his terrace, he watched birds, chipmunks and squirrels darting back and forth on the grass, going about the exhausting spring business of putting on fat and finding a mate.