A Girl in Winter (12 page)

But there was nothing to say. Robin, with an abstracted air, broke off a cornflower growing through a gate and drew it deliberately into his buttonhole. They continued their walk.

There was no more bother from Jane. During the rest of that day, they only saw her at mealtimes, when she was as uncommunicative as usual. Otherwise she avoided them as a singed cat avoids the hearth.

But Katherine had returned from the walk puzzled. Nothing notable had happened after Jane left them. If she had expected an onset of personalities, she was
disappointed
: he did not as much as refer to the fact that they were at last alone, alone without merely awaiting a meal, or a bus, or Jane herself. They had certainly kept up a sort of bi-lingual banter, but it had got them nowhere. Robin would ride boldly up to a subject, like one of the entries in the gymkhana, and then stop dead in front of it; nothing she could say would bring him a step further forward. She was bewildered. What was
he playing at? He had invited her. She had come. For two weeks out of the three he had submitted to the uneasy threesome. Now he had got rid of Jane, so that they could be alone. She had consented, at the risk of seeming
unpardonably
rude; she laid herself open, ready to follow any pace he made. What was he waiting for, then; why the aimlessness, the tentative explorations of the
already-known
, the advances that weren’t worth making, the sudden full stops?

As it happened, they were not alone much the rest of that day. Some visitors called and they were required to meet them; Robin played whist in the evening. Katherine was pinned for a time by a woman belonging to something called the League of Nations’ Union, which gave her enough to think about. In the intervals she looked at Robin longingly, even while annoyed admiring his flexible company manners, that never for a moment, not even when handing round sandwiches, degenerated into
servility
. Occasionally she smiled at him ruefully, and he smiled back at her, only with a certain lack of edge that suggested he did not quite take her meaning.

But when the visitors had gone, and the noise of their car died away, he strolled back into the lounge where Katherine was shuffling the cards together and studying the unfamiliar patterns, the knaves, queens, and kings. The room was littered with glasses and ash-trays, and there was plenty of smoke in the air.

“What a fug,” he said, looking round. He unlocked the french window and opened it onto the still night, so that a mild coolness drifted in, and a faint weedy smell of the river. There was still a streak of yellow in the west. She sat on the sofa watching him.

“Look,” he said, with a small toss of the head that
suggested
his collar was too tight. “We’ve never taken you to Oxford yet. After all, that’s the real show-spot. Shall we go, tomorrow?”

“Yes, I want to go very much.”

She remembered how Jane had mentioned this on her first morning—Jane, who would not now come with them. As he stood against the open window, Katherine felt a moment of delighted thankfulness that he was accepting her love. For a second or two she had been puzzled, uneasy. But it seemed to her now that his odd behaviour was no less than the working-out of some pre-arranged plan, in which this last visit had a ceremonious place, depending on a chain of emotions she had not detected in him. She should not regard him as insensitive: there might be much she had not noticed. And because he was too shy to say he liked her, he was letting his actions speak for him till he should have the courage to do so himself.

She went to bed feeling satisfied for once.

There was a bus at ten to nine the next morning, and another at ten to eleven. They decided to get up rather earlier and catch the first one, and in consequence
breakfasted
with Mr. and Mrs. Fennel. She did not see Jane till she was on her way downstairs ready to go, and then Jane came out of the breakfast room dressed oddly in a white high-necked sweater, a freshly-lighted cigarette between her lips. She slightly resembled a doll. They eyed each other silently. Then Katherine said “Good morning” and Jane nodded.

She was glad to get away from the house: it was a relief to take her seat by Robin on the upper deck of the bus. He was dressed in an open-necked shirt, and a
biscuit-coloured
jacket; a light canvas haversack hung from his shoulder, as if he were bringing their lunch with them, although there was no need for it. Diffused sunlight gleamed on the outhouses and farmyard walls built of local stone; it was just another week-day morning, with shoppers travelling with them, and shirt-sleeved men working in the yards, building ricks.

She had resolved that morning to let Robin handle the outing as he pleased, and to attend not to her own wishes but to his suggestions. For now there was no hurry. They had all the day to themselves, and for the moment she was content just with his company. She would let him arrange things. The bus ran on.

Mainly to make conversation, she said:

“Jane is rather a strange person, isn’t she?”

“Sometimes,” he answered, briefly and lightly.

“Is she much older than you are?”

“She’s twenty-five.”

“As old as that!” Twenty-five was practically
middle-aged
. “No!”

“She’s nine years older than I am, yes,” said Robin. “I know she looks younger.”

“What does she do?”

“Do? Nothing much. At one time she used to help Father, but I fancy she was more trouble than she was worth. She went to evening classes for a bit.”

The bus swooped along, branches scraping on the windows.

“There is nothing she wants to do, then?”

“There may be, I don’t know.” He struggled into a more upright position. “She is strange, as you say. I don’t know much about her. If you watch carefully, we ought to be seeing some of the spires from here.”

She obeyed. But the one or two visionary glimpses she caught over the tree-tops were swiftly rubbed away by their eventual approach through very matter-of-fact streets. They were set down on a wide pavement by an antique-dealer’s shop, whose freshly-scrubbed step had not yet dried. The pale sun was just warming the fronts of buildings, and there was plenty of traffic; the air smelt fresh and clean. Katherine, who was by upbringing a town dweller, felt her spirits rise.

“And where is the university?” she said.

Robin laughed. “Everywhere. Everything you see or touch.”

She stared. They strolled slowly up the street while he explained the collegiate system, and then as they
automatically
began the rounds of the graceful triangles, squares and circles of the college buildings, he began to tell of what she saw. Though he knew probably no more than one-fiftieth of what a standard guidebook contained, it was enough to keep up a continuous quiet chatting that she found restful. Actually she was disappointed with the city, for what she had heard about it led her to believe that to enter it would be like stepping back into the Middle Ages: as it was, she found so many shops and taxicabs that she thought there were more medieval towns in her own country. But, as he continued to recite the litany of
monasteries
, kings, noblemen and prelates, she realized that every century had left accretions, and though she did not trouble to follow his details, she was impressed by the uniqueness of the place, where such variety was controlled within a single atmosphere. In the intervals he allowed her she did a little unpremeditated shopping, buying a small bowl with a map of ancient Oxford in the centre, a handbag, a cigarette-case, and an elaborate ring from an antique shop that was reassuringly expensive. Since coming to England she had spent hardly any money. The other things she would take back as presents, but she decided to keep the ring herself.

Robin was in the best of humours. She could feel that he was as proud of Oxford as if it belonged to him. It was almost irritating, the way he kept informing her that this or that building was three or four or five hundred years old, from the reign of James or Henry or Edward, as if extracting whole plums from an over-rich cake. The very public-houses, where old men held curling matches to their pipes, had stood for centuries: this dated from Tudor times, here Shakespeare had often slept on his way from
Stratford to London. He was not simply trying to impress a foreign visitor: he was more like a millionaire who
cannot
refrain from saying how much everything that he owns has cost him, with a certain fascinated awe. For his sake she tried to feel as he did. But she found that when they were walking down a broad, tree-shaded avenue, lined with hurdles, she did not much care that these meadows had been given to the cathedral to maintain a chantry by a noblewoman whose tomb he had pointed out to her. It pleased her more that they could walk
together
in such a pleasant place, going towards the river and hearing the cattle tearing up grass nearby, and when they sat down eventually to rest at the side of the water, she leaned back and thought that as far as age was
concerned
, sheer age that was almost timelessness, the sound of the trees was more impressive. The surrounding
tree-tops
settling and unsettling with an endless sifting of leaves reminded her as she lay with closed eyes of the unceasing wash of waves round the shingle of an island. They filled the air with whispering of eternity, or as near eternity as made no matter, making this place, famous as it was, like all other places. Like all other places, it was both temporal and eternal, and she found that degrees of temporality did not interest her—while in eternity, of course, there were no such measurements.

She sat up and looked at Robin. He had relapsed beside her with his head on the haversack, eyes closed; his face wore an expression of patience. She leaned over and stroked a lock of his hair into place, at which his eyes, in the shadow of her arm, opened wide.

“Wake up,” she said.

“I wasn’t asleep.” He sat up quickly as if it had begun to rain. For a moment they sat side by side, then he scrambled to his feet. “If you’ve rested, we might
perhaps
be getting on.”

Katherine realized at once—though too late—that she
had made an advance he would not receive, and she scrambled up blushing—blushing and bewildered. He had behaved almost as if she had scared him, and it had shaken the whole day off its course. What was the matter with him? Was she doing any more than she had done, showing him that she loved him? And if at that moment he didn’t want her to, hadn’t he enough poise to treat her better than this? Almost she was pushed back on the fear that he was indifferent to her, but then, why ask her, why manœuvre so that they were alone?

She followed him sulkily on their solemn pilgrimage. The whole day was being spoiled.

But there was worse to come. They finished their tour just before lunch by climbing to the top of the Radcliffe Camera. They climbed in silence, coming out onto the balcony from which they could see the whole elaborately chiselled and buttressed panorama of Oxford spread out beneath them, like the decorations on an enormous iced cake. Robin said something vague about James Gibbs, and leaned on the balustrade. Together they looked at the slate roofs, the spires, and the hills in the distance, backed with clouds.

The sun had gone in, and a light rain began to fall in the wind. Robin straightened up regretfully, and, looking round the sky with a knowledgeable air, said: “I half expected this.” He swung the haversack to his hand, and drew out a thin mackintosh, folded small, which he held while she put it on. “Lucky I did. Shall we go and have lunch, and give it a chance to blow over?”

“All right.”

She was fumbling in the pockets: there were gloves. When they emerged at the bottom of the dark stairway, she pulled one out and inspected it casually. It was old and wrinkled, and one of the fingers had become
unstitched
. Looking inside, she found the neat red-and-white tab “Jane R. Fennel”.

It was silly to mind. But she could have thrown it at him.

For there seemed something supremely callous in the situation. Robin was quite indifferent to both of them, showing that he had no notion of the battle he had
contrived
and won. This showed that he was not alert to every stir of emotion around him, as she was; showed in fact that she had been constructing an elaborate pagoda out of nothing, and the shame she now felt was a punishment for this. In fact she could not have made a bigger fool of herself if she had tried carefully. At that moment she hated England and everybody in it—this would never have happened if she could have understood all the foreign inflexions and shades of meaning. The idea of the
afternoon
still untouched made her sick, and the conversation at lunch she could anticipate so well: Robin, composed and unconcerned, was turning up his collar against the rain, to reveal a strip of plain lining under the lapels. All she could think of that she would welcome doing would be to make some sort of apology to Jane, who had offered far more friendship and had been treated very poorly. Otherwise she would have been glad to go home. The rest of the week did not bear thinking about.

She found Jane in the garden when they returned shortly after six. It had rained steadily until half an hour ago, and now the sun shone again. Robin had gone
upstairs
to change, having got rather wet waiting for the bus; Katherine passed through the empty lounge, came out on the terrace and saw Jane’s bright shirt moving among the lupins. She was tying up a peony that had broken in the force of the shower.

Katherine hesitated a moment to watch her, as she worked with sullen persistence. Now she was actually here, she felt less eager to apologize; the desire had come in the first place from a longing to set everything right, so that she could extricate herself, as one might pay a bill
before
leaving a hotel. But it might lead to nothing of the sort. She contemplated Jane’s neat shoulders, her small head made to look smaller by the tidily-brushed dark hair. More likely it would precipitate more entanglements, more commitments, clumsy and unsatisfying because she could not fathom what these English people meant. But if it only meant publicly dissociating herself from Robin—and it meant more than that—she would have to do it.

So she went down the steps and turned across the lawn. Jane looked up without any surprise or pleasure.

“Hallo,” she said.

“We came back,” said Katherine. “It rained all the time.”

“It rained pretty hard here.” Jane did not seem interested enough to avoid the obvious.

“All the afternoon. We went to a cinema.”

“Oh yes? What did you see?”

“I really don’t remember.”

She waited till Jane had finished tying the raffia and cut off the loose ends. Other flowers brushed beads of water onto her skirt as she worked. It was quite plain that she would go not a step towards meeting her.

When Jane had got off the flower-bed, Katherine took a deep breath.

“I want to apologize for offending you yesterday.”

Jane glanced at her with mixed surprise and boredom. Her face had become slightly sunburned, and there were a few untrimmed whiskers round her mouth.

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” she said.

“I truly did not mean to be rude.”

“There’s no need to apologize.”

Jane looked so small and sensible standing there that Katherine almost believed her.

“But you were offended, weren’t you?” she asked uncertainly.

Jane made a slight distasteful gesture. “Can’t we let it drop?” she said.

“But I never meant to be rude,” Katherine persisted.

“There’s no need to worry,” said Jane, with a hint of sarcasm. “I accept your apology.”

Having brought herself to apologize, Katherine was irritated by Jane’s bland refusal to accept it. In spite of herself, she said: “You behave like Robin,” which was an insult according to her present mood.

“How do you think you’re behaving?” said Jane, so softly and swiftly that Katherine hardly heard what she said. After a moment she went off to mend another peony. The heavy crimson head shook water over her hands.

Katherine was taken aback by this sudden attack: she would have found it difficult to deal with in her own language. Now she stood helpless. The rain had brought out the snails, and there was one crawling tenderly over the base of a stone bird-bath, turning its horns from side to side.

“I will explain all we said,” she re-began weakly.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jane. “It doesn’t matter to me just exactly how rude you were.”

“I was not rude—I did not say——”

Jane shrugged her shoulders.

“You shall understand!” exclaimed Katherine. “We said——”

“I understand you wanted to get me out of the way,” said Jane, and Katherine stopped speaking, to give her every courtesy. “But I must say it didn’t occur to me. Two is company, of course.”

Katherine flushed. However right Jane was, there was no excuse for this hypocrisy. “Well, that was your business.”

“But that isn’t the way visitors usually——” Jane
stopped
, pulled up by Katherine’s answer. “It was nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, wasn’t it? I am not as stupid as all that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You needn’t worry that your valuable Robin will

“What do I care about Robin?” asked Jane, speaking from sheer wonder.

“Oh!” said Katherine irritably. “Shall we forget all about it? It’s rather a boring subject. I only want to apologize.”

Jane looked at her evenly, narrowing her eyes in the strong light. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I don’t
understand
. What has Robin been saying about me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then where have you got this notion?”

“What notion?” said Katherine, obstinately.

“That I was supposed to keep an eye on you and Robin.”

“It was so clear I could see it for myself.”

“But do you think we should ever … But why?”

Katherine disliked being thus cross-examined.

“You are older than we are,” she said. “You came with us wherever we went. And you found it boring, so there must have been another reason.”

“It’s almost laughable,” said Jane. She turned away.

“I’m sorry to mention it,” said Katherine, wondering if it had been an error in taste. “But you made it plain to me.”

“You mean you couldn’t see what I was doing here at all?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“And why should there be an explanation—why shouldn’t I go about with you, seeing that this is my own house?”

“Why should you,” said Katherine. “You don’t want to. You’re older than we are. It’s a waste of your time.”

“Well, you’ve got a pretty low opinion of yourself,” said Jane, with a breathless snatch of laughter. She wound the raffia in her hands. “Don’t you think your company worth keeping?”

Katherine said nothing, being ignorant of the phrase and suspecting it was sarcastic.

“Well then, I’m sorry to have plagued you,” Jane went on after a moment. “I’d no idea I was turning into a maiden aunt already. Thank you for telling me.”

“I didn’t mean that!” said Katherine. “I’m certain that I don’t want to be with Robin all the time, and I expect he feels the same.”

“What’s the matter with him?” said Jane casually. “Isn’t he as extraordinary as you thought?”

“
I
never——” Katherine then caught the reference, and felt rather silly. “He’s all right. Why did he ask me, though? For the pleasure of improving my mind, or to get some language lessons?”

She said this recklessly, to make her own feelings clear, and thought afterwards that Jane might take offence. However, she did not. She looked at Katherine with weary amusement.

“Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“That Robin asked you because I made him?”

Katherine stared at her. She repeated the sentence to herself several times, wondering if she had failed to shake out the right meaning.

“What do you mean?”

“Robin invited you because I asked him to,” Jane repeated. She leaned against the back of a garden seat.

“But why?”

“I thought it’d amuse you, and it’d be fun to have you here.”

“Do you mean that he didn’t want me to come?”

“Oh no!” Jane released the seat, and smoothed her hair, lifting her sharp elbows. “Just that he didn’t think of it.”

Katherine was beginning to see the light. At first she had thought Jane was telling a desperate lie for some reason or other, because she could not believe it. But as soon as she had thought twice about it, she saw how fatally obvious it all was. For two weeks she had exercised her imagination in building up theories based on the fact that Robin had invited her, and trying to hide from herself the dissatisfaction she felt with them. This was what was wrong with them. Robin had not asked her at all.

“Well!” she said. “This is very extraordinary. I wish you had told me earlier. May I ask, then, who did invite me?”

“I’ve told you,” said Jane. “I did. Which incidentally is why I was such an efficient chaperon. Glory.” She chuckled slightly. “Like chaperoning the British Museum. How marvellous.”

Katherine looked at her closely. “Then why did you ask me?” she demanded. “To see what the savages were like?”

“No. I wanted to meet you.”

“But you knew nothing about me.”

“There were your letters.”

“But I only wrote——” Katherine stopped. “You read them?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did he show them to you?”

“If I asked him, yes.”

“Oh!” Katherine struggled to speak through her annoyance. “You had no right!”

“Why not?” said Jane. “There was nothing personal in them.” She picked a grass-stalk and began nibbling it.

“That does not matter—if—— He should have told me! It was wrong of him—and you too.”

“Don’t worry. I was a far more appreciative audience than he was.”

“I wanted no audiences!”

Jane looked at her meditatively, and blew a piece of husk from her mouth with a crisp sound.

“I’ll explain,” she said. “We seem to have been at pretty fair cross-purposes all along.”

“I am not to blame for that.”

“I was interested when Robin began writing to you,” said Jane. “It was about the only thing he’s done I should have liked to do myself.” She was silent for a moment. “I think it would be fascinating to write to
somebody
who didn’t know you, who’d never seen you, even, and who didn’t even live in the same country. You could tell them anything, and it wouldn’t matter: you could make out you were all sorts of things you weren’t, and they wouldn’t know any different. Or you could tell them the truth, and see how they took it. I suppose it would be rather like confessing to a priest.” She looked at Katherine, as if prepared for her to laugh.

“Well, it isn’t,” said Katherine, simmering down. “It’s rather boring.”

“You’re thinking of Robin,” said Jane rather
impatiently
. They began to walk up and down the small lawn. “Supposing by chance you’d struck someone different—someone you really liked—someone you felt understood what you said. Don’t you see what I mean?—how
wonderful
it would be to be able to tell them everything, and be certain that they’d never—I mean, that they’d be so remote and away from it all.”

Katherine said she understood. She was doubtful if she did.

“Well anyhow, that was what I thought when Robin began writing to you. I didn’t think for a moment he’d strike anyone worth while.” She paused to rattle a
poppy-head
, full of seeds. “But as a matter of fact you turned out rather well, not that Robin noticed it.”

“In what way?” said Katherine sarcastically, cross with this last remark.

“I mean, what you wrote was so interesting. I read the parts in English, and Robin translated the rest,” she added as explanation. “It interested me no end. What you did, how you lived, what you felt about things —just ordinary things—all as if you’d known us’—Robin, anyway—for years. Yet so strange.” She paused to think, as if conscious of giving the wrong impression. “You didn’t write pages of description—Lord knows what drivel Robin «was sending back—but for all that I felt I knew you perfectly well. And it was all so natural; you weren’t trying to make an impression.”

Oh, wasn’t I, thought Katherine. Wasn’t I!

“So you see,” Jane finished, “I couldn’t help thinking that just by accident Robin had—well”—her casual tone became harder and she spoke as if afraid Katherine might laugh at her—“well, that Robin had struck exactly the kind of person I should have liked to know myself.”

“Why didn’t you write to me, then?” said Katherine, catching her self-consciousness.

“I couldn’t, really.” Jane gestured. “You’d have thought I was mad. I thought the best thing to do,” she went on, speaking quicker as if to get out a discreditable confession, “was to get Robin to ask you here for a holiday. Then I could meet you and see what you were like and if we got on well I might have written when you got back. I hoped we should get on well,” she ended, raising her eyebrows and looking downwards. They had reached the seat again. Katherine kicked it softly. Even she could connect the last sentence with what had happened the previous day.

But she felt bound to make some protest. She found what Jane had said hard to believe, partly because she had never felt anything of the kind herself, and partly as one is not moved by even a poem in a foreign language. And as Jane spoke almost dispassionately, she found
herself
unconvinced.

“But——”

“You think all this sounds very silly.”

“No. No! but—but what did Robin think of all this?” This was not the question she meant to ask, but it would gain time.

“I don’t think he knew. I never mentioned it.” She looked downwards again. “This seat isn’t dry enough to sit on. Shall we go indoors?”

“If you like.”

They went up the steps to the still, close lounge. Dust sparkled in the sunbeams. The clock said five to seven.

Katherine sat on the sofa. She was bewildered. When she had written her letters she had barely known that Jane existed, and now she was asked to believe that the nets she had contrived so cunningly to capture Robin had succeeded down to the last syllable in snaring Jane. Apart from not believing it, she found the suggestion absurd. She had no feelings for Jane at all. And it was ridiculous that she should affect a person she did not care about. Besides—the impossibilities thronged upon her—she was sixteen, while Jane was twenty-five, middle-aged, and foreign, too.

“But I can’t see,” she said haltingly, “why—
you
—bothered.”

Jane was leaning against the piano lighting a cigarette.

“I suppose it is rather difficult to understand,” she said. The weariness had come back into her voice. “I wonder if I can explain.”

She shut her eyes a moment. “Put it this way,” she said.
“I get so bored that things are apt to get out of
proportion
.” She looked at Katherine, to see if she understood.

“You get bored,” said Katherine, to show she did.

“Yes, bored!” said Jane, with a sudden flash of temper, flicking her cigarette needlessly, and moving to the
bookcase
. “And that sounds silly, too. What have I got to be bored about? I’m healthy, I’m not starving, I live in a perfectly good house. Silly, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’ve only been doing it ten years,” she ended with a touch of juvenile sarcasm.