A Girl in Winter (13 page)

Katherine realized at last with relief that Jane was going to talk about herself. That explained it. She had had these conversations before, when people had caught her interest by paying her compliments, and then had held her to confess their self-centred immaturities. This was like all the rest. She settled down to listen, a little disappointed, nevertheless, that they were not going to talk about herself.

“Tell me,” she said.

Jane moved from the bookcase to the gramophone, and fingered a record as if she half-intended putting it on.

“I don’t know if I can,” she said at last. “There doesn’t seem anything to tell. I left school when I was sixteen, because it seemed no use staying on there. As you’ve no doubt gathered, Robin has the brains of the family. So I came back and lived at home.” She put down the record, and played with a little brush kept to clean them. “They stuck me for about a year and a half. Then it was decided I ought to do something. So I went to a technical college to learn shorthand and that sort of thing. We typed for hours. When I was considered to know enough, Father got me into an office of a friend of his, an insurance office, and I worked there for nearly a year.” She drifted on to the fireplace, and tapped ash into an ornament. “Then they said politely but firmly that they had to reduce staff, and I had to go. I wasn’t very surprised, as I was quite
hopeless, but it was rather a slap in the face.” She laughed. “They were probably only speaking the truth, because of the slump, but I didn’t realize that at the time. So I went and messed around in Father’s office while he tried to find me another job. That was worse than the insurance place, because I hadn’t anything definite to do, and people felt I had no business there. Of course, he didn’t pay me much. In the end, he couldn’t find anyone silly enough to take me—who would take a half-trained nincompoop?—so I said I was sick of the whole thing and came back to ‘help mother’. Since then I’ve gone on helping her.”

She finished, rocking to and fro on the fender.

“But your father—he would help you to do anything you wanted to do, wouldn’t he?” said Katherine
uncertainly
.

“Oh yes. But you see there isn’t anything I want to do.”

Katherine said nothing. Jane moved on, straightening some flowers on the window-sill. A petal fell off.

“Careers for women,” said Jane. She took up the petal and tore it. “What about women that don’t want careers? In the old days, I suppose, we should have an enormous family and I should quietly turn into a sort of unpaid housekeeper. Aunt Jane and what-not.” She threw the bits of petal into the coal bucket. “But nowadays nobody forces me to do anything like that, and there’s nothing I want to do, so the answer’s simple. I don’t do anything. Now understand this,” she added, as Katherine seemed about to say something. “It’s the whole point. I’m not lazy, I’m not even scared of the big world and all the rest of it—and heaven knows I should like to pay for my keep instead of just sponging. I can even kid myself for as long as three weeks that I’m thrilled with something and want to go on doing it—though I don’t know if I still can, I haven’t tried lately. But then I get so sickened—” She shook a curtain straight. “And then I sometimes hear of people
I was at school with, getting fresh appointments or being married or something. I can remember some of them. They weren’t very special. But at least … And then there’s Robin. He appals me sometimes. Or rather, he makes me appalled at myself—because I know they’re right, you see. They’ve got this desire to—well, it’s hardly that; I mean it seems quite natural for them to peg along and do things, they don’t give it a second thought. But I don’t see any
point
in it,” said Jane, giving the
piano-lid
a soft blow.

“You might get married,” said Katherine tentatively.

“No, you don’t understand,” said Jane in an irritated voice. She put her hands on her hips. “I mean everything, all the things I might do. I might get married, I might start shorthand-typing again, I might even go in a factory or be a waitress, I might even stay on here. Don’t you see? Just because I don’t see any point in doing anything, it doesn’t mean I see any point in doing nothing. Oh——” She turned as if tired of her own voice, and sat on the piano stool, the sun coming in over her shoulders. The smoke from her cigarette was grey in the sunlight.

“Besides,” she threw out as an afterthought, “if you don’t see any point in getting married, nobody’s going to marry you. I know that all right. They’d as soon marry a Zulu.”

“The question to ask yourself,” said Katherine
carefully
, after a long pause, during which Jane tossed her cigarette through the open french windows, “is: what would you do if you had a million pounds?”

“Sounds pretty stupid,” said Jane. “What should I do if I lived on the moon?”

“It might help you to make up your mind.”

“But I haven’t got a mind to make up—oh well,” said Jane, rising and starting to rove round the room once more, “I might travel, I suppose. I might like that.”

“Where would you go?”

“Europe, Russia, America. Nowhere hot. Move on as soon as one got bored.” The idea did not seem to attract her much. “I don’t know,” she said. “It beats me. You know, I thought once before you came that if we became friends, I’d tell you all this, and ask you what you thought about it. I suppose I should have told you anyway.” She sighed. “What do you think about it?”

Katherine had an extraordinary idea. She did not know where it came from, unless for the last few minutes she had been taking Jane seriously. It was that she should suggest that Jane came back with her, to her home. She could stay there for six months or even a year as a paying guest; live with them, learn the language, make friends, do more or less as she pleased. Her parents, who were intellectual and given to strange actions, would probably not object. There was a room for her. Even if it made no lasting change, it would amuse her till the novelty wore off. For a moment it seemed brilliantly sane. Then all at once it appeared melodramatic. Jane would turn down the
suggestion
at once; it was presumptuous to think that she could play the fairy-godmother like that. Jane was not seriously asking advice of her: she simply wanted to talk. If there were anything to be done, her father would do it, for he had money enough. Or at least, it would be silly to make the offer straight off. She would have to ask her own parents first; it would be far better to wait, and then
perhaps
suggest it in a letter. It was not a thing to blurt out. She collected herself.

“And you really have no money?”

“About a hundred pounds.”

“Then it’s quite clear,” said Katherine, laughing. “It’s marriage or nothing.”

“I suppose so. But who?”

“Oh, a foreigner,” said Katherine, stretching her legs. “To take you away. Someone opposite to you.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Jane, as if bidding farewell to the subject. “That is, if you’re serious.”

“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

“Deathly,” said Jane, laughing too.

And here matters came to a halt, no longer puzzling, no longer leading on her imagination. She found herself suddenly in unremarkable surroundings, friendly with two unremarkable young English people, at her leisure in their well-appointed house. When Jane had been speaking to her so sincerely and desperately, she had supposed that they would naturally become more closely dependent on each other, but Jane never referred to the subject again and Katherine had no wish to bring it up. She knew that these confessions are their own reward, and imagined Jane was now at ease. Her voice had been like that of a chess-player, explaining after defeat the tactics with which she had intended to gain victory: her manner had all the sterile quality of one who has never lain open to another. Nor was Jane’s anger mentioned: the three of them went about together as before, though Robin still insisted in talking to her in her own language.

It was odd to find Robin’s manner warming towards her. At the beginning of her visit he had been reserved, making sure his dark rambling hair was always carefully combed, springing to hold doors open, making sure
everything
they did was to her liking. Now he relaxed, and, when her interest in him had nearly died out, became
unceremonious
, casually bold. He lounged around in dirty trousers and no socks. He no longer had a special voice for her—articulate and precise—and he no longer treated
her like royalty. Because her daydreams were over, and her over-heated fancy extinct, she paid no attention to this, but occasionally she could have sworn he had taken on a half-flirting tone. He had a trick of laughing at her, not looking away, and of taking her arm familiarly now and again, that she could not but notice.

Well, it was nice of him, but a little late. She thought fantastically that he had caught the tail-end of her four-days’ love and was manfully doing his best. She was more concerned with trying to forget her embarrassing
behaviour
when she had been trying to coax him out into a non-existent open. That made her blush deeply, and was something she would never tell her friends.

But what was she going to tell them? She could already imagine the scene. After a decorous tea-time, the three—or perhaps four—of them would retreat to the bedroom, where there would be chocolates. The nightdress-case, shaped like a woolly dog, would be stuck rakishly on the mantelpiece so that at least two of them could sit on the bed. And then: “Well, Katherine dear, let us have the whole story.” What was she going to tell them? “We played tennis, and I won.” “We went on the river, and I lost the pole.” “We went to Oxford, and it rained all the time.” And what would they say? “Did you go lots of bicycle rides?” Well, as a matter of fact she had been a fair number. “And you saw St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey?” That was true, too. “And he made you give him language lessons?” She could not deny even that. “And of course you never went near a dance-hall or a theatre or a beer-garden all the time you were there!” No, it was really rather appalling, how terrible they would make it sound. Yet had it been terrible? On the evidence, yes. On her own feelings? She was not sure.

For not all the holiday had depended on how Robin had behaved, or what he had said, or how Jane had acted. There were moments when she was alone that compensated
for them. There was a time when she could not sleep, so she had leant out of her window to look at the moonlight, and the smell of the stocks and wallflowers had made her dizzy. In the mornings she liked to hear the men calling to the horses, and the explosive threadbare calls of the roosters. She loved the extraordinary soft greenness of the landscape, and the way hills were capped with dark green woods. She remembered with pleasure how she had found a child squalling in a lane, and had stopped its crying by talking to it, though it had probably been as much
dumbfounded
as comforted. But it had laughed eventually. And there was a grave in the churchyard that fascinated her, ornate and Jacobean, with four angels, an urn, and a
grinning
skull, all worn away by the continual weather that had beaten it for three hundred years. She did not ask Robin whose it was, and dreaded lest he should tell her. But there had been an evening or two when she had sat by it in the deep grass, able to look down towards the village on the one hand, and down towards the river on the other. The moon had risen not with freshly-minted brightness, but with almost a bloom, like a ripe fruit, and when the landscape was dusky touched the mist to
pearl-colour
. As she sat there she noticed a cat sitting ten yards off by another headstone, and sometimes the cat looked at her, and yawned, as if they both happened to be waiting on the same street corner. She had had to go home and leave the cat still there.

These, and other things that she no longer remembered, made her feel that in some way she had taken possession of that summer there. Once she had thought that for them, too, she would remain inextricably embedded in their recollections, and be referred to as a date—“the year Katherine came”; “the summer Katherine was here”. But on the whole this was unlikely. For she had asked:

“Robin, do you have many people to stay with you?”

They were walking up towards the main road, where they would intercept Jack Stormalong’s car. The weather was humid, a foretaste of autumn. The blackberries were ripening in the hedges, and earthenware bowls of red and yellow plums stood in the kitchen, ready for jam-making. Jane had stayed indoors because of this—or had it been something to do with moths discovered in the spare-room blankets? She had not been clear. At any rate, they were alone.

“Well, most of our friends are family friends, if you know what I mean,” he replied. She did. The
watered-down
relationship was typical of them. “I suppose a fair number, by the end of the summer.”

“And this Jack we are going to meet—has he been here before?”

“Rather. We’ve known him for ages. His father and my father were in the army together.”

“He’ll be surprised to find me here,” said Katherine.

“No, why should he? He’s used to finding other people here. And you’re almost one of the family.”

“It would be amusing if I were,” said Katherine absently. “Don’t you think families with a foreign side are more interesting? They become much stronger. And the one branch can help the other.”

“That’s what the Jews think, isn’t it,” he said rather distantly.

Jack Stormalong was in high spirits. He had driven from somewhere—Tewkesbury? Newbury? Aylesbury?—in sixty-five minutes by his shockproof wristwatch, his dashboard clock being out of order like all dashboard clocks. The engine of his dark crimson sports car roared hoarsely as he whisked them back home again, explaining to Robin that he was using a new kind of juice. He had no difficulty in making himself heard above the noise of the engine.

His introduction to Katherine was not fortunate. He greeted her loudly and asked her a question she could not follow: she realized suddenly that her conversance with English depended a good deal on being accustomed to the Fennels’ voices. This made an awkward gap in the
conversation
till Robin straightened it out, and Katherine found herself blushing. He looked at her with an expression of arrested benevolence as if she had said something improper. She noticed that his two middle top teeth pushed each other outward and formed an
arc
brisé.

His arrival put her rather into the background, and for the moment she was not sorry, finding it amusing to see another guest welcomed as she had been. Also she had subconsciously been waiting for this new visitor ever since she heard he was coming. Her sensation that there should be somebody else had never quite left her. But she did not know what she had expected, and certainly Jack
Stormalong
made very little appeal to her. When they assembled in the lounge before dinner to drink some sherry in honour of his arrival, she expanded her initial rebuff into dislike. He would be about twenty-five, with short, oiled hair that waved slightly in front, a face neither handsome nor ugly, that spoke of little but a sense of his own authority—a military face, such as she was used to seeing above the high collars of cadets in her own country, offering peace but not friendship on certain terms. He was over six feet tall and very strong. He shook hands warmly with Mr. Fennel, whom he called “sir”, and, carrying a glass of pale sherry to Jane, said “Hello, Jane” in a low,
affectionate
voice, gripping her right arm momentarily just below the shoulder, which caused her slightly to stagger. Katherine kept out of his reach, sitting quietly on the piano stool.

With increasing annoyance she noticed however that his arrival put the Fennels in good spirits. With her they were attentive, kind, relaxed: now, matched with a
different partner, they grew sunny, skilful, almost
flickering
as the conversation at dinner played lightly around garden-pests, even Jane joining in, and Jack Stormalong demonstrated that it was perfectly easy to eat and hold up one end of a conversation at the same time. There was no doubt that he was more of a success than she had been. He took it for granted that he was at home there: he
embarked
on long anecdotes, sipping at the wine, and after each sip redirecting his discourse to a different person. Only he never said anything to Katherine. When they brought her into the conversation he forced himself to take notice of her, blinking his cold blue eyes once or twice. It was not quite as if they had introduced the maid into the discussion, but all the same he seemed disconcerted.

Robin was very attentive to him. Perhaps by contrast, he seemed more boyish than usual; he asked questions about fishing and the sports car that Jack Stormalong answered with good-humoured superiority, as if speaking to a younger brother. Katherine, in whom Robin had never shown such interest, grew sulky, and let the babble go on without bothering to follow it. At the end of the meal Robin finished by suggesting that while they were all there a photograph should be taken, and Katherine knew that he would not have suggested it for her sake. However, she followed the party out onto the small lawn while Robin went upstairs to find the camera.

“There ought to be a couple of films left,” said Mr. Fennel, flattening worm-casts with the toe of his shoe. “When did we use it last? At Easter, was it?”

“Robin took one the day we were held up by the sheep on the way to Reading,” said Jane, from where she was standing with Jack Stormalong. “I thought he finished the roll then.”

Jack then began describing an incident that Jane seemed to find funny. Katherine, momentarily abandoned, drifted towards the garden seat that had stood between Jane and
herself on the evening of their discussion, and where Mrs. Fennel was now sitting.

Mrs. Fennel looked up.

“Well, my dear, we are quite a party now.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Sit down a moment, won’t you? I’m afraid I’ve seen very little of you since you came. Not very gracious of me. But I thought you’d sooner be with Robin and Jane than holding my wool for me.”

Katherine murmured something, not understanding. But she was grateful to Mrs. Fennel. All the small
embarrassments
that were consequent on staying in a strange house had been smoothed deftly and precisely away by her, and Katherine had felt no hesitation in speaking to her. She now laid aside a novel by Sir Walter Scott.

“I’m sure it hasn’t been a very exciting holiday for you, but we thought it would be best to carry on as we are. We were a little uncertain about what you would expect.”

“I’m sure … everything has been wonderful.”

“Well, I hope at any rate that England won’t be a foreign country to you any longer,” said Mrs. Fennel. “You will come again another year. We all like you very much.”

“Oh, thank you——”

“And I think Robin has been very fortunate to make such a good friend.”

At this point Robin ran down the steps carrying a
folding-camera
. Mr. Fennel, who was wearing a panama hat, stepped forward.

“Now give that to me. I’ll be the man who presses the button.”

“Oh, but we want you in the picture,” exclaimed Jane, coming forward.

“Not a bit of it. Just you all get together. Ladies at the front, gentlemen at the back. Yes, round the seat will do.”

“Is it all right for the sun, sir?” said Jack Stormalong
anxiously, looking as if he would like to take the camera into his own hands.

“I’ve taken dozens of photographs,” said Mr. Fennel firmly, “without bothering about things like that. The secret is to hold it steadily.”

“It’ll do,” said Robin, aside.

“You might hold it straight as well,” said Jane. Mrs. Fennel was in the middle, with Katherine on her right and Jane on her left. “If you’d wait a moment, I’d put some proper shoes on,” she said. “These aren’t really fit to be seen.”

“My dear, posterity won’t be interested in your shoes, presentable or not. Now let me see. I can’t see anything at all. Where are you?” He swivelled the camera
plaintively
. “Wave something.”

Jane waved a hand.

“Ah. Yes, that’s got it, thank you. The next trouble is going to be Jack’s head. I’m afraid your head will be out of the picture, Jack.”

“Well, that’s a comfort,” said Jane.

“Wait a minute. Nil desperandum. I’m afraid we shall have to dispense with the ladies’ feet—you needn’t have worried about your shoes, my dear.”

“Perhaps if you stepped back, sir——”

“No, this will do very well. Now then. That’s got it. Everybody smile. Remember this is a special occasion—where’s the thing, the button on this thing? Where—ah. Now then.”

And so the image of them standing and sitting in relaxed attitudes in the evening sun was pressed onto the negative for all eternity.

“One of Katherine,” called Mrs. Fennel. “We ought to have one of her alone.”

“Certainly we should. My dear, would you mind? Stand against the monkshood—the flowers there. Wait while I turn this film——”