A Girl in Winter (16 page)

It was extravagant, even melodramatic. But she could hardly have cared more if her life had depended on them.

Cheshunt Avenue was on the north side of the city, in a district made up of rows of houses occasionally relieved by a grocery shop or the back of a laundry. Somewhere among them was a football ground. The bus ran towards it along a long road lined with shops, public-houses, and factories, called Balsam Lane.

Sick of thinking about herself, she crushed out her
cigarette
in the blackened ashtray and looked at Miss Parbury’s handbag. It was brown and unremarkable. Out of curiosity she opened it and looked inside. It smelt of stale scent and peppermint, and the lining shone. In places the seams were fraying. Rather it looked as if Miss
Parbury
couldn’t afford to buy a new one for everyday use.

There came back to her mind that odd conviction that she had found a letter addressed by Mr. Anstey in it, and she poked about among the papers till she discovered it again. As well as a purse and a handkerchief and some odds and ends, there were a few handbills giving the times of buses, a folded paper bag, a shopping list and an empty envelope that had come from the Inland Revenue
Department
. All these she had mistaken for letters, but in fact there was only one, and she drew it out and looked at it. If it was not Mr. Anstey’s writing, it was extraordinarily like it. The mincing hand, the fine-nibbed pen: these she had seen often when at her work. The postmark was of the day before, posted locally. If it had been written at the
library, the address would have been typewritten, but this looked like a private letter. Was it from Mr. Anstey? Strange: she thought she knew his writing well enough, but once she examined it closely half a dozen doubtful instances occurred to her. She grew less confident as she continued to inspect it.

If it was a private letter, of course, that still did not prevent Anstey’s having written it; it was only that she had not imagined him as an individual who had friends like everyone else. The thought was as unfamiliar as meeting him in the street on a Sunday. But it tantalized her not to know. Should she open it? Quite honestly, she did not much care what was inside, only it would settle the argument one way or the other. She was not curious about people any longer. But then it was so strange, such a coincidence, if in truth it was from him. And Katherine was always disposed to follow coincidences to their fullest extent.

The envelope contained one sheet of paper, inscribed on one side and folded with the writing inwards, like her letter from Robin. It would be quite easy to glance at the signature without necessarily reading the rest, and this she did, finding not very much to her surprise that it was signed “Lancelot”, Mr. Anstey’s outlandish Christian name. This put the question beyond doubt. So she opened it fully to glance momentarily over it before slipping it back in the envelope, and remained reading it for perhaps half a minute.

There was nothing startling about it. But it puzzled her because she could not instantly pick up what it was about. Her eye fled from sentence to sentence, trying to break into the meaning. Accustomed to grasping any passage at once, she was baulked. Then she tried reading it slowly, sentence by sentence.

“My dear Veronica, (it ran)

“I received your letter this morning.

“You only say all over again what we have discussed many times, and seem no nearer deciding than you were last week. I have tried hard enough to show you I
sympathize
with your point of view, but surely you can see that what I suggest is the best way. If you do not agree, you only have to say so.”

Then two sentences to make a final paragraph:

No more. She turned it over: the other side was blank. There was nothing else in the envelope. Once more she read through the shrouded sentences, feeling somewhere the meaning striking like a muffled drum, as in the
procession
of a funeral. But what was the meaning? It seemed no sentence carried a loose end she could pick up and thereby unravel the whole. The masked phrases—“what we have discussed many times”; “what I suggest is the best way”; “we had better let the matter drop”—were as smooth and heavy in her hands as stones. She could get nothing out of them. There were a dozen things such a letter might refer to: it might be the sale of some
furniture
, or a proposed illegality, or something dark and evasive like a will-making or disposal of property. Yet it sounded funereal, troubling. The chief point was this
correspondent
, this Veronica Parbury. Who was she,
Katherine
wondered. It could be that they were related, and that she was a cousin or an aunt. Their different names denied close blood-relation. Hadn’t Miss Green said, for instance, that Anstey had been married, but his wife had died? This might be a sister-in-law, then. And family business might well take on such masked and muffled sadness.

But if they were not related in any way, and there was no evidence of this, what was left? The drums deepened,
as if coming nearer, heading a wintry company that would tread her down. It was ridiculous to think of Mr. Anstey marrying anyone, but that was the first thing that would come to anyone’s mind if they read the letter. No-one would write so guardedly unless their feelings were involved. But him! Had he any feelings? It was absurd. Yet she was not amused. She read through it again. If only it had been a simple, blurting letter, she might have been scornful easily: she had often thought it would be
satisfying
to get some handle against him, to give her dislike a vicious instrument. But as it was, the figure of him was blurring in her mind, no longer a sharply-cut target for loathing, and was beginning to waver like something seen under water, to wobble, and even grow for moments
together
to more than life-size, not so much menacing as monumental. Her compact hatred dissipated against it, like a herd deprived of its driver, pulled up, beginning to amble in all directions, grown purposeless.

However, she was not in the mood for further
speculation
on these vague themes that led her bemusedly round and round the outskirts of things. She replaced the
envelope
in the bag and snapped it shut; and soon afterwards the bus set her down by a glazed-brick tavern called The General Wolfe. She knew that Cheshunt Avenue was the first turn left in Cheylesmore Road, that opened into Balsam Lane a little way after this bus-stop. It was a little after a quarter to two, and she hurried, because there was not too much time. One and three-quarter hours after middle-day: would Robin have arrived yet? Would he learn that she had been there and read his letter, and be offended that she had left no message? This was the first time that had occurred to her. She
half-stopped
, wondering if at this eleventh hour she should ring up the chemist and find whether he had called, and if not, leave some sort of explanation. There was a telephone-box on the other side of the road. She hesitated.

But no. Something made her resolve to leave it to chance. If any good was coming to her, she preferred not to interfere. By stretching out a blind hand she might knock the cup over. And if he was offended, or had not sufficient interest to seek her out again, it was better that they should not meet, for she would sooner miss him
outright
than meet him awkwardly and fail. Instead, she went on. She had never been in this part of the town before. Through occasional grills she could see lights on in
basements
: a table spread with food, or an edge of hanging washing. And there were streets upon streets extending on either side of her, like a deathly stone forest.

When she turned into Cheshunt Avenue she realized that the mist that had hung undispersed since morning was thickening somewhat. She could not see to the end of the road, and it seemed like a cul-de-sac. On each side stretched two rows of quiet houses behind dirty hedges: all had secretive lace curtains and some had panels of stained glass let into the front door. They had iron gates and perhaps a yard of earth in front of them, now covered with snow. Like the rest of the district, it was not quite genteel and not quite common: through one window she saw a man in shirt-sleeves drinking tea, and outside a second stood a bicycle with a ladder tied to it, and a small signboard advertising a painter and decorator. A third had a card in the window announcing a make of corsets.

She rattled at the knocker of number fifty. After a while someone came down the stairs that rose inside flush from the front door, and opened it.

“Is Miss Parbury in, please?”

“Why, yes,” said the lady. “I’m her.”

Katherine had been wondering what she would look like, and was rather disappointed to find she looked ordinary. She was twenty-eight or thirty years old, and spoke with local accent. Rather tall, with a rosy complexion and fair hair, she looked like a large tea-rose gone well to seed.

She held up the handbag. “Is this yours, then?”

“Oh!” Miss Parbury, who had been holding the door defensively, as if suspecting that Katherine was canvassing for a refugee’s charity, now released it in relief. “That is good of you. I couldn’t think—but come in. Yes, please do. Everything is rather untidy——”

Katherine stepped into the house and followed Miss Parbury as she scuttled into the back room. The air smelt of cooking.

“This room—I would have asked you into the front, but there’s no fire, and it’s so bitter, isn’t it?” Miss
Parbury
was snatching things up, newspapers, and a library book with a knitting-needle to mark her place. She whisked away some object Katherine’s eye could not catch, and bundled some sewing into a bureau whose lid already would not shut. “Do sit down. This is good of you, to come all this way. Everything is rather——” She
completed
her extempore change of scene, and motioned Katherine to the armchair on one side of the small coal fire. Katherine sat down, undoing the belt of her coat.

“Oh, I’m so pleased you’ve brought it back, I was in such a state … Until I came to pay my bus fare, I didn’t notice I’d taken the wrong one. It was silly of me. And I knew I should put someone else to no end of trouble, I was so worried … I’m always doing these silly things. It was in the chemist’s, was it?”

Katherine nodded.

“I was wondering how it happened. I had been
shopping
, you know, and I was just about to go home when I remembered I hadn’t got some things for mother, so I was going up that little street—what is it called, now? I forget—and I noticed the shop and went in. After I’d paid—it must have been after—I put my bag on the counter, and took the things out of my basket to make more room, because I’d had a busy morning and I was just loaded—and I dropped a box of drawing pins and
they went all over the floor.” Miss Parbury laughed at herself. “So what with all that, and knowing if I missed the bus it would make me late, particularly on Saturday with all the crowds, and then with the dinner waiting, I just rushed away as fast as I could, and I must have taken your bag by mistake, not thinking.”

“Not my bag,” said Katherine. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

“Oh, I see. But you were in the shop, weren’t you? I remember you, now I come to think.”

“I bought some aspirins.”

“Yes, you did, I remember. But how did you know who I was—who it belonged to, I mean?” said Miss Parbury. She took up the thin little poker that hung from an ornamental fireirons-stand and prodded a coal uselessly.

“The chemist said your name and address were in it. He told me where you lived.”

“How lucky—because there’s nothing in your bag—in the other one, I mean. There was nothing I could have done, except perhaps take it back there to the shop. I was in a stew about it. Still, all’s well that ends well, though I shouldn’t say that, should I?—the cause of all the trouble. I’ll fetch your bag, it’s upstairs. And you will have a cup of tea, won’t you?”

“Well, I don’t——”

“Oh yes! But you must. It’s such a very cold day. I won’t be a jiffy.”

Miss Parbury went out, and Katherine heard her scamper up the stairs in her carpet-slippers. She was a quaint, sloppy person, and Katherine had been wondering increasingly how any such letter could have been written to her. Because it seemed so incongruous. In her woollen jumper and cardigan she was breathless and rather
grotesque
; her pale eyes bulged somewhat and her neck was too long. She was one of the people who do not look right till they are nearly fifty, when their eccentric appearance
harmonizes with the caricaturing onset of age. But now, for she could only be thirty at the most, vestiges of youth still clung about her, and while she did not look as if she had ever been pretty, she still kept a gaucheness of manner that would have been suitable only in a very young girl. It made her laughable.

Left alone, Katherine looked round. Sometimes, when her own attic depressed her, she thought for comfort how miserable she would be living with a family, and looking round now she knew she sometimes forgot how ugly the English houses were. This room was overcrowded with gimcrack furniture, and the furniture overcrowded with trifling ornaments and photographs, fancy matchbox stands and little woolly dogs made of pipecleaners. On the wall were a few framed, coloured photographs,
extraordinarily
unpleasant to look at. On the small square table was a table-centre with a basket of wild flowers, somehow dried and coloured into permanency. But Katherine looked for other things than these. She
wondered
first who else lived there. There was nothing
masculine
in the room, nothing cross-grained; no pipes, or bottles of lighter-fluid, or textbooks on building
construction
or pigeons. In fact apart from the one Miss Parbury was reading, there were no books in the room except a small shelf in the window, and this was filled with dreary rubbish, such as a Holiday Haunts for 1928. This gave the room a slack, soulless air. Through the window she could see a depressing yard, with a bucket standing in the snow, and a high wall. Who else lived in the house beside Miss Parbury? She had mentioned her mother. Perhaps they lived alone together. What could be her “point of view”?