A Girl in Winter (3 page)

The truth of the matter was, she could not now keep them out of her mind, and they were constantly linking up with whatever she thought or did. She looked from the unevenly-travelling bus, and saw a cheap dress shop, where a bare-ankled girl was arranging a copy of a stylish model; then a linen-draper’s, with an old ceremonial
frontage
; a milk-bar, permanently blacked-out, with the door ajar and no-one on the tall stools; a pawn-shop window crowded with old coins, shirts, a theodolite, bed-pans and a harp; a public-house door with a bright brass rail, just opening; a sudden gap of high, papered walls and a heap of bricks, furred with frost, where a house had been
destroyed
. There was nothing in all this to remind her of them, yet it did.

The bus stopped, restarted, took on more passengers. The buildings outside grew taller and impressive. The streets were wider; they at last came to the end of City Road and circled slowly along one-way streets in the centre of the city. Many people hurried by, with a flickering of white collars and newspapers. They passed the cathedral yard, glimpsed the long, soot-encrusted glass roof of a
railway
station, halted at a set of lights by a doorway bearing a dozen professional brass plates. Here and there girls dressed in overcoats sat huddled in cigarette-kiosks,
reading
, and down a side-street a man was selling baked potatoes from an ancient roaster.

She had left Miss Green to herself: they were sharing a double-seat downstairs. Miss Green was nearest the
gangway
,
and the bus had become so crowded that a shopping basket swayed above her head, from which hung the end of a leek. At every movement of the owner it tapped Miss Green’s hair. But she had looked mutely in front of her and said nothing.

Now she leaned against Katherine.

Katherine accordingly gave her more room. But Miss Green said:

“I don’t feel well. I’m sorry. I must get out.”

Katherine glanced at her. She looked ghastly.

“All right.”

She signalled to the conductress, and got Miss Green to the platform at the back of the bus. At the next stop it swerved alongside the pavement and put them down. Miss Green went and sat on a low wall from which the railings had been removed, her head low. Katherine stood by her.

“Do you feel faint or sick?” she asked helplessly.

“Sick,” said Miss Green after a while. She tilted back her head as if the cold air were wet muslin laid across her forehead.

They had not reached Bank Street, but it would have been the next stop. This was a large square, the formal centre of the city, two sides of which were taken up by the Town Hall and Municipal Departments, under which the bus had dropped them. In the middle of the square was a small green, with flowerbeds and seats; over the branches of the leafless trees on the third side was the high-pillared façade of the Central City Library, and on the last side were low reticent shop windows, tailors and jewellers. The green was covered with snow.

Katherine was uncertain what to do. She had had no experience of English invalids: if she went quickly to a chemist’s she would not know what to buy. If Miss Green asked for anything, she would do all she could to get it, but in the meantime she did nothing, looking at the thin
neck bowed within the chiffon scarf. Pain was so remote from what she herself was feeling that she felt helpless. Possibly Miss Green would not have thanked her for any offer of comfort.

So she waited. At last Miss Green raised her head.

“Buses seem to upset me sometimes,” she said, in little more than a whisper.

“How are you feeling? What would you like to do?”

“I don’t want anything. Just rest for a bit.”

Katherine looked round her.

“There’s a shelter place in the middle of this green. There’d be a proper seat there. You shouldn’t sit on the cold stone.”

Miss Green gave no sign that she had heard. But after a minute she looked up.

“Where?”

“Over there. Do you think you could walk it?”

“I can try.”

Katherine stooped and took her thin arm. Together they crossed to the green and went up the path to the shelter, crushing a light layer of frozen snow. The benches were dusty with frost and the laurel-bushes rustled. She got Miss Green up the steps into the dingy interior, and sat her on a wooden seat. The place was bitterly cold, but built
substantially
: it had a drinking-fountain let into the wall, and a plaque saying it was to commemorate a coronation. There seemed nothing for the moment Katherine could do, so she leant in the doorway with her back to Miss Green, to give her time to recover herself, and stared out at the grey tracing of branches and the dark buildings beyond, their upper storeys sprinkled with lighted
windows
. It looked as if after all she would have to take Miss Green home. Then there would be no time to go to her room before returning to work: indeed, if they went on at this present pace it was doubtful whether it would be worth going back to work before lunch at all. She was
working eight hours a day this week, from nine till one and three till seven, when the Library closed. In any case she could call at her rooms at lunchtime: it wouldn’t make more than an hour’s difference. The longer she put off making sure there was a letter or not, the longer she had something to look forward to. In the meantime she lolled in the doorway as if on guard, surprised at finding herself in this strange place, while behind her Miss Green pressed her hands to her eyes, letting her spectacles lie on the smooth wooden bench. There was one-way traffic round the square, and she watched the taxis and saloon cars go by at a distance, the noise of them sharpened on the cold air like a knife on a whetstone.

After a while she glanced round.

“How are you feeling now?”

Miss Green rubbed her forehead. She had taken off her gloves.

“A bit better, I think.”

She blinked at Katherine: without her spectacles she did not look nearly so disagreeable. Her lips were childish and pouting.

“Is there anything you’d like to do? Would you like to have something hot to drink somewhere?”

“Oh, no, that would make me feel worse.”

“Brandy would do you good.”

“No.”

“Well, rest a bit longer, then. There’s plenty of time.”

“A drink of water, perhaps,” said Miss Green, timidly, after a pause.

“Water!” Katherine looked round. “Well, there is a drinking-fountain here.”

“Oh, but they’re filthy,” said Miss Green, wrinkling her nose.

“Well, it may be frozen.” She pressed the button
experimentally
, and an uneven trickle of water came out of the lion’s mouth. She passed her hand through it, and was
amazed at its coldness. It might have been a stream drained from plateau after plateau of ice, running down tracks of stones still above cloud level. She withdrew her hand quickly.

“It works, but it’s terribly cold.”

“Oh, but it’s not healthy. All sorts of people use them—old tramps and——”

Katherine looked at the chained iron cup. “Well, if there are any germs the frost will have killed them.” She ran the water again momentarily, to test it once more. It numbed her hand, like a distillation of the winter. “But you needn’t use the cup—you could drink from your hands.”

Miss Green got up very gingerly and came over to stand by her as if walking barefoot on ice.

“I don’t like to,” she said, with a deliberate expression.

“Why not? Make a cup of your hands. I’ll keep the water running.”

Miss Green ducked her narrow shoulders, cupping her palms together. She gave a gasp as the water touched them but sipped at it. Then she dabbed her forehead with wet fingers.

“It’s so cold it almost stops my tooth hurting.”

She bent to drink again, and Katherine saw as she raised her head afterwards that she was gasping at the chill of the water and half-smiling, the tiny hairs around her mouth wet. Katherine, who ever since she had got up that
morning
had been thinking of the Fennels and herself with
increasing
excitement, was suddenly startled to sympathy for her. Till then she had seen only her ugliness, her petulance, her young pretensions. Now this faded to unimportance and she grasped for the first time that she really needed care, that she was frail and in a remote way beautiful. It was so long since she had felt this about anyone that it came with unexpected force: its urgency made her own affairs, concerned with what might or might not happen,
bloodless and fanciful. This was what she had not had for ages, a person dependent on her: there were streets around that she must help her to cross, buses she must help her on and afterwards buy the tickets, for the pain the girl was suffering had half-obliterated her notice of the world. In the dull suburb was her home, and she must help her to reach it safely, and hand her over to whoever would take care of her next. It was so unusual that she knew it to be linked with the thankfulness she had been feeling for the last few days: it was the unconsidered generosity that follows a rare gambling-win; for the first time in months she had
happiness
to spare, and now that her passive, pregnant
expectation
had suddenly found its outlet, it was all the more eager for having come so casually and unexpectedly, leading her to this shelter she never knew existed in the very centre of the city.

She gently took her arm.

“Would you like to rest a little longer? But we shall be cold if we stay long.”

They sat together on the seat under the scrolled plaque, Miss Green huddled into herself, and Katherine glancing first at her then out through the doorway; there was a path outside where chance heelmarks seemed eternally printed in the frost. Through the light mist she could see the ornamental front of the Town Hall under the flat shield of the sky, dark and ledged with snow. But all the
white-grey
patches were not snow, for as she watched they revealed themselves as pigeons, a score of them launching off into the air and hanging with a great clapping of wings. Then the whole flight dropped, rose over the intervening trees across the traffic, and landed on a stretch of snow not fifteen yards from where the two of them sat, coming up as if they expected to be fed.

They remained silent for a few minutes, while Miss Green finally composed herself, putting on her spectacles and looking at her face in a handmirror. After this she
powdered
her nose and chin, making herself no less
unattractive
. The bones of her wrists were prominent and her hair, done to resemble the fashion, seemed lifeless. Katherine looked at her anxiously.

“Do you feel better now?”

“Yes, a bit.” Miss Green swallowed. “This tooth has always been a trouble.” Her voice had no volume, and sometimes rose to a whine to make itself heard.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Well, there was a time when I didn’t go to a dentist for nearly two years. Then it got very bad, and I had to go, and he filled it so that it was nearly all filling. Then some time ago all the filling came out and it started to hurt. He filled it again, but it went on hurting, so he gave me some stuff to put on it, and that stopped it hurting. But now it’s started again.” She looked at Katherine with weak,
self-pitying
eyes. “Last night was terrible. I didn’t get to sleep till four, and then I woke up before seven. It was awful. All my face—the whole of my head seemed to be aching.”

“A headache? The one starts the other.”

“Yes, I suppose so, but I do get terrible headaches in any case. And when I’ve got one, I just can’t do
anything.
Mother knows there’s nothing for it but to keep me in bed with aspirins in hot milk. And very often I’m sick too.”

“But do you have them at work?”

“They don’t come on during the day as a rule. At night sometimes. Most often I wake up with them. Then I don’t go to work, I just stay in bed.”

“Perhaps you should have stayed in bed this morning.”

Miss Green replaced her gloves with a genteel gesture. “Mother did suggest it. But it wasn’t hurting so much when I got up, and it doesn’t do to stay at home too often, does it? Mr. Anstey can be very rude.”

“He gets worse every day. He’s got the manners of a dustman.”

“How funny you should say that,” said Miss Green with a faint giggle, “because his father was only a Corporation workman. They used to live in Gas Street.”

“Is he married? I wouldn’t be his wife.”

“His wife died over five years ago.”

“I’m sorry for her,” said Katherine. “She must have had a dog’s life. He’s so
stupid.
We don’t get on at all.”

Again Miss Green gave the ghost of a giggle, as if she were watching another person break a rule.

“Of course,” she said, a trifle more animated, “he’s only temporarily in the job at all. Mr. Rylands was the real head, you remember. Or did you never see him?”

“No, I never did.”

“He was a very different kind of person altogether. Young and very well-educated. He had a university degree. But when the war started he had to go into the army, unfortunately.”

“Then they appointed Anstey, did they?”

“Yes, he’d started as a junior assistant as soon as he left school and had been there ever since. He was senior
assistant
when Mr. Rylands left. I suppose they felt they had to appoint him.”

“I can’t think why.”

“He knows the work, I suppose.”

“Well, perhaps he does. But he doesn’t know how to behave. He shouldn’t have any sort of authority.”

Miss Green looked at her stealthily.

“Have you been having a row with him?” she asked.

“Not so far. Just one of his little lectures, this morning. One day, though, oh, one day——!”

She gazed out of the shelter at the motionless branches: Miss Green studied her for a moment or two. Near at hand a sparrow was pecking for crumbs at a paper bag, and beyond it in the middle distance a tramp was looking into a salvage bin. The traffic circulated under the porticoes of the high buildings, the cars sounding their horns like ships lost at sea. She was glad to see that Miss Green had a little more colour.

“Do you feel well enough to go on now?” she asked, turning back to her.

Miss Green nodded and rose, but as she did so a sombre look came over her face. She put her hand up to her cheek. Katherine hesitated.

“Is it hurting?”

“Yes, it——” Miss Green looked at her fearfully. “I think it’s coming on again.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“Yes, it is. Oh, dear. It must have been the water, drinking.”

Katherine’s heart sank. “Is it bad?”

“Yes, I think so.”

There was a silence. Miss Green pressed harder against her cheek.

Katherine shivered slightly in the cold. “Wouldn’t it be better to go to a dentist straightaway?”

“Oh no. I’d sooner go home.”

“But it would be just as bad at home.”

“Yes, I know, but——”

“I should go to a dentist now,” said Katherine. Miss Green did not answer, but looked so miserable that Katherine made up her mind to put an end to it for her. “Really I should. Then it would all be over.”

“I daren’t,” Miss Green said brokenly.

“But you wouldn’t have any more pain. Then you could
go home. You’d have the whole week-end to get over it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Miss Green, dryly tearful. “It would hurt so.”

“You could have gas.”

“It’s so expensive.”

“But you wouldn’t feel a thing. It would be over before you knew it.”

“This is much worse than it was before,” gasped Miss Green in a kind of sob. “I’m——”

She turned away, hiding her face. Katherine realized that she was in no state of mind to make decisions, and determined to act.

“I’ll tell you what. There’s a dentist near where I live, only three minutes away. In Merion Street. We’ll go there.”

“Oh, no!—who is he? I want my own dentist.”

“Where does he live?”

“In the next street from us. I’d better go home——”

“It would be much better to get it over first. You can’t stand any more of this. Come along now—you won’t feel anything.”

“But what’s he like? Have you tried him?” cried Miss Green, shrinking as if asked to jump from a window into a sheet sixty feet below.

“It’ll be all right. Really it will.” Katherine pulled Miss Green’s arm: the girl resisted a little, then finally gave way. “It’ll be much the best thing. Don’t be afraid.”

So Miss Green, looking dazed at the pain rooted in her head, allowed herself to be led across the snow and across the street, avoiding the traffic, and a brewer’s wagon drawn by two dray-horses that tossed plumes of breath into the cold air amid a jingling of medallions. Merion Street was a narrow connection between one of the streets leading from this square and Bank Street, where they had been going. On one side of it were dark offices, the premises of an oculist, a chemist’s shop. On the other were the back
entrances to some large stores, and the warehouse of a wine and spirit merchant. The two of them passed
un-remarked
along the wide pavements, for everyone out that day seemed contracted by the cold, having no attention to spare for others. A warm breath came from the swing doors of a club just before they turned into the narrow entrance of Merion Street, which bore its name high up on the wall in elaborate and out-moded letters.

“It’s just along here,” said Katherine. They reached an entrance with a plate bearing the name of A. G.
Talmadge
. Miss Green looked apprehensively up the dark steps, like a dog knowing it has been brought to be
destroyed
.

“I think——” she began, in a whisper. “Is this it?”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Katherine, wishing that in some way she could put more strength into Miss Green’s thin body. Her wristwatch said five to eleven. They mounted the steps, and climbed the stairs to the first landing.

There was a sour smell here, as if the floors swabbed by the cleaner were never properly dry, and the woodwork was varnished a dark brown. The landing should have been lit by an inaccessible window, but this had been painted over with streaky black paint, and they had difficulty in seeing more than the outlines of things: the banisters, a bucket of sand on the linoleum. Then they noticed a small board directing them into a poky corridor. They could hardly see. There were four doors in this corridor, with glass upper panels: two of them were blank. The others said “waiting room” and “surgery”.

Katherine tried the first one. It was locked.

“Perhaps,” said Miss Green, whispering, “there’s
nobody
here.”

“Surely there must be,” said Katherine. She was
somewhat
puzzled.

Then a shadow rose slowly up against the glass panels of the surgery door, and hung there for a moment, making
the passage even more obscure. It was broad and humped, as if bent in thought. They watched it silently. At last the door began to open, and a man stood on the threshold, his hand groping in his jacket pocket. He looked at them, fingers still busy.

In the darkness of the corridor they could see that he was a youngish man, but he had about him no youthful qualities. He wore spectacles and had pale blue eyes. His arms and shoulders were powerful, and he was dressed in a pale green sports coat buttoned closely and looking too small, and tubular flannel trousers. He half-resembled an idiot boy whose body had developed at the expense of his mind.

“Good morning,” she said. “We——”

“If you’re looking for me,” he said, disregarding her, in a slow, flat voice that sounded as if his tongue was too large for his mouth, “I don’t work on Saturday mornings.”

“Oh—but my friend here——”

The man did not answer. Lowering his head, he took a Yale key from his pocket and opened one of the nameless doors. When he was in, he pushed it nearly shut, so that they could not see what was inside. They heard something close, and water running.

So they waited in the half-darkness, Miss Green
changing
her hold on her handbag every thirty seconds. She cast a glance towards the stairs, but there was nobody about. The whole building seemed deserted.

When he came out again, he looked dispassionately at them.

“What’s the matter?”

“My friend has a——”

“Pardon?”

It was harsh, a protracted bark. She realized he was slightly deaf.

“My friend has a bad tooth that ought to come out.”

The dentist ran his hands through his pockets, took out
a bunch of keys, worked the separate Yale key onto the ring, and slid them back into his trouser-pocket.

“I don’t work on a Saturday,” he said gratingly. “My assistant isn’t here. She doesn’t come on Saturdays.”

There was a short silence. There was no noise of traffic: only a very faraway sound of typewriters.

He moved suddenly. “Which of you is it?”

“My friend.” Katherine pointed.

He inspected her with lowered head.

“Are you in pain?”

Miss Green nodded dumbly.

“It’s very bad,” said Katherine desperately.

The dentist searched through all his pockets, this time without finding anything. After a pause he turned his back on them.

“Come in.”

They followed him into the surgery. He indicated that Katherine should sit on a little straight-backed chair against the wall, next to an unlit gas fire. Miss Green drifted uncertainly towards the professional chair that was bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Though Katherine wanted to support her, something kept them from speaking to each other: the very atmosphere separated them, surrounding Miss Green and placing her beyond any assistance. She was committed now. Katherine told herself it was all for the best.

The surgery was as dingy as the passage outside, with the same sticky-looking, brown wainscoting. The carpet was red, blue, and green, the wallpaper dusty yellow. The chair faced the windows, the lower halves of which were boarded over, and the crooked shape of the drill hung high up by a cluster of frosted-glass lights.

These the dentist switched on.

“Will you sit in the chair?”

Miss Green sat with her back to Katherine, nervously smoothing back a strand of hair: she shifted her shoulders
once or twice. Still holding her handbag, she carefully aligned her feet on the iron foot-rest. Then cautiously, almost suspiciously, she let her head lean back against the leather pads.

The dentist went over to her and took her handbag away. “We don’t want that,” he said, as if in a remote corner of his brain he thought he was being funny. Then he came towards Katherine and lit the small gas fire at her feet with a bang. He had put on his white coat.

“Now which tooth is giving pain?”

“At the back—here——” Miss Green made inarticulate noises, a finger to her mouth. It seemed she had to tense her whole body to make her voice audible at all. The
dentist
bent over her, thrusting a mirror into her mouth, polishing it and looking again. Then he swung a little circular tray nearer his reach: on it, long, pointed
instruments
were laid out on a rack. Taking one, he bent over her, his own mouth slightly open. The elbows of his white coat were dirty.

At length he announced: “There’s a lot of filling in it,” going across the room to a small cabinet of flat drawers. He returned with two tiny bits of metal rolling in his palm, and pulled down the drill, which had been folded high and remote, till it elongated like an insect’s leg. He began fitting a head into the drill.

Miss Green spoke up in her taut, trembling voice:

“Are you going to——”

“Pardon?”

He flicked on the drill with his foot and bent over her, knowing she had spoken.

“You aren’t going to fill it, are you?”

“Fill it? No.”

The noise of the drill was insidious, a slack noise. There was a knot in the belt where it had broken and been mended again, and the knot ran round the short, endless course, silhouetted against the window.

Miss Green whimpered as he began drilling. It seemed her nerve had broken at the first touch of the revolving drill-head, that she now had no restraint and was crying whether she was hurt or not. Her little, half-smothered noises hardly sounded human at all: Katherine leaned forward, aware that though she could hear them the dentist could not.