A Girl in Winter (6 page)

“I had some coffee.”

“Oh, then we’ll eat on the train. We should get to London before two, and meet my father. He will drive us home.”

“In a motor-car?”

“Yes, then you’ll be able to see the country.” He sat opposite her composedly, his arms folded, speaking as if they were old friends. “You haven’t been to England before, have you?”

“Never.”

“I hope this fine weather will hold. It will be too bad if it rains all the time.”

The photograph had not been bad, but it had not quite done him justice. The thing it had failed to capture was the contrast between his severely-cut features and the gaiety conferred upon them by his youthfulness and fresh skin. Although he was only a boy, it was already quite plain what he would look like as a man—stern, with strong nose, chin and forehead. The muscles round his mouth
would become prominent, and his cheeks hint at
concavity
. The dry black hair would appear on his wrists, and with constantly shaving his jowl would be
dark-blueish
. But this was all in the future: at the moment his mature look was counterbalanced by the almost
feminine
gentleness of youth, smooth as the skin of a pear and as delicate as linen.

She had been greatly afraid that they would find nothing to say to each other. This was well-grounded as far as she was concerned, but Robin seemed to feel no constraint. His manner was unhurried: he wasted no words or gestures, and this calmed her: he explained that his father and himself had stayed the previous night in London, and while his father had gone about some
business
, Robin had travelled down that morning to Dover, and spent the time wandering about the town until her boat was due. He said that it was a perfect day for seeing across to France. She remembered how she fancied she could see large patches of weed dark through the lucid water, but dare not try to explain this. No-one else got into their compartment and after a while the train started, easing forward with a surprising absence of shock: as they moved steadily out Katherine noticed two posters by the station bookstall: “Heat Wave” and “Lunchtime Scores”. She wondered what they meant but did not ask. Robin went on talking quietly about nothing in particular: at one point she was disconcerted to learn he rode
horseback
.

“Is your case locked?” he asked as they rose to go along for lunch.

“Locked? … Yes…. I leave it here, don’t I?”

“Oh, yes. It’s safest to lock it, though.”

“The keys are safe.”

The dining-car was not full, and they had a table to themselves, with a vase of flowers which Robin moved aside. Clear soup swayed to and fro in the deep plates.
Katherine realized that she was very hungry. She took a roll from the wicker basket.

“People say food on English trains is very bad,” Robin observed. “I can’t judge. There usually isn’t enough of it, but that’s a different thing.”

Katherine straightened this out in her mind, and made an appropriate remark.

“I hope you’ll like English food, by the way,” he added. “That again is supposed to be very bad—like the climate. But you can see what the climate does when it tries.”

The midday sun wheeled backwards and forwards across the bright white cloth as they sat eating. Napkins on other tables were folded into mitres. After the soup they had ham and tongue, with salad in dishes, and glasses of colourless fizzy lemonade. She helped herself to salad with a wooden spoon and fork.

“Where are we now?”

He looked at his watch and told her.

“It’s Kent, is it? The county Kent? But there are so many houses.”

“Well, a lot of people live here.”

“I thought that Kent … was farms.”

“Hardly that,” he said, rolling ribbons of lettuce expertly round his fork. His fingernails were cut bluntly and brushed very clean. “There’s a lot of hop-growing. And there’s a lot of fruit and vegetables, for the London markets. The lorries go up every night, before dawn.”

“But there are factories,” she objected. “There! And another one.”

“Not many, though. This isn’t anything like an
industrial
region. Most of south-east England is like this.”

They finished tiny moulded jellies, and had cheese, celery and biscuits, with coffee. Katherine wondered if he would offer her a cigarette, but he didn’t: he paid the bill with a new pound note and tipped the waiter directly. Then they went back to their compartment along the
swaying corridor, Katherine catching glimpses through the bucking glass-panelled doors of English people awake or asleep, in many attitudes. “I expect you’ll be wanting to change some money,” Robin said as they resumed their seats. Her suitcase was still there. “Do you understand it? Or do you find it confusing?”

“Money?” Katherine had spent some time studying a handbook for travellers in England, so she was prepared in this respect. “Twelve pence are one shilling, twenty shillings are one pound. But I have never seen any.”

He withdrew a handful from his pocket. “They’re
pennies
. And that’s a shilling. But there are also two-shilling pieces and half-crowns—they’re two shillings and
sixpence
.”

“And these?”

“Sixpences—worth six pennies.”

They fell to talking about the rate of exchange and the vacillations of Katherine’s own currency. The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed. Thinking how lonely she was, she suddenly found herself near crying: she looked unbelievingly at Robin. It was
impossible
to imagine what he was thinking: he seemed perfectly adjusted to all his surroundings—including her—and able to withdraw his real personality elsewhere. This was not at all as she had pictured him. She had thought of him first as dull, then as inarticulate: both conceptions were wrong. In either case she had imagined that she would be well able to hold her own in the impact of their characters, because she thought herself wise for her age, and because English boys were traditionally uncouth. In fact, he was a good deal more at his ease than she was: she was disconcerted to find herself deferential. For the moment silent, he glanced out of the window. The
expression
on his face was cool, as if travelling alone: he raised his hand slowly to draw one strand of his hair back
into place. At first she had thought he was shy and was playing at being grown-up: now it occurred to her that he was simply being natural. Accustomed to sizing up and judging people at once, she could find nothing about him to fix on. Blinking, she looked out of the window too: they were on the edge of London. It was a Saturday
afternoon
and the rows of new brick houses were brilliantly shadowed in the sun. Once she caught a glimpse of a straight road, where an unattended baker’s van was being amblingly led by a horse, following the baker as he went from door to door. Gone in a moment, it filled her with a sense of relaxation, and she watched the roads and gardens curiously. After a while the ticket-collector passed along the train.

It was intensely hot at Victoria, where according to plan Mr. Fennel met them. The station was crowded. “You’ve brought the fine weather with you,” he said as they shook hands. “Had lunch?”

“On the train,” said Robin. “Katherine would just like to send a postcard home, to say she’s arrived safely.”

She liked Mr. Fennel. He was short, spry, elderly and courteous, with close white hair and a felt hat the colour of oatmeal which reminded her that he was a country auctioneer. He did not wear spectacles, but a worn spectacle-case protruded from an upper waistcoat pocket. He was very slightly bow-legged. As she scribbled the postcard that she had brought specially with her she wondered if father and son were exchanging brief appraisals and condemnations, and in her confusion pushed the completed card through the slit marked “London and District” without noticing. As she rejoined them Robin said: “They had some good animals there once.”

Their car was an old-fashioned model, very dusty about the wings, and Mr. Fennel handled it with the extreme
care of one who has learned to drive late in life. “This is your first visit to England, then, is it?” he said to Katherine who sat beside him, Robin being in the back with the bags. “What do you think of it, so far?”

“Oh, I like it.”

“Katherine was disappointed with Kent,” said Robin with a chuckle. “There were too many houses.”

“Well!” said Mr. Fennel. “I agree with her. She’s
perfectly
right. But it’s the same all over England—good arable land being turned into pasture, pasture turning into housing estates. It’ll be the ruin of us.”

“England is an industrial country, isn’t it?” said Katherine, determined to keep up the conversation when she was able.

Mr. Fennel snorted. “It’ll be the ruin of us,” he
repeated
. “Suppose there’s another war? What are we going to live on? Christmas crackers and ball-bearings?” He glanced from right to left, turning the wheel. “It’s getting very hot. Are the windows all open, Robin?”

“Shall I open the roof?”

“Well, a little way, perhaps. How are you, Katherine? You must be warm with that coat on.”

“Yes, a little.”

Robin leaned over them and slid back the roof, so that a simultaneous breath of sun and wind struck in.
Katherine
felt her hair streaming, and resigned herself. “I dare say I’m not going fast enough for Robin,” Mr. Fennel continued pleasantly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t greatly care for cars. But everyone runs one these days. Still”—he sounded the horn—“when I do drive, I drive slowly. If there are any mistakes to make, the other fellow can make them. Really, the road accidents are
nothing
to laugh at. What were those figures in the paper the other day, Robin?—something to show it was no more dangerous to go through the war than cross Piccadilly?—something like that.”

“Well, you won’t get gonged for speeding, dad,” said Robin with placid irony.

“The roads are crowded, certainly,” agreed Katherine. Mr. Fennel’s voice had suggested he was speaking to an invalid who did not properly take in all he was saying. “Saturday,” he said.

When they were out of London, she sometimes looked about her for the England she had expected. It was
difficult
to see it. The main roads were full of cars and cyclists, the garages were all open, and every so often they would pass a teagarden with a sign, or a chalked board saying that fruit was on sale, plums or pears. There was no end of the cars. They streamed in both directions, pulled up by the roadside so that the occupants could spread a meal, formed long ranks outside swimming pools. Also there were innumerable hoardings, empty petrol drums and broken fences lying wastefully about. Occasionally she saw white figures standing at a game of cricket. These were the
important
things, and because of them the town never seemed distant. Only infrequently did she see things that reminded her of landscape paintings—a row of cottages, a church on rising ground, the slant of a field—and she preferred in the end to watch the road and feel the wind play around her. Everything seemed enshrined beneath the sky.

“Could I take a turn, dad?” said Robin once.

“I’d as soon you didn’t,” Mr. Fennel replied equably, and the matter was dropped. Instead, Mr. Fennel talked slowly and explicitly about ordinary things so that Katherine could understand and answer what he said. Already she found she could relax her classroom eagerness, and this cheered her. She was only afraid that it was tedious for him, and listened in dread for the resigned note that would mean: well, we’ve got her for three weeks and we’d better make the best of it. In the meantime, Robin busied himself in the back seat with a crossword puzzle. When she looked into the driving mirror above
the windscreen, she could see his eyes dropped towards the page, or sometimes turned distantly out of the window. Once they were looking at her. She glanced quickly away, knowing that at present she had no idea of how to meet them.

At length when afternoon had become late afternoon and except for the continued brilliance of the sun would have been evening, they arrived at the village whose name she had so often written on envelopes, and there sought out a short gravelled slope, where a long gate was hooked open, and halted by a circular lawn in front of a large unimposing house built of red brick.

They got out into the sudden silence. Mr. Fennel removed his hat and wiped his forehead: “A job for you, my lad,” he remarked, indicating the dusty body of the car.

Robin nodded, taking out the bags.

The front door stood open, and they went in through a small porch to a large hall, that had stairs ascending round two sides and the landing banisters running round the third. From windows set high up at the turn of these stairs sunless light came, making the hall seem like a well. There was a blue bowl of flowers on a dark chest, a few pictures in elaborate frames. Almost at once a door opened and Mrs. Fennel came out to meet them.

“Here’s your guest, delivered safe and sound,” said Mr. Fennel. Katherine advanced to shake hands.

“Very pleased to meet you, my dear. You must be tired out. Is it as hot in London as it’s been here?”

“I should say, myself, it’s hotter,” said Mr. Fennel, smoothing the sides of his head with his palms. There were some letters lying on a salver for him and he picked them up. “It’s breathless in London—simply no air at all.”

“I’ll show you your room,” said Mrs. Fennel.

They went upstairs, Katherine looking wonderingly about her. The house was rather larger than her own. Her room was at the end of a long passage, and was reached by two steps down that Mrs. Fennel advised her to watch for. Her hostess was a strong, grey-haired woman. Her face was not beautiful but expressed great
good-humour
and tolerance. Robin had already taken up Katherine’s bag and it lay waiting to be unstrapped on a cane chair, so when Mrs. Fennel had left her she did this and took out a few of her things. As soon as she had started she stopped to stare round the room. It faced south-west, and was decorated in cream and white, with a blue carpet and curtains; these furnishings contrasted coldly with the warmth of its aspect. There was a grey marble washbowl in the corner, with bright silver taps and white towels, and an expensive, low dressing-table with a stool to match in front of it: when she pulled open one of the drawers to put away a handful of clothes she found it lined with English newspapers, which gave her an unreasonable shock. It was like the money: unfamiliarity where she was not prepared for it. But she liked the room; crossing to the window, she looked out from the side of the house onto a small lawn edged by poplar trees, where two striped deckchairs lay empty in the sun. She thought dimly she could hear the sound of water, but decided after a few moments that it was only the unfamiliar hush of silence in the country.