A Girl in Winter (7 page)

She went very slowly down the wide staircase, keeping one hand on the banister. In her dark brown skirt, white shirt and dark brown tie pinned with a small Olympic badge, and with her hair newly brushed and drawn back, she looked severe and foreign. They had gone into the lounge, leaving the door open so that she could see where they were. “This is the untidy room,” said Mrs. Fennel, from where she sat sewing. “The children do as they please with it.” It was a long, low room at the back of the house
with french windows opening onto a terrace, low,
chintz-covered
furniture and a grand piano. Robin snorted at the deprecation. “It’s the comfortable room,” he said, getting up politely. “There’s lemonade, if you’d like some, Katherine.”

“Oh, thank you.”

He filled a long, hand-painted glass from a jug and handed it to her, first removing with a silver spoon a pip that floated on the surface.

“I hope it’s cool enough,” said Mrs. Fennel. “The
refrigerator
has gone wrong again.”

“There’s one thing about Jane,” said Robin, tasting it critically. “She can make lemonade. I think it was what she was put on the earth to do. Jane is my sister,” he added to Katherine, who sat down by Mrs. Fennel on the sofa.

“She won’t be in for dinner, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Fennel. “I expect you three are hungry. By the way, Katherine, do we talk too fast? What do you think? Should we speak more slowly?”

“Oh no.” Katherine blushed. “I can understand what you say. But I don’t speak English well.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Fennel, rising with his opened letters in his hand and folding away his spectacles. “We shall just ramble on as usual. You just do as you like —don’t trouble about making conversation. We want you to be at home here. If you feel you are, we shall be satisfied.”

But Katherine did not relax. They ate dinner in a
dark-panelled
room around a polished table, and it was served by a maid. She was so alert to behave properly that she hardly noticed whether she enjoyed her food or not, but thinking it over decided that she had. It was not imaginative, but of fine quality and well cooked. She was served first and pressed to eat more than she wanted.

Robin’s face derived from Mrs. Fennel; the stern, serene features and regular teeth became too definite in later
years to be handsome in a woman, but it was easy to see that he would always appear good-looking, even when the delicate quality of youth had disappeared. She watched how they behaved to each other: they were courteous, as though conscious a visitor was present. Mr. Fennel served the second course with a ceremonial flourish, and they helped themselves to vegetables from dishes held by the maid. Katherine found it all rather trying and hoped as time went on they would be less formal.

Afterwards the maid brought coffee into the lounge, and Mrs. Fennel took the lead in asking her about her journey, but she tactfully confined herself to questions that
Katherine
could answer with a yes or no if she liked. Robin sat attentively and sometimes interposed a sentence. They were willing to laugh if she was flippant, and she tried to be as amusing as she could: gradually she was relieved to find the atmosphere becoming easier. Mr. Fennel smoked a cigarette with a deliberation that suggested he did not smoke as a rule. Later on Katherine found she had no handkerchief and rose to excuse herself.

“Can I go?” said Robin, getting up.

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Fennel, waving him back. “You can’t go rummaging round Katherine’s bedroom.” She rested an amused eye on her son.

“I shall have to look for them in my case, also,” said Katherine. She sped upstairs.

The maid had turned back the bed and laid her night things ready, and although it was only nine o’clock the curtains had been drawn. She pushed them partly back and undid her suitcase, searching for handkerchiefs. Just as she found them she fancied there was a knock at the half-open door. She listened, but could hear nothing so shut the case with a sharp click. The door swung inwards silently, and in the dusk Katherine could see a girl standing on the threshold.

“Oh,” she said.

The girl looked at her. She wore a lemon shirt and pale, shapeless skirt and no socks: her height would be the same as Robin’s.

“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly. “I didn’t know if—I mean, I thought I heard you. I’m Jane. How do you do.”

“How do you do,” murmured Katherine.

They shook hands.

“When did you get here?”

“About seven.”

“Good journey?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Katherine knew that Robin’s sister was over twenty. But she would not have thought there was more than a year’s difference in their ages.

“Are you coming down now?” asked Katherine,
shaking
her handkerchief from its folds.

Jane had withdrawn to the door, her eyes still searching Katherine’s face as if waiting for her to take the lead.

“No,” she said. “No, I’ll see you later.” And with a brief smile she went. Katherine heard a door close along the passage.

When Katherine returned the other three were as she had left them. Robin suggested they went out onto the terrace, and held the french window open for her. Beyond a rockery and some rose trees there was a tennis court, sunk below a gravel path that led to a door in a wall running across the bottom of the garden. “Do you play tennis?” asked Robin. “We must have a game. You see, we decided to have a proper hard court instead of a big lawn; a lawn looks very nice, but it takes some keeping up, and in any case there’s the little one at the side—under your window—if we want to have tea out or anything. Below the tennis court is the kitchen garden”—he pointed to the wall—“and then the river.”

“The river? I heard it,” said Katherine, pleased.

“Did you? Would you like to see it?”

They went down the steps and along the high gravel path. Robin ran his finger along the wire netting. “The apricots are ripening,” he said, indicating some trees spreading against a wall. “Last year we got fifteen pounds.”

He opened a door and they passed into the kitchen garden, meeting a profusion of lettuces, peas, runner beans, cabbages and rows of feathery carrots. In the corner were a small toolshed and a glass-house, where she glimpsed some tomatoes. A tap dripped slowly, wrapped in sacking, making a perpetual green stain on the cobbles.

“This is a wonderful place for growing things,” said Robin. “See how sheltered it is, with the high wall on one side and these fruit trees on the other. And then you see it slopes pretty well due south down to the river, and catches all the sun.” He pulled down a branch and fingered one or two plums; when he found one that rolled off into his hand he gave it to her. The bloom bore his fingerprints.

“Does the river——?” She failed to finish this sentence in English; however, he understood her to ask if the river ever overflowed? “Sometimes on the other side, where there are water-meadows. Come and see.”

They went through golden clouds of gnats to a high door with faded blue paint, and when he opened it Katherine was surprised to see a broad river drifting by, as it seemed, on the very threshold, though there was ten yards of bank that had been scythed and mown, leading down to the water and a set of wooden steps.

“This is beautiful,” she said, tossing the stone of her plum into the water, where translucent fish rose
momentarily
at it. “You are very fortunate, aren’t you?” Looking up and down the river, she saw they were at the middle point of a slow bend lined with willow trees, at the foot of which were hoofmarks. Just opposite, the sweeping branches of a weeping-willow tree made a tent that a canoe could lie in. Further up the river, the sunset
flashed off the water, showing hundreds of insects borne on transparent wings.

“It’s nice,” said Robin. He leaned against a noticeboard that said “Private. No Landing Allowed”, and looked across the water at a field scattered with golden-fleeced sheep. “Do you go boating?”

“Yes—have you a boat?”

“We have a punt,” said Robin, pointing to the end of a wooden landing-stage where a small boathouse had been built. “I didn’t bring the key, I’m afraid. Can you punt?”

“Punt?”

“Yes, with a pole.”

She pondered the image. “No! But I can”—she made rowing motions—“and”—she made paddling motions—“do you see?” She ended with a half-nervous, half-excited laugh, foreign and gleeful, that she thought might attract him. He shoved himself away from the post with his shoulders. “Well, we’ll teach you to punt,” he said. “Look, there’s a water-rat. See it? Under the opposite bank.” He pointed to a small brown head travelling steadily along, accompanied by a diagonal ripple, until it vanished under the weeping-willow tree.

“I saw it.”

He led the way back, locking the blue gate and hanging the key on a rusty nail. She was alert for his mood. But his actions rarely had anything stronger than the flavour of a motive around them: in this case, he was at ease among his inherited surroundings. He took it for granted that she would find it interesting to look over them, but no more.

They went up the terrace steps to the now-lighted lounge. “Been looking round?” asked Mrs. Fennel. “Has he shown you our river?”

“Yes. You must like it.”

“It is nice,” Mrs. Fennel admitted. “But I think it makes the place rather damp, do you know? And it’s mournful in winter.”

This last remark, spoken as it was in a foreign language, came to Katherine with something of the impact of a line of poetry. She sank quietly to a seat, looking around her, and thought of the time she would be no longer there. Mr. Fennel, wearing his spectacles, was turning over the stiff, close-printed sheets of the local paper. Jane had at last come in, and was lying on the sofa, a book balanced on her chest, with a picture of mountains in it: she did not say anything to Katherine but was paying attention to her. In the electric light Katherine could judge her better. She had the angular, chiselled, Fennel face, but with neither the flickering beauty youth cast on it nor the
good-natured
repose of maturity. Instead she looked pale and irritable, rather like Robin after a long illness. Katherine wondered if she could be mistaken in thinking she was much older than her brother; she had none of his poise: she was not even dressed as well. Her clothes had a shabby look, and in addition she was not made up, nor were her hands attentively manicured. Robin dropped onto the piano stool and fingered a few notes.

“I expect Katherine would like to go to bed early,” said Mrs. Fennel. “She must be very tired. Did you stay at an hotel last night?”

“No, I slept on the train.”

“That isn’t a proper sleep, is it,” said Mr. Fennel, removing his spectacles and scratching his nose with the steel earpiece. “Sleep is more than rest for the
mind.
The
body
must lie down—every muscle should be relaxed——”

“Horses sleep standing up,” said Robin vaguely. “Well, Katherine, do go to bed if you are tired.”

“Oh, I will not go for a little while. I am not tired.”

“You can sleep as long as you please tomorrow,” said Mrs. Fennel, biting off a thread suddenly. “We shan’t disturb you. Oh, Robin, what’s that on the ceiling there? Is it a moth got in?”

Robin bestirred himself, and examined the immobile wings spread in the rose-coloured light on the ceiling. “It certainly is,” he said. “Isn’t there a duster somewhere on the bookcase? Can I stand on this chair?”

“Put a paper on it first.”

“Be careful,” said Jane. Robin looked round at her with amusement. “It’s quite furry,” he reported. “Have you suddenly taken a fancy to them?”

“You can handle it carefully.”

“Yes, dear, don’t crush it,” said Mrs. Fennel. “Gather it up firmly but gently. Put it out of the window.”

They all watched while Robin’s head and reaching hands shut out the light, and Mr. Fennel looked up resignedly as the shadow fell across his paper. Katherine felt that at this moment it was at last natural for her to be there, yet at the same time there was no intimacy among them: the whole thing resembled a scene in a hotel lounge. But she dismissed the comparison in a moment, telling herself that three untouched weeks lay ahead of her. Her head reeled suddenly with fatigue: it was certainly time she went to bed. Robin reported that the moth had flown into the creeper.

Yet when, after saying good night all round, she was at length lying in the darkness, hearing nothing but tiny unfamiliar sounds from the trees outside and from other rooms in the house, she found she was not ready to sleep. Her thoughts were like a tangle of live wires: she would choose one and try to follow it to its source, but almost immediately she would be swept away again by one
travelling
in the opposite direction. Any circumstance she picked on changed disconcertingly to something else. Her mind was like a puzzle in which many silver balls have to be shaken into their sockets; it was her thoughts that were rolling free, and she moved her head from side to side as if to settle them. Then, abruptly, she succeeded: and her uneasiness faded as she knew what she was thinking.

When was Robin going to start behaving naturally?

So far he had stood insipidly upon his party-manners, even when they had been alone, as if playing at
grown-ups
. When would he drop that, and be more friendly, and put her at her ease?

Because she had nearly stifled herself trying to be polite, none of the visit so far seemed quite real. It was all a little insincere, like a school prizegiving. The parents, of course, might always behave like that. But Robin seemed to have taken his cue from them, so that she had now met all four of them, one after another, and was left with the absurd feeling that the most important person, her real friend, had not yet appeared. There seemed nothing in their greetings so far to warrant their inviting her so many expensive miles. They welcomed her undramatically, even casually, as if she had come from the next village. She found this a disappointment.

Was he, perhaps, shy? She pondered on his face, which she already knew well, and his attitude. It was impossible to think that. And she could not accuse him of being bored with her, either, because his attention was always on her and his manner was solicitous. Really, he acted as if he had long ago made up his mind about her, and had brought about this meeting simply in order to check and correct one or two trifling points. There was no constraint in his manner at all.