A Girl in Winter (8 page)

Then why should she assume he was not behaving naturally?

This was a facer.

Oh, because he just couldn’t be. He was only her own age. It couldn’t be natural for anyone of sixteen to behave like a Prince Regent and foreign ambassador combined. It just wasn’t possible. Besides, if (ghastly thought!) by the thousandth chance it
was
natural, it would mean that he would never have asked her. They would be so entirely opposite in every way that—— And again to be so
independent, yet so gracious—and Robin’s movements were always beautifully finished and calm—well, it would mean that
people
, mere friends, mere other personalities, would hold no interest at all for him.

And consequently he wouldn’t have invited her.

But he had.

And therefore this reserve, this sandpapering of every word and gesture until it exactly fitted its place in the
conversation
, this gracious carriage of the personality—this was not natural, or at the most it was a manner, so familiar by now that his thoughts and motives could change freely behind it. Somewhere behind it was a desire to see her, which would now alter into something else. At the moment she could do nothing but watch. But in time she would know. The time would come when he would let her see.

But after this period of order, her thoughts broke their pattern once more and recommenced rocking to and fro, so that she became too tired to follow them any more and sank into half-consciousness. At this, half-effaced
impressions
rushed upon her, details of the journey and
passengers
, the shine of the sea, the lifting of the waves that was the slumbering of strength, the gulls at Dover, and above all her surprise that after so many miles and hours and different vehicles, after threading her way along so many platforms and quays, through ticket-barriers,
entrance-halls
, customs-houses and waiting-rooms, she should have reached the point she set out for, successfully encountered Robin Fennel, and have been taken along so many
unnamed
roads and lanes until they reached the house where he lived. Finally, her mind gave one last flicker of surprise, as a sail gleams for a moment before going over the horizon, that she should at last be lying in this house, surrounded by strangeness on all sides to a depth of hundreds of miles, and yet be feeling no anxiety of any kind.

No-one called her the next morning, so she had her sleep out, waking up to find it half-past nine by her wristwatch and the sun already high, the heat spreading over the countryside like a huge green tree. She was uncertain what was expected of her, so washed and put on a linen dress. Then she stole through the corridor and down the stairs. Bedroom doors were freely open, and she heard a rattling of saucepans from the kitchens, and an unabashed voice lifted in song. All the carpets in the house were thick and soundless, and the doors shut precisely with a click.
Blinding
gold swords of light came obliquely from the landing windows, which stood open. She was relieved to find on opening the dining-room door that Robin and Jane were still sitting at breakfast. Robin put down the morning paper instantly, and rose to manipulate her chair.

“Good morning,” he said. “Sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you. I am late, I’m afraid.”

“Not at all,” said Robin. “We breakfast at any old time on Sundays. Besides, you were tired after your journey.” He pushed the sugar across and she began sifting it on her grapefruit.

“And we were tired after our lack of journeys,” said Jane obscurely. She reached over and hooked the paper away from Robin. They were both eating toast and
marmalade
. Grapefruit was a luxury to Katherine, and she scoured it with enjoyment until it spat in her eye. After that she went more slowly. Her subtleties of the previous night no longer seemed at all plausible, and she was left once more shy and uneasy.

“What would you like to do today?” asked Robin, after he had rung for bacon and fried eggs by pressing a bell
concealed under the carpet with his foot. He motioned that Jane should pour out a cup of coffee for her.

“Why, I don’t know.” Katherine was wary, suspecting there might be a concealed answer to this that etiquette required her to give.

“You wouldn’t like to go to church?”

“If you go, I will.”

Jane looked up, her elbows on the table, and gave a short chuckle. “We are a godless family,” she said. “But we respect your principles, if you have any. There was some
speculation
as to whether you’d be a Roman Catholic or not.”

“Oh no. I’m not Catholic.”

Robin looked relieved, and felt for the newspaper, which was not there. Jane threw it back to him and rose, lighting a cigarette.

“But I should like to see some of your churches, all the same,” said Katherine hastily. “They are very fine, I believe.”

“Oh, we’ll have a regular orgy of that,” said Jane. “We’ll go to London and Oxford and Salisbury and all the other places. Robin will tell you all the dates.” The cigarette looked unusually large in her small mouth as she lounged on the window-seat.

Robin drew a silver pencil from his jacket pocket and flattening the newspaper down more firmly, pencilled a solution in the crossword puzzle. Then he rested a glance on Jane. “The question is,” he said, “what are we going to do this morning?”

“I suggest we show Katherine the village. What there is to show.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“And the river.”

“She’s seen that.”

“She can see it from the other side, then.”

“Rivers,” said Robin mildly, “look much the same from either side.”

Jane glanced round sharply. “Well, there’s nothing to see in the village. You could walk through if you didn’t know it was there and never see it. And that’d be a good thing, too.” She sounded inexplicably cross.

Katherine gathered that Jane was co-host, so to speak, and this disappointed her, because she wanted to get Robin alone. Further, she had taken something of a
dislike
to Jane. She was short-mannered and irritable. Her hair was cut rather outmodedly into an Eton crop, and her figure was small, bony and unemphatic. When all three of them set out she wore a raffish check shirt that
contrasted
with the Sunday sedateness of the other two. The front door was open, and as they passed through the tiled porch the sun seemed simultaneously to lift up at them from the ground and to press down on their heads and shoulders. Robin appeared to straighten himself against it, looking round at the trees that ascended on all sides towards the sky. He looked handsome to the point of sleekness.

They went up a lane to a secondary road, which led them to the village. As Jane had said, there was not much to see: nothing but one street of cottages, a tiny toolshop and garage, a combined general shop and post office, and an unpretentious public-house with a bench outside it. At the end of the street was a pond, and standing back on a slight rise on the right was a church. The cottages had brief front gardens blazing with flowers, and the air was full of the noise of birds.

Undistinguished as it was, Katherine found it
fascinating
. She looked curiously round the sides of cottages, where small ugly children were fussing, and at old people who sat on kitchen chairs in the doorways. When she saw their hands lying in their laps, or on the wooden arms of the chair, she thought it was strange that these husks, that had poured out their lives so distantly and differently from her, should for a second look at her with their bright eyes. From occasional doorways came dance music from Radio
Luxembourg
,
and she could see dimly through the lace curtains on the windowsill mass-produced china figures and Sunday newspapers, read by men in shirt sleeves. A white dog looked at them and then lay down. They walked together through the pouring light, which so far was not balanced by such heat, but which promised that the two would reach equal intensity at perhaps three in the afternoon.

“Well, now you know all about it,” said Jane, after Robin had finished some rambling anecdote about the Civil War. “Don’t you think it looks nicer than it sounds?”

“It’s very nice,” said Katherine.

“Yes, it is, for what it’s worth. It palls with time.” Jane yawned with the heat. “But tell me”—as the yawn abated, her voice assumed by contrast unnatural clarity—“is it as you’d imagined it? All this, I mean?”

Katherine looked at her, caught off her guard. This was the question Robin ought to have asked—the one she had rehearsed. Yet Jane obviously expected an answer. She hesitated. Did Jane mean simply the village, or the whole visit? Robin, she guessed, would have meant the former, unless she had got him very much wrong: with Jane she was not so certain. But she did not like Jane sufficiently to treat it as a personal question.

“It’s smaller,” she admitted. “I did not know what to expect. I had looked in some books about England to see if I could find anything of it, but there was nothing. Really, I suppose I thought there would be—white cottages, a very old church, grass——”

“A maypole, and everyone going hunting and eating roast beef,” Jane finished, throwing off the remark
without
deflecting her watchfulness. “Didn’t Robin tell you about it?”

Katherine thought guiltily of long passages of
description
in English impatiently skimmed through and tossed aside. Words that baffled her she had not troubled to search out in a dictionary.

“I had a shot at it,” Robin said. For some reason he carried an ash walkingstick with which he cut at nettles and peppery cow-parsley. “But I’m not very good at that sort of thing.”

“Robin favours the guide-book style,” said Jane. “Although I don’t think we are in any guide-books.”

“Jane’s favourite literature,” Robin retorted, with the nearest approach he made to sarcasm, “is written by people who travel about with a gun and a typewriter.”

“I like to
know
about places.” Jane’s voice took on a curious, younger-sister note of defiance. “All you care about is the birthrate and the standard of living. I want to know what I should feel like if I lived there.”

“You’d be bored.”

Jane addressed herself solely to Katherine.

“Does what you’ve seen of England fit in with what you’d read about it before you came? Of course, you’ve probably read a lot. But does it?”

Katherine was rather bewildered at this.

“Perhaps a little,” she said. “Not very much.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said Robin. He came to a halt at the edge of the duckpond, and tucking his stick under his arm took a bread roll he had saved from breakfast out of his pocket and began breaking bits off to throw to the ducks. They hovered in an expectant semi-circle, rushing towards each new piece as it fell. “But you can connect it, you know. Take what you see now,” Jane
muttered
impatiently, and pulling up a grass-stalk to nibble, lounged aside to watch the ducks. Robin went on,
breaking
the bread neatly in his fingers. “Small fields, mainly pasture. Telegraph wires and a garage. That Empire Tea placard. And you know, don’t you, that Britain is a small country, once agricultural but now highly industrialized, relying a great deal for food on a large Empire. You see, it all links up.”

Katherine looked at him doubtfully. The edge of his
voice sounded as if the gap between his inner and outer thoughts had closed up, and that he was speaking
sincerely
. She wondered why. The ducks gobbled and made slapping noises.

“That one at the back hasn’t had any,” said Jane. “Do you see? He makes little rushes but the others always get there first. Give him one to himself.”

“He’s not trying,” said Robin. “He doesn’t really want one.”

Nevertheless, he threw a bit, so accurately that it hit the duck on the head. Before it could realize what had happened, the crust had been gobbled up by another, streaking in with a flurry of speckled feathers.

“Oh, give him another bit,” said Jane.

“There’s no more.” Robin dusted his hands, and took his walking stick in hand again. “I don’t suppose he was hungry.”

The ducks followed them hopefully as they turned away, the one that had been hit swimming with dazed dignity away from its fellows. Robin suddenly and unaccountably brought down his stick on the end of a twig that lay on the ground, causing it to leap up into the air, and then, before it had touched the ground, knocked it ten yards over a hedge, where chickens rushed towards it. “
Boundary
,” he said, looking at Katherine, who laughed, infected by his sudden irresponsibility. “Remember what day it is,” said Jane in mock reproof, but looked at him with a sort of futile contempt. Katherine saw them both very clearly for a moment: Robin standing erect in the sun, looking about him, bearing the stick authoritatively; Jane sallow and
irritable
, wanting to get back indoors. “It’s absurd,” she thought. “He’s not shy at all. But of course, why should he be?”

They climbed a path leading through the churchyard, where flowers and seeding grasses mingled with the graves and the sound of singing came from the church. The pure light picked out the distance of woods and hills, as well as
sharpening the immediate surroundings; the blue
harebells
, the roughness of the carved headstones, the insects half-way up the stalks of grass. At the end of the path was a wicket-gate, leading into a wide field that sloped down to the river, thickly covered with kingcups and
buttercups
. A few cattle stood in the shade of trees, their flanks shining, and watched the three of them pass through the gate and down the scarcely-worn path. As she walked
behind
the other two, Katherine noticed that the shiny flowers threw a yellow reflection upwards to the shadows of their clothes, making it seem as if they walked in a kind of splendour.

It was on the first day, too—or, at latest, the second—that they started to play tennis. Afterwards there were few days that passed without a game. Jane objected that it was far too hot, and Katherine hoped that this would separate Jane from Robin and herself, for she wanted to see how he behaved when they were alone, but when she came down after changing her shoes Jane had lounged out onto the court, and was throwing her racquet up and catching it, the strings glittering in the sun. It was obvious that she did not want to play, and Katherine admitted a fresh problem to her attention—why Jane was attaching herself to them so persistently. When she said anything, particularly to Robin, she was derisive and (as far as Katherine could tell) bored. Robin treated her politely, but with just the suspicion of off handedness that suggested that in his opinion he thought very little of her and had the whiphand. Yet though she didn’t look it, Jane must be at least four years the elder. Katherine sensed that there was a subdued conflict between them, though of course it might be only an elaborate family joke. Her ear was not quick enough yet to catch such fine shades of meaning. But since this situation existed, why should Jane prolong it by
hanging
about with people so much younger than herself?

So far she did not expect an answer to such questions. All her attention was concentrated on picking up what was said.

Before they started, Robin wound up the net. It
appeared
by implication that he was the best player, and so the first game was between the two girls. They went to the ends of the court and Robin stood by a net-post to call the score. As soon as she started to play, Katherine realized that she was wretchedly out of practice, and her clumsiness was aggravated by Robin’s presence. The
racquet
she had borrowed from Mrs. Fennel seemed unwieldy, and time after time her shots came off the wood. She tried to concentrate, knowing Jane to be an indifferent player, but only became over-enthusiastic, and lost the first two games. Then, as she made the first service of the third game, the court came suddenly into focus, and she was all at once confident. Six consecutive games went to her, giving her the set. She rejoined Robin and Jane at the sideline guiltily, wondering belatedly if she should not have allowed Jane to win a game or two more.

Surprisingly, Jane did not seem annoyed.

“Robin will give you a better game,” she said. “I’m going for a deckchair.”

“Would you like to rest a bit?” asked Robin, touching the rubber grip on his racquet-handle.