A Girl in Winter (10 page)

“Sweet little thing,” said a woman nearby.

The loudspeaker announced that Cream Cracker had
been awarded third prize, and the three winners came out again to receive their rosettes. There was a curious custom, she noticed, whereby the riders held the rosettes in their teeth while they cantered round in order; when they did this there was another roar of laughter, for whether accidentally or not Cream Cracker led the parade. After circling the field twice they went out among renewed applause. The little girl in the saddle had never given the slightest indication that she was not playing on a rocking-horse in her nursery.

“This is an English crowd,” said Jane. “They’re quite unique. Their lowest common multiple is very low indeed.”

Katherine smiled, but she was enjoying herself. The warm air was filled with the smell of grass and horses. Occasionally a whiff of pipe-tobacco sharpened it by
contrast
. A great good-humour filled the crowd, which was a local one from the surrounding villages. Every class of person wandered aimlessly about: village women,
looking
older than they were; knowledgeable farmers, who knew what neighbours had left at home in their stables as well as what they had brought to show; a tramp dressed in a long overcoat fastened with a safety-pin and with a wisp of grass drooping from his mouth, who stumped painfully round three sides of the field in order to buy a bottle of beer from the refreshment tent, and then retired to the foot of a five-barred gate to unwrap a large cheese sandwich. There were young men with raw, red necks and closely-tailored suits, young farmers’ sons who pushed through the crowd on their horses, groomed and braided for the occasion; unplaceable men who stared from the open sunshine-roofs of their cars; the fantastic older gentry, hardly to be taken seriously, in archaic tweeds, with old sticks and fobs and hat pins that had been worn through season after season of this same company and pursuit; and then there were the young gentry, on holiday
from school, rarely one in twenty with a face that was beautiful, but all having the fine texture of skin that good food and exercise automatically gave. A bevy of them was helping in the refreshment tent, charging extortionate prices for lettuce sandwiches and home-made cakes, and muddling the change that was kept in an upturned trilby hat. Katherine and Jane went there and bought a bottle of cherry cider each, very gassy, which they held as they strolled round, swigging occasionally. It was all very free and easy. Finally, there were village children, the elder ones minding the younger, busy with anything but what was going on in the roped-off arena. Little ones strayed about almost under the feet of the horses. Small groups of bullet-headed boys, who a hundred years ago would have been scaring crows for a few pence a week, lifted their bottles to the sun to see who could drink the most without stopping. It was strange that, islanded in the half-attentive, slovenly crowd, the horses seemed more highly strung, as if belonging to a higher breed altogether. Also many of them were reluctant to jump, as if resenting doing so before so many people.

As time went on they lost Robin, and Jane, by now tired even of being offensive, suggested they should go home and have tea in peace. “Or haven’t you had enough yet? They’ll probably go on all night: they’re hours behind time already.”

“I don’t mind. We’ll go if you like.”

She was willing to leave before she became bored, and they crossed the littered grass to the entrance gate. As they walked off down the road the deep quacking of the
loudspeaker
followed them, along with the noise from
sideshows
. There had been a few stalls of amusements,
traditional
games with backcloths grown shabby from being hawked year after year round such village entertainments. Eventually the sound died away.

“I enjoyed that,” said Katherine.

“Did you really? I shouldn’t have thought you would.” Jane kicked at the dust piled by the edge of the road as she walked. “I should have thought you’d find it
insufferable
. I do.”

“But why? I liked it.”

“I thought you were too clever for it.”

Katherine chuckled. By now she was finding it easy to understand English, and less difficult to speak it.

“Well, I don’t know, but the sight of people enjoying themselves in the mass always depresses me,” Jane went on. “Some people may take a pleasure in it.”

“It’s strange to me,” said Katherine. “That’s the reason. It was very English and interesting.”

“It’s English all right,” said Jane. “But then I am English, more’s the pity. And I know a lot of those people, rot them, and they aren’t at all interesting.”

“Of course, I don’t go to—horse-shows?—at home.”

“No.” Jane suggested they should take a shorter path across some fields, and they climbed a stile. “What do you do at home?”

“What do you mean?” Katherine was surprised.

“How do you spend your time?”

“I go to school. There’s always work to do in the evenings. But I read, go to friends’ houses, sometimes go to the theatre.”

“Of course, you live in a town. There’s always so much more to do in a town,” Jane said ruminatively. “
Whereabouts
in it do you live? I mean, what does your house look like?”

Katherine recollected her home with difficulty.

“I live in a wide street with trees and seats … The houses are much alike. High, white … fairly big.”

“Have you a garden?”

“No. No, it is not like England, you know. There are gardens near—the—I don’t know what you call them. Gardens—a park—with a café and a band.”

Jane pondered on this. After a pause she remarked that it was raining. Large white clouds had hung about during the day, but had not interfered with the sunshine. Now they had coagulated for the time being, and a determined shower was falling, though another part of the sky was quite blue and the sun continued to shine. They went into a barn to shelter.

“Beware of the bull,” said Jane, peering inside.

The barn was empty, and they stood in the broad open doorway and watched the glistening rain fall. Behind them the barn was like a whispering hollow shell as rain beat on the roof. Jane leaned at the side of the doorway, folded her arms, and stared out across the veiled meadow. The small shoulders of her check shirt were wet.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “When you grow up.” She inflected the last two words sardonically.

“I haven’t thought,” said Katherine. “I hope I shall go to the university.”

“Robin has his career all planned out, down to the Order of the British Empire,” said Jane. “He wants to go into the Diplomatic Service. Haven’t you really any ideas?”

“Not many.”

“What does your father want you to do?”

“Oh, he doesn’t mind,” said Katherine, laughing. “I don’t think he has ever thought of the question.” She
considered
. “There is always being a schoolteacher. I thought once I should like to work on a newspaper.”

“Yes, that would suit you.”

“But I hope privately that something more exciting will turn up.”

“Something more exciting,” Jane echoed, and the rain echoed behind her. It was falling now with astonishing vehemence, making the grass dance, whirling across the field in sudden silver ghosts. “Do you mean you want to get married?”

“Oh no!” Katherine was truthfully surprised. “No, I
meant some work I had never thought of—I might meet somebody at the university who would offer me a really good job—to be a secretary, perhaps——”

“Well, but you might get married,” said Jane. “Hadn’t you thought of that?”

Katherine had indeed discussed it for hours on end, and so had her answer ready. “One should act as if one was not likely to,” she said. “Though as you say there’s always the possibility.”

“I didn’t say that exactly,” Jane murmured. “It isn’t a thing one can include in any plans, though Robin does. He will marry at thirty—I can’t remember for the moment what post he’ll be holding then.”

Katherine did not quite follow this, so remained silent. After a time she said curiously:

“What about you?”

“Nothing about me,” said Jane. The hiss of the rain slackened abruptly, and it fell gently in front of the open doorway, running in tiny rivulets in over the stone flags, that were dusty with chaff. The clouds had huddled over onto one side of the sky and separate rays of sun forked obliquely down, making the distant tree-tops shine; from somewhere nearby they heard the liquid croaking of a full stream. Jane stepped out and looked about her.

“We can get home in this, though our shoes will be soaked,” she said. “There ought to be a rainbow
somewhere
about.” She squinted upwards. “I can’t see it.”

Katherine realized one morning that half her holiday had gone. This surprised her, for so far her visit had been
unremarkable
, as if the three of them had been wandering
in a green maze, getting no nearer the centre. How had it passed? Most of the mornings they spent at the house, setting the afternoons aside for excursions; these were slow and leisurely bicycle rides around the many south Oxfordshire villages, to Nuneham Courtenay, to
Dorchester
to see the church and its windows, and round a dozen smaller places, Toot Baldon, Marsh Baldon,
Berwick
Salome, Ewelme, Benson—names Katherine never remembered, that remained in her memory as a
composite
picture of cottages built of Cotswold stone, church porches, oaks and beeches, and the river, with its locks and bridges, always close at hand or just out of sight among the trees. It was August and the reapers were out, saying cautiously that it had been a middling year. Also they had made two longer excursions—one to London, where Katherine had been exhausted by sight-seeing and would have preferred to look at the shops; and one
northwards
to the Midlands, to see Banbury, Warwick, and Stratford-on-Avon. She reported all this to her friend, who had been very sceptical about her first letter. “I don’t understand cream cakes, but I eat them.”

Indeed, she had grown rather sceptical about it
herself
. The time passed so easily, with cycling and tennis, cutting sandwiches and eating them under trees, or simply lounging about, that she no longer felt aggrieved that Jane was always with them. It seemed simply that she had nothing else to do. Mrs. Fennel and a maid took care of the house, and the few duties that Jane undertook were more to keep her amused than anything else. Katherine wondered if all English girls did as little as she did. As she seemed to have no proper work to do, Katherine half-expected her to lavish unnecessary
attention
on something else—needlework, her clothes, perhaps even work in the village. She did not. Except for her cigarettes, she was like a discontented schoolgirl on
perpetual
holiday. No-one suggested that it was her place to
do anything; in fact, the subject was never mentioned; and in consequence she had all the time in the world to tag along with them, sometimes silent, sometimes
argumentative
. The only times she paid willing attention were when Katherine said anything about her own home, how it differed from theirs, and so on.

Robin’s manner did not alter. They were friends, but he was the host, and she was the guest. He treated her as he might a boy of his own age whom he wanted to impress. Her assent was asked for everything they did: he never left her alone without making sure she had something
nominally
to amuse her. And this began to exasperate her. She was used to striking a quick response from people, to
jumping
from track to track of intimacy until either she tired of it or they reached a stable relationship. With him she simply could not get going. And this annoyed her, because he was attractive. If he had—well, if he had only laughed and paid her openly-insincere compliments, which was the lightest kind of flirtation she knew, that would have
satisfied
her. It would have shown he was human, at all events, and having exacted such tribute she would probably have forgotten the matter. But when he held her chair for her at meals, when he sketched out excursions on a map with the point of his pencil, when he met one of Jane’s sarcasms by pushing back his hair slowly and looking at her with faint surprise, when he was unexpectedly flippant, as if he had flicked a new halfpenny into the air, when he talked about Norman lead fonts or suddenly announced he was tired and would not leave the grass where they were lying—these and a dozen other things he did so composedly that he might only have been rehearsing them in his room. When she spoke to him he listened seriously to what she was saying; as it was often incoherent and usually trite she would rather he had looked at her while she was saying it. She became confused and embarrassed. It kept her attention on him too much: she brooded on what he might
be thinking, or how she should meet a strangled avowal of love if he made it. A score of such fancies would occupy her mind, usually in the early afternoon or in the early evening, for the air in the river valley was so soft that there were times when it slackened all her muscles and she could only lie by an open window or out on the
veranda
, her mind suspended sensually above herself and the people round her.

But most of the time it seemed less important than at first. One morning a letter from home was waiting for her on the breakfast table, and this so delighted her that she paid little attention to what the others said. When they went into the lounge afterwards she realized Jane and Robin had been having a mild quarrel, something about Robin’s swimming before breakfast in the river, which Jane seemed to resent. Or perhaps there had been another reason that Katherine had missed. It had not fully died down when Jane listlessly opened a small blue portable gramophone and put on a record. She sometimes did this when she was alone, for Katherine had heard it; there was a small pile of records on one of the window-ledges. They were all about eight years old and Katherine wondered how they had come to be bought. All of them were
ten-inch
dance records.

Robin shifted irritably when the music started. “Can’t you put in a new needle?” he said with some self-control, as if the very fact of a gramophone fitted with a used needle annoyed him.

“There aren’t any,” said Jane. He grunted, and sat down. His hair had dried brittly on his head, and he wore a blazer and rubber shoes. Jane had on a grubby white dress.

The record was old-fashioned, and had a tinny quality only partly due to the needle. The tune it played had been popular for perhaps a week or two, or perhaps for even as long as a musical comedy had run in London, but was
now quite forgotten. The orchestra that played it did so in what had been the fashion of the moment, with little empty tricks of syncopation that recalled the outmoded dresses of the girls that had danced to it. It was strange to think it had once sounded modern. Now it was like an awning propped in the sun, nearly white, that years ago had been striped bright red and yellow.

As if to prevent Jane playing any more, Robin got up when it finished.

“Let’s go on the river,” he said.

“Always the river,” said Jane. “First you swim in it, then you want to float on it. You’ll turn into a
water-rat
.” She turned over some other records wearily.

“Coming?” said Robin, more or less to Katherine.

Jane shut the lid of the gramophone.

“Why do we always do what you want?” she inquired.

Robin stared at her as if he thought her rather ill-bred.

“I’d hoped we were always doing what Katherine wanted.”

Katherine, who had taken out her letter again, looked up when her name was spoken.

“Are we?” said Jane. She looked out of the window moodily at the sunlight. A milkman was going round to the side of the house.

Robin turned almost elaborately to Katherine.

“Would you like to go on the river?” he said. “You haven’t been yet, you know.”

“I should,” said Katherine.

This was the first time she had had the chance to show him whom she was prepared to side with. She had only just realized that the quarrel might result in their being alone. It depended on whether Jane took up the challenge.

She did not. When they went down to the boathouse, she was with them, carrying cushions, a book, and dark sunglasses. Robin led the punt out of the boathouse by the painter, as if unstabling a patient beast, and Katherine
settled in the seat facing the way they would go. He
dexterously
swung the boat round, and they started off against the slow current, with the water drifting past Katherine at shoulder-level, covered with dead may-flies, twigs, and fallen tree-blossoms: here and there water-beetles sped on the bright surface. The morning had an almost-mocking quality of peace. On either side of them stretched the fields, with sometimes a garden coming to the water’s edge where a house stood, and once they passed a row of riverside
cottages
, and a bare-armed woman came out with a pail. She set it down with a clang and stared at them.

Robin addressed his remarks to Katherine, who sat with her back to him. “I’m not splashing you, am I?”

“Not at all.” She glanced round. He had dropped his blazer and rolled up his sleeves. At every thrust he made at the riverbed, the satisfying impulse forward lilted inside her. Some drops did sprinkle her occasionally, but this was more pleasant than otherwise. “I’ve never been in a boat like this one before.”

“Haven’t you really? They’re great fun. Plenty of room, and you can’t upset them. Slowish, of course, but they’re not built for speed.”

“There’s no other boat you push along like that, is there?”

“I don’t think there is. A gondolier has an oar, I believe. There are people who can pole canoes. Jack can.”

“Who?”

Jane muttered something, and turned on her side.

“Jack Stormalong, a friend of ours. He’s coming next week. But it’s a mad thing to do, unless you’re wearing a bathing costume.”

It looked a very easy thing to do. After each stroke Robin threw the twelve-foot pole carelessly upwards before negligently slipping it back into the water. It whistled through his hands. He stood easily but quite still, not
seeming
to shift his stance in the slightest.

Katherine trailed a hand in the water which, to her surprise, was quite warm. There had been a mist in the early morning, but this had now disappeared, and the sun was climbing unhindered. The heat-wave during which she had arrived had broken up, but not
disastrously
; each day was now a mixture of sunlight and cloud, and the air remained humid. At present the landscape stretched luminous and detailed.

As they passed under a bridge, Jane, who had been lying with her eyes shut behind the sun-spectacles and her rough-skinned ankles close to Katherine’s right hand, stirred in the cold bar of shadow and looked up.

“Where are we going?”

Robin whisked the pole in and out of the water a few times before saying: “Just up the river.”

“What do you mean by just up the river?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“Well, I know you,” said Jane. “You’ll probably make us late for lunch.”

“I thought we might go up to the Rose for lunch,” said Robin, with an indifferent air. “It’s a good place.”

“Have you said we shall be out?”

“We can ring up once we get there.”

“I don’t know about that. It’ll be too late then. We shan’t get there till half-past twelve.”

“We shall get there long before half-past twelve,” said Robin with an edge of contempt in his voice. “I can put on a bit of speed.” He gave an extra-hard push as
illustration.

“If you wanted to go to the Rose you should have let them know beforehand,” said Jane.

“I didn’t think of it beforehand.”

“Well, then, you’d better leave it till another time. You can’t go messing all the arrangements up like this. Have some thought for others,” said Jane, rather angrily. Robin poled on without altering their speed or his expression.
Katherine awkwardly studied the scenery. She could understand most of what they had said, and their tone of voice told her the rest. It was as if Robin was trying to push Jane down from the place she had assumed during the last few days, and Jane was refusing to be pushed.

He poled on, but gradually diminished speed. When he spoke it was lightly once more.

“I thought you’d appreciate the idea. Aren’t you always saying we never do anything on the spur of the moment?”

Jane did not say anything, but looked red. She had taken off the dark glasses, but now replaced them.

“But if you don’t really mean it, you ought to explain that first.”

She threw down her book. “All right, go to the Rose if you want to. Only I’ve warned you, that’s all.”

“What do you think, Katherine?”

“Me?” Katherine had been afraid they would draw her into this. “I don’t know where the place is.” She struggled between supporting him and being sensible. “But if we had given your mother trouble—it would rather spoil it, wouldn’t it? We can go another day.” And she added, leaning backwards to smile at him: “Won’t you teach me how to do this? You said you would.”

As he stood against the sun, she could not see how he took the question, but she thought he was pleased. Jane glared indifferently out of the boat, and Katherine felt balanced between the two conflicting wills. So far she had given one vote to each. She hoped he would see whose side she was on: there had been a curious note in the way he had asked his last question.

“Well,” he said at last, “perhaps Jane’s got some objection to that, too.” He could say these things in a level way, that sounded far removed from any bickering. Jane defiantly crossed her ankles.

“As long as I don’t have to do anything,” she said.
“And as long as you don’t want more than one admiring spectator.”

Robin let this pass. “Well, if you’re prepared to risk it,” he said to Katherine. She stood up uncertainly. “The point is, you might fall in.”

“Oh, but I can swim.”

“Yes, but we should get into a row for not taking care of you. It’s tricky till you get your balance.” He brought up the pole again. “Stand where you are till you get the feel of it, and watch what I do.”

“Till you get sick of it,” said Jane. She was watching them sharply, as if expecting entertainment. Katherine stood self-consciously in the middle, lurching occasionally, and watched while Robin poled with text-book
correctness
for some distance. “I can see what you do,” she said eventually. “But I don’t know whether I could do it.”

“Come and try,” said Robin.

She picked her way cautiously to the end of the boat, and joined him, it seemed in perilous isolation, above the surrounding river. Edging away to allow her room, he laid the pole in her hands. Taken unawares by its weight she dropped it, with a fearful clatter and splashing, and an exclamation from Jane. Robin picked it up, and gave it back to her. It was very cold and wet. The punt slowly came to a halt against the sluggish current.