A Girl in Winter (11 page)

“Now,” said Robin, briskly. “Stand facing the way you’re going.”

“If you’re lucky,” said Jane. Her mouth tightened
contemptuously.

“Feet about a foot apart, so that you won’t fall in. Strictly speaking, a good punter never moves his feet at all, you see. You’ll soon be more surefooted.”

Katherine doubted that. The punt had stopped and had now begun to turn round in a slow circle. She prodded ineffectually at the water, nearly overbalancing.

“Wait a minute, I’ll turn her round,” said Robin,
reclaiming
the pole and standing on the very end, while Katherine watched him uselessly. “We’ll turn back, since we’re not going anywhere, it seems.”

“How beautiful to watch you,” said Jane.

When the punt was once more pointing straight down the empty river, Katherine tried again. She positioned her feet and on Robin’s instructions lifted the pole vertically, so that water dripped down her arm. It would take very little to send her into the water.

“Now, point it slightly towards the way you want to go, and drop it in. Drop it, don’t push it down. As soon as it touches the bottom, grip it as high as you can reach and haul on it. Fairly hard, of course, but don’t fall over
backwards
. Now, try it.”

Katherine tried it. She tried to drop the pole in
slantwise
, and only sent it diagonally under the boat. When she hauled on it, the punt surged forward in a crablike way, and ended up travelling towards the bank. Her next stroke was really not too bad, and sent the bow crashing into the rushes. As she dragged the pole up, it became entangled with the alders overhead, and she staggered as if in a nightmare.

Jane, shaken by the bump and showered with leaves and twigs, began to laugh. “End of Act One,” she said.

Katherine furiously did not look at her.

After Robin had restored the boat to midstream, she tried again. This time she forgot to slant the pole, so that when she was ready to haul there was nothing to haul on, and she could only give the river-bed a frantic poke to justify the stroke at all, and this did not contribute to their progress.

Robin explained how to straighten a boat by wagging the pole in the water behind it, and as the punt was again drifting as if by instinct towards the bank, she at once tried this out. To her surprise it was successful.

“That’s right,” said Robin. “You’re doing very well.”

She looked at him with dislike, and as she brought round the pole for the next stroke nearly knocked him in the water. He saved himself by catching it with one hand, and this sudden interruption nearly upset Katherine. Jane was heaving quietly with laughter. Katherine viciously
dropped
the pole into the river again, and felt the splash swamp her right shoe.

“It’s a good thing the current is with us,” said Jane.

Having to keep her feet still made Katherine feel as insecure as if she were carrying a long plank along high scaffolding. Somehow she had imagined punting to be a gentle pastime, rather resembling croquet. She could not remember feeling so silly since her early schooldays.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

“It’ll come to you all at once,” Robin assured her. “Try again.”

Their voices sounded flat on the water. Katherine,
summoning
all her determination, poised the pole and slid it (the hardest part, she decided) down into the river at exactly the right angle. Cheered, she hauled on it with all her might. It grew suddenly rigid in her hands. Carried on by the impetus of the stroke, she tugged wildly for a second, then at the last moment overbalanced by trying to improve her grip. Robin (who must have been watching her closely, she decided later) took a step forward, caught her neatly round the waist, and pulled her upright again. She stumbled and put her hands on his shoulders. A cow standing with its forelegs in the water lifted its head and gave a long bellow.

“End of Act Two,” said Jane. “Love will find a way.” She leant back and fished out a couple of old paddles from the front of the boat. The pole, stuck in the mud, drew away from them.

Katherine sank down on the cushions, trembling from rage, fright, and embarrassment. The bright, almost
metallic contact when he had gripped her sharply wiped away all traces of self-deception. She knew she wanted to lie with her head in his lap, to have him comfort her: she knew equally that this was not going to happen partly because he had no interest in her, and because Jane was specifically there to prevent it. She sat blushing.

When they reached the pole again, Robin stood up and with a smart double twist drew it, dripping, from the water: he swished it in the river a few times to clean off the wet black mud, then with a slight smile offered it to her again.

“No,” she said. Her voice shook. “No, I won’t try again. I can’t do it. I only make a fool of myself.”

“You don’t.” Robin sounded surprised. “Not at all. You were doing well.”

“I tell you I don’t want to.”

She stared down at the cushions.

“Well, of course, you can’t do it,” cut in Jane coolly, “if you try Robin’s idiotic way. Nobody could, first shot. I wonder you didn’t go into the water as soon as you started. Look here, try again. Go on, take the pole and try again.” Katherine obeyed, seeing no alternative but an open quarrel. “Now forget all about your feet and doing it with one hand and all the rest of it; the important thing is that you want to drive the boat along by pushing the pole on the river-bed.”

“I thought,” said Robin, drying his hands on a
handkerchief
, “one might as well do a thing properly.”

No-one answered him. Katherine worked off her fury by poling as best she could. Jane was right. Once she felt that her feet were no longer glued down and she could turn about as she pleased, it became much easier, and she drove them along in an ungainly but decided way. Robin, who had thus been defeated twice that morning, watched her with a subdued expression on his face which suggested to her when she once happened to catch sight of it that he would not be content to leave it at that.

At some untraceable point she had fallen in love with him. Her curiosity and his fascination had brought her to the brink of it, she knew, but she had fancied that love needed two people, as if it were a lake they had to dive in
simultaneously
. Now she found she had gone into it alone, while he remained undismayed.

Because Katherine was so young she had hitherto thought love a pleasant thing; a state that put order into her life, directing her thoughts and efforts towards one end, and because she found it pleasant she thought it could not be real love, which by all accounts caused suffering and was to be feared. Perhaps because she had lived always in her parents’ house, making no effort to have a life of her own, she had not stirred up any but the surface of the passionate emotions—sentimentality; devotion; perhaps too it was because she had so far loved only women and girls. So she would have thought that to love Robin would have done no more than set a seal on her visit, to frame it, to enclose it in a glass sphere. Here, where he could not leave her, they would spend the long days in each other’s company, with every romantic background ready to hand, deep cornfields, the burning-glass of the sky, the willows by the river, the white lanes.

But this was not what she felt. Being so far from home, it was natural for her to assume at one blow what was due to her sixteen years, that before she had shunned a little. When he had touched her, every nerve in her body had snapped as if with electricity, and the desire she felt for him was cloudy and shameful. It put a curious
constraint
upon her; at first she thought it might be the heat that made her flesh tingle at the touch of her clothes, and
her ears alert to every sound in the house; it might be due to the weather, that she could not eat, and felt as if she had just left her bed after a convalescence. And to be with him was no pleasure, for she could not be satisfied with words, and the sultriness put such a hunger upon her body that sometimes she was driven almost to desperation to know that there would be nothing easier than to lay her hand on his bare arm, and yet also to know that this was a thing she could never do.

It was a strange, disturbing time, lasting a few days. It made her bitter and miserable. She was frightened to think that this feeling was something she would meet again, that love would henceforward have something of this manner, for it was not a sensation she rejoiced in. If this was love—even this tiny shudder caused by his holding her waist for a second—it made her feel guilty, for it did not change him in her eyes: he did not grow admirable, more noble, not even more likeable, as the girls had that she had loved. Simply she thought him beautiful, against her will, and nothing would have excited her more than to kiss him and to make him love her too. But then she would have had to be different, and he would have had to be different also, and it would not happen. Knowing this, she drew her curtains back and opened each window as far as it would go, hoping as she lay bitterly among the hot bedclothes that whatever stillness there was in the summer night would come to her and still her restlessness.

One morning she could not sleep after five o’clock, so got up and went out quietly into the clouded daybreak. The fields were wet, so she kept to the lanes: rain during the night had freshened up the bracken and pale wild-flowers until, with an over-reaching sky logically ribbed with clouds, they made a landscape of half-tones such as she had not seen before. There was a tang of damp wood from the fences. After a time she leant on a stile and watched a tiny stream running along a ditch, over a bed of white
sand; she stooped and flicked her hand in it, finding it very cold. She noticed a small frog in the grass, struck to immobility by her presence; when she tickled it with a straw it crawled away. There was watercress growing under the hedge. She dried her fingers on her skirt.

It was little use troubling. She could not pretend to
herself
that he felt towards her one-tenth of the interest she felt in him, or that the house held her more securely than a pair of cupped hands may hold a moth for a few seconds before releasing it again. She could only hope that the burden of this new love would be taken off her before it betrayed her into actions she would regret.

“We thought you’d run away,” said Robin.

He sat watching her eat. She had stayed out longer than she meant to, and come in a little late for breakfast. A cup of cold tea had been waiting for her in her bedroom, and she drank it guiltily. When she went down Robin and Jane had nearly finished, and now Robin remained in his place while Jane inspected the flowers in a bored way, picking out any dead blooms before changing the water.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. His tie was knotted
carelessly
round his throat, his shirt-collar not fastened.

“Bad luck,” he said, pouring her some more coffee. She needed plenty to drink to force down these impossible breakfasts. He watched her, lightly bouncing a knife-blade on his plate, then suddenly laughed and said in her own language:

—And so you rose up to see the dawn.

—I did, she answered, surprised. But there was nothing to see.

Outside it was raining. He pushed back his chair and got up with his hands in his pockets. “Yes, that’s rather a good idea,” he said. “Why should Katherine talk English all the time? Let’s return the compliment a bit. Two hours every morning, say.”

“Rubbish,” said Jane. She peered into the flowers. In short sleeves her elbows were very sharp.

“Why rubbish? It would be a graceful act. From ten to twelve every morning.”

“She came here for a holiday,” Jane said rudely, “not to give you lessons.”

“But think what a strain it must be, talking English all the time.”

“Robin’s the perfect Englishman,” said Jane to Katherine. “Everything is for somebody else’s benefit.”

“Well, if it’s unpopular, I won’t press it,” said Robin. He regarded the point of a pencil and began to sharpen it onto a newspaper. “I just thought it would be rather fun. What do you think, Katherine?”

That question again. And Katherine was just about to temporize when she guessed the important point, which was, of course, that Jane spoke nothing but English. She nearly choked.

“I don’t mind,” she said faintly.

“There you are, Katherine doesn’t mind,” said Robin. He shook the paperful of sharpenings into the empty grate. “It would be rather a lark. Even you might learn something.”

Katherine was alarmed. Jane could do three things. She could throw up her task of chaperon and leave them together, or she could give in and stick it out. Or, if she got angry (and Robin seemed careless of that), she could sail in and smash this younger-brother impertinence, so that no more would be heard of it. Katherine looked at her.

“Well, that’s very kind of you,” Jane said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to make a small charge?”

“Well, you needn’t listen if you don’t want to—you needn’t come if you don’t want to,” said Robin
reasonably
, tapping the end of his pencil on his teeth.

No, don’t say that, Katherine was shouting, you’ll spoil it all. She took the thinnest piece of toast and a spoonful of marmalade.

“I didn’t know we were going anywhere,” said Jane. She collected up the dead wet stalks, and from the sound of her voice, once again listless, Katherine knew she was giving in once more. “You’ll pretty soon get sick of it. You say, Katherine, when you’ve had enough. You’ll be teaching him irregular verbs before you know where you are.” She dropped the dead flowers in the
wastepaper-basket
.

Where they were going was no more exciting than into the village. Yet Katherine was more expectant than she had been for a week—since she had first arrived, in fact. Apart from this bold attempt by Robin to get Jane out of the way, she had not foreseen how it changed her position. Hitherto Robin had been in command, with Jane second and Katherine herself third. Now she led, and Robin and Jane followed. When the rain stopped they walked down the drive, and she gave way to a silly impulse to quote a verse of romantic poetry that she had once admired, with no prefacing explanation. They gaped at her.

“Here, hold on,” said Robin. “Let’s all start level.”

“I reserve the right to talk English,” said Jane
obstinately
. She was wearing sandals that showed her small, perfectly-formed feet and was thereby the smallest of the three. “And if I ask what you’re talking about, you’ve got to tell me.”

“Then you must ask properly,” said Katherine, and sweeping ahead under Robin’s eye she told Jane how to ask for a sentence to be repeated or translated. Jane repeated the sentences dubiously.

“Well, shall we start?” said Robin. “Katherine had better begin.”

There was a pause. It was hard to know what to say first. Finally she asked Robin why he was going to the
village. He replied solemnly that he was going to buy some postage stamps and a packet of envelopes.

Did he write many letters, then?

No, but he had no more postage stamps or envelopes.

Whom did he write to?

School friends, relations.

Any girls?

Only one.

And did she write nice letters back?

Oh, very nice.

Where did she live?

Robin repeated Katherine’s address, and they burst out laughing. Katherine could not help blushing. It was really too easy. Jane gave a suspicious and unconvinced smile.

“Are you talking about writers?”

“Yes, about writers,” said Katherine.

Jane, after much warning and preliminary inquiries, managed to ask what English writers Katherine liked the best. Obviously she was doing her level best to stand her ground.

She had read very little. Shakespeare. Byron.

—What about Dickens, asked Robin.

She had read no Dickens.

That was a pity. Many English people liked Dickens.

—Ah.

But he was, perhaps of all writers, the most English.

Katherine turned out of a sort of distorted kindness to Jane and asked her if she liked Dickens. “Eh? Was that something about Dickens? Do I read Dickens?”

“Like.”

“Do I
like
Dickens? No, I don’t. He’s too dull.”

Robin observed that Dickens made a great deal of money by his writings.

—And you? Are you a writer?

—Eh?

—Have you ever written anything?

—No, of course not.

—Not ever?

—Not ever.

—One might think you had the artistic nature.

Robin’s face wore a baffled expression, centred round a small frown similar to the one he had worn when she had started to win at tennis. Then he laughed, not at all put out.

—You’re always very sarcastic.

—Think so if you like.

—What is an artistic nature then?

—One that cares nothing for other people.

—Cares nothing for other people, he repeated, as if to fix the precise meaning. And I care nothing for other people?

“This seems a very important point,” said Jane. “What’s it all about?”

“Katherine says I have something of the artistic nature,” said Robin. “I’m trying to decide if it’s a
compliment
or not.” There was even a suspicion of guilt in his voice.

“She’s pulling your leg,” said Jane, as if relieved it was no worse.

At this point they arrived at the small post office, and Katherine unwarily entering with them, was formally presented to the old woman who kept it, who had of course heard that the Fennels had a foreign lady staying. Katherine was quite at a loss with the Oxfordshire dialect, and could only say “oh yes” and smile. The Fennels had been on the whole very considerate with her, but they had not been able to avoid some such introductions, which made Katherine feel like some rare animal in captivity.

When they were out once more in the puddled road, Robin said in a lingering, thoughtful tone:

—But I care for other people.

“Oh, don’t start that again,” said Jane irritably. “It’s
stopped being amusing. For heaven’s sake let’s talk English.”

Katherine saw the corners of Robin’s mouth draw slightly back “We’re still walking,” he pointed out. “Is it boring you, Katherine?”

“Oh, no. I like it.”

—My sister is not a scholar, Robin said with faint
contempt
. She did not learn very much. I have the brains of the family.

—Oh, obviously, said Katherine warily.

—It is a question of application. If she could learn by wishing, she would know everything by now. But she is incapable of sitting down and starting in real earnest. A pity, because——

“What are you drivelling about?” said Jane angrily.

—Although she is lazy she is not completely stupid.

—Whereas you are stupid though not completely lazy, retorted Katherine in a desperate attempt to finish the conversation.

He smiled.

—She wastes her time thinking about what she might do one day if she tried. But she knows she never will try, and that makes her silly and irritable. I don’t know what we are going to do with her.

“What is this?” said Jane sharply, and immediately, “Tell me! What are you talking about?”

“A mutual friend.” Robin’s voice had never sounded more courteous, more placid and exact than at that moment.

Jane went very red, and before Katherine could find enough words to speak, had broken into:

“I see. Well, don’t let me stop you. I should hate to interrupt. I’ll leave you to get on with it.”

With that she turned and went off.

“My dear Jane,” Robin said, as a complete
sentence
. Small and almost ridiculous in her sandals, she
disappeared along the narrow lane lined with hedges, in which the autumn berries had begun to appear and were now beaded with rain.

“Shall I fetch her back?” Katherine burst out
desperately.

Robin shrugged his shoulders. “She’ll be all right, she’s just got one of her moods on. I must apologize for her.”

“But she thinks——”

“No, I tell you, don’t trouble. There’s nothing the matter. She often flies off the handle like this——” And because Katherine could not understand that phrase her mind was free to come upon the appalling success of Robin’s manœuvre, staring her in the face. For a moment she felt almost frightened, as if although this was what she thought an impossible hope, it had turned, when realized, into something she did not altogether like.