A Girl in Winter (14 page)

“I don’t think it’s any good, dad,” said Robin, coming forward. “There was only the one film left.”

“Well, let me see. Oh yes, what a nuisance. I’m sorry, Katherine, there’s no more film left—is there none in the house?”

“Not unless you’ve bought any.”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Fennel, picking up the fringed cushion she had brought out to sit on. “We have one of you in the group.”

Nevertheless, she did mind. It seemed to her that she was already embarked on her homeward journey, and watching their faces recede into a common blur. Robin was infuriating. At his suggestion the four of them spent most of their time together, and the brush with Jane was no longer referred to: Katherine’s last two full days were spent in slack fourhanded pastimes—doubles at tennis (and if there was anything Katherine disliked it was doubles, particularly when partnered with Jack
Stormalong
, in a game of England versus the world: Jack
Stormalong
held a post in India), two hours wasted by moving chairs to the Village Hall. The weather, after the dash of rain, stabilized in a pleasant waxen sunshine, and in the evenings there was occasionally a chill in the blue shadows, an infinitesimal hint of autumnal frost,
saddening
in any circumstances. It was not that Robin and Jane disregarded her: they did not. But they assumed that she was contented, which she wasn’t, and that anything done by four people was automatically more enjoyable than anything done by three or two. They seemed to assume, too, that she was never to leave them: an outsider could not have gathered that on Saturday they were to say
good-bye
to her and not see her again: her departure was simply not regarded as important. Katherine was disgusted, and she reserved a special corner of her disgust for Jane.
Whatever
else she had felt when Jane had told her all that stuff, she had respected the emotion behind it: she had
re-estimated her as the only Fennel with sensibility. If Jane had continued petulant or even hostile, she would not have minded, but now she behaved quite differently: the irritable languor had slipped from her as if by the very confessing of it. She contributed her full share of laughter and idiotic jokes. And Katherine summed her up bitterly in Robin’s word: Jane’s moods. Mood after mood after mood. Her crossness had been a mood, so had her
friendliness
, and it had amused her after that to pose as a person trapped and misunderstood. Now r all that was over, and there was someone else to show off to, she had changed once more. Her emotions, thought Katherine, are as flexible as Robin’s manners, and that’s the only difference between them.

On Friday, her last full day, they fulfilled Robin’s original plan and went up-river to the Rose for lunch. It was a heavy day, and the sun shone intermittently: at midday a few drops of rain fell, but nothing more. Katherine began with a headache too slight to be
mentioned
as an excuse to stay behind, but which
nevertheless
weighed on her throughout the trip, which was tediously jolly. Jack Stormalong poled them vigorously there, and theatrically drank a quantity of beer on arrival. Robin also had some, and there developed between them a masculine waggishness that aroused laughter at
Katherine’s
expense, as she could not properly understand them. She struggled to take this in good part, but even Jane found it trying and began edging her remarks with sarcasm, which quietened them down somewhat. After lunch, they had some more drinks in the garden, where there was a skittle-alley: Jack and Robin played, and Jack won. The clumsy clattering got on Katherine’s nerves, and she said as much to Jane, who sat with her. Jane, who had been drinking gin, replied: “This is, quite seriously, life itself,” and such pretentiousness did nothing to soothe her. She was relieved when they took the punt home again,
Jack (who had paid the luncheon-bill) poling
indefatigably
. Robin fell asleep.

Between tea and dinner she went to her room to pack. First of all she held her face in cold water, opening and shutting her eyes, then sponged herself, and put on what clean clothes she had left. Everything else was dirty. She sat by her open trunk, remembering how carefully the laundered garments had been stowed the first time, layer upon layer, with great regard for relative weight and
likelihood
of creasing. It seemed distant to her now. Putting aside what she was to travel in, she began sorting and
folding
, carelessly at first, then with more attention as the pleasure of working alone came over her. She found the few presents she had bought to take home, and to turn them over and anticipate the thanks she would get made her eager to see her parents and friends once more. When she rose and looked round the room in search of things she had missed, it pleased her to feel that she had practically withdrawn herself from it, that she would leave it exactly as she had found it, that she would pass through this house and leave no trace behind, as all the others who had slept in this guest room had done.
Disregarding
the few hours that remained, she reviewed her visit and condemned it. She had come expecting to solve a mystery, and had found at the end there was no mystery to solve. From what she had been told, she had been invited partly out of politeness and partly to divert Jane’s alleged boredom: Robin had played host with true English reserve, and had managed to slip in a few free language lessons on the side. She thought bitterly that it would hardly be out of place to hint that they might refund her fares.

Dinner was a little better. The beer and exertion had left Jack Stormalong subdued for the moment, and at her first mention of the word “packing” they were all solicitous. Mr. Fennel had been consulting a timetable and had
written out a list of trains and times in an old-fashioned, delicate, ledger-book hand. The conversation ran lightly over the events of her stay, spinning them into a web of reminiscence that took only the pleasant colours for material. Both Robin and Jane contributed, treating her as if she were quite a different person, and her visit as if it had been one of the many meetings of established friends. It was the best they could do, she imagined, in the way of a happy ending, and she was grateful.

However, in the lounge afterwards Jack Stormalong awoke to conversation again, and a tactless discussion followed in which Robin and Jane tried to persuade him not to leave on Monday night but stay till Tuesday.

“Or do you find it so dull here, after all your
tiger-shooting
?” Robin added, putting an ashtray for him on the arm of his chair.

“Oh, we can’t compete with tigers,” said Jane, who for once was wearing lipstick. “Not that I believe you’ve been near one.”

“I really ought to push off on Monday,” said Jack, continually placing his cigarette between different pairs of oblong fingers. “I might stay if you could provide a tiger.”

“We could ring up a zoo.”

“They would be very expensive, though. Would you give us the skin?”

“Will you give us a skin anyway?”

Jack Stormalong wagged his head, grinning.

“I haven’t any skins.”

“I don’t believe you’ve ever shot one at all,” said Jane.

“Oh, he has, haven’t you?”

“I’ve put a bullet into one, if you count that. But you have to stand down in favour of the senior man in the party—the Resident, in this case …”

They talked a while vaguely about India, during which Katherine listened sourly. Their goodwill at dinner, allied
with their resumed assumption that this night was like any other night, had once more awoken regret in her that she must leave them. Now that the surface of their relations had quietened in her mind, she saw that only her
inquisitive
imagination had prevented the holiday being like this from the evening she arrived—an untroubled expanse resembling a lake between hills. She wished it could go on. Although she was eager to return to her own life and country, she wished she could stay a little longer to watch the quiet procession of evenings, of meals on the dark table, of small presents of hothouse fruit from neighbours left wrapped in baskets in the porch with a note, of the river drifting southward. Now that it was too late, she felt that all the time she had been paying attention to the wrong things.

But Jack Stormalong, encouraged by the others, was deep in tigers. “Of course, you don’t find them unless you go out and look for them,” he said. “As a rule, they keep out of your way. If they start killing, it’s different. If a tiger kills a man, you have to do something about it for the sake of prestige—and they say as well, of course, that once a tiger gets a taste for human flesh it won’t look for anything different. I don’t know about that. But obviously men are easy things to kill—we’ve no claws or horns or tusks … we can’t even run fast.”

“We’re not much use when it comes to a fight, are we?” said Jane, looking at her own right hand.

“Not with tigers, at any rate,” said Jack. He guffawed. “A man I met had a narrow squeak once—a perfect
mad-man
, mind you. He and another chap had been out, and they’d come across a tiger and put a brace of bullets in her, but she got away. What did they do but follow her. The prints were clear as day in the jungle, but when they came out into a clearing they lost them. So they separated to have a snoop round. This chap said that he was just bending down to take a look when there was an earsplitting
roar and up comes the tiger from a ditch fifteen yards off, in a pretty savage temper, and went straight at him. He hadn’t time to do more than put out his rifle with both hands—it was just as well he did—and then he was bowled over with the tiger on top of him. Luckily the other man noticed what was up and got a lucky shot in her brain as she was turning again. The shekarries were scared blue. He’s still got the rifle, and he showed it me—it had caught the tiger’s first swipe, and there were
claw-marks
a quarter of an inch deep down the butt, and the trigger and guard were bent flat.” Jack leaned forward with leaden sincerity. “Absolutely flat.”

Robin expressed amazement. “But you don’t go on foot, do you?” he said.

“Surely when it was wounded——”

“On a formal shoot there’s elephants. But even then it isn’t all jam. You’d imagine you’d feel as safe as houses up on an elephant——”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jane.

“Oh, you do. At least you do till our friend stripes comes along. But you see it’s like this. The tiger goes for the elephant—I’ve seen a tiger spring right up on an elephant’s head—clinging, you know, with the claws in. And then it all depends how the elephant behaves. It’s liable to get bothered, and anything may happen. It may try to shake the tiger off, and only succeed in shaking the poor bloke out of the howdah. Or the other elephants may get the wind up. What it ought to do is stand still and let the guns pot the tiger till it drops off. But they don’t always see it that way.”

There was general laughter.

“Oh, it’s a terrific thrill,” said Jack Stormalong, sitting forward with an eagerness that suggested he was still a trifle drunk. “You’ve no idea. A tiger will go on fighting till it drops. You imagine yourself surrounded by elephants as big as houses, with fellows on top putting both barrels
into you. You’d leg it for cover as fast as you could. But I’ve seen a tiger with as many as eight bullets in it go on trying to beat the whole crowd till he drops. Absolute rage incarnate. You can’t call it courage; it’s more than that.” He studied the squashy end of his cigarette for a moment. “And you look down, you know … if he got you he’d tear you to bits. You can’t help feeling scared. That’s where the fun comes in.”

“I think it would go out, with me,” said Jane.

In response to a question from Robin, Jack began to describe the particular tiger-shoot he had attended, and they fell into a discussion of rifles; calibres, velocities, bores. Jack’s elephant had lurched, causing him to put his foot into the luncheon-basket and break a siphon: this had impressed him more than the destruction of the tiger. Robin asked if a tiger’s stripes were really effective
camouflage
; Jack Stormalong lit another cigarette and began to tell him.

Katherine had had enough. Surely, she thought, Jane can’t be less bored than I am. Experimentally she caught Jane’s eye, trying to express resignation, and rather to her surprise Jane gave a little annoyed gesture, which Katherine found hard to interpret. She could not think that they were both annoyed at the same thing, because although listening to the half-intelligible ramble of this English Colonial Official was irritating enough, she could have borne it on any other night than this. What made her desperate was the invisible running-out of time; a stupid thing to resent, and yet it galled.

She jumped up, “I think I’ll go out for a little,” she said.

She was out of the french windows before anyone could protest, and a glance back from the foot of the steps showed she was not being followed. For this she was thankful. At the moment she wanted only time enough to calm herself; it was nothing serious. All she needed was a little space to
look around her for the last time and accept the fact that she was going. When this was done—when she had made her peace, as she called it—she could return and mix with them on equal terms.

It was very solacing to be alone. She looked about her at the garden and the sky. It was after nine o’clock; the sun had set and the trees hung motionless in a
barely-visible
mist; down towards the west there ran a vast fan of tiny clouds, ribbed and golden. She walked slowly along the path by the tennis-court, looking at the broad bed of flowers. Many of them had softly closed. From here she passed through into the kitchen-garden, where the air was richer with a confused smell of vegetables; on an impulse she went over to the tap and tried to stop it dripping. Twist as she could, the drops still slowly formed and fell onto the stones, and at last she gave it up. Let it go on. A few grasses touched her bare legs as she walked on towards the blue door, and she shivered, although it was not cold. The key turned easily in the lock and she found herself again on the short mown bank, remembered so vividly from her first evening, at the edge of the river that moved contentedly past.