A Girl in Winter (15 page)

It was always bigger than she expected, and she sat down on the grass to watch it flow. Lazily throwing a twig upstream, she watched it drift slowly level with her and then pass on, and she wondered where the river rose, how many towns and bridges it passed on its course, and past what fields the twig would be carried in the
half-light
of next morning, before she was awake. She had never even found out its name. The line of trees on the bank were reflected in it, thin upflung branches being flattened in the reflection to dark gesturing masses. Underneath them she could see small erratic shapes flying. They
dipped
and swerved furiously, and she realized after a few seconds that they were bats. They were too far away to alarm her.

But she withdrew her eyes to the foreground again, and noticed that the fastening of the tiny boat-house—little more than a low shack—had not been padlocked. She got up and went to it, and looking in saw that the punt was there. Half-experimentally she drew it silently out, and climbed in. It rocked soothingly. She wondered if it would be wrong of her to paddle it a few hundred yards downstream and back: it was no use her
unstrapping
the pole, but she thought it would be quite easy to manage with a paddle that lay on the seat beside her. Would they mind? Surely not, on her last evening; and even if they did, there would be little enough time left for them to mind in. She picked up the paddle and dipped it in the water.

“Are you stealing our boat?” said Robin. He was
standing
on the bank behind her.

“Oh——” She dropped her hands. “You left the door unfastened.”

“Did I?” He glanced towards it. “No, don’t get out,” he added as she prepared to rise. “I’ll come with you. Or would you rather go alone?”

“Please come.”

He sat beside her, taking the other paddle from the back, and, paddling together, they felt the punt draw away from the bank, rocking lightly on the sensitive water. She regulated her strokes with his.

“I hope you did not mind when I left you,” she said presently. “I was a bit tired.”

“Oh, there’s no stopping old Jack, once he gets talking,” Robin said. He smiled.

The evening was so still, it was like setting forth into silence itself, that sharpened the noise of their paddles stirring the dull river and of an occasional fish breaking the surface with a tiny liquid explosion. As they proceeded downstream, sending ripples towards either bank, the trees fell behind and fields opened around them. On one
side the bank had been built up with bricks, now grown dull and mossy after much weather, and an iron ring fastened in them was rusty and disused. The water was the colour of pewter, for the afterglow had faded rapidly and left a quality of light that resembled early dawn. It had drawn off the brightness from the meadows and
stubble-fields
, that were now tarnished silver and pale yellow, and the shadows were slowly mixing with the mist. In this way the edges of her emotions had blurred, and they now
overlaid
each other like twin planes of water running over wet sand, the last expenditure of succeeding waves. There was no longer any discord in them: she felt at peace.

“Robin, what is this river called?” she asked after a while.

“Why, the Thames, of course.”

“Not the real Thames?”

“Certainly.” And then he added with mild amusement: “If we’d lived in prehistoric times, before England was an island, I could nearly have taken you home. The Thames used to flow into the Rhine.”

She glanced at him. His expression was friendly but serious, as if concentrating; at the end of each stroke he gave the blade a twist sideways, to neutralize the fact that his strokes were stronger than hers. There was something formal about him, as if he were a figure in allegory,
carrying
her a stage further on some undefined journey, and she smiled to remember her discarded belief that he might at any moment say something she would never forget. She doubted if she would ever think that again of anyone: with this in mind, she stopped paddling, and after two more strokes Robin allowed his paddle to trail diagonally in the water, so that the punt’s direction slowly altered, and it drifted towards the bank, about eighty yards from where they had started. In time the front of the boat crushed over the reeds with a dry crackle, and they came to rest, Robin digging his paddle in the mud to prevent
their moving with the current. He folded his arms and looked in front of him.

It’s come to an end, she thought. No matter what she thought might happen, or what she had done that she regretted, it was all now part of the past. Tomorrow she would undertake the long journey back to her normal life, and this isolated excursion to England would remain in her mind as something irrelevant and beautiful. For better or worse, it was over; it had been dull, perhaps; Robin had been less exciting than she had thought he would be, but that might be for the best. The parents had been tactful and quite uninterested in her, which had been a good thing. The house, so comfortable and unpretentious, would stand for many years yet among the trees, and she would not miss it. As for what she would tell her friends, she would distort her visit into something amusing. There was nothing sacred about it. Yet for all that as they floated there she wanted to add nothing more, not a word or a look. It was finished. Her mind was free to be diverted by the surface of things she had no need to remember—the sound of water, of birds close at hand, the remote sound of a train-whistle. Her attention rose and fell from these things as the shadow of a ball thrown against the side of a building rises and drops back again; they were, she felt, tiny decorative tracings on the finished vase.

Suddenly he took hold of her.

She gave a start and bit her tongue.

He ducked his head and kissed her inexpertly with tight lips, as if dodging something that swept above their heads. It was not a bit like lovemaking, and she never thought of it as such till afterwards. He kept his face hidden against her hair. At the end of this unfathomable interval, he shivered, and the shiver changed to a short scrambling shudder, almost an abortive attempt to climb on her; then he slowly relaxed. Still he would not look her in the face. In the end he released her, carelessly.

Neither of them said anything.

After a time he dragged up his paddle, washed the blade, and they turned upstream again.

When they got back, she went upstairs to her room, tenderly moving the end of her tongue to and fro without knowing what she was doing. She felt dazed, as if she had nearly been run over in the street. Sitting at her
nearly-empty
dressing table, she looked at herself, trembling. The evening whispered outside, the quiet evening that had suddenly risen up against her in one great stamping chord, like the beginning of music she would never hear.

There was a bang on the door. She turned quickly. It was Jane.

“Oh, you are here,” she said. She hung onto the
door-knob
, swaying slightly as if drunk, and breathing hard. Then she put her hand to her forehead as if faint, and gasped with laughter. “What a life,” she said. “Your
tactful
exit … glory.” She flopped on the bed, then instantly scrambled up to say: “I’ve just had an honourable
proposal
of marriage!”

She stared at Katherine.

“Well?”

“I said I would.”

But the snow did not come. The sky remained as
immovable
as a pebble frozen in the surface of a pond. The lights had to be kept on in offices, and some people worked in their coats; those who looked out of the windows of
expensive
centrally-heated flats still saw the bare, motionless trees, the railings, the half-obliterated government notices.

It was easier to forget about it in the city, however. For one thing it was Saturday afternoon, and by one o’clock most people were free to go home. They could turn their backs on the window, and the slab of garden, and read the newspaper by the fire till teatime. Or if they had no real home, they could pay to sit in the large cinemas, where it seemed warmer because it was dark. The
cafeterias
filled up early, and the, shoppers lingered over their teas, dropping cigarette-ends into their empty cups,
unwilling
to face the journey back to where they lived. Everywhere people indoors were loth to move. Men stayed in their clubs, in billiard saloons, in public bars till closing time. Soldiers lay discontentedly in Y.M.C.A. rest rooms, writing letters or turning over magazines several weeks old.

And meanwhile, the winter remained. It was not romantic or picturesque: the snow, that was graceful in the country, was days old in the town: it had been trodden to a brown powder and shovelled into the gutters. Where it had not been disturbed, on burnt-out buildings, on warehouse roofs or sheds in the railways yards, it made the scene more dingy and dispirited. Women went round to the coal yards with perambulators and large baskets; elderly men picked up pieces of lath from heaps of rubble: there were no fires in waiting-rooms. Paper-sellers with the three o’clock edition stood well within the locked entrances of banks. The papers said nothing about the
weather, but gave lists of football matches and
race-meetings
that had been cancelled.

On one of the stations, a crowd watched a porter come out and chalk up on a board that the Paddington train was eighty-five minutes late.

Katherine came out of a self-service café where she had lunched. The time was three minutes after one o’clock, half an hour after Miss Green had left her to go home.

She was angry with herself for behaving unreasonably and for the knowledge that she was still not quite
controlled
. What was wrong, to make her rush away from her lodging, leaving no message and making no arrangements? She would only have to go back again, and her steps took the direction of Merion Street as if walking to a scaffold. What was the matter with her? Her feelings were like a flight of birds that swoop over to one corner of a field and then stop, all trembling equidistantly in the air, and then come streaming back, like a banner tossed first one way, then the other. Had there been anything more exciting than the thought of this letter? Was she afraid of meeting Robin, as Robin? No, of course not. Wasn’t such a meeting as Robin suggested exactly what she had anticipated as being practically unavoidable? Why was she acting so immaturely?

Yet she almost wished she had not written to Jane. The truth was, that she had set too much store on a meeting for it to happen so quickly. She was gripped by the reaction that follows the granting of a wish. Had she pushed herself forward, had she cornered them so that they could do nothing but make such a response? And
was this proposed meeting a compromise between
ignoring
her and having to invite her to stay? At this
construction
her nervousness increased. She was again brought up against the fact that she might not, according to English standards, be acting correctly, and she would sooner be ignored than accepted unwillingly. Looking over the letter again, she had to admit that he did not sound
overjoyed
at the prospect. Conceivably Mrs. Fennel had directed him to meet her and fob her off in some way—for at this distance of time they were all strangers. If she met Robin now, in this street—it was an hour after twelve and he might well be on his way to her address—she would probably not know him. He would be in officer’s uniform, deep-voiced, full-grown. She stopped on the pavement opposite Merion Street, and looked cautiously around her. Her fingers encountered a bent cigarette at the bottom of her coat pocket, and she meditatively put it into her mouth and lit it.

No, she decided suddenly, she would leave no message. This was somehow not the kind of meeting she wanted—inconclusive, on strange ground, brief, finding her
unprepared
. She would let things fall by chance, as they would; and in any case there was no need. If she left a note in her room or even on her door, he would not see it, and the only alternative was to tell the chemist’s wife that she would return about half-past seven at night—which the chemist’s wife knew already and would certainly tell him if he called. If he could see her then, presumably he would; if he couldn’t, no messages would alter the fact.

In the meantime, then, there was this handbag. She would just have enough time to return it before starting work again. It seemed quite natural to her to set off on this errand as she made her way towards the Bank Street bus-stop once more. This day was already so unlike other days that it was beginning to resemble an odyssey in a dream: to find herself in strange places, looking for strange
people, following out thin threads of coincidence—it was almost as if an enchantment had been put on her to keep her away from the only two places where Robin knew she might be. But it would be awkward if she met him in the street.

Miss Green, she thought, as she settled down in the bus, would be home by now. The driver swung into his seat, and they began to move. Off once more. As long as she was travelling, she was safe.

But safe! safe from what? It was time she faced the question. What did she remember of the Fennels, plainly and without embroidery? There had been Robin, of course; he had puzzled her at first, because he was so very English—how English she never realized till she met more English people—but once she had got used to him he had been rather dull. She did not remember ever having been attracted by him. Now he would probably be even duller. Jane—well, Jane was indistinct to the point of anonymity. She had got engaged during her visit to
someone
she couldn’t recall anything about except his surname, which was so queer. The parents had been kind and pleasant. What else? It had been very hot: she had not taken enough light dresses. Then afterwards she had told her friends that Robin was passionately, simply madly and passionately, in love with her. One had had to say something. Hadn’t he kissed her once? Or had she made that up afterwards?

So it wasn’t any personal attachment that made them so important. They had continued writing spasmodically for about six months afterwards: Jane had sent her a piece of wedding-cake. It seemed that once they had met they had lost interest in each other. Since then she had not thought of them; there had been other things to think of, a few pleasanter, the rest such that she kept them out of her mind. She had not thought of the Fennels again till she had arrived in England for the second time.

The first few weeks had been a nightmare. Luckily there was little for her to do about them: in a haphazard way, she was provided for, and had only to accept what she was given. She lived in a hostel, ate in a canteen, and shared a bedroom with two other girls. She had to attend interviews in hastily-furnished offices. Never in her life had she experienced such bottomless despair and
loneliness
: there was nothing familiar, nothing of her own choosing, nothing that she could turn to and grasp in the face of everything else. It was as if the world had been turned round, like innumerable bits of reversible stage scenery. Quite frequently she felt moments of stark terror at the strangeness of things, at the way all had collapsed, presumably as a cat will go mad upon the ruins of its suddenly-destroyed home. There was only one sure thing: she was still alive. The rest was like walking across a plaster ceiling.

It was then, naturally, that she had thought of the Fennels. Should she write to them or not? She had decided not, for several reasons, but as much as anything because she did not want to make a fuss. Most of all she wanted to be unobtrusive and disregarded. And so she had set herself to climb out of the slithering pit into which she had fallen, without success at first, but as time went on managing to re-establish herself gradually, to regain her willpower, to avoid the terrible moments that left her sickened. She did this by suppressing as far as she could every reference to her former life, and treating every day as complete in itself. She ate, slept and worked, and refused to compare what she did or ate, or where she slept, with any work or food or household she had known in the past. Everything had to be reduced to its simplest terms.

The trick—if it was a trick—had worked: she found herself gradually able to relax. After some months of sorting forms, or copying out new ration-cards, she had applied for several more ambitious jobs, and to her
surprise had been appointed to the one she now held. It was only for the duration of the war, but it was a fraction better-paid, and she quickened her attention till she could do the work without embarrassment. It gave her a sense of independence. When she had left London to come here, her sense of desolation had returned, but less strongly than before, and she discovered she was well in control of it. It was affecting her no more than the discomfort, say, of a hard frost.

There was time now to look round, and take stock of her position, to mend what clothes she had, and buy new ones. She was reluctant to part with her old clothes and start wearing English ones. Nearly everything she possessed was a reference back to the days before she left home: her leather motoring-coat, for instance, was a relic of her student days. There had been a fad about dressing in accordance with the machine-age. But she hated to part with anything. Although she was not keen on mending, she spent many evenings darning stockings and underwear, with a sort of love for them. They were all she had left.

The truth was, she had not been facing the facts. To live from day to day, as she had been doing, shut out the past, but it shut out the future too, and made the present one long temporary hand-to-mouth existence. All the time she had been behaving as if everything would suddenly snap back to normal, if she could only hang on a little longer. Without admitting it to herself, she had been believing that in a little while the walls would fly back, and at a touch she would find herself back at home, or studying in the university, with her old life about her.

It shocked her to realize she had been believing
anything
so absurd, and it shocked her to realize that it was absurd. But a third fact shocked her most of all: that even if her old life had been waiting for her, she no longer wanted to return to it. And truly she did not realize this for a long time. In strange surroundings one was bound
to have strange thoughts, that perhaps did not go very deep: such fancies as this she dismissed as wish-fulfilment: since she could not go back, she did not want to. But as time passed she could not ignore it any more than she could have ignored a dislocated bone. Somehow, without knowing it, she had broken fresh ground.

For she knew, now, that in most lives there had to come a break, when the past dropped away and the maturity it had enclosed for so long stood painfully upright. It came through death or disaster, or even through a
love-affair
that with the best will in the world on both sides went wrong. Certainly there were people to whom it never came: girls she had known had slipped cosily from
childhood
to marriage, and their lives would be one long
unintelligent
summer. But once the break was made, as though continually-trickling sand had caused a building to slip suddenly on its foundations so that perhaps one single ornament fell to the floor, life ceased to be a
confused
stumbling from one illumination to another, a series of unconnected clearings in a tropical forest, and became a flat landscape, wry and rather small, with a few
unforgettable
landmarks somewhat resembling a stretch of fenland, where an occasional dyke or broken fence shows up for miles, and the sails of a mill turn all day long in the steady wind.

She knew—for such a break brings knowledge, but no additional strength—that her old way of living was finished. In the past she thought she had found happiness through the interplay of herself and other people. The most important thing had been to please them, to love them, to learn them so fully that their personalities were as distinct as the taste of different fruits. Now this brought happiness no longer: she no longer felt that she was exalted or made more worthy if she could spin her
friendships
to incredible subtlety and fineness. It was something she had tired of doing. And what had replaced it? Here
she was at a loss. She was not sure if anything had replaced it.

She was not sure if anything would replace it.

For the world seemed to have moved off a little, and to have lost its immediacy, as a bright pattern will fade in many washings. It was like a painting of a winter landscape in neutral colours, or a nocturne in many greys of the riverside, yet not so beautiful as either. Like a
person
who is beginning to go physically colour-blind she was disturbed. She felt one of her faculties had died without her consent or knowledge, and she was less than she had been. The world that she had been so used to appraising, delighting in, and mixing with had drawn away, and she no longer felt she was part of it. Henceforward, if she needed comfort, she would have to comfort herself; if she were to be happy, the happiness would have to burn from her own nature. In short, since people seemed not to affect her, they could not help her, and if she was to go on living she would have to get the strength for it solely out of herself.

Perhaps there was nothing startling about that. But she shrank from accepting it. It was the only thing she could not conquer by accepting, because it was not a fancy or a new piece of self-knowledge that she could fit to her own vanity, but true, true in a sense she found horrible, like a medical diagnosis. Life was not going to be as pleasant as it had been. It would be more cramped, less variegated, more predictable. She was not going to be surprised any more. She was not going to trust anybody. She was not going to love anybody. And when the time came for her to die, she would die not only without having done
anything
worth while, like most other people, but without having done anything she wanted.

Once she had thought belief depended on inclination. But she fought against this new realization as hard as she could, trying to shut out the future as before she had shut
out the past; yet still it gained ground. It mingled with her daily life, with the war, with the winter, until it scarcely seemed a separate thing at all, but merely a state of mind produced by living alone, living in England, and all the rest of it. She deeply hoped it was. There were times when it seemed a trivial and shallow depression. And there were times when the fear of it touched her as cold as wet steel: when she could see herself hardly aware that she was unhappy, because her feelings had so nearly atrophied, and receiving no compensations in return.

Was it silly to worry about such things? Weren’t there enough material circumstances to trouble her? The answer was of course that she did not worry all the time. But when it came to the forefront of her mind, she did not dissociate it from the apparently meaningless disasters that had driven her to England. They seemed bound up together. And she had believed for a long time that a person’s life is directed mainly by their actions, and these in turn are directed by their personality, which is not self-chosen in the first place and modifies itself quite independently of their wishes afterwards. To find her theory being proved upon herself increased her uneasiness.

So where did the Fennels come in all this? Simply, that she was lonely; more complexly, that they supported her failing hope that she was wrong to think her life had worsened so irrevocably. Since writing to Jane, those three nearly-forgotten weeks had taken on a new character in her memory. It was the only period of her life that had not been spoiled by later events, and she found that she could draw upon it hearteningly, remembering when she had been happy, and ready to give and take, instead of unwilling to give, and finding nothing worth taking. It was as if she hoped they would warm back to life a part of her that had been frozen, with the same solicitude she had tried to give Miss Green that morning—though she feared in retrospect that she had done no more than if she had
handed her an elaborate basket of fruit left for weeks in a refrigerator, all frosted over and tasteless.