A Girl in Winter (17 page)

She yawned, and leaned back in her easy chair, which was less comfortable than it looked. Very faintly she could hear music, as if a wireless set were playing in the next house. Miss Parbury came flopping downstairs and went into the
kitchen, where she could be heard rattling spoons and saucers and singing what sounded like a hymn. There was a small book of Common Prayer lying on the sideboard bound in crimson. Eventually she came in with a large tray, on which were two large cups of tea and another brown handbag.

“Here we are,” she said, beaming. “And here’s your bag. I hope your friend won’t mind, but I had to borrow fourpence from her to get home. Here is the money.” She gave Katherine the bag and four pennies from the pocket of her cardigan.

“Thank you,” said Katherine, slipping them in and snapping it shut.

“Now we can have a quiet cup of tea before you go out again. It was really very good of you to come at all.” She gave Katherine a cup, strong, and, as she discovered at the first sip, virulently sugared. “Have you far to go? Whereabouts do you live?”

“Oh, right in the city,” said Katherine. She instinctively disliked saying where she lived. “I have a sort of flat.”

“Oh, have you? I believe it’s frightfully difficult to find rooms these days. Do you share it at all?”

“No. I’ve been here about nine months. I came from London.”

“From London! It must have been terrible there while the raids were on.”

“It could have been worse. London’s a big place.”

“Oh, but I’m terrified. As soon as those sirens start, my bones turn to water. That awful moaning.” She drank some more tea as if to steady herself.

They talked for a little while about the war, and the
circumstances
that had brought Katherine to England. Miss Parbury was a very sympathetic listener. Katherine noticed she wore no rings on her fingers.

“I think it’s dreadful,” she said at the finish. “And so you just have to start all over again, in a foreign country—start a new life altogether!”

Katherine moved the spoon in her saucer. “Perhaps so.”

“When you think of it, we’ve nothing to grumble at in England, at least, I suppose I should speak for myself.” Miss Parbury smiled brightly. “A home and enough to eat. And I’ve lost no-one.”

Katherine agreed subduedly.

“Of course, it’s been terrible,” said Miss Parbury. She cocked her head as if thoughtful. “But if it had happened differently … I mean, I expect you won’t think so, but wouldn’t it have been rather—well—fun—to come to England?”

“I had been before,” said Katherine. Two hours and five minutes after midday.

“Oh, had you? I only thought that it would be nice to be suddenly on one’s own—if there wasn’t a war, of course.”

“If there wasn’t a war, I shouldn’t be here.”

“Everything would be different, of course.”

Miss Parbury sighed.

“But to be on one’s own is very lonely,” said Katherine. “Don’t you agree?”

She said this as a kind of bait for whatever lay
unrevealed
in this depressing, bright room.

“I expect so,” said Miss Parbury, adding primly: “I’ve always lived at home.”

“Oh yes.” Angling in the dark, she said: “It isn’t like having a home of one’s own.”

Miss Parbury shook her head. She did not seem
communicative
on this. But later she said: “After Father died, I felt I had to look after Mother.”

“Yes, of course.” Katherine could still see no trace of any other person in the house. “Is she out now?”

Miss Parbury looked up, as if startled out of a train of thought. “Oh no, she’s upstairs. She’s ill.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Katherine prepared to abandon the subject. “I hope she’ll soon get better.”

“No, she’s an invalid.” Miss Parbury sounded a little impatient that Katherine did not understand.

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry.”

“When Father died,” said Miss Parbury flatly, after a pause, “she had a sort of stroke.” In the silence the
wireless
sounded still, now relaying a tango orchestra and she moved her head. “I think she likes to listen to the wireless,” she said with a return to cheerfulness. “I think it cheers her up.”

Katherine nodded vaguely.

“But the neighbours complain sometimes,” said Miss Parbury, with the faintest indignation. “Of course, she does have it on all day. Though as I say, it’s different when someone’s ill, isn’t it? You have to make allowances.”

“Yes, of course.”

Miss Parbury brooded a little.

“It is hard when a person’s ill,” said Katherine. “Won’t she ever get better?”

A shade had come over Miss Parbury’s face, as if
speaking
of sad things made her sad, in a childish way.
Midway
between youth and middle age as she was, her
appearance
called up both: it was easy to imagine her in ten years’ time, more withered, more wispy, the veins showing on the backs of her hands, perhaps wearing rimless spectacles; but all the same there were moments when she looked simply like an overgrown girl, in her flat-heeled slippers. From the gawkiness of youth she was passing to the grotesqueness of age, and at no point would she touch the handsomeness of maturity.

“No,” she said. “I’m afraid she won’t. Just after the war started she had another stroke. She can’t move now, it paralysed her right side. The doctor says she may live for some years yet. But eventually one will be fatal.”

She put her head on one side and stared at the grate.

“What does she do all the time?” said Katherine. “Can she read?”

“Oh dear no,” said Miss Parbury. From her decided tone Katherine might have suggested something far more unusual. “No, she doesn’t read now, though once she did…. She can’t, her mind sometimes wanders. One just has to be patient with her.”

“Wanders?” said Katherine, with misgiving.

“Oh, she’s all right some of the time. But sometimes she doesn’t know who I am.” Miss Parbury looked at Katherine as if willing to let her find this comical. “And she has sort of delusions. She thinks I’m trying to harm her—poison her food, and that kind of thing. The doctor says I mustn’t take any notice. But I don’t know what to do if she won’t eat what I give her.”

Katherine said nothing. The fire was burning sluggishly, as if resentful of the cold.

“And then she’ll say—oh, all sorts of funny things, like that Daddy comes at nights and talks to her. I often hear her talking in the night. Of course, she means no harm, but it’s not nice when there’s no-one in the house.” Miss Parbury spoke in a reasonable, slightly complaining voice, as if explaining why she was behind with her rent. She had an apologetic air. “She says he warns her that I’m trying to harm her. It’s just impossible to make her see reason,
because
she doesn’t know what she’s saying or doing. Once I was ill for a week and we had a nurse in. We had to, you see. And she tried to give the nurse all sorts of things—anything—spoons, vases, one of the clocks. Of course the nurse told me about it and didn’t take them. But after she’d gone I found she’d taken mother’s fur, a lovely fur I’d wrapped up in tissue and mothballs, one she wouldn’t ever have used again. Mother must have said she could have it. She wouldn’t answer when I asked her if she had.”

A coal spat suddenly. The room was dark enough to have the light on. Katherine said:

“But you mean you have to do everything by yourself?”

“She’s quite helpless.”

“Helpless,” repeated Katherine. “But with the work for you—it would be better if she were in a hospital,” she added, rebelling against this conspiracy to make Miss Parbury into a tragic personality, which she was not, being rather comic.

Miss Parbury said in a surprised voice:

“But there’s nothing she needs that I can’t——”

Katherine blinked. Miss Parbury had taken the point exactly the wrong way round. More gently she said:

“It would be easier for you.”

Miss Parbury seemed to consider the suggestion, though she must have thought of it many times before. She moved her head on her long neck, like a timid animal.

“No,” she said finally, “I couldn’t do it. These places, you know, they haven’t the consideration, and the nurses eat the things you send. She wouldn’t be happy there.”

“But it isn’t right, that you should have to be the one who suffers.” As Miss Parbury continued to look
enquiringly
at her, as if she had never heard this viewpoint, Katherine sought to be reasonable. “I think, if someone is entirely dependent on you, there’s something wrong somewhere. It shouldn’t be asked, or given.” And if she had listened to what she was saying, she would have visualized life and happiness like ration tokens, that once spent are never recovered, and are allotted equally to everyone. “When you make kindness a duty, everybody resents it—it’s such a mistake, I think.”

“One has to do what one can,” murmured Miss
Parbury
, “surely.”

“For a definite time, perhaps—three or six months. But for always—I should insist on a definite arrangement. It is always a mistake to be kind, because people are cross if you leave off then for a moment, and you are tied for life.”

“To do for the best,” Miss Parbury was excusing herself bewilderedly. It grew darker and their exchange died
away in a mutter of Katherine’s protesting it was none of her business, having just thought that no doubt that there was not enough money to send the mother to a hospital: the dull light hid their faces. But Miss Parbury settled this as quickly as if she had heard it asked, saying in a voice disclaiming personal implication:

“There is the money, of course. Father was in the navy and so there’s a pension, but it would cost too much to—I have been having to think that over, as I have a friend who suggested we become engaged, and that would make things very much more difficult. Then——”

“Then she would
have
to be taken care of.”

“Or live with us. That’s what I think the best, because you can’t ask an old person to make such a change, can you? But that doesn’t suit all parties. My friend is very strongly against that, and, really, I can see his point of view, because it’s always such an unsuccessful
arrangement
, isn’t it? But what I say is, it’s inevitable, and we should just have to make the best of it, that is, if we——”

“Well, and you are right, I think.”

“The only thing is,” said Miss Parbury, who, having started to tell the story because it oppressed her and
because
it showed that someone besides her mother needed her, was now quite wound up in the problem again and free from whatever embarrassment hindered her volatile spirit, “my friend says he is willing to help with what it would cost, sending her away.”

Katherine looked across the hearthrug to where she sat, oddly like an incarnation of some loved childish
grotesquerie
—Rhoda Rabbit or Lolly Flopears—and thought that she had heard nothing stranger than this, a man paying to have Miss Parbury with him always, and that man to be Anstey: and at this she happened to see both of them less as people than as the “other person” who is so necessary. Looking at her, still hearing the unexpected sentence, she glimpsed the undertow of peoples’ relations,
two-thirds of which is without face, with only begging and lonely hands.

“And so,” she said interrogatively.

Miss Parbury laughed, self-reproachfully. “I’m silly,” she said. “I always have been. I know I’m silly, but, do you know, I can’t decide. I don’t like the idea, even now. It would be convenient, and so easy, and no-one could say anything very well, but I should never feel quite happy in my mind about it. It’s the real test, you know, isn’t it, when you feel: ‘I shouldn’t like it to be done to me.’”

“But it is surely reasonable——”

“Oh, but I couldn’t think of her among strangers. There’d be times when she’d wonder where I was, the same as she wonders where Daddy is now sometimes. She doesn’t understand, you see. And I should hate to feel I hadn’t done all I could, if anything … It can’t be for very long.”

“But it seems so unfair that
you
should have to do it.”

“There
is
no-one else. My brother is in Darlington, and he’s got a family of his own. No,” said Miss Parbury, as if gently rebuking her, “I’ve thought it all over. There’s no other way. I suppose it’s just bad luck, though it’s wrong of me to say so. One has to look after one’s parents when they’re old and need you.”

And Miss Parbury’s manner, lacking both reticence and self-praise, seemed to take on a new grace, as if Katherine’s reproval had stirred something asleep in her nature that had now risen gently to its full height, and which it was no use attacking. Because she did not quite understand it, she was resentful, and so called it stupidity. She was simultaneously aware that almost any member of Anstey’s staff would have given a week’s pay to be in her present position. “And what of your friend, don’t you feel you owe something to him?” she countered, trading recklessly on what she had noticed, that people would tell her things they
would not tell a fellow-countryman. “And yourself, too, supposing he will not wait.”

Miss Parbury’s hesitation was only very slight, but it made Katherine afraid that she had remembered what letter had been in her bag. But her expression when she lifted her head was quite undirected, only myopic with what Katherine recognized with a shock as sorrow.

“That’s as must be,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone except myself, but if I do, it’s not because I’m being selfish. I may not be right, but all one can do is go by one’s own judgement, isn’t it? I can’t understand,” said Miss Parbury, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve, “what people mean by a duty to oneself. It sounds so silly. I don’t think I could ever like a person who didn’t see what I meant, not in that way.”

And to both their embarrassments she dropped a few tears, her shoulders being plucked lightly by the never-distant emotion of grief.

Katherine sat wretchedly for the half-minute it took Miss Parbury to stifle her sobbing, finished her cold tea, and put the cup aside. At what seemed the correct moment she said she ought to be going, and Miss Parbury regained the last trace of self-control. “Well!” she said, rising and touching her sickly lemon necklace. “I’ve been talking, as usual, talking and making myself miserable. I’m sure you want to be getting off. Now, have you got your friend’s bag? It wouldn’t do to take the wrong one this time! I’m very obliged to you for bringing it back,” she added, as she held the door open and followed Katherine into the hall.