“Are you coming down now?” asked Katherine, shaking her handkerchief from its folds.
Jane had withdrawn to the door, her eyes still searching Katherine’s face as if waiting for her to take the lead.
“No,” she said. “No, I’ll see you later.” And with a brief smile she went. Katherine heard a door close along the passage.
When Katherine returned the other three were as she had left them. Robin suggested they went out onto the terrace, and held the french window open for her. Beyond a rockery and some rose trees there was a tennis court, sunk below a gravel path that led to a door in a wall running across the bottom of the garden. “Do you play tennis?” asked Robin. “We must have a game. You see, we decided to have a proper hard court instead of a big lawn; a lawn looks very nice, but it takes some keeping up, and in any case there’s the little one at the side—under your window—if we want to have tea out or anything. Below the tennis court is the kitchen garden”—he pointed to the wall—“and then the river.”
“The river? I heard it,” said Katherine, pleased.
“Did you? Would you like to see it?”
They went down the steps and along the high gravel path. Robin ran his finger along the wire netting. “The apricots are ripening,” he said, indicating some trees spreading against a wall. “Last year we got fifteen pounds.”
He opened a door and they passed into the kitchen garden, meeting a profusion of lettuces, peas, runner beans, cabbages and rows of feathery carrots. In the corner were a small toolshed and a glass-house, where she glimpsed some tomatoes. A tap dripped slowly, wrapped in sacking, making a perpetual green stain on the cobbles.
“This is a wonderful place for growing things,” said Robin. “See how sheltered it is, with the high wall on one side and these fruit trees on the other. And then you see it slopes pretty well due south down to the river, and catches all the sun.” He pulled down a branch and fingered one or two plums; when he found one that rolled off into his hand he gave it to her. The bloom bore his fingerprints.
“Does the river——?” She failed to finish this sentence in English; however, he understood her to ask if the river ever overflowed? “Sometimes on the other side, where there are water-meadows. Come and see.”
They went through golden clouds of gnats to a high door with faded blue paint, and when he opened it Katherine was surprised to see a broad river drifting by, as it seemed, on the very threshold, though there was ten yards of bank that had been scythed and mown, leading down to the water and a set of wooden steps.
“This is beautiful,” she said, tossing the stone of her plum into the water, where translucent fish rose momentarily at it. “You are very fortunate, aren’t you?” Looking up and down the river, she saw they were at the middle point of a slow bend lined with willow trees, at the foot of which were hoofmarks. Just opposite, the sweeping branches of a weeping-willow tree made a tent that a canoe could lie in. Further up the river, the sunset flashed off the water, showing hundreds of insects borne on transparent wings.
“It’s nice,” said Robin. He leaned against a noticeboard that said “Private. No Landing Allowed”, and looked across the water at a field scattered with golden-fleeced sheep. “Do you go boating?”
“Yes—have you a boat?”
“We have a punt,” said Robin, pointing to the end of a wooden landing-stage where a small boathouse had been built. “I didn’t bring the key, I’m afraid. Can you punt?”
“Punt?”
“Yes, with a pole.”
She pondered the image. “No! But I can”—she made rowing motions—“and”—she made paddling motions—“do you see?” She ended with a half-nervous, half-excited laugh, foreign and gleeful, that she thought might attract him. He shoved himself away from the post with his shoulders. “Well, we’ll teach you to punt,” he said. “Look, there’s a water-rat. See it? Under the opposite bank.” He pointed to a small brown head travelling steadily along, accompanied by a diagonal ripple, until it vanished under the weeping-willow tree.
“I saw it.”
He led the way back, locking the blue gate and hanging the key on a rusty nail. She was alert for his mood. But his actions rarely had anything stronger than the flavour of a motive around them: in this case, he was at ease among his inherited surroundings. He took it for granted that she would find it interesting to look over them, but no more.
They went up the terrace steps to the now-lighted lounge. “Been looking round?” asked Mrs. Fennel. “Has he shown you our river?”
“Yes. You must like it.”
“It is nice,” Mrs. Fennel admitted. “But I think it makes the place rather damp, do you know? And it’s mournful in winter.”
This last remark, spoken as it was in a foreign language, came to Katherine with something of the impact of a line of poetry. She sank quietly to a seat, looking around her, and thought of the time she would be no longer there. Mr. Fennel, wearing his spectacles, was turning over the stiff, close-printed sheets of the local paper. Jane had at last come in, and was lying on the sofa, a book balanced on her chest, with a picture of mountains in it: she did not say anything to Katherine but was paying attention to her. In the electric light Katherine could judge her better. She had the angular, chiselled, Fennel face, but with neither the flickering beauty youth cast on it nor the good-natured repose of maturity. Instead she looked pale and irritable, rather like Robin after a long illness. Katherine wondered if she could be mistaken in thinking she was much older than her brother; she had none of his poise: she was not even dressed as well. Her clothes had a shabby look, and in addition she was not made up, nor were her hands attentively manicured. Robin dropped onto the piano stool and fingered a few notes.
“I expect Katherine would like to go to bed early,” said Mrs. Fennel. “She must be very tired. Did you stay at an hotel last night?”
“No, I slept on the train.”
“That isn’t a proper sleep, is it,” said Mr. Fennel, removing his spectacles and scratching his nose with the steel earpiece. “Sleep is more than rest for the mind. The body must lie down—every muscle should be relaxed——”
“Horses sleep standing up,” said Robin vaguely. “Well, Katherine, do go to bed if you are tired.”
“Oh, I will not go for a little while. I am not tired.”
“You can sleep as long as you please tomorrow,” said Mrs. Fennel, biting off a thread suddenly. “We shan’t disturb you. Oh, Robin, what’s that on the ceiling there? Is it a moth got in?”
Robin bestirred himself, and examined the immobile wings spread in the rose-coloured light on the ceiling. “It certainly is,” he said. “Isn’t there a duster somewhere on the bookcase? Can I stand on this chair?”
“Put a paper on it first.”
“Be careful,” said Jane. Robin looked round at her with amusement. “It’s quite furry,” he reported. “Have you suddenly taken a fancy to them?”
“You can handle it carefully.”
“Yes, dear, don’t crush it,” said Mrs. Fennel. “Gather it up firmly but gently. Put it out of the window.”
They all watched while Robin’s head and reaching hands shut out the light, and Mr. Fennel looked up resignedly as the shadow fell across his paper. Katherine felt that at this moment it was at last natural for her to be there, yet at the same time there was no intimacy among them: the whole thing resembled a scene in a hotel lounge. But she dismissed the comparison in a moment, telling herself that three untouched weeks lay ahead of her. Her head reeled suddenly with fatigue: it was certainly time she went to bed. Robin reported that the moth had flown into the creeper.
Yet when, after saying good night all round, she was at length lying in the darkness, hearing nothing but tiny unfamiliar sounds from the trees outside and from other rooms in the house, she found she was not ready to sleep. Her thoughts were like a tangle of live wires: she would choose one and try to follow it to its source, but almost immediately she would be swept away again by one travelli
ng in the opposite direction. Any circumstance she picked on changed disconcertingly to something else. Her mind was like a puzzle in which many silver balls have to be shaken into their sockets; it was her thoughts that were rolling free, and she moved her head from side to side as if to settle them. Then, abruptly, she succeeded: and her uneasiness faded as she knew what she was thinking.
When was Robin going to start behaving naturally?
So far he had stood insipidly upon his party-manners, even when they had been alone, as if playing at grown-ups. When would he drop that, and be more friendly, and put her at her ease?
Because she had nearly stifled herself trying to be polite, none of the visit so far seemed quite real. It was all a little insincere, like a school prizegiving. The parents, of course, might always behave like that. But Robin seemed to have taken his cue from them, so that she had now met all four of them, one after another, and was left with the absurd feeling that the most important person, her real friend, had not yet appeared. There seemed nothing in their greetings so far to warrant their inviting her so many expensive miles. They welcomed her undramatically, even casually, as if she had come from the next village. She found this a disappointment.
Was he, perhaps, shy? She pondered on his face, which she already knew well, and his attitude. It was impossible to think that. And she could not accuse him of being bored with her, either, because his attention was always on her and his manner was solicitous. Really, he acted as if he had long ago made up his mind about her, and had brought about this meeting simply in order to check and correct one or two trifling points. There was no constraint in his manner at all.
Then why should she assume he was not behaving naturally?
This was a facer.
Oh, because he just couldn’t be. He was only her own age. It couldn’t be natural for anyone of sixteen to behave like a Prince Regent and foreign ambassador combined. It just wasn’t possible. Besides, if (ghastly thought!) by the thousandth chance it was natural, it would mean that he would never have asked her. They would be so entirely opposite in every way that—— And again to be so independent, yet so gracious—and Robin’s movements were always beautifully finished and calm—well, it would mean that people, mere friends, mere other personalities, would hold no interest at all for him.
And consequently he wouldn’t have invited her.
But he had.
And therefore this reserve, this sandpapering of every word and gesture until it exactly fitted its place in the conversation, this gracious carriage of the personality—this was not natural, or at the most it was a manner, so familiar by now that his thoughts and motives could change freely behind it. Somewhere behind it was a desire to see her, which would now alter into something else. At the moment she could do nothing but watch. But in time she would know. The time would come when he would let her see.
But after this period of order, her thoughts broke their pattern once more and recommenced rocking to and fro, so that she became too tired to follow them any more and sank into half-consciousness. At this, half-effaced impressions rushed upon her, details of the journey and passengers, the shine of the sea, the lifting of the waves that was the slumbering of strength, the gulls at Dover, and above all her surprise that after so many miles and hours and different vehicles, after threading her way along so many platforms and quays, through ticket-barriers, entrance-halls, customs-houses and waiting-rooms, she should have reached the point she set out for, successfully encountered Robin Fennel, and have been taken along so many unnamed roads and lanes until they reached the house where he lived. Finally, her mind gave one last flicker of surprise, as a sail gleams for a moment before going over the horizon, that she should at last be lying in this house, surrounded by strangeness on all sides to a depth of hundreds of miles, and yet be feeling no anxiety of any kind.
2
No-one called her the next morning, so she had her sleep out, waking up to find it half-past nine by her wristwatch and the sun already high, the heat spreading over the countryside like a huge green tree. She was uncertain what was expected of her, so washed and put on a linen dress. Then she stole through the corridor and down the stairs. Bedroom doors were freely open, and she heard a rattling of saucepans from the kitchens, and an unabashed voice lifted in song. All the carpets in the house were thick and soundless, and the doors shut precisely with a click. Blinding gold swords of light came obliquely from the landing windows, which stood open. She was relieved to find on opening the dining-room door that Robin and Jane were still sitting at breakfast. Robin put down the morning paper instantly, and rose to manipulate her chair.
“Good morning,” he said. “Sleep well?”
“Yes, thank you. I am late, I’m afraid.”
“Not at all,” said Robin. “We breakfast at any old time on Sundays. Besides, you were tired after your journey.” He pushed the sugar across and she began sifting it on her grapefruit.
“And we were tired after our lack of journeys,” said Jane obscurely. She reached over and hooked the paper away from Robin. They were both eating toast and marmalade. Grapefruit was a luxury to Katherine, and she scoured it with enjoyment until it spat in her eye. After that she went more slowly. Her subtleties of the previous night no longer seemed at all plausible, and she was left once more shy and uneasy.
“What would you like to do today?” asked Robin, after he had rung for bacon and fried eggs by pressing a bell concealed under the carpet with his foot. He motioned that Jane should pour out a cup of coffee for her.
“Why, I don’t know.” Katherine was wary, suspecting there might be a concealed answer to this that etiquette required her to give.
“You wouldn’t like to go to church?”
“If you go, I will.”
Jane looked up, her elbows on the table, and gave a short chuckle. “We are a godless family,” she said. “But we respect your principles, if you have any. There was some speculation as to whether you’d be a Roman Catholic or not.”
“Oh no. I’m not Catholic.”
Robin looked relieved, and felt for the newspaper, which was not there. Jane threw it back to him and rose, lighting a cigarette.
“But I should like to see some of your churches, all the same,” said Katherine hastily. “They are very fine, I believe.”
“Oh, we’ll have a regular orgy of that,” said Jane. “We’ll go to London and Oxford and Salisbury and all the other places. Robin will tell you all the dates.” The cigarette looked unusually large in her small mouth as she lounged on the window-seat.
Robin drew a silver pencil from his jacket pocket and flattening the newspaper down more firmly, pencilled a solution in the crossword puzzle. Then he rested a glance on Jane. “The question is,” he said, “what are we going to do this morning?”
“I suggest we show Katherine the village. What there is to show.”
“Not a bad idea.”
“And the river.”
“She’s seen that.”
“She can see it from the other side, then.”
“Rivers,” said Robin mildly, “look much the same from either side.”
Jane glanced round sharply. “Well, there’s nothing to see in the village. You could walk through if you didn’t know it was there and never see it. And that’d be a good thing, too.” She sounded inexplicably cross.
Katherine gathered that Jane was co-host, so to speak, and this disappointed her, because she wanted to get Robin alone. Further, she had taken something of a dislike to Jane. She was short-mannered and irritable. Her hair was cut rather outmodedly into an Eton crop, and her figure was small, bony and unemphatic. When all three of them set out she wore a raffish check shirt that contrasted with the Sunday sedateness of the other two. The front door was open, and as they passed through the tiled porch the sun seemed simultaneously to lift up at them from the ground and to press down on their heads and shoulders. Robin appeared to straighten himself against it, looking round at the trees that ascended on all sides
towards the sky. He looked handsome to the point of sleekness.
They went up a lane to a secondary road, which led them to the village. As Jane had said, there was not much to see: nothing but one street of cottages, a tiny toolshop and garage, a combined general shop and post office, and an unpretentious public-house with a bench outside it. At the end of the street was a pond, and standing back on a slight rise on the right was a church. The cottages had brief front gardens blazing with flowers, and the air was full of the noise of birds.
Undistinguished as it was, Katherine found it fascinating. She looked curiously round the sides of cottages, where small ugly children were fussing, and at old people who sat on kitchen chairs in the doorways. When she saw their hands lying in their laps, or on the wooden arms of the chair, she thought it was strange that these husks, that had poured out their lives so distantly and differently from her, should for a second look at her with their bright eyes. From occasional doorways came dance music from Radio Luxembourg, and she could see dimly through the lace curtains on the windowsill mass-produced china figures and Sunday newspapers, read by men in shirt sleeves. A white dog looked at them and then lay down. They walked together through the pouring light, which so far was not balanced by such heat, but which promised that the two would reach equal intensity at perhaps three in the afternoon.
“Well, now you know all about it,” said Jane, after Robin had finished some rambling anecdote about the Civil War. “Don’t you think it looks nicer than it sounds?”
“It’s very nice,” said Katherine.
“Yes, it is, for what it’s worth. It palls with time.” Jane yawned with the heat. “But tell me”—as the yawn abated, her voice assumed by contrast unnatural clarity—“is it as you’d imagined it? All this, I mean?”
Katherine looked at her, caught off her guard. This was the question Robin ought to have asked—the one she had rehearsed. Yet Jane obviously expected an answer. She hesitated. Did Jane mean simply the village, or the whole visit? Robin, she guessed, would have meant the former, unless she had got him very much wrong: with Jane she was not so certain. But she did not like Jane sufficiently to treat it as a personal question.
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