A Girl in Winter

by Philip Larkin

  These, and other things that she no longer remembered, made her feel that in some way she had taken possession of that summer there. Once she had thought that for them, too, she would remain inextricably embedded in their recollections, and be referred to as a date—“the year Katherine came”; “the summer Katherine was here”. But on the whole this was unlikely. For she had asked:

  “Robin, do you have many people to stay with you?”

  They were walking up towards the main road, where they would intercept Jack Stormalong’s car. The weather was humid, a foretaste of autumn. The blackberries were ripening in the hedges, and earthenware bowls of red and yellow plums stood in the kitchen, ready for jam-making. Jane had stayed indoors because of this—or had it been something to do with moths discovered in the spare-room blankets? She had not been clear. At any rate, they were alone.

  “Well, most of our friends are family friends, if you know what I mean,” he replied. She did. The watered-down relationship was typical of them. “I suppose a fair number, by the end of the summer.”

  “And this Jack we are going to meet—has he been here before?”

  “Rather. We’ve known him for ages. His father and my father were in the army together.”

  “He’ll be surprised to find me here,” said Katherine.

  “No, why should he? He’s used to finding other people here. And you’re almost one of the family.”

  “It would be amusing if I were,” said Katherine absently. “Don’t you think families with a foreign side are more interesting? They become much stronger. And the one branch can help the other.”

  “That’s what the Jews think, isn’t it,” he said rather distantly.

  *

  Jack Stormalong was in high spirits. He had driven from somewhere—Tewkesbury? Newbury? Aylesbury?—in sixty-five minutes by his shockproof wristwatch, his dashboard clock being out of order like all dashboard clocks. The engine of his dark crimson sports car roared hoarsely as he whisked them back home again, explaining to Robin that he was using a new kind of juice. He had no difficulty in making himself heard above the noise of the engine.

  His introduction to Katherine was not fortunate. He greeted her loudly and asked her a question she could not follow: she realized suddenly that her conversance with English depended a good deal on being accustomed to the Fennels’ voices. This made an awkward gap in the conversation till Robin straightened it out, and Katherine found herself blushing. He looked at her with an expression of arrested benevolence as if she had said something improper. She noticed that his two middle top teeth pushed each other outward and formed an arc brisé.

  His arrival put her rather into the background, and for the moment she was not sorry, finding it amusing to see another guest welcomed as she had been. Also she had subconsciously been waiting for this new visitor ever since she heard he was coming. Her sensation that there should be somebody else had never quite left her. But she did not know what she had expected, and certainly Jack Stormalong made very little appeal to her. When they assembled in the lounge before dinner to drink some sherry in honour of his arrival, she expanded her initial rebuff into dislike. He would be about twenty-five, with short, oiled hair that waved slightly in front, a face neither handsome nor ugly, that spoke of little but a sense of his own authority—a military face, such as she was used to seeing above the high collars of cadets in her own country, offering peace but not friendship on certain terms. He was over six feet tall and very strong. He shook hands warmly with Mr. Fennel, whom he called “sir”, and, carrying a glass of pale sherry to Jane, said “Hello, Jane” in a low, affectionate voice, gripping her right arm momentarily just below the shoulder, which caused her slightly to stagger. Katherine kept out of his reach, sitting quietly on the piano stool.

  With increasing annoyance she noticed however that his arrival put the Fennels in good spirits. With her they were attentive, kind, relaxed: now, matched with a different partner, they grew sunny, skilful, almost flickering as the conversation at dinner played lightly around garden-pests, even Jane joining in, and Jack Stormalong demonstrated that it was perfectly easy to eat and hold up one end of a conversation at the same time. There was no doubt that he was more of a success than she had been. He took it for granted that he was at home there: he embarked on long anecdotes, sipping at the wine, and after each sip redirecting his discourse to a different person. Only he never said anything to Katherine. When they brought her into the conversation he forced himself to take notice of her, blinking his cold blue eyes once or twice. It was not quite as if they had introduced the maid into the discussion, but all the same he seemed disconcerted.

  Robin was very attentive to him. Perhaps by contrast, he seemed more boyish than usual; he asked questions about fishing and the sports car that Jack Stormalong answered with good-humoured superiority, as if speaking to a younger brother. Katherine, in whom Robin had never shown such interest, grew sulky, and let the babble go on without bothering to follow it. At the end of the meal Robin finished by suggesting that while they were all there a photograph should be taken, and Katherine knew that he would not have suggested it for her sake. However, she followed the party out onto the small lawn while Robin went upstairs to find the camera.

  “There ought to be a couple of films left,” said Mr. Fennel, flattening worm-casts with the toe of his shoe. “When did we use it last? At Easter, was it?”

  “Robin took one the day we were held up by the sheep on the way to Reading,” said Jane, from where she was standing with Jack Stormalong. “I thought he finished the roll then.”

  Jack then began describing an incident that Jane seemed to find funny. Katherine, momentarily abandoned, drifted towards the garden seat that had stood between Jane and herself on the evening of their discussion, and where Mrs. Fennel was now sitting.

  Mrs. Fennel looked up.

  “Well, my dear, we are quite a party now.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Sit down a moment, won’t you? I’m afraid I’ve seen very little of you since you came. Not very gracious of me. But I thought you’d sooner be with Robin and Jane than holding my wool for me.”

  Katherine murmured something, not understanding. But she was grateful to Mrs. Fennel. All the small embarrassments that were consequent on staying in a strange house had been smoothed deftly and precisely away by her, and Katherine had felt no hesitation in speaking to her. She now laid aside a novel by Sir Walter Scott.

  “I’m sure it hasn’t been a very exciting holiday for you, but we thought it would be best to carry on as we are. We were a little uncertain about what you would expect.”

  “I’m sure … everything has been wonderful.”

  “Well, I hope at any rate that England won’t be a foreign country to you any longer,” said Mrs. Fennel. “You will come again another year. We all like you very much.”

  “Oh, thank you——”

  “And I think Robin has been very fortunate to make such a good friend.”

  At this point Robin ran down the steps carrying a folding-camera. Mr. Fennel, who was wearing a panama hat, stepped forward.

  “Now give that to me. I’ll be the man who presses the button.”

  “Oh, but we want you in the picture,” exclaimed Jane, coming forward.

  “Not a bit of it. Just you all get together. Ladies at the front, gentlemen at the back. Yes, round the seat will do.”

  “Is it all right for the sun, sir?” said Jack Stormalong anxiously, looking as if he would like to take the camera into his own hands.

  “I’ve taken dozens of photographs,” said Mr. Fennel firmly, “without bothering about things like that. The secret is to hold it steadily.”

  “It’ll do,” said Robin, aside.

  “You might hold it straight as well,” said Jane. Mrs. Fennel was in the middle, with Katherine on her right and Jane on her left. “If you’d wait a moment, I’d put some proper shoes on,” she said. “These aren’t really fit to be seen.”

&
nbsp; “My dear, posterity won’t be interested in your shoes, presentable or not. Now let me see. I can’t see anything at all. Where are you?” He swivelled the camera plaintively. “Wave something.”

  Jane waved a hand.

  “Ah. Yes, that’s got it, thank you. The next trouble is going to be Jack’s head. I’m afraid your head will be out of the picture, Jack.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort,” said Jane.

  “Wait a minute. Nil desperandum. I’m afraid we shall have to dispense with the ladies’ feet—you needn’t have worried about your shoes, my dear.”

  “Perhaps if you stepped back, sir——”

  “No, this will do very well. Now then. That’s got it. Everybody smile. Remember this is a special occasion—where’s the thing, the button on this thing? Where—ah. Now then.”

  And so the image of them standing and sitting in relaxed attitudes in the evening sun was pressed onto the negative for all eternity.

  “One of Katherine,” called Mrs. Fennel. “We ought to have one of her alone.”

  “Certainly we should. My dear, would you mind? Stand against the monkshood—the flowers there. Wait while I turn this film——”

  “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 h
as, 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.”