A Girl in Winter

by Philip Larkin

  “And who is it, Miss Feather?” This was a third manner, that of the judiciary alert to learn all the facts of the case.

  “Miss Green. She really looks very ill.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” he demanded harshly. “Is she sickening for something, influenza or measles or——”

  “She has very bad toothache, and she wants to go home. I think it would be as well to let her. She won’t be much use here, really.”

  “Go home! It’s a dentist she ought to go to,” said Mr. Anstey contemptuously, as if detecting a subterfuge.

  “I think she will, if we let her go home first.” Miss Feather, perhaps alone on the staff, had the knack of keeping Mr. Anstey fairly close to the point: she inserted submissive, insinuating remarks that urged him gently back to the path she wished him to follow.

  “Where does she live? Is her mother on the telephone?” He picked up the directory, disregarding Miss Feather’s denial, and discovered she was not.

  “It’s quite a long way,” said Miss Feather. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to send someone with her. She seems almost likely to faint.”

  “Why not give a holiday all round?” agreed Mr. Anstey, with a crowing, hysterical laugh. “I’ll go with her myself if it means getting the morning off!”

  He laughed alone.

  “I think the best thing would be to send someone with her,” repeated Miss Feather, glancing furtively at the clock on the mantelpiece. Mr. Anstey, chuckling good-humouredly, stuck his pipe back into his mouth and turned again to his papers.

  “Yes, all right, all right,” he said with indulgent impatience, as if they had both been wasting his time. “Send someone with her. I don’t mind who. Send someone—ha, ha!—you’d be glad to get rid of for an hour or two.”

  They left him enclosed in his unbreakable belief that all things depended on him, and that he managed, despite an overwhelming weight of work, to administer every detail efficiently.

  When they were outside, Miss Feather said:

  “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind going, Miss Lind.”

  3

  What would the Fennels think of this, Katherine wondered.

  She stood waiting in the entrance-hall of the library, three minutes later, as she had been bidden. This was a dim, unheated place, with double swing-doors leading out into the street: two sets of glass doors lay on either side, to the Lending Library and to the Reading Room. The only piece of furniture was a large double-sided stand, painted duck-egg green, for Official War Photographs. This was now covered with pictures of destroyers, aeroplanes, and tanks in the desert: sometimes urchins crept in and stared at them, or prised out the drawing-pins to steal. High up on the walls, in the shadow from the blacked-over windows, hung worthless paintings by local artists.

  What would they imagine from her letter? To them, the phrase ‘working in a library’ would call up a picture of calf-bound aisles, with her holding hushed conversations with professors, or drowsing at a mahogany desk: they would be under the impression that the work involved some form of studying, unaware that library assistants are forced to do everything to books except read them. They certainly would not visualize the daily round of string bags, trembling old men, tramps reading newspapers through magnifying glasses, soldiers asking to consult a medical dictionary. Not that they were stupid, but these things did not come into their ken. Or was it simply that she could not imagine them having any thought of such surroundings as these?

  Perhaps she should not have written to them. On her arrival in England over a year ago, she had thrashed that question out with herself, and decided that she should not. They would not want any such unexpected liability from the past. And it might even be that they would dislike dealing with her because of her nationality, for the English, she found—and the Fennels were nothing if not English—were characterized in time of war by antagonism to every foreign country, friendly or unfriendly, as a simple matter of instinct. It might even be socially awkward for them to meet her again. And although as the months passed she came to think these things less and less likely, she had kept to her original decision mainly from shyness, though there were minor questions, such as whether they still lived at the same address, that also deterred her.

  When she had written, therefore, she had written on an impulse—a reflex action from seeing their name in the papers, or rather, a name she connected with them. She had written to Jane, because Jane had been mentioned, and Katherine was troubled by misgivings that either or both the parents might by now be dead, and there was even the chance that Robin had been called up and already killed or wounded. It was not very likely, but she thought it best to go softly until she knew how matters stood. So a week ago she had been waiting anxiously for a reply. And it had come—not from Jane, which was understandable in the circumstances, but from Mrs. Fennel, written on the same notepaper that Robin had used, with the house and the village and the telephone number stamped boldly in blue at the head of each page. The mere sight of this brought such emotion that she could hardly read it, and had to go through it several times before she could gather its meaning. They were glad, Mrs. Fennel said, to hear of her again: they had often wondered what had happened to her, but they had never dreamed she was in England again. She should have written to tell them. Jane thanked her for her sympathy, and would write herself later. In the meantime, she would send Katherine’s address and the news of her to Robin, who was in the army (though still in England) and would no doubt write to her himself. In closing, the three of them sent their very best wishes.

  She had written off at once a letter of thanks—stupidly, for there was nothing to thank them for. But thankfulness was what she felt. That night she had been too excited to sleep, and had smoked many cigarettes, finally, after midnight, starting to dust her room and set it to order, half for something to do and half because she felt the need to make some kind of preparation. Really she would have liked to have gone out and walked the empty streets. But that was against the police regulations. Finally she fell to reading the letter again, staring at the blue embossed heading, and went to bed so restless and exhausted that something really important might have happened—the war might have ended, or an invasion begun.

  All the week she had been waiting for Robin’s letter. So far it had not come, but the interval lulled her excitement to a powerful, delicious expectation, strong enough to carry her through the daily work that she normally found disagreeable. Wondering what the Fennels would think of it all, and in particular what they would think of Anstey, cheered her as if she had found allies, where before she had been alone. If it weren’t for Anstey, she knew, she might find the work at least tolerable. But she loathed him so much that at times she wondered if he really was so bad, and whether there weren’t some blind spot in her that prevented her seeing him naturally. The other assistants seemed to find him a standing joke—even to like him while agreeing he was quite impossible, as if cursing the weather. But she had disliked him on sight, and as she got to know him better her dislike increased. She could never dispel a feeling of incredulous rage when they met, for he always seemed to be deliberately insulting her. She found him so objectionable that she was almost forced to think that there might be some tone in his voice or turn in his phrases that all English people would instantly take to mean that his sawn-off brutality was only a jocular way of speaking, not for a moment to be taken seriously. It was possible. But she flattered herself that she knew English well enough to detect any such thing, and besides, she had disliked his face before she had heard his voice, and what he said seemed typical. He was theatrical, scraggy, and rude.

  Still, she had got through another scene with him. In time, perhaps, he would lose his power of infuriating her so regularly. And this morning, as all the week, none of this seemed very important: it was only when there had been nothing else in her life at all that it made her desperate. Now, when she could not help feeling that in a matter of weeks, perhaps, all might be altered, she could t
ake it lightly.

  Certainly it had ended better than they usually did. Usually she felt that the one thing she wanted to do was get out of the library and as far away as she could, and that was almost what she had been told to do. True, it had been rather an insult in itself. But it was quite of a piece with the way they treated her. She had been appointed temporary assistant, which marked her off from the permanent staff: she was neither a junior a year or so out of school who was learning the profession, nor a senior preparing to take the intermediate or final examination. It meant that she could safely be called upon to do anything, from sorting old dust-laden stock in a storeroom to standing on a table in the Reading Room to fit a new bulb in one of the lights, while old men stared aqueously at her legs. Behind all this she sensed the influence of Mr. Anstey. There was a curious professional furtiveness about him, as if he were a guardian of traditional secrets; he seemed unwilling to let her pick up any more about the work than was unavoidable. Therefore any odd job that was really nobody’s duty fell to her, for Miss Feather, who was a pale ghost of his wishes, had caught the habit from him. It annoyed her, not because she gave two pins for library practice, but because it stressed what was already sufficiently marked: that she was foreign and had no proper status there.

  Still, this errand was better than most. It would be easy enough, and almost anything would be worth getting away from work, even though it meant going out into the cold. She could slip into a café for a hot drink on the way back, and if possible might even call at her room to see if any letters had come. It was strange to be expecting letters again. That depended largely on where Miss Green lived. She was not certain who this Miss Green was. There were several juniors, and she only knew the pretty one by name, Miss Firestone. The others were not remarkable and she had nothing to do with them.

  She waited impatiently. After a time a girl came out and moved slowly up to her, dressed in her outdoor clothes. She would be about sixteen, and Katherine recognized her face.

  “Are you Miss Green? I’m coming along with you.”

  Miss Green nodded stiffly. She was thin and dressed in a beige coat that did not suit her: her face was poorly-complexioned and she wore spectacles. Her mouth was held as if her teeth were stuck with toffee.

  Katherine looked at her uncertainly, wondering how ill she was. It happened that Miss Green was the first member of the staff she had ever spoken to, for when she had come to work on her first morning she had met Miss Green in the entrance hall, and had asked her where Miss Feather was. Miss Green had stared and answered in off hand nasal tones that she would be in the cataloguing room, without saying where that was, and had disappeared. That had been nine months ago and they had not spoken since. She worked mainly in the Junior Department.

  “Is your toothache very bad? Do you feel well enough to start?”

  Another nod, as if crossly asserting she had no need of dependence. Katherine, feeling some sympathy was called for, said:

  “I’m sorry it’s so bad.”

  “Oh, that makes it feel better already,” replied Miss Green sarcastically, with a huddled movement of the lips as if eating a sweet. She pushed out of the double doors without holding them open afterwards.

  Exasperating brat, thought Katherine, following her, but it was a relief not to have to pretend sympathy. They stood for a second on the top of the steps, the cold rising up their skirts, and began to walk down as a clock struck ten-fifteen. It was a Branch Library and stood on one corner of a crossroads, a residential avenue and the fag-end of a long street lined with small shops that ran, gathering importance and size as it went, nearly to the centre of the city. The Library was an ugly old building built up on a bank, where laurel bushes grew: the bank was now covered with snow and littered with bus-tickets. A newspaper had been carefully folded and thrust into a drift, where it was frosted stiff. A cart creaked past, from which an old man was flinging shovelfuls of gravel, swinging the spade in an arc that spun the gravel thinly. As they went down the steps Katherine looked disproportionately strong and dark beside Miss Green.

  At the bottom they were met by an urchin with very red face and hands, who eyed them suspiciously, saying in a hoarse voice:

  “Is this where the books are?”

  Miss Green walked on without replying, so Katherine had to stop and give directions. The boy shrank from her foreign voice: in his left hand he held a sixpence. Glancing round while she hurried after Miss Green, she saw him go up to the main entrance though she had specially told him to go round to the Junior Department.

  “I say, where do you live?”

  “Lansbury Park.”

  “You’re catching a bus here?”

  A nod.

  “Then we shall change at Bank Street?”

  “There’s no need for you to,” said Miss Green shortly, as they reached the bus-stop. “I can go home alone quite well.”

  “I shall go with you as far as I can,” said Katherine. “I’m not coming back before I have to.”

  “Well, that’s your business.”

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Lansbury Park was excellent: it would take them right across the centre of the city, and her room was quite near Bank Street. She could easily call there on her way back. In fact, as Miss Green seemed so independent she might leave her at Bank Street as she suggested, and spend the rest of the time in her room, in a café, or looking round the shops. Would there be a letter? Robin surely must have had time to write by now, if he wanted to. Perhaps he was not greatly interested to hear that she was in England again. Of course, he wouldn’t be as excited at the prospect of meeting as she was: in any case, no-one had said anything about meeting yet. But she would have expected him to write quickly out of politeness. It might be that he was stationed in some inaccessible spot—Ireland, perhaps—which letters took days to reach, or possibly he was busy on a scheme or battle-course that left him no time for writing. Or Mrs. Fennel might not have written as quickly as she implied she would. It was all very tantalizing. But surely every day that passed made the arrival of a letter more likely.

  She stirred impatiently as they stood by the bus-stop with a few other people. Miss Green stood a little away from her, as if disclaiming any relationship, and Katherine glanced at her every now and then to make sure she was all right, which was after all what she was supposed to be doing. She looked pale and badly-fed: her thick-lensed spectacles stretched over her ears, meaning she had worn them for a long time. If her eyes had grown weaker, that would explain the petulant backward lilt of her head, which made her look scornful and stuck-up. Her hair was arranged limply on the top of her head, and her wrists were very thin. And she was in pain. Katherine was sorry for her: she looked so pathetic and spiteful; and if it had not been for her she would now be working resentfully till one o’clock.

  There seemed so many things to be happy about. She could not have named them, but as the large Corporation bus came up she felt that even the cold was delightful. Miss Brooks would see it in terms of the deadening snow that was littered everywhere, but to Katherine the frost made everything stand alone and sparkle. Even getting on the bus gave a momentary flicker of pleasure, as if she were entering on a fresh stage of some more important journey. She rubbed a space clear on the window as they moved off, watching the shops of City Road go past. City Road was several miles long. In the middle of it were twin scars where tramlines had been taken up. In some of the little shop-windows candle-ends were burning to melt the frost from the glass. They were all very much alike, selling tobacco and newspapers, or bread and canned food, or greengroceries. But they made a living from people dwelling in the many poor streets around them, who went no further for their shopping. As it was Saturday, there were plenty of them about: women of the district carrying baskets from one shop to another, leaning on the counters for five minutes’ dark, allusive conversation, waiting patiently outside butchers’ and fish-shops. Here and there old men, m
uffled up to their scrawny necks, leaned against walls filling their pipes with stenching tobacco cut and sold in sticky segments. Files of papers hung outside the news-agents. Yes, she thought, imagining the wedding rings and the scale-pans gritty from weighing vegetables, they’d certainly wonder how she got here. This kind of scene—though it reminded her of them—would mean nothing to the Fennels at all. They only noticed things that artists had been bringing under their noses for centuries, such as sunsets and landscapes. Or was that unjust? It was all very well saying the Fennels would notice this or that, but her memories of them were not at all clear. When she stayed with them, she had not been half observant enough, thinking no doubt that she would never see them again, so that all that remained was a mingled flavour of where they had lived and how they had treated her, and the kind of things they had said. Could she remember what they had looked like? She remembered Robin’s face clearly, and Mr. Fennel’s to a lesser extent: Mrs. Fennel had grown confused with one of the mistresses at school. And Jane she could not remember at all. That was odd. Katherine reckoned on having a good memory for faces.

  The truth of the matter was, she could not now keep them out of her mind, and they were constantly linking up with whatever she thought or did. She looked from the unevenly-travelling bus, and saw a cheap dress shop, where a bare-ankled girl was arranging a copy of a stylish model; then a linen-draper’s, with an old ceremonial frontage; a milk-bar, permanently blacked-out, with the door ajar and no-one on the tall stools; a pawn-shop window crowded with old coins, shirts, a theodolite, bed-pans and a harp; a public-house door with a bright brass rail, just opening; a sudden gap of high, papered walls and a heap of bricks, furred with frost, where a house had been destroyed. There was nothing in all this to remind her of them, yet it did.

  The bus stopped, restarted, took on more passengers. The buildings outside grew taller and impressive. The streets were wider; they at last came to the end of City Road and circled slowly along one-way streets in the centre of the city. Many people hurried by, with a flickering of white collars and newspapers. They passed the cathedral yard, glimpsed the long, soot-encrusted glass roof of a railway station, halted at a set of lights by a doorway bearing a dozen professional brass plates. Here and there girls dressed in overcoats sat huddled in cigarette-kiosks, reading, and down a side-street a man was selling baked potatoes from an ancient roaster.