A Girl in Winter

by Philip Larkin

  “This is a nuisance,” Miss Green said grumblingly.

  Katherine switched off the gas fire, and they went down to the shop, Miss Green holding onto the banisters and peering at the dark stairs. They questioned the chemist, who was kind and fussy, but could do little to help. He thought there had been someone in the shop when Katherine had been there, but he could not remember anything about her, nor had anyone come back afterwards to tell him of the mistake.

  “Well, this other person must have your bag,” said Katherine when they were outside. “What a bother. I’d better have some lunch, and go and call on her. Then I’ll give it back to you.”

  Miss Green was fretful. “I wish it hadn’t happened … there were keys … if they aren’t honest——”

  “It’s my fault, I know.” Katherine wanted to get away from this doorway. “I’m terribly sorry, I am really.”

  “And I’ve no money or anything——”

  She opened her own bag. “How much do you want?”

  “Well, Miss Lind, I owe you ten shillings already, for the dentist——”

  “Yes, that will do any time. Will half-a-crown be enough?”

  “Oh, yes, but—” Miss Green looked timidly from the coin to Katherine. “Could you give it me in change, do you think? They’re so rude on the buses, nowadays, if you haven’t the right money.”

  “I’ve no change——” Katherine hurried back into the shop, growing more desperate. She came out again with some coppers and sixpences, and also a bottle of mouthwash tablets she had bought to avoid asking the chemist for nothing but change. “Will that do? And I bought these for you, in case you haven’t any at home.”

  “Oh—” Miss Green looked too bewildered to be gracious. “I’ll pay you back——”

  They moved up the street together.

  “Are you sure you’ll be able to get home all right?” asked Katherine, with more compunction now they were away from her address. “Shall I come with you?”

  “Oh, I can manage.” Miss Green achieved an almost friendly smile, touching her mauve scarf.

  “And you will go home and rest? I think you ought to.”

  “Well, I feel I should,” said Miss Green pitifully. “But don’t you think I ought to go back to work? I’ve missed a whole morning——”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Katherine. “I’ll tell them how ill you’ve been. There won’t be any trouble.” She smiled. “Go back home and lie down, or sit by the fire. And keep your mouth shut, you don’t want to catch a cold in your mouth.”

  “Well——” Miss Green still seemed indecisive.

  “There’s no point in working this afternoon if you’re going to be away on Monday, is there?”

  “No.” They stopped on the corner. “Well, I think I will, then. I’ll go now.”

  “I’ll see you on Monday.”

  “Thank you for—for the milk,” said Miss Green confusedly. “I hope you get the bag back.”

  “I will.”

  They parted, Miss Green going off in one direction to the bus-stop, her pink nose high in the air. She was soon lost in the crowd. Katherine walked slowly the other way, her hands in her pockets, wondering if she could possibly be mistaken in thinking that the address on the letter in the strange handbag she was carrying had been written by Mr. Anstey.

  PART TWO

  1

  The morning when she came to England for the first time had been still and hot: not an accidental fine day, but one of a series that had already lasted a week. Each had seemed more flawless than the one before it, as if in their slow gathering of depth and placidity they were progressing towards perfection. The sky was deep blue as if made richer by the endless recession of past summers: the sea smooth, and when a wave lifted the sun shone through it as through a transparent green window. She walked to and fro across the sharp shadows on the deck, noticing how the deck and all the ropes had been drenched in sea-water and then whitened in the sun.

  It was incredible that she should be there at all. Walking on the deck that morning was a direct result of a day she could hardly remember, when they had all filled up their application-forms with much giggling and speculation. It seemed absurd. It was like taking a ticket in a sweepstake, or drawing a package from a bran-tub; no, it was less pleasant than that: it really was one of the silly things one does in company and regrets afterwards. For although Katherine was easily moved by a crowd she was not a person to make friends carelessly, and this was exactly what they had led her to do.

  After that day, for some weeks she had gone about in subdued dread, but as no more was heard of the scheme this gradually passed. There were other more immediate things to take her attention, so that when one of her friends arrived at school brandishing the first of the letters it came as a shock. Several correspondences began, and as Katherine listened to the boys’ letters being read aloud at sporadic intervals her alarm returned: she felt herself quite incapable of keeping her end up in this kind of exchange. In the hilarious search for double meanings she sounded as light-hearted as anyone, but inwardly she hoped her application would have gone astray. It was really not her sort of amusement at all.

  She need not have worried. When Robin Fennel’s first letter arrived, she was relieved to find it very formal. He described his home and school and daily life as if writing an exercise. Even her friends were hard put to it to find anything funny or thrilling. The only tangible thing he seemed to do was go bicycle rides, and so they called him “the bicyclist”. In every subsequent letter when he innocently began a paragraph “The other day I cycled to” they shrieked with laughter. But the joke passed; other correspondents were far more interesting, and soon no-one bothered about her letters from England unless to say: “Well, and how’s the bicyclist? Still bicycling about?”

  Incongruously, her relief changed slowly to disappointment. She felt slightly annoyed with this Robin Fennel for letting her down: she did not mind their laughing at him, but she resented the patronizing verdict that Katherine had drawn a blank. She kept on writing, although the exchange affected her no more than an interminable business correspondence, and after a while began trying to draw him out. She started writing only half her letters in English, and filling the other half with more personal likes, dislikes, and enthusiasms, hoping to lure him into following suit. He did: but the two halves of his letters (divided by a short ruled line) remained equally dispassionate. He had been here, gone there; he had walked, fished, swum; he had read this, heard that. As a last attempt, she had begun writing in diary form, with alternate (and usually shorter) entries in English, wondering if he could be persuaded to adopt this form and so become more intimate. But he stuck to the half-and-half arrangement, starting, invariably, “Dear Katherine” and ending “Robin Fennel”. This was all very exasperating. Fundamentally, as she knew well, she did not want a close friendship with him. He sounded harmless but dull. But it would have made the task of writing to him much more interesting, and in any case she disliked failing in anything she attempted.

  So after these vain attempts, she gave it up. She got into the habit of leaving the familiar letter with the English stamp lying about unopened for days, or she read half of it before being momentarily interrupted and then forgot to finish it. Her answers were shorter and less prompt. What now became so annoying was that he did not take this hint any more than he had taken her first one: though he could not be drawn on, he could not be shaken off. To Katherine’s disgust, he sent her a card on her birthday—a woodcut, not displeasing. His letters always arrived nine days after hers were posted. From annoyance she passed to alarm: “But I shall never get rid of him!” she thought, panic-stricken. Her friends prophesied a life-time of writing serious letters to England, and receiving in return lengthy descriptions of bicycle journeys: “but perhaps it won’t always be so bad, perhaps he will buy a motor-car one day. Then he will go much faster and much farther, and will have lots more to tell you, and he will write much oftener. Once a week he w
ill sit down with his dictionary and grammar-book, with a clean sheet of blotting-paper and a razor-blade to scratch out his mistakes, and write simply sheets. Of course he’ll be married. And his wife will say: ‘Who is this Katherine you are always writing to? Leave your letter and take me to a music-hall.’ And he will say: ‘Later, dear, later: I have still to describe Canterbury Cathedral.’ And then she will be very sad, and cry, and they will quarrel and part. You will stop writing, perhaps you will move, perhaps you will die—it will all make no difference. He will go on writing about his punctures and the watercress for tea.” Several times Katherine vowed that she would just stop writing, or tell him gently but firmly that she found herself too busy to continue the correspondence. But somehow she never did. And so they kept it up for over a year.

  Then, on the first of June, another letter arrived. There was nothing remarkable about the outside of it, and she carried it about unopened with her all day, for she made an affectation among her friends of being completely indifferent to him. Late in the afternoon, on the way home from school, she opened it: it contained an invitation for her to spend a holiday in England. She felt as if she had been holding a live hand-grenade without knowing what it was. It was unbelievable. Sitting in her bedroom, she scanned it for any trace of insincerity, but found none. The invitation was in perfect good faith.

  She sat trembling for a while, and swallowed several times. It never entered her head to accept it: that was the only saving point in the whole business. She had never spent a holiday away from her family in her life, and if she did, the companion she would choose would be a really close friend. The best line of action seemed to be to say nothing about it, simply refusing the offer when she wrote back. But incautiously she mentioned it to her parents, who congratulated her on her luck. Not everyone, they said, has a chance to go to England.

  “But I don’t want to go to England!”

  There was a great deal to settle: dates, routes, questions of luggage, clothes. After a short conclusive argument Katherine sat down to write a letter of acceptance and thanks. Rebelliously, she wrote it on the house notepaper, and not on her own lettuce-coloured kind she kept upstairs. This made it seem unreal, but the reality rushed back as soon as she had irrevocably posted it, and for the next few days she grumbled incessantly. Her father scolded her for ingratitude.

  “But I want to spend my holidays with you,” she argued. “I’m terrified of going abroad! And I’m afraid of the journey.”

  He said: “Rubbish!”

  To her it seemed an ordeal; to her parents, a privilege; but to her friends it was a farce. She could not help laughing when she admitted it, and they all lay back and shrieked together. No-one suggested that there was anything romantic or even exciting about it. It was generally agreed that Katherine was in for an exhausting three weeks, the greater proportion of which would be spent on the rear seat of a bicycle made for two, pedalling miserably through the rain (it always rained in England) in search of bigger and better cathedrals. No doubt he would ask her to give him language lessons. There would be huge, badly-cooked meals, based invariably on roast beef: she would come back looking enormous.

  Yet as she thought it over that night in bed, her apprehension returned, and with it a certain wonder. After all, it was a gesture of friendship. It startled her that this unknown boy in England should think of her, adding month by month to the conception he had of her in his mind, until now he proposed that arrangements should be made and machinery put into motion so that they could meet. It was fascinating. How little she had thought of him, and how shallow her ideas had been: she scrambled up, put the light on, and took out his letters from the drawer she kept them in. Sitting up in bed, she read them through critically. The first thing that struck her was that they really said very little about cycling—or cathedrals, for that matter. And in any case the English were very reserved. What was really important, she thought, dropping them on the counterpane, was that he should have kept on writing, promptly and indefatigably, even after her own interest had worn thin and her letters grown perfunctory. How kind he had been. What did he think of her? For almost the first time she pictured him sitting in the lamplight at dusk, in a room in a house at the end of a lane in England, writing to her. How strange that he should want to bring her to that room.

  She picked a letter up, and brushed his signature with the tips of her fingers, imagining that she could feel the roughness of the ink.

  *

  She travelled light, her one large suitcase standing by a ventilator. It contained all her best clothes, freshly cleaned, washed or pressed, as if she were passing into another life and were concerned that only her finest things should go with her. Everything was in order. In her handbag she had keys, tickets, papers: the sea was so placid that only an occasional heave, a tiny hinting at illimitable strength, showed she was not on land: at Dover Robin had arranged to meet her. He had been thorough about this. He would stand just past the Customs, wearing a grey suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie: as for recognizing him, he had enclosed a photograph to help her. This gave her another shock. At times she had wondered what sort of appearance he presented: it was not a question to which she gave much thought, and she had assumed he was a variant of the red-hair, freckles and projecting-teeth English face. In this she had been wrong. The photograph showed him looking at the camera with his hands on his hips, lit by brilliant sunlight, wearing a cricket shirt. There was a swing in his body that suggested he had been called and had turned momentarily back while the picture was taken. He was dark and slight, with long eyelashes. The expression on his face was evasive in the sense of not being fully captured by the camera. Rather to her surprise, she had shown it to nobody except her parents: in return, she had despatched a conventional portrait of herself, dressed in white for the occasion, dark hair drawn severely back. She did not imagine it would be much like her after she had spent a night travelling.

  All had been arranged so precisely. Yet she could not help stirring uneasily as they neared Dover. Slowly the white-cliffed island drifted nearer. She knew very little about it: only enough to know that by this crossing of thirty miles of water she would land in a completely different country. As time drew on, the quality of the early morning, like paper-thin glass, grew deeper and more clear; high above the harbour an aeroplane, like a tiny silver filing, climbed and tumbled in the sky so that an enormous word drifted on the air, emphasizing the stillness of the day. The gulls met them, blindingly white in the sun, wheeling and screaming as they escorted the boat slowly towards the stone jetty, and their cries added to her mistrust. She did not want to land in this foreign country. Cables were thrown out and made fast: the boat shuddered to a standstill. She looked over the rail at the bare stones of the quay, terrified. Then she joined the large bunch of passengers that had begun to go down the gangway, possessed of a sick feeling that Robin Fennel would have failed to appear and that she would be left tongue-tied and helpless, unable to explain her business to anyone. She found it impossible to understand the chatter around her—odd words rose irrelevantly to the surface: “dear”; “punctual”; “Daily Mail”. The porters and customs officials spoke a language as intelligible to her as Icelandic, but to her great relief they took no notice of her, simply chalking her bag without comment, so that she could follow the main press of people up a concrete passage out onto the railway platform. Robin Fennel was standing under a notice-board which said: “To the Boats.”

  They saw each other simultaneously.

  “Katherine?”

  She held out her hand, smiling.

  “So glad you could come. Did you have a good journey?”

  “Yes—good.”

  “Let me take your bag—we’d better get seats.”

  She followed him up the platform. He had a very clear voice, and she was thankful to find that she could separate his words without difficulty. A soft grey hat shaded his eyes and face. They got into a first-class compartment and he put her bag onto the rack and l
et down the window as far as it would go. The carriage was otherwise unoccupied and filled with dusty light.

  “Would you sooner face the engine?”

  She blushed. “Please——?”

  Without embarrassment, he made an effort to translate, slowly, with an accurate accent.

  “Oh!—no. I never mind.”

  They sat down, Robin throwing his hat and a copy of The Times on the seat by him.

  “We’ll have lunch on the train. I expect you are hungry. Did you have anything to eat on the boat?”

  “I had some coffee.”

  “Oh, then we’ll eat on the train. We should get to London before two, and meet my father. He will drive us home.”

  “In a motor-car?”

  “Yes, then you’ll be able to see the country.” He sat opposite her composedly, his arms folded, speaking as if they were old friends. “You haven’t been to England before, have you?”

  “Never.”

  “I hope this fine weather will hold. It will be too bad if it rains all the time.”

  The photograph had not been bad, but it had not quite done him justice. The thing it had failed to capture was the contrast between his severely-cut features and the gaiety conferred upon them by his youthfulness and fresh skin. Although he was only a boy, it was already quite plain what he would look like as a man—stern, with strong nose, chin and forehead. The muscles round his mouth would become prominent, and his cheeks hint at concavity. The dry black hair would appear on his wrists, and with constantly shaving his jowl would be dark-blueish. But this was all in the future: at the moment his mature look was counterbalanced by the almost feminine gentleness of youth, smooth as the skin of a pear and as delicate as linen.

  She had been greatly afraid that they would find nothing to say to each other. This was well-grounded as far as she was concerned, but Robin seemed to feel no constraint. His manner was unhurried: he wasted no words or gestures, and this calmed her: he explained that his father and himself had stayed the previous night in London, and while his father had gone about some business, Robin had travelled down that morning to Dover, and spent the time wandering about the town until her boat was due. He said that it was a perfect day for seeing across to France. She remembered how she fancied she could see large patches of weed dark through the lucid water, but dare not try to explain this. No-one else got into their compartment and after a while the train started, easing forward with a surprising absence of shock: as they moved steadily out Katherine noticed two posters by the station bookstall: “Heat Wave” and “Lunchtime Scores”. She wondered what they meant but did not ask. Robin went on talking quietly about nothing in particular: at one point she was disconcerted to learn he rode horseback.