A Girl in Winter

by Philip Larkin

  Katherine was beginning to see the light. At first she had thought Jane was telling a desperate lie for some reason or other, because she could not believe it. But as soon as she had thought twice about it, she saw how fatally obvious it all was. For two weeks she had exercised her imagination in building up theories based on the fact that Robin had invited her, and trying to hide from herself the dissatisfaction she felt with them. This was what was wrong with them. Robin had not asked her at all.

  “Well!” she said. “This is very extraordinary. I wish you had told me earlier. May I ask, then, who did invite me?”

  “I’ve told you,” said Jane. “I did. Which incidentally is why I was such an efficient chaperon. Glory.” She chuckled slightly. “Like chaperoning the British Museum. How marvellous.”

  Katherine looked at her closely. “Then why did you ask me?” she demanded. “To see what the savages were like?”

  “No. I wanted to meet you.”

  “But you knew nothing about me.”

  “There were your letters.”

  “But I only wrote——” Katherine stopped. “You read them?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did he show them to you?”

  “If I asked him, yes.”

  “Oh!” Katherine struggled to speak through her annoyance. “You had no right!”

  “Why not?” said Jane. “There was nothing personal in them.” She picked a grass-stalk and began nibbling it.

  “That does not matter—if—— He should have told me! It was wrong of him—and you too.”

  “Don’t worry. I was a far more appreciative audience than he was.”

  “I wanted no audiences!”

  Jane looked at her meditatively, and blew a piece of husk from her mouth with a crisp sound.

  “I’ll explain,” she said. “We seem to have been at pretty fair cross-purposes all along.”

  “I am not to blame for that.”

  “I was interested when Robin began writing to you,” said Jane. “It was about the only thing he’s done I should have liked to do myself.” She was silent for a moment. “I think it would be fascinating to write to somebody who didn’t know you, who’d never seen you, even, and who didn’t even live in the same country. You could tell them anything, and it wouldn’t matter: you could make out you were all sorts of things you weren’t, and they wouldn’t know any different. Or you could tell them the truth, and see how they took it. I suppose it would be rather like confessing to a priest.” She looked at Katherine, as if prepared for her to laugh.

  “Well, it isn’t,” said Katherine, simmering down. “It’s rather boring.”

  “You’re thinking of Robin,” said Jane rather impatiently. They began to walk up and down the small lawn. “Supposing by chance you’d struck someone different—someone you really liked—someone you felt understood what you said. Don’t you see what I mean?—how wonderful it would be to be able to tell them everything, and be certain that they’d never—I mean, that they’d be so remote and away from it all.”

  Katherine said she understood. She was doubtful if she did.

  “Well anyhow, that was what I thought when Robin began writing to you. I didn’t think for a moment he’d strike anyone worth while.” She paused to rattle a poppy-head, full of seeds. “But as a matter of fact you turned out rather well, not that Robin noticed it.”

  “In what way?” said Katherine sarcastically, cross with this last remark.

  “I mean, what you wrote was so interesting. I read the parts in English, and Robin translated the rest,” she added as explanation. “It interested me no end. What you did, how you lived, what you felt about things —just ordinary things—all as if you’d known us’—Robin, anyway—for years. Yet so strange.” She paused to think, as if conscious of giving the wrong impression. “You didn’t write pages of description—Lord knows what drivel Robin «was sending back—but for all that I felt I knew you perfectly well. And it was all so natural; you weren’t trying to make an impression.”

  Oh, wasn’t I, thought Katherine. Wasn’t I!

  “So you see,” Jane finished, “I couldn’t help thinking that just by accident Robin had—well”—her casual tone became harder and she spoke as if afraid Katherine might laugh at her—“well, that Robin had struck exactly the kind of person I should have liked to know myself.”

  “Why didn’t you write to me, then?” said Katherine, catching her self-consciousness.

  “I couldn’t, really.” Jane gestured. “You’d have thought I was mad. I thought the best thing to do,” she went on, speaking quicker as if to get out a discreditable confession, “was to get Robin to ask you here for a holiday. Then I could meet you and see what you were like and if we got on well I might have written when you got back. I hoped we should get on well,” she ended, raising her eyebrows and looking downwards. They had reached the seat again. Katherine kicked it softly. Even she could connect the last sentence with what had happened the previous day.

  But she felt bound to make some protest. She found what Jane had said hard to believe, partly because she had never felt anything of the kind herself, and partly as one is not moved by even a poem in a foreign language. And as Jane spoke almost dispassionately, she found herself unconvinced.

  “But——”

  “You think all this sounds very silly.”

  “No. No! but—but what did Robin think of all this?” This was not the question she meant to ask, but it would gain time.

  “I don’t think he knew. I never mentioned it.” She looked downwards again. “This seat isn’t dry enough to sit on. Shall we go indoors?”

  “If you like.”

  They went up the steps to the still, close lounge. Dust sparkled in the sunbeams. The clock said five to seven.

  Katherine sat on the sofa. She was bewildered. When she had written her letters she had barely known that Jane existed, and now she was asked to believe that the nets she had contrived so cunningly to capture Robin had succeeded down to the last syllable in snaring Jane. Apart from not believing it, she found the suggestion absurd. She had no feelings for Jane at all. And it was ridiculous that she should affect a person she did not care about. Besides—the impossibilities thronged upon her—she was sixteen, while Jane was twenty-five, middle-aged, and foreign, too.

  “But I can’t see,” she said haltingly, “why—you—bothered.”

  Jane was leaning against the piano lighting a cigarette.

  “I suppose it is rather difficult to understand,” she said. The weariness had come back into her voice. “I wonder if I can explain.”

  She shut her eyes a moment. “Put it this way,” she said. “I get so bored that things are apt to get out of proportion.” She looked at Katherine, to see if she understood.

  “You get bored,” said Katherine, to show she did.

  “Yes, bored!” said Jane, with a sudden flash of temper, flicking her cigarette needlessly, and moving to the bookcase. “And that sounds silly, too. What have I got to be bored about? I’m healthy, I’m not starving, I live in a perfectly good house. Silly, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’ve only been doing it ten years,” she ended with a touch of juvenile sarcasm.

  Katherine realized at last with relief that Jane was going to talk about herself. That explained it. She had had these conversations before, when people had caught her interest by paying her compliments, and then had held her to confess their self-centred immaturities. This was like all the rest. She settled down to listen, a little disappointed, nevertheless, that they were not going to talk about herself.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Jane moved from the bookcase to the gramophone, and fingered a record as if she half-intended putting it on.

  “I don’t know if I can,” she said at last. “There doesn’t seem anything to tell. I left school when I was sixteen, because it seemed no use staying on there. As you’ve no doubt gathered, Robin has the brains of the family. So I came back and lived at home.” She put down the re
cord, and played with a little brush kept to clean them. “They stuck me for about a year and a half. Then it was decided I ought to do something. So I went to a technical college to learn shorthand and that sort of thing. We typed for hours. When I was considered to know enough, Father got me into an office of a friend of his, an insurance office, and I worked there for nearly a year.” She drifted on to the fireplace, and tapped ash into an ornament. “Then they said politely but firmly that they had to reduce staff, and I had to go. I wasn’t very surprised, as I was quite hopeless, but it was rather a slap in the face.” She laughed. “They were probably only speaking the truth, because of the slump, but I didn’t realize that at the time. So I went and messed around in Father’s office while he tried to find me another job. That was worse than the insurance place, because I hadn’t anything definite to do, and people felt I had no business there. Of course, he didn’t pay me much. In the end, he couldn’t find anyone silly enough to take me—who would take a half-trained nincompoop?—so I said I was sick of the whole thing and came back to ‘help mother’. Since then I’ve gone on helping her.”

  She finished, rocking to and fro on the fender.

  “But your father—he would help you to do anything you wanted to do, wouldn’t he?” said Katherine uncertainly.

  “Oh yes. But you see there isn’t anything I want to do.”

  Katherine said nothing. Jane moved on, straightening some flowers on the window-sill. A petal fell off.

  “Careers for women,” said Jane. She took up the petal and tore it. “What about women that don’t want careers? In the old days, I suppose, we should have an enormous family and I should quietly turn into a sort of unpaid housekeeper. Aunt Jane and what-not.” She threw the bits of petal into the coal bucket. “But nowadays nobody forces me to do anything like that, and there’s nothing I want to do, so the answer’s simple. I don’t do anything. Now understand this,” she added, as Katherine seemed about to say something. “It’s the whole point. I’m not lazy, I’m not even scared of the big world and all the rest of it—and heaven knows I should like to pay for my keep instead of just sponging. I can even kid myself for as long as three weeks that I’m thrilled with something and want to go on doing it—though I don’t know if I still can, I haven’t tried lately. But then I get so sickened—” She shook a curtain straight. “And then I sometimes hear of people I was at school with, getting fresh appointments or being married or something. I can remember some of them. They weren’t very special. But at least … And then there’s Robin. He appals me sometimes. Or rather, he makes me appalled at myself—because I know they’re right, you see. They’ve got this desire to—well, it’s hardly that; I mean it seems quite natural for them to peg along and do things, they don’t give it a second thought. But I don’t see any point in it,” said Jane, giving the piano-lid a soft blow.

  “You might get married,” said Katherine tentatively.

  “No, you don’t understand,” said Jane in an irritated voice. She put her hands on her hips. “I mean everything, all the things I might do. I might get married, I might start shorthand-typing again, I might even go in a factory or be a waitress, I might even stay on here. Don’t you see? Just because I don’t see any point in doing anything, it doesn’t mean I see any point in doing nothing. Oh——” She turned as if tired of her own voice, and sat on the piano stool, the sun coming in over her shoulders. The smoke from her cigarette was grey in the sunlight.

  “Besides,” she threw out as an afterthought, “if you don’t see any point in getting married, nobody’s going to marry you. I know that all right. They’d as soon marry a Zulu.”

  “The question to ask yourself,” said Katherine carefully, after a long pause, during which Jane tossed her cigarette through the open french windows, “is: what would you do if you had a million pounds?”

  “Sounds pretty stupid,” said Jane. “What should I do if I lived on the moon?”

  “It might help you to make up your mind.”

  “But I haven’t got a mind to make up—oh well,” said Jane, rising and starting to rove round the room once more, “I might travel, I suppose. I might like that.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Europe, Russia, America. Nowhere hot. Move on as soon as one got bored.” The idea did not seem to attract her much. “I don’t know,” she said. “It beats me. You know, I thought once before you came that if we became friends, I’d tell you all this, and ask you what you thought about it. I suppose I should have told you anyway.” She sighed. “What do you think about it?”

  Katherine had an extraordinary idea. She did not know where it came from, unless for the last few minutes she had been taking Jane seriously. It was that she should suggest that Jane came back with her, to her home. She could stay there for six months or even a year as a paying guest; live with them, learn the language, make friends, do more or less as she pleased. Her parents, who were intellectual and given to strange actions, would probably not object. There was a room for her. Even if it made no lasting change, it would amuse her till the novelty wore off. For a moment it seemed brilliantly sane. Then all at once it appeared melodramatic. Jane would turn down the suggestion at once; it was presumptuous to think that she could play the fairy-godmother like that. Jane was not seriously asking advice of her: she simply wanted to talk. If there were anything to be done, her father would do it, for he had money enough. Or at least, it would be silly to make the offer straight off. She would have to ask her own parents first; it would be far better to wait, and then perhaps suggest it in a letter. It was not a thing to blurt out. She collected herself.

  “And you really have no money?”

  “About a hundred pounds.”

  “Then it’s quite clear,” said Katherine, laughing. “It’s marriage or nothing.”

  “I suppose so. But who?”

  “Oh, a foreigner,” said Katherine, stretching her legs. “To take you away. Someone opposite to you.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Jane, as if bidding farewell to the subject. “That is, if you’re serious.”

  “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

  “Deathly,” said Jane, laughing too.

  7

  And here matters came to a halt, no longer puzzling, no longer leading on her imagination. She found herself suddenly in unremarkable surroundings, friendly with two unremarkable young English people, at her leisure in their well-appointed house. When Jane had been speaking to her so sincerely and desperately, she had supposed that they would naturally become more closely dependent on each other, but Jane never referred to the subject again and Katherine had no wish to bring it up. She knew that these confessions are their own reward, and imagined Jane was now at ease. Her voice had been like that of a chess-player, explaining after defeat the tactics with which she had intended to gain victory: her manner had all the sterile quality of one who has never lain open to another. Nor was Jane’s anger mentioned: the three of them went about together as before, though Robin still insisted in talking to her in her own language.

  It was odd to find Robin’s manner warming towards her. At the beginning of her visit he had been reserved, making sure his dark rambling hair was always carefully combed, springing to hold doors open, making sure everything they did was to her liking. Now he relaxed, and, when her interest in him had nearly died out, became unceremonious, casually bold. He lounged around in dirty trousers and no socks. He no longer had a special voice for her—articulate and precise—and he no longer treated her like royalty. Because her daydreams were over, and her over-heated fancy extinct, she paid no attention to this, but occasionally she could have sworn he had taken on a half-flirting tone. He had a trick of laughing at her, not looking away, and of taking her arm familiarly now and again, that she could not but notice.

  Well, it was nice of him, but a little late. She thought fantastically that he had caught the tail-end of her four-days’ love and was manfully doing his best. She was more concerned with trying to forget
her embarrassing behaviour when she had been trying to coax him out into a non-existent open. That made her blush deeply, and was something she would never tell her friends.

  But what was she going to tell them? She could already imagine the scene. After a decorous tea-time, the three—or perhaps four—of them would retreat to the bedroom, where there would be chocolates. The nightdress-case, shaped like a woolly dog, would be stuck rakishly on the mantelpiece so that at least two of them could sit on the bed. And then: “Well, Katherine dear, let us have the whole story.” What was she going to tell them? “We played tennis, and I won.” “We went on the river, and I lost the pole.” “We went to Oxford, and it rained all the time.” And what would they say? “Did you go lots of bicycle rides?” Well, as a matter of fact she had been a fair number. “And you saw St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey?” That was true, too. “And he made you give him language lessons?” She could not deny even that. “And of course you never went near a dance-hall or a theatre or a beer-garden all the time you were there!” No, it was really rather appalling, how terrible they would make it sound. Yet had it been terrible? On the evidence, yes. On her own feelings? She was not sure.

  For not all the holiday had depended on how Robin had behaved, or what he had said, or how Jane had acted. There were moments when she was alone that compensated for them. There was a time when she could not sleep, so she had leant out of her window to look at the moonlight, and the smell of the stocks and wallflowers had made her dizzy. In the mornings she liked to hear the men calling to the horses, and the explosive threadbare calls of the roosters. She loved the extraordinary soft greenness of the landscape, and the way hills were capped with dark green woods. She remembered with pleasure how she had found a child squalling in a lane, and had stopped its crying by talking to it, though it had probably been as much dumbfounded as comforted. But it had laughed eventually. And there was a grave in the churchyard that fascinated her, ornate and Jacobean, with four angels, an urn, and a grinning skull, all worn away by the continual weather that had beaten it for three hundred years. She did not ask Robin whose it was, and dreaded lest he should tell her. But there had been an evening or two when she had sat by it in the deep grass, able to look down towards the village on the one hand, and down towards the river on the other. The moon had risen not with freshly-minted brightness, but with almost a bloom, like a ripe fruit, and when the landscape was dusky touched the mist to pearl-colour. As she sat there she noticed a cat sitting ten yards off by another headstone, and sometimes the cat looked at her, and yawned, as if they both happened to be waiting on the same street corner. She had had to go home and leave the cat still there.