A Girl in Winter

by Philip Larkin

  Miss Green, she thought, as she settled down in the bus, would be home by now. The driver swung into his seat, and they began to move. Off once more. As long as she was travelling, she was safe.

  But safe! safe from what? It was time she faced the question. What did she remember of the Fennels, plainly and without embroidery? There had been Robin, of course; he had puzzled her at first, because he was so very English—how English she never realized till she met more English people—but once she had got used to him he had been rather dull. She did not remember ever having been attracted by him. Now he would probably be even duller. Jane—well, Jane was indistinct to the point of anonymity. She had got engaged during her visit to someone she couldn’t recall anything about except his surname, which was so queer. The parents had been kind and pleasant. What else? It had been very hot: she had not taken enough light dresses. Then afterwards she had told her friends that Robin was passionately, simply madly and passionately, in love with her. One had had to say something. Hadn’t he kissed her once? Or had she made that up afterwards?

  So it wasn’t any personal attachment that made them so important. They had continued writing spasmodically for about six months afterwards: Jane had sent her a piece of wedding-cake. It seemed that once they had met they had lost interest in each other. Since then she had not thought of them; there had been other things to think of, a few pleasanter, the rest such that she kept them out of her mind. She had not thought of the Fennels again till she had arrived in England for the second time.

  The first few weeks had been a nightmare. Luckily there was little for her to do about them: in a haphazard way, she was provided for, and had only to accept what she was given. She lived in a hostel, ate in a canteen, and shared a bedroom with two other girls. She had to attend interviews in hastily-furnished offices. Never in her life had she experienced such bottomless despair and loneliness: there was nothing familiar, nothing of her own choosing, nothing that she could turn to and grasp in the face of everything else. It was as if the world had been turned round, like innumerable bits of reversible stage scenery. Quite frequently she felt moments of stark terror at the strangeness of things, at the way all had collapsed, presumably as a cat will go mad upon the ruins of its suddenly-destroyed home. There was only one sure thing: she was still alive. The rest was like walking across a plaster ceiling.

  It was then, naturally, that she had thought of the Fennels. Should she write to them or not? She had decided not, for several reasons, but as much as anything because she did not want to make a fuss. Most of all she wanted to be unobtrusive and disregarded. And so she had set herself to climb out of the slithering pit into which she had fallen, without success at first, but as time went on managing to re-establish herself gradually, to regain her willpower, to avoid the terrible moments that left her sickened. She did this by suppressing as far as she could every reference to her former life, and treating every day as complete in itself. She ate, slept and worked, and refused to compare what she did or ate, or where she slept, with any work or food or household she had known in the past. Everything had to be reduced to its simplest terms.

  The trick—if it was a trick—had worked: she found herself gradually able to relax. After some months of sorting forms, or copying out new ration-cards, she had applied for several more ambitious jobs, and to her surprise had been appointed to the one she now held. It was only for the duration of the war, but it was a fraction better-paid, and she quickened her attention till she could do the work without embarrassment. It gave her a sense of independence. When she had left London to come here, her sense of desolation had returned, but less strongly than before, and she discovered she was well in control of it. It was affecting her no more than the discomfort, say, of a hard frost.

  There was time now to look round, and take stock of her position, to mend what clothes she had, and buy new ones. She was reluctant to part with her old clothes and start wearing English ones. Nearly everything she possessed was a reference back to the days before she left home: her leather motoring-coat, for instance, was a relic of her student days. There had been a fad about dressing in accordance with the machine-age. But she hated to part with anything. Although she was not keen on mending, she spent many evenings darning stockings and underwear, with a sort of love for them. They were all she had left.

  The truth was, she had not been facing the facts. To live from day to day, as she had been doing, shut out the past, but it shut out the future too, and made the present one long temporary hand-to-mouth existence. All the time she had been behaving as if everything would suddenly snap back to normal, if she could only hang on a little longer. Without admitting it to herself, she had been believing that in a little while the walls would fly back, and at a touch she would find herself back at home, or studying in the university, with her old life about her.

  It shocked her to realize she had been believing anything so absurd, and it shocked her to realize that it was absurd. But a third fact shocked her most of all: that even if her old life had been waiting for her, she no longer wanted to return to it. And truly she did not realize this for a long time. In strange surroundings one was bound to have strange thoughts, that perhaps did not go very deep: such fancies as this she dismissed as wish-fulfilment: since she could not go back, she did not want to. But as time passed she could not ignore it any more than she could have ignored a dislocated bone. Somehow, without knowing it, she had broken fresh ground.

  For she knew, now, that in most lives there had to come a break, when the past dropped away and the maturity it had enclosed for so long stood painfully upright. It came through death or disaster, or even through a love-affair that with the best will in the world on both sides went wrong. Certainly there were people to whom it never came: girls she had known had slipped cosily from childhood to marriage, and their lives would be one long unintelligent summer. But once the break was made, as though continually-trickling sand had caused a building to slip suddenly on its foundations so that perhaps one single ornament fell to the floor, life ceased to be a confused stumbling from one illumination to another, a series of unconnected clearings in a tropical forest, and became a flat landscape, wry and rather small, with a few unforgettable landmarks somewhat resembling a stretch of fenland, where an occasional dyke or broken fence shows up for miles, and the sails of a mill turn all day long in the steady wind.

  She knew—for such a break brings knowledge, but no additional strength—that her old way of living was finished. In the past she thought she had found happiness through the interplay of herself and other people. The most important thing had been to please them, to love them, to learn them so fully that their personalities were as distinct as the taste of different fruits. Now this brought happiness no longer: she no longer felt that she was exalted or made more worthy if she could spin her friendships to incredible subtlety and fineness. It was something she had tired of doing. And what had replaced it? Here she was at a loss. She was not sure if anything had replaced it.

  She was not sure if anything would replace it.

  For the world seemed to have moved off a little, and to have lost its immediacy, as a bright pattern will fade in many washings. It was like a painting of a winter landscape in neutral colours, or a nocturne in many greys of the riverside, yet not so beautiful as either. Like a person who is beginning to go physically colour-blind she was disturbed. She felt one of her faculties had died without her consent or knowledge, and she was less than she had been. The world that she had been so used to appraising, delighting in, and mixing with had drawn away, and she no longer felt she was part of it. Henceforward, if she needed comfort, she would have to comfort herself; if she were to be happy, the happiness would have to burn from her own nature. In short, since people seemed not to affect her, they could not help her, and if she was to go on living she would have to get the strength for it solely out of herself.

  Perhaps there was nothing startling about that. But she shrank from accepting it. It was the only
thing she could not conquer by accepting, because it was not a fancy or a new piece of self-knowledge that she could fit to her own vanity, but true, true in a sense she found horrible, like a medical diagnosis. Life was not going to be as pleasant as it had been. It would be more cramped, less variegated, more predictable. She was not going to be surprised any more. She was not going to trust anybody. She was not going to love anybody. And when the time came for her to die, she would die not only without having done anything worth while, like most other people, but without having done anything she wanted.

  Once she had thought belief depended on inclination. But she fought against this new realization as hard as she could, trying to shut out the future as before she had shut out the past; yet still it gained ground. It mingled with her daily life, with the war, with the winter, until it scarcely seemed a separate thing at all, but merely a state of mind produced by living alone, living in England, and all the rest of it. She deeply hoped it was. There were times when it seemed a trivial and shallow depression. And there were times when the fear of it touched her as cold as wet steel: when she could see herself hardly aware that she was unhappy, because her feelings had so nearly atrophied, and receiving no compensations in return.

  Was it silly to worry about such things? Weren’t there enough material circumstances to trouble her? The answer was of course that she did not worry all the time. But when it came to the forefront of her mind, she did not dissociate it from the apparently meaningless disasters that had driven her to England. They seemed bound up together. And she had believed for a long time that a person’s life is directed mainly by their actions, and these in turn are directed by their personality, which is not self-chosen in the first place and modifies itself quite independently of their wishes afterwards. To find her theory being proved upon herself increased her uneasiness.

  So where did the Fennels come in all this? Simply, that she was lonely; more complexly, that they supported her failing hope that she was wrong to think her life had worsened so irrevocably. Since writing to Jane, those three nearly-forgotten weeks had taken on a new character in her memory. It was the only period of her life that had not been spoiled by later events, and she found that she could draw upon it hearteningly, remembering when she had been happy, and ready to give and take, instead of unwilling to give, and finding nothing worth taking. It was as if she hoped they would warm back to life a part of her that had been frozen, with the same solicitude she had tried to give Miss Green that morning—though she feared in retrospect that she had done no more than if she had handed her an elaborate basket of fruit left for weeks in a refrigerator, all frosted over and tasteless.

  It was extravagant, even melodramatic. But she could hardly have cared more if her life had depended on them.

  3

  Cheshunt Avenue was on the north side of the city, in a district made up of rows of houses occasionally relieved by a grocery shop or the back of a laundry. Somewhere among them was a football ground. The bus ran towards it along a long road lined with shops, public-houses, and factories, called Balsam Lane.

  Sick of thinking about herself, she crushed out her cigarette in the blackened ashtray and looked at Miss Parbury’s handbag. It was brown and unremarkable. Out of curiosity she opened it and looked inside. It smelt of stale scent and peppermint, and the lining shone. In places the seams were fraying. Rather it looked as if Miss Parbury couldn’t afford to buy a new one for everyday use.

  There came back to her mind that odd conviction that she had found a letter addressed by Mr. Anstey in it, and she poked about among the papers till she discovered it again. As well as a purse and a handkerchief and some odds and ends, there were a few handbills giving the times of buses, a folded paper bag, a shopping list and an empty envelope that had come from the Inland Revenue Department. All these she had mistaken for letters, but in fact there was only one, and she drew it out and looked at it. If it was not Mr. Anstey’s writing, it was extraordinarily like it. The mincing hand, the fine-nibbed pen: these she had seen often when at her work. The postmark was of the day before, posted locally. If it had been written at the library, the address would have been typewritten, but this looked like a private letter. Was it from Mr. Anstey? Strange: she thought she knew his writing well enough, but once she examined it closely half a dozen doubtful instances occurred to her. She grew less confident as she continued to inspect it.

  If it was a private letter, of course, that still did not prevent Anstey’s having written it; it was only that she had not imagined him as an individual who had friends like everyone else. The thought was as unfamiliar as meeting him in the street on a Sunday. But it tantalized her not to know. Should she open it? Quite honestly, she did not much care what was inside, only it would settle the argument one way or the other. She was not curious about people any longer. But then it was so strange, such a coincidence, if in truth it was from him. And Katherine was always disposed to follow coincidences to their fullest extent.

  The envelope contained one sheet of paper, inscribed on one side and folded with the writing inwards, like her letter from Robin. It would be quite easy to glance at the signature without necessarily reading the rest, and this she did, finding not very much to her surprise that it was signed “Lancelot”, Mr. Anstey’s outlandish Christian name. This put the question beyond doubt. So she opened it fully to glance momentarily over it before slipping it back in the envelope, and remained reading it for perhaps half a minute.

  There was nothing startling about it. But it puzzled her because she could not instantly pick up what it was about. Her eye fled from sentence to sentence, trying to break into the meaning. Accustomed to grasping any passage at once, she was baulked. Then she tried reading it slowly, sentence by sentence.

  *

  “My dear Veronica, (it ran)

  “I received your letter this morning.

  “You only say all over again what we have discussed many times, and seem no nearer deciding than you were last week. I have tried hard enough to show you I sympathize with your point of view, but surely you can see that what I suggest is the best way. If you do not agree, you only have to say so.”

  *

  Then two sentences to make a final paragraph:

  “At all events, I see no point in waiting any longer as you suggest. I say finally that if you cannot make up your mind one way or the other, we had better let the matter drop.”

  No more. She turned it over: the other side was blank. There was nothing else in the envelope. Once more she read through the shrouded sentences, feeling somewhere the meaning striking like a muffled drum, as in the procession of a funeral. But what was the meaning? It seemed no sentence carried a loose end she could pick up and thereby unravel the whole. The masked phrases—“what we have discussed many times”; “what I suggest is the best way”; “we had better let the matter drop”—were as smooth and heavy in her hands as stones. She could get nothing out of them. There were a dozen things such a letter might refer to: it might be the sale of some furniture, or a proposed illegality, or something dark and evasive like a will-making or disposal of property. Yet it sounded funereal, troubling. The chief point was this correspondent, this Veronica Parbury. Who was she, Katherine wondered. It could be that they were related, and that she was a cousin or an aunt. Their different names denied close blood-relation. Hadn’t Miss Green said, for instance, that Anstey had been married, but his wife had died? This might be a sister-in-law, then. And family business might well take on such masked and muffled sadness.

  But if they were not related in any way, and there was no evidence of this, what was left? The drums deepened, as if coming nearer, heading a wintry company that would tread her down. It was ridiculous to think of Mr. Anstey marrying anyone, but that was the first thing that would come to anyone’s mind if they read the letter. No-one would write so guardedly unless their feelings were involved. But him! Had he any feelings? It was absurd. Yet she was not amused. She read through it again. If only it had been
a simple, blurting letter, she might have been scornful easily: she had often thought it would be satisfying to get some handle against him, to give her dislike a vicious instrument. But as it was, the figure of him was blurring in her mind, no longer a sharply-cut target for loathing, and was beginning to waver like something seen under water, to wobble, and even grow for moments together to more than life-size, not so much menacing as monumental. Her compact hatred dissipated against it, like a herd deprived of its driver, pulled up, beginning to amble in all directions, grown purposeless.

  However, she was not in the mood for further speculation on these vague themes that led her bemusedly round and round the outskirts of things. She replaced the envelope in the bag and snapped it shut; and soon afterwards the bus set her down by a glazed-brick tavern called The General Wolfe. She knew that Cheshunt Avenue was the first turn left in Cheylesmore Road, that opened into Balsam Lane a little way after this bus-stop. It was a little after a quarter to two, and she hurried, because there was not too much time. One and three-quarter hours after middle-day: would Robin have arrived yet? Would he learn that she had been there and read his letter, and be offended that she had left no message? This was the first time that had occurred to her. She half-stopped, wondering if at this eleventh hour she should ring up the chemist and find whether he had called, and if not, leave some sort of explanation. There was a telephone-box on the other side of the road. She hesitated.

  But no. Something made her resolve to leave it to chance. If any good was coming to her, she preferred not to interfere. By stretching out a blind hand she might knock the cup over. And if he was offended, or had not sufficient interest to seek her out again, it was better that they should not meet, for she would sooner miss him outright than meet him awkwardly and fail. Instead, she went on. She had never been in this part of the town before. Through occasional grills she could see lights on in basements: a table spread with food, or an edge of hanging washing. And there were streets upon streets extending on either side of her, like a deathly stone forest.