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 will 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.”
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 let 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.
“Is your case locked?” he asked as they rose to go along for lunch.
“Locked? … Yes…. I leave it here, don’t I?”
“Oh, yes. It’s safest to lock it, though.”
“The keys are safe.”
The dining-car was not full, and they had a table to themselves, with a vase of flowers which Robin moved aside. Clear soup swayed to and fro in the deep plates. Katherine realized that she was very hungry. She took a roll from the wicker basket.
“People say food on English trains is very bad,” Robin observed. “I can’t judge. There usually isn’t enough of it, but that’s a different thing.”
Katherine straightened this out in her mind, and made an appropriate remark.
“I hope you’ll like English food, by the way,” he added. “That again is supposed to be very bad—like the climate. But you can see what the climate does when it tries.”
The midday sun wheeled backwards and forwards across the bright white cloth as they sat eating. Napkins on other tables were folded into mitres. After the soup they had ham and tongue, with salad in dishes, and glasses of colourless fizzy lemonade. She helped herself to salad with a wooden spoon and fork.
“Where are we now?”
He looked at his watch and told her.
“It’s Kent, is it? The county Kent? But there are so many houses.”
“Well, a lot of people live here.”
“I thought that Kent … was farms.”
“Hardly that,” he said, rolling ribbons of lettuce expertly round his fork. His fingernails were cut bluntly and brushed very clean. “There’s a lot of hop-growing. And there’s a lot of fruit and vegetables, for the London markets. The lorries go up every night, before dawn.”
“But there are factories,” she objected. “There! And another one.”
“Not many, though. This isn’t anything like an industrial region. Most of south-east England is like this.”
They finished tiny moulded jellies, and had cheese, celery and biscuits, with coffee. Katherine wondered if he would offer her a cigarette, but he didn’t: he paid the bill with a new pound note and tipped the waiter directly. Then they went back to their compartment along the swaying corridor, Katherine catching glimpses through the bucking glass-panelled doors of English people awake or asleep, in many attitudes. “I expect you’ll be wanting to change some money,” Robin said as they resumed their seats. Her suitcase was still there. “Do you understand it? Or do you find it confusing?”
“Money?” Katherine had spent some time studying a handbook for travellers in England, so she was prepared in this respect. “Twelve pence are one shilling, twenty shillings are one pound. But I have never seen any.”
He withdrew a handful from his pocket. “They’re pennies. And that’s a shilling. But there are also two-shilling pieces and half-crowns—they’re two shillings and sixpence.”
“And these?”
“Sixpences—worth six pennies.”
They fell to talking about the rate of exchange and the vacillations of Katherine’s own currency. The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed. Thinking how lonely she was, she suddenly found herself near crying: she looked unbelievingly at Robin. It was impossible to imagine what he was thinking: he seemed perfectly adjusted to all his surroundings—including her—and able to withdraw his real personality elsewhere. This was not at all as she had pictured him. She had thought of him first as dull, then as inarticulate: both conceptions were wrong. In either case she had imagined that she would be well able to hold her own in the impact of their characters, because she thought herself wise for her age, and because English boys were traditionally uncouth. In fact, he was a good deal more at his ease than she was: she was disconcerted to find herself deferential. For the moment silent, he glanced out of the window. The expression on his face was cool, as if travelling alone: he raised his hand slowly to draw one strand of his hair back into place. At first she had thought he was shy and was playing at being grown-up: now it occurred to her that he was simply being natural. Accustomed to sizing up and judging people at once, she could find nothing about him to fix on. Blinking, she looked out of the window too: they were on the edge of London. It was a Saturday afternoon and the rows of new brick houses were brilliantly shadowed in the sun. Once she caught a glimpse of a straight road, where an unattended baker’s van was being amblingly led by a horse, following the baker as he went from door to door. Gone in a moment, it filled her with a sense of relaxation, and she watched the roads and gardens curiously. After a while the ticket-collector passed along the train.
*
It was intensely hot at Victoria, where according to plan Mr. Fennel met them. The station was crowded. “You’ve brought the fine weather with you,” he said as they shook hands. “Had lunch?”
“On the train,” said Robin. “Katherine would just like to send a postcard home, to say she’s arrived safely.”
She liked Mr. Fennel. He was short, spry, elderly and courteous, with close white hair and a felt hat the colour of oatmeal which reminded her that he was a country auctioneer. He did not wear spectacles, but a worn spectacle-case protruded from an upper waistcoat pocket. He was very slightly bow-legged. As she scribbled the postcard that she had brought specially with her she wondered if father and son were exchanging brief appraisals and condemnations, and in her confusion pushed the completed card through the slit marked “London and District” without noticing. As she rejoined them Robin said: “They had some good animals there once.”
Their car was an old-fashioned model, very dusty about the wings, and Mr. Fennel handled it with the extreme care of one who has learned to drive late in life. “This is your first visit to England, then, is it?” he said to Katherine who sat beside him, Robin being in the back with the bags. “What do you think of it, so far?”
“Oh, I like it.”
“Katherine was disappointed with Kent,” said Robin with a chuckle. “There were too many houses.”
“Well!” said Mr. Fennel. “I agree with her. She’s perfectly right. But it’s the same all over England—good arable land being turned into pasture, pasture turning into housing estates. It’ll be the ruin of us.”
“England is an industrial country, isn’t it?” said Katherine, determined to keep up the conversation when she was able.
Mr. Fennel snorted. “It’ll be the ruin of us,” he repeated. “Suppose there’s another war? What are we going to live on? Christmas crackers and ball-bearings?” He glanced from right to left, turning the wheel. “It’s getting very hot. Are the windows all open, Robin?”
“Shall I open the roof?”
“Well, a little way, perhaps. How are you, Katherine? You must be warm with that coat on.”
“Yes, a little.”
Robin leaned over them and slid back the roof, so that a simultaneous breath of sun and wind struck in. Katherine felt her hair streaming, and resigned herself. “I dare say I’m not going fast enough for Robin,” Mr. Fennel continued pleasantly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t greatly care for cars. But everyone runs one these days. Still”—he sounded the horn—“when I do drive, I drive slowly. If there are any mistakes to make, the other fellow can make them. Really, the road accidents are nothing to laugh at. What were those figures in the paper the other day, Robin?—something to show it was no more dangerous to go through the war than cross Piccadilly?—something like that.”
“Well, you won’t get gonged for speeding, dad,” said Robin with placid irony.
“The roads are crowded, certainly,” agreed Katherine. Mr. Fennel’s voice had suggested he was speaking to an invalid who did not properly take in all he was saying. “Saturday,” he said.
When they were out of London, she sometimes looked about her for the England she had expected. It was difficult to see it. The main roads were full of cars and cyclists, the garages were all open, and every so often they would pass a teagarden with a sign, or a chalked board saying that fruit was on sale, plums or pears. There was no end of the cars. They streamed in both directions, pulled up by the roadside so that the occupants could spread a meal, formed long ranks outside swimming pools. Also there were innumerable hoardings, empty petrol drums and broken fences lying wastefully about. Occasionally she saw white figures standing at a game of cricket. These were the important things, and because of them the town never seemed distant. Only infrequently did she see things that reminded her of landscape paintings—a row of cottages, a church on rising ground, the slant of a field—and she preferred in the end to watch the road and feel the wind play around her. Everything seemed enshrined beneath the sky.
“Could I take a turn, dad?” said Robin once.
“I’d as soon you didn’t,” Mr. Fennel replied equably, and the matter was dropped. Instead, Mr. Fennel talked slowly and explicitly about ordinary things so that Katherine could understand and answer what he said. Already she found she could relax her classroom eagerness, and this cheered her. She was only afraid that it was tedious for him, and listened in dread for the resigned note that would mean: well, we’ve got her for three weeks and we’d better make the best of it. In the meantime, Robin busied himself in the back seat with a crossword puzzle. When she looked into the driving mirror above the windscreen, she could see his eyes dropped towards the page, or sometimes turned distantly out of the window. Once they were looking at her. She glanced quickly away, knowing that at present she had no idea of how to meet them.
*
At length when afternoon had become late afternoon and except for the continued brilliance of the sun would have been evening, they arrived at the village whose name she had so often written on envelopes, and there sought out a short gravelled slope, where a long gate was hooked open, and halted by a circular lawn in front of a large unimposing house built of red brick.
They got out into the sudden silence. Mr. Fennel removed his hat and wiped his forehead: “A job for you, my lad,” he remarked, indicating the dusty body of the car.
Robin nodded, taking out the bags.
The front door stood open, and they went in through a small porch to a large hall, that had stairs ascending round two sides and the landing banisters running round the third. From windows set high up at the turn of these stairs sunless light came, making the hall seem like a well. There was a blue bowl of flowers on a dark chest, a few pictures in elaborate frames. Almost at once a door opened and Mrs. Fennel came out to meet them.
“Here’s your guest, delivered safe and sound,” said Mr. Fennel. Katherine advanced to shake hands.
“Very pleased to meet you, my dear. You must be tired out. Is it as hot in London as it’s been here?”
“I should say, myself, it’s hotter,” said Mr. Fennel, smoothing the sides of his head with his palms. There were some letters lying on a salver for him and he picked them up. “It’s breathless in London—simply no air at all.”
“I’ll show you your room,” said Mrs. Fennel.
They went upstairs, Katherine looking wonderingly about her. The house was rather larger than her own. Her room was at the end of a long passage, and was reached by two steps down that Mrs. Fennel advised her to watch for. Her hostess was a strong, grey-haired woman. Her face was not beautiful but expressed great good-humour and tolerance. Robin had already taken up Katherine’s bag and it lay waiting to be unstrapped on a cane chair, so when Mrs. Fennel had left her she did this and took out a few of her things. As soon as she had started she stopped to stare round the room. It faced south-west, and was decorated in cream and white, with a blue carpet and curtains; these furnishings contrasted coldly with the warmth of its aspect. There was a grey marble washbowl in the corner, with bright silver taps and white towels, and an expensive, low dressing-table with a stool to match in front of it: when she pulled open one of the drawers to put away a handful of clothes she found it lined with English newspapers, which gave her an unreasonable shock. It was like the money: unfamiliarity where she was not prepared for it. But she liked the room; crossing to the window, she looked out from the side of the house onto a small lawn edged by poplar trees, where two striped deckchairs lay empty in the sun. She thought dimly she could hear the sound of water, but decided after a few moments that it was only the unfamiliar hush of silence in the country.
She went very slowly down the wide staircase, keeping one hand on the banister. In her dark brown skirt, white shirt and dark brown tie pinned with a small Olympic badge, and with her hair newly brushed and drawn back, she looked severe and foreign. They had gone into the lounge, leaving the door open so that she could see where they were. “This is the untidy room,” said Mrs. Fennel, from where she sat sewing. “The children do as they please with it.” It was a long, low room at the back of the house with french windows opening onto a terrace, low, chintz-covered furniture and a grand piano. Robin snorted at the deprecation. “It’s the comfortable room,” he said, getting up politely. “There’s lemonade, if you’d like some, Katherine.”
“Oh, thank you.”
He filled a long, hand-painted glass from a jug and handed it to her, first removing with a silver spoon a pip that floated on the surface.
“I hope it’s cool enough,” said Mrs. Fennel. “The refrigerator has gone wrong again.”
“There’s one thing about Jane,” said Robin, tasting it critically. “She can make lemonade. I think it was what she was put on the earth to do. Jane is my sister,” he added to Katherine, who sat down by Mrs. Fennel on the sofa.
“She won’t be in for dinner, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Fennel. “I expect you three are hungry. By the way, Katherine, do we talk too fast? What do you think? Should we speak more slowly?”
“Oh no.” Katherine blushed. “I can understand what you say. But I don’t speak English well.”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Fennel, rising with his opened letters in his hand and folding away his spectacles. “We shall just ramble on as usual. You just do as you like —don’t trouble about making conversation. We want you to be at home here. If you feel you are, we shall be satisfied.”
*
But Katherine did not relax. They ate dinner in a dark-panelled room around a polished table, and it was served by a maid. She was so alert to behave properly that she hardly noticed whether she enjoyed her food or not, but thinking it over decided that she had. It was not imaginative, but of fine quality and well cooked. She was served first and pressed to eat more than she wanted.
Robin’s face derived from Mrs. Fennel; the stern, serene features and regular teeth became too definite in later years to be handsome in a woman, but it was easy to see that he would always appear good-looking, even when the delicate quality of youth had disappeared. She watched how they behaved to each other: they were courteous, as though conscious a visitor was present. Mr. Fennel served the second course with a ceremonial flourish, and they helped themselves to vegetables from dishes held by the maid. Katherine found it all rather trying and hoped as time went on they would be less formal.
Afterwards the maid brought coffee into the lounge, and Mrs. Fennel took the lead in asking her about her journey, but she tactfully confined herself to questions that Katherine could answer with a yes or no if she liked. Robin sat attentively and sometimes interposed a sentence. They were willing to laugh if she was flippant, and she tried to be as amusing as she could: gradually she was relieved to find the atmosphere becoming easier. Mr. Fennel smoked a cigarette with a deliberation that suggested he did not smoke as a rule. Later on Katherine found she had no handkerchief and rose to excuse herself.
“Can I go?” said Robin, getting up.
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Fennel, waving him back. “You can’t go rummaging round Katherine’s bedroom.” She rested an amused eye on her son.
“I shall have to look for them in my case, also,” said Katherine. She sped upstairs.
The maid had turned back the bed and laid her night things ready, and although it was only nine o’clock the curtains had been drawn. She pushed them partly back and undid her suitcase, searching for handkerchiefs. Just as she found them she fancied there was a knock at the half-open door. She listened, but could hear nothing so shut the case with a sharp click. The door swung inwards silently, and in the dusk Katherine could see a girl standing on the threshold.
“Oh,” she said.
The girl looked at her. She wore a lemon shirt and pale, shapeless skirt and no socks: her height would be the same as Robin’s.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly. “I didn’t know if—I mean, I thought I heard you. I’m Jane. How do you do.”
“How do you do,” murmured Katherine.
They shook hands.
“When did you get here?”
“About seven.”
“Good journey?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Katherine knew that Robin’s sister was over twenty. But she would not have thought there was more than a year’s difference in their ages.
“Are you coming down now?” asked Katherine, shaking her handkerchief from its folds.
Jane had withdrawn to the door, her eyes still searching Katherine’s face as if waiting for her to take the lead.
“No,” she said. “No, I’ll see you later.” And with a brief smile she went. Katherine heard a door close along the passage.
When Katherine returned the other three were as she had left them. Robin suggested they went out onto the terrace, and held the french window open for her. Beyond a rockery and some rose trees there was a tennis court, sunk below a gravel path that led to a door in a wall running across the bottom of the garden. “Do you play tennis?” asked Robin. “We must have a game. You see, we decided to have a proper hard court instead of a big lawn; a lawn looks very nice, but it takes some keeping up, and in any case there’s the little one at the side—under your window—if we want to have tea out or anything. Below the tennis court is the kitchen garden”—he pointed to the wall—“and then the river.”
“The river? I heard it,” said Katherine, pleased.
“Did you? Would you like to see it?”
They went down the steps and along the high gravel path. Robin ran his finger along the wire netting. “The apricots are ripening,” he said, indicating some trees spreading against a wall. “Last year we got fifteen pounds.”
He opened a door and they passed into the kitchen garden, meeting a profusion of lettuces, peas, runner beans, cabbages and rows of feathery carrots. In the corner were a small toolshed and a glass-house, where she glimpsed some tomatoes. A tap dripped slowly, wrapped in sacking, making a perpetual green stain on the cobbles.
“This is a wonderful place for growing things,” said Robin. “See how sheltered it is, with the high wall on one side and these fruit trees on the other. And then you see it slopes pretty well due south down to the river, and catches all the sun.” He pulled down a branch and fingered one or two plums; when he found one that rolled off into his hand he gave it to her. The bloom bore his fingerprints.
“Does the river——?” She failed to finish this sentence in English; however, he understood her to ask if the river ever overflowed? “Sometimes on the other side, where there are water-meadows. Come and see.”
They went through golden clouds of gnats to a high door with faded blue paint, and when he opened it Katherine was surprised to see a broad river drifting by, as it seemed, on the very threshold, though there was ten yards of bank that had been scythed and mown, leading down to the water and a set of wooden steps.
“This is beautiful,” she said, tossing the stone of her plum into the water, where translucent fish rose momentarily at it. “You are very fortunate, aren’t you?” Looking up and down the river, she saw they were at the middle point of a slow bend lined with willow trees, at the foot of which were hoofmarks. Just opposite, the sweeping branches of a weeping-willow tree made a tent that a canoe could lie in. Further up the river, the sunset flashed off the water, showing hundreds of insects borne on transparent wings.
“It’s nice,” said Robin. He leaned against a noticeboard that said “Private. No Landing Allowed”, and looked across the water at a field scattered with golden-fleeced sheep. “Do you go boating?”
“Yes—have you a boat?”
“We have a punt,” said Robin, pointing to the end of a wooden landing-stage where a small boathouse had been built. “I didn’t bring the key, I’m afraid. Can you punt?”
“Punt?”
“Yes, with a pole.”
She pondered the image. “No! But I can”—she made rowing motions—“and”—she made paddling motions—“do you see?” She ended with a half-nervous, half-excited laugh, foreign and gleeful, that she thought might attract him. He shoved himself away from the post with his shoulders. “Well, we’ll teach you to punt,” he said. “Look, there’s a water-rat. See it? Under the opposite bank.” He pointed to a small brown head travelling steadily along, accompanied by a diagonal ripple, until it vanished under the weeping-willow tree.
“I saw it.”
He led the way back, locking the blue gate and hanging the key on a rusty nail. She was alert for his mood. But his actions rarely had anything stronger than the flavour of a motive around them: in this case, he was at ease among his inherited surroundings. He took it for granted that she would find it interesting to look over them, but no more.
They went up the terrace steps to the now-lighted lounge. “Been looking round?” asked Mrs. Fennel. “Has he shown you our river?”
“Yes. You must like it.”
“It is nice,” Mrs. Fennel admitted. “But I think it makes the place rather damp, do you know? And it’s mournful in winter.”
This last remark, spoken as it was in a foreign language, came to Katherine with something of the impact of a line of poetry. She sank quietly to a seat, looking around her, and thought of the time she would be no longer there. Mr. Fennel, wearing his spectacles, was turning over the stiff, close-printed sheets of the local paper. Jane had at last come in, and was lying on the sofa, a book balanced on her chest, with a picture of mountains in it: she did not say anything to Katherine but was paying attention to her. In the electric light Katherine could judge her better. She had the angular, chiselled, Fennel face, but with neither the flickering beauty youth cast on it nor the good-natured repose of maturity. Instead she looked pale and irritable, rather like Robin after a long illness. Katherine wondered if she could be mistaken in thinking she was much older than her brother; she had none of his poise: she was not even dressed as well. Her clothes had a shabby look, and in addition she was not made up, nor were her hands attentively manicured. Robin dropped onto the piano stool and fingered a few notes.
“I expect Katherine would like to go to bed early,” said Mrs. Fennel. “She must be very tired. Did you stay at an hotel last night?”
“No, I slept on the train.”
“That isn’t a proper sleep, is it,” said Mr. Fennel, removing his spectacles and scratching his nose with the steel earpiece. “Sleep is more than rest for the mind. The body must lie down—every muscle should be relaxed——”
“Horses sleep standing up,” said Robin vaguely. “Well, Katherine, do go to bed if you are tired.”
“Oh, I will not go for a little while. I am not tired.”
“You can sleep as long as you please tomorrow,” said Mrs. Fennel, biting off a thread suddenly. “We shan’t disturb you. Oh, Robin, what’s that on the ceiling there? Is it a moth got in?”
Robin bestirred himself, and examined the immobile wings spread in the rose-coloured light on the ceiling. “It certainly is,” he said. “Isn’t there a duster somewhere on the bookcase? Can I stand on this chair?”
“Put a paper on it first.”
“Be careful,” said Jane. Robin looked round at her with amusement. “It’s quite furry,” he reported. “Have you suddenly taken a fancy to them?”
“You can handle it carefully.”
“Yes, dear, don’t crush it,” said Mrs. Fennel. “Gather it up firmly but gently. Put it out of the window.”
They all watched while Robin’s head and reaching hands shut out the light, and Mr. Fennel looked up resignedly as the shadow fell across his paper. Katherine felt that at this moment it was at last natural for her to be there, yet at the same time there was no intimacy among them: the whole thing resembled a scene in a hotel lounge. But she dismissed the comparison in a moment, telling herself that three untouched weeks lay ahead of her. Her head reeled suddenly with fatigue: it was certainly time she went to bed. Robin reported that the moth had flown into the creeper.
Yet when, after saying good night all round, she was at length lying in the darkness, hearing nothing but tiny unfamiliar sounds from the trees outside and from other rooms in the house, she found she was not ready to sleep. Her thoughts were like a tangle of live wires: she would choose one and try to follow it to its source, but almost immediately she would be swept away again by one travelling in the opposite direction. Any circumstance she picked on changed disconcertingly to something else. Her mind was like a puzzle in which many silver balls have to be shaken into their sockets; it was her thoughts that were rolling free, and she moved her head from side to side as if to settle them. Then, abruptly, she succeeded: and her uneasiness faded as she knew what she was thinking.
When was Robin going to start behaving naturally?
So far he had stood insipidly upon his party-manners, even when they had been alone, as if playing at grown-ups. When would he drop that, and be more friendly, and put her at her ease?
Because she had nearly stifled herself trying to be polite, none of the visit so far seemed quite real. It was all a little insincere, like a school prizegiving. The parents, of course, might always behave like that. But Robin seemed to have taken his cue from them, so that she had now met all four of them, one after another, and was left with the absurd feeling that the most important person, her real friend, had not yet appeared. There seemed nothing in their greetings so far to warrant their inviting her so many expensive miles. They welcomed her undramatically, even casually, as if she had come from the next village. She found this a disappointment.
Was he, perhaps, shy? She pondered on his face, which she already knew well, and his attitude. It was impossible to think that. And she could not accuse him of being bored with her, either, because his attention was always on her and his manner was solicitous. Really, he acted as if he had long ago made up his mind about her, and had brought about this meeting simply in order to check and correct one or two trifling points. There was no constraint in his manner at all.
Then why should she assume he was not behaving naturally?
This was a facer.
Oh, because he just couldn’t be. He was only her own age. It couldn’t be natural for anyone of sixteen to behave like a Prince Regent and foreign ambassador combined. It just wasn’t possible. Besides, if (ghastly thought!) by the thousandth chance it was natural, it would mean that he would never have asked her. They would be so entirely opposite in every way that—— And again to be so independent, yet so gracious—and Robin’s movements were always beautifully finished and calm—well, it would mean that people, mere friends, mere other personalities, would hold no interest at all for him.
And consequently he wouldn’t have invited her.
But he had.
And therefore this reserve, this sandpapering of every word and gesture until it exactly fitted its place in the conversation, this gracious carriage of the personality—this was not natural, or at the most it was a manner, so familiar by now that his thoughts and motives could change freely behind it. Somewhere behind it was a desire to see her, which would now alter into something else. At the moment she could do nothing but watch. But in time she would know. The time would come when he would let her see.
But after this period of order, her thoughts broke their pattern once more and recommenced rocking to and fro, so that she became too tired to follow them any more and sank into half-consciousness. At this, half-effaced impressions rushed upon her, details of the journey and passengers, the shine of the sea, the lifting of the waves that was the slumbering of strength, the gulls at Dover, and above all her surprise that after so many miles and hours and different vehicles, after threading her way along so many platforms and quays, through ticket-barriers, entrance-halls, customs-houses and waiting-rooms, she should have reached the point she set out for, successfully encountered Robin Fennel, and have been taken along so many unnamed roads and lanes until they reached the house where he lived. Finally, her mind gave one last flicker of surprise, as a sail gleams for a moment before going over the horizon, that she should at last be lying in this house, surrounded by strangeness on all sides to a depth of hundreds of miles, and yet be feeling no anxiety of any kind.