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.

These, and other things that she no longer remembered, made her feel that in some way she had taken possession of that summer there. Once she had thought that for them, too, she would remain inextricably embedded in their recollections, and be referred to as a date—“the year Katherine came”; “the summer Katherine was here”. But on the whole this was unlikely. For she had asked:

“Robin, do you have many people to stay with you?”

They were walking up towards the main road, where they would intercept Jack Stormalong’s car. The weather was humid, a foretaste of autumn. The blackberries were ripening in the hedges, and earthenware bowls of red and yellow plums stood in the kitchen, ready for jam-making. Jane had stayed indoors because of this—or had it been something to do with moths discovered in the spare-room blankets? She had not been clear. At any rate, they were alone.

“Well, most of our friends are family friends, if you know what I mean,” he replied. She did. The watered-down relationship was typical of them. “I suppose a fair number, by the end of the summer.”

“And this Jack we are going to meet—has he been here before?”

“Rather. We’ve known him for ages. His father and my father were in the army together.”

“He’ll be surprised to find me here,” said Katherine.

“No, why should he? He’s used to finding other people here. And you’re almost one of the family.”

“It would be amusing if I were,” said Katherine absently. “Don’t you think families with a foreign side are more interesting? They become much stronger. And the one branch can help the other.”

“That’s what the Jews think, isn’t it,” he said rather distantly.

*

Jack Stormalong was in high spirits. He had driven from somewhere—Tewkesbury? Newbury? Aylesbury?—in sixty-five minutes by his shockproof wristwatch, his dashboard clock being out of order like all dashboard clocks. The engine of his dark crimson sports car roared hoarsely as he whisked them back home again, explaining to Robin that he was using a new kind of juice. He had no difficulty in making himself heard above the noise of the engine.

His introduction to Katherine was not fortunate. He greeted her loudly and asked her a question she could not follow: she realized suddenly that her conversance with English depended a good deal on being accustomed to the Fennels’ voices. This made an awkward gap in the conversation till Robin straightened it out, and Katherine found herself blushing. He looked at her with an expression of arrested benevolence as if she had said something improper. She noticed that his two middle top teeth pushed each other outward and formed an arc brisé.

His arrival put her rather into the background, and for the moment she was not sorry, finding it amusing to see another guest welcomed as she had been. Also she had subconsciously been waiting for this new visitor ever since she heard he was coming. Her sensation that there should be somebody else had never quite left her. But she did not know what she had expected, and certainly Jack Stormalong made very little appeal to her. When they assembled in the lounge before dinner to drink some sherry in honour of his arrival, she expanded her initial rebuff into dislike. He would be about twenty-five, with short, oiled hair that waved slightly in front, a face neither handsome nor ugly, that spoke of little but a sense of his own authority—a military face, such as she was used to seeing above the high collars of cadets in her own country, offering peace but not friendship on certain terms. He was over six feet tall and very strong. He shook hands warmly with Mr. Fennel, whom he called “sir”, and, carrying a glass of pale sherry to Jane, said “Hello, Jane” in a low, affectionate voice, gripping her right arm momentarily just below the shoulder, which caused her slightly to stagger. Katherine kept out of his reach, sitting quietly on the piano stool.

With increasing annoyance she noticed however that his arrival put the Fennels in good spirits. With her they were attentive, kind, relaxed: now, matched with a different partner, they grew sunny, skilful, almost flickering as the conversation at dinner played lightly around garden-pests, even Jane joining in, and Jack Stormalong demonstrated that it was perfectly easy to eat and hold up one end of a conversation at the same time. There was no doubt that he was more of a success than she had been. He took it for granted that he was at home there: he embarked on long anecdotes, sipping at the wine, and after each sip redirecting his discourse to a different person. Only he never said anything to Katherine. When they brought her into the conversation he forced himself to take notice of her, blinking his cold blue eyes once or twice. It was not quite as if they had introduced the maid into the discussion, but all the same he seemed disconcerted.

Robin was very attentive to him. Perhaps by contrast, he seemed more boyish than usual; he asked questions about fishing and the sports car that Jack Stormalong answered with good-humoured superiority, as if speaking to a younger brother. Katherine, in whom Robin had never shown such interest, grew sulky, and let the babble go on without bothering to follow it. At the end of the meal Robin finished by suggesting that while they were all there a photograph should be taken, and Katherine knew that he would not have suggested it for her sake. However, she followed the party out onto the small lawn while Robin went upstairs to find the camera.

“There ought to be a couple of films left,” said Mr. Fennel, flattening worm-casts with the toe of his shoe. “When did we use it last? At Easter, was it?”

“Robin took one the day we were held up by the sheep on the way to Reading,” said Jane, from where she was standing with Jack Stormalong. “I thought he finished the roll then.”

Jack then began describing an incident that Jane seemed to find funny. Katherine, momentarily abandoned, drifted towards the garden seat that had stood between Jane and herself on the evening of their discussion, and where Mrs. Fennel was now sitting.

Mrs. Fennel looked up.

“Well, my dear, we are quite a party now.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Sit down a moment, won’t you? I’m afraid I’ve seen very little of you since you came. Not very gracious of me. But I thought you’d sooner be with Robin and Jane than holding my wool for me.”

Katherine murmured something, not understanding. But she was grateful to Mrs. Fennel. All the small embarrassments that were consequent on staying in a strange house had been smoothed deftly and precisely away by her, and Katherine had felt no hesitation in speaking to her. She now laid aside a novel by Sir Walter Scott.

“I’m sure it hasn’t been a very exciting holiday for you, but we thought it would be best to carry on as we are. We were a little uncertain about what you would expect.”

“I’m sure … everything has been wonderful.”

“Well, I hope at any rate that England won’t be a foreign country to you any longer,” said Mrs. Fennel. “You will come again another year. We all like you very much.”

“Oh, thank you——”

“And I think Robin has been very fortunate to make such a good friend.”

At this point Robin ran down the steps carrying a folding-camera. Mr. Fennel, who was wearing a panama hat, stepped forward.

“Now give that to me. I’ll be the man who presses the button.”

“Oh, but we want you in the picture,” exclaimed Jane, coming forward.

“Not a bit of it. Just you all get together. Ladies at the front, gentlemen at the back. Yes, round the seat will do.”

“Is it all right for the sun, sir?” said Jack Stormalong anxiously, looking as if he would like to take the camera into his own hands.

“I’ve taken dozens of photographs,” said Mr. Fennel firmly, “without bothering about things like that. The secret is to hold it steadily.”

“It’ll do,” said Robin, aside.

“You might hold it straight as well,” said Jane. Mrs. Fennel was in the middle, with Katherine on her right and Jane on her left. “If you’d wait a moment, I’d put some proper shoes on,” she said. “These aren’t really fit to be seen.”

“My dear, posterity won’t be interested in your shoes, presentable or not. Now let me see. I can’t see anything at all. Where are you?” He swivelled the camera plaintively. “Wave something.”

Jane waved a hand.

“Ah. Yes, that’s got it, thank you. The next trouble is going to be Jack’s head. I’m afraid your head will be out of the picture, Jack.”

“Well, that’s a comfort,” said Jane.

“Wait a minute. Nil desperandum. I’m afraid we shall have to dispense with the ladies’ feet—you needn’t have worried about your shoes, my dear.”

“Perhaps if you stepped back, sir——”

“No, this will do very well. Now then. That’s got it. Everybody smile. Remember this is a special occasion—where’s the thing, the button on this thing? Where—ah. Now then.”

And so the image of them standing and sitting in relaxed attitudes in the evening sun was pressed onto the negative for all eternity.

“One of Katherine,” called Mrs. Fennel. “We ought to have one of her alone.”

“Certainly we should. My dear, would you mind? Stand against the monkshood—the flowers there. Wait while I turn this film——”

“I don’t think it’s any good, dad,” said Robin, coming forward. “There was only the one film left.”

“Well, let me see. Oh yes, what a nuisance. I’m sorry, Katherine, there’s no more film left—is there none in the house?”

“Not unless you’ve bought any.”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Fennel, picking up the fringed cushion she had brought out to sit on. “We have one of you in the group.”

Nevertheless, she did mind. It seemed to her that she was already embarked on her homeward journey, and watching their faces recede into a common blur. Robin was infuriating. At his suggestion the four of them spent most of their time together, and the brush with Jane was no longer referred to: Katherine’s last two full days were spent in slack fourhanded pastimes—doubles at tennis (and if there was anything Katherine disliked it was doubles, particularly when partnered with Jack Stormalong, in a game of England versus the world: Jack Stormalong held a post in India), two hours wasted by moving chairs to the Village Hall. The weather, after the dash of rain, stabilized in a pleasant waxen sunshine, and in the evenings there was occasionally a chill in the blue shadows, an infinitesimal hint of autumnal frost, saddening in any circumstances. It was not that Robin and Jane disregarded her: they did not. But they assumed that she was contented, which she wasn’t, and that anything done by four people was automatically more enjoyable than anything done by three or two. They seemed to assume, too, that she was never to leave them: an outsider could not have gathered that on Saturday they were to say good-bye to her and not see her again: her departure was simply not regarded as important. Katherine was disgusted, and she reserved a special corner of her disgust for Jane. Whatever else she had felt when Jane had told her all that stuff, she had respected the emotion behind it: she had re-estimated her as the only Fennel with sensibility. If Jane had continued petulant or even hostile, she would not have minded, but now she behaved quite differently: the irritable languor had slipped from her as if by the very confessing of it. She contributed her full share of laughter and idiotic jokes. And Katherine summed her up bitterly in Robin’s word: Jane’s moods. Mood after mood after mood. Her crossness had been a mood, so had her friendliness, and it had amused her after that to pose as a person trapped and misunderstood. Now r all that was over, and there was someone else to show off to, she had changed once more. Her emotions, thought Katherine, are as flexible as Robin’s manners, and that’s the only difference between them.

On Friday, her last full day, they fulfilled Robin’s original plan and went up-river to the Rose for lunch. It was a heavy day, and the sun shone intermittently: at midday a few drops of rain fell, but nothing more. Katherine began with a headache too slight to be mentioned as an excuse to stay behind, but which nevertheless weighed on her throughout the trip, which was tediously jolly. Jack Stormalong poled them vigorously there, and theatrically drank a quantity of beer on arrival. Robin also had some, and there developed between them a masculine waggishness that aroused laughter at Katherine’s expense, as she could not properly understand them. She struggled to take this in good part, but even Jane found it trying and began edging her remarks with sarcasm, which quietened them down somewhat. After lunch, they had some more drinks in the garden, where there was a skittle-alley: Jack and Robin played, and Jack won. The clumsy clattering got on Katherine’s nerves, and she said as much to Jane, who sat with her. Jane, who had been drinking gin, replied: “This is, quite seriously, life itself,” and such pretentiousness did nothing to soothe her. She was relieved when they took the punt home again, Jack (who had paid the luncheon-bill) poling indefatigably. Robin fell asleep.

Between tea and dinner she went to her room to pack. First of all she held her face in cold water, opening and shutting her eyes, then sponged herself, and put on what clean clothes she had left. Everything else was dirty. She sat by her open trunk, remembering how carefully the laundered garments had been stowed the first time, layer upon layer, with great regard for relative weight and likelihood of creasing. It seemed distant to her now. Putting aside what she was to travel in, she began sorting and folding, carelessly at first, then with more attention as the pleasure of working alone came over her. She found the few presents she had bought to take home, and to turn them over and anticipate the thanks she would get made her eager to see her parents and friends once more. When she rose and looked round the room in search of things she had missed, it pleased her to feel that she had practically withdrawn herself from it, that she would leave it exactly as she had found it, that she would pass through this house and leave no trace behind, as all the others who had slept in this guest room had done. Disregarding the few hours that remained, she reviewed her visit and condemned it. She had come expecting to solve a mystery, and had found at the end there was no mystery to solve. From what she had been told, she had been invited partly out of politeness and partly to divert Jane’s alleged boredom: Robin had played host with true English reserve, and had managed to slip in a few free language lessons on the side. She thought bitterly that it would hardly be out of place to hint that they might refund her fares.

Dinner was a little better. The beer and exertion had left Jack Stormalong subdued for the moment, and at her first mention of the word “packing” they were all solicitous. Mr. Fennel had been consulting a timetable and had written out a list of trains and times in an old-fashioned, delicate, ledger-book hand. The conversation ran lightly over the events of her stay, spinning them into a web of reminiscence that took only the pleasant colours for material. Both Robin and Jane contributed, treating her as if she were quite a different person, and her visit as if it had been one of the many meetings of established friends. It was the best they could do, she imagined, in the way of a happy ending, and she was grateful.

However, in the lounge afterwards Jack Stormalong awoke to conversation again, and a tactless discussion followed in which Robin and Jane tried to persuade him not to leave on Monday night but stay till Tuesday.

“Or do you find it so dull here, after all your tiger-shooting?” Robin added, putting an ashtray for him on the arm of his chair.

“Oh, we can’t compete with tigers,” said Jane, who for once was wearing lipstick. “Not that I believe you’ve been near one.”

“I really ought to push off on Monday,” said Jack, continually placing his cigarette between different pairs of oblong fingers. “I might stay if you could provide a tiger.”

“We could ring up a zoo.”

“They would be very expensive, though. Would you give us the skin?”

“Will you give us a skin anyway?”

Jack Stormalong wagged his head, grinning.

“I haven’t any skins.”

“I don’t believe you’ve ever shot one at all,” said Jane.

“Oh, he has, haven’t you?”

“I’ve put a bullet into one, if you count that. But you have to stand down in favour of the senior man in the party—the Resident, in this case …”

They talked a while vaguely about India, during which Katherine listened sourly. Their goodwill at dinner, allied with their resumed assumption that this night was like any other night, had once more awoken regret in her that she must leave them. Now that the surface of their relations had quietened in her mind, she saw that only her inquisitive imagination had prevented the holiday being like this from the evening she arrived—an untroubled expanse resembling a lake between hills. She wished it could go on. Although she was eager to return to her own life and country, she wished she could stay a little longer to watch the quiet procession of evenings, of meals on the dark table, of small presents of hothouse fruit from neighbours left wrapped in baskets in the porch with a note, of the river drifting southward. Now that it was too late, she felt that all the time she had been paying attention to the wrong things.

But Jack Stormalong, encouraged by the others, was deep in tigers. “Of course, you don’t find them unless you go out and look for them,” he said. “As a rule, they keep out of your way. If they start killing, it’s different. If a tiger kills a man, you have to do something about it for the sake of prestige—and they say as well, of course, that once a tiger gets a taste for human flesh it won’t look for anything different. I don’t know about that. But obviously men are easy things to kill—we’ve no claws or horns or tusks … we can’t even run fast.”

“We’re not much use when it comes to a fight, are we?” said Jane, looking at her own right hand.

“Not with tigers, at any rate,” said Jack. He guffawed. “A man I met had a narrow squeak once—a perfect mad-man, mind you. He and another chap had been out, and they’d come across a tiger and put a brace of bullets in her, but she got away. What did they do but follow her. The prints were clear as day in the jungle, but when they came out into a clearing they lost them. So they separated to have a snoop round. This chap said that he was just bending down to take a look when there was an earsplitting roar and up comes the tiger from a ditch fifteen yards off, in a pretty savage temper, and went straight at him. He hadn’t time to do more than put out his rifle with both hands—it was just as well he did—and then he was bowled over with the tiger on top of him. Luckily the other man noticed what was up and got a lucky shot in her brain as she was turning again. The shekarries were scared blue. He’s still got the rifle, and he showed it me—it had caught the tiger’s first swipe, and there were claw-marks a quarter of an inch deep down the butt, and the trigger and guard were bent flat.” Jack leaned forward with leaden sincerity. “Absolutely flat.”

Robin expressed amazement. “But you don’t go on foot, do you?” he said.

“Surely when it was wounded——”

“On a formal shoot there’s elephants. But even then it isn’t all jam. You’d imagine you’d feel as safe as houses up on an elephant——”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jane.

“Oh, you do. At least you do till our friend stripes comes along. But you see it’s like this. The tiger goes for the elephant—I’ve seen a tiger spring right up on an elephant’s head—clinging, you know, with the claws in. And then it all depends how the elephant behaves. It’s liable to get bothered, and anything may happen. It may try to shake the tiger off, and only succeed in shaking the poor bloke out of the howdah. Or the other elephants may get the wind up. What it ought to do is stand still and let the guns pot the tiger till it drops off. But they don’t always see it that way.”

There was general laughter.

“Oh, it’s a terrific thrill,” said Jack Stormalong, sitting forward with an eagerness that suggested he was still a trifle drunk. “You’ve no idea. A tiger will go on fighting till it drops. You imagine yourself surrounded by elephants as big as houses, with fellows on top putting both barrels into you. You’d leg it for cover as fast as you could. But I’ve seen a tiger with as many as eight bullets in it go on trying to beat the whole crowd till he drops. Absolute rage incarnate. You can’t call it courage; it’s more than that.” He studied the squashy end of his cigarette for a moment. “And you look down, you know … if he got you he’d tear you to bits. You can’t help feeling scared. That’s where the fun comes in.”

“I think it would go out, with me,” said Jane.

In response to a question from Robin, Jack began to describe the particular tiger-shoot he had attended, and they fell into a discussion of rifles; calibres, velocities, bores. Jack’s elephant had lurched, causing him to put his foot into the luncheon-basket and break a siphon: this had impressed him more than the destruction of the tiger. Robin asked if a tiger’s stripes were really effective camouflage; Jack Stormalong lit another cigarette and began to tell him.

Katherine had had enough. Surely, she thought, Jane can’t be less bored than I am. Experimentally she caught Jane’s eye, trying to express resignation, and rather to her surprise Jane gave a little annoyed gesture, which Katherine found hard to interpret. She could not think that they were both annoyed at the same thing, because although listening to the half-intelligible ramble of this English Colonial Official was irritating enough, she could have borne it on any other night than this. What made her desperate was the invisible running-out of time; a stupid thing to resent, and yet it galled.

She jumped up, “I think I’ll go out for a little,” she said.

She was out of the french windows before anyone could protest, and a glance back from the foot of the steps showed she was not being followed. For this she was thankful. At the moment she wanted only time enough to calm herself; it was nothing serious. All she needed was a little space to look around her for the last time and accept the fact that she was going. When this was done—when she had made her peace, as she called it—she could return and mix with them on equal terms.

It was very solacing to be alone. She looked about her at the garden and the sky. It was after nine o’clock; the sun had set and the trees hung motionless in a barely-visible mist; down towards the west there ran a vast fan of tiny clouds, ribbed and golden. She walked slowly along the path by the tennis-court, looking at the broad bed of flowers. Many of them had softly closed. From here she passed through into the kitchen-garden, where the air was richer with a confused smell of vegetables; on an impulse she went over to the tap and tried to stop it dripping. Twist as she could, the drops still slowly formed and fell onto the stones, and at last she gave it up. Let it go on. A few grasses touched her bare legs as she walked on towards the blue door, and she shivered, although it was not cold. The key turned easily in the lock and she found herself again on the short mown bank, remembered so vividly from her first evening, at the edge of the river that moved contentedly past.

It was always bigger than she expected, and she sat down on the grass to watch it flow. Lazily throwing a twig upstream, she watched it drift slowly level with her and then pass on, and she wondered where the river rose, how many towns and bridges it passed on its course, and past what fields the twig would be carried in the half-light of next morning, before she was awake. She had never even found out its name. The line of trees on the bank were reflected in it, thin upflung branches being flattened in the reflection to dark gesturing masses. Underneath them she could see small erratic shapes flying. They dipped and swerved furiously, and she realized after a few seconds that they were bats. They were too far away to alarm her.

But she withdrew her eyes to the foreground again, and noticed that the fastening of the tiny boat-house—little more than a low shack—had not been padlocked. She got up and went to it, and looking in saw that the punt was there. Half-experimentally she drew it silently out, and climbed in. It rocked soothingly. She wondered if it would be wrong of her to paddle it a few hundred yards downstream and back: it was no use her unstrapping the pole, but she thought it would be quite easy to manage with a paddle that lay on the seat beside her. Would they mind? Surely not, on her last evening; and even if they did, there would be little enough time left for them to mind in. She picked up the paddle and dipped it in the water.

“Are you stealing our boat?” said Robin. He was standing on the bank behind her.

“Oh——” She dropped her hands. “You left the door unfastened.”

“Did I?” He glanced towards it. “No, don’t get out,” he added as she prepared to rise. “I’ll come with you. Or would you rather go alone?”

“Please come.”

He sat beside her, taking the other paddle from the back, and, paddling together, they felt the punt draw away from the bank, rocking lightly on the sensitive water. She regulated her strokes with his.

“I hope you did not mind when I left you,” she said presently. “I was a bit tired.”

“Oh, there’s no stopping old Jack, once he gets talking,” Robin said. He smiled.

The evening was so still, it was like setting forth into silence itself, that sharpened the noise of their paddles stirring the dull river and of an occasional fish breaking the surface with a tiny liquid explosion. As they proceeded downstream, sending ripples towards either bank, the trees fell behind and fields opened around them. On one side the bank had been built up with bricks, now grown dull and mossy after much weather, and an iron ring fastened in them was rusty and disused. The water was the colour of pewter, for the afterglow had faded rapidly and left a quality of light that resembled early dawn. It had drawn off the brightness from the meadows and stubble-fields, that were now tarnished silver and pale yellow, and the shadows were slowly mixing with the mist. In this way the edges of her emotions had blurred, and they now overlaid each other like twin planes of water running over wet sand, the last expenditure of succeeding waves. There was no longer any discord in them: she felt at peace.

“Robin, what is this river called?” she asked after a while.

“Why, the Thames, of course.”

“Not the real Thames?”

“Certainly.” And then he added with mild amusement: “If we’d lived in prehistoric times, before England was an island, I could nearly have taken you home. The Thames used to flow into the Rhine.”

She glanced at him. His expression was friendly but serious, as if concentrating; at the end of each stroke he gave the blade a twist sideways, to neutralize the fact that his strokes were stronger than hers. There was something formal about him, as if he were a figure in allegory, carrying her a stage further on some undefined journey, and she smiled to remember her discarded belief that he might at any moment say something she would never forget. She doubted if she would ever think that again of anyone: with this in mind, she stopped paddling, and after two more strokes Robin allowed his paddle to trail diagonally in the water, so that the punt’s direction slowly altered, and it drifted towards the bank, about eighty yards from where they had started. In time the front of the boat crushed over the reeds with a dry crackle, and they came to rest, Robin digging his paddle in the mud to prevent their moving with the current. He folded his arms and looked in front of him.

It’s come to an end, she thought. No matter what she thought might happen, or what she had done that she regretted, it was all now part of the past. Tomorrow she would undertake the long journey back to her normal life, and this isolated excursion to England would remain in her mind as something irrelevant and beautiful. For better or worse, it was over; it had been dull, perhaps; Robin had been less exciting than she had thought he would be, but that might be for the best. The parents had been tactful and quite uninterested in her, which had been a good thing. The house, so comfortable and unpretentious, would stand for many years yet among the trees, and she would not miss it. As for what she would tell her friends, she would distort her visit into something amusing. There was nothing sacred about it. Yet for all that as they floated there she wanted to add nothing more, not a word or a look. It was finished. Her mind was free to be diverted by the surface of things she had no need to remember—the sound of water, of birds close at hand, the remote sound of a train-whistle. Her attention rose and fell from these things as the shadow of a ball thrown against the side of a building rises and drops back again; they were, she felt, tiny decorative tracings on the finished vase.

Suddenly he took hold of her.

She gave a start and bit her tongue.

He ducked his head and kissed her inexpertly with tight lips, as if dodging something that swept above their heads. It was not a bit like lovemaking, and she never thought of it as such till afterwards. He kept his face hidden against her hair. At the end of this unfathomable interval, he shivered, and the shiver changed to a short scrambling shudder, almost an abortive attempt to climb on her; then he slowly relaxed. Still he would not look her in the face. In the end he released her, carelessly.

Neither of them said anything.

After a time he dragged up his paddle, washed the blade, and they turned upstream again.

When they got back, she went upstairs to her room, tenderly moving the end of her tongue to and fro without knowing what she was doing. She felt dazed, as if she had nearly been run over in the street. Sitting at her nearly-empty dressing table, she looked at herself, trembling. The evening whispered outside, the quiet evening that had suddenly risen up against her in one great stamping chord, like the beginning of music she would never hear.

There was a bang on the door. She turned quickly. It was Jane.

“Oh, you are here,” she said. She hung onto the door-knob, swaying slightly as if drunk, and breathing hard. Then she put her hand to her forehead as if faint, and gasped with laughter. “What a life,” she said. “Your tactful exit … glory.” She flopped on the bed, then instantly scrambled up to say: “I’ve just had an honourable proposal of marriage!”

She stared at Katherine.

“Well?”

“I said I would.”