Winter in the Air

iii

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

Winter
in the Air

&
Other Stories

v

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Winter in the Air
3. Hee-Haw!
4. The Children’s Grandmother
5. Evan
6. A Priestess of Delphi
7. At the Trafalgar Bakery
8. Shadwell
9. Under New Management
10. At a Monkey’s Breast
11. Absolom, My Son
12. A Kitchen Knife
13. Uncle Blair
14. Emil
15. Idenborough
16. A Funeral at Clovie
17. A Passing Weakness
18. The Reredos
19. A Second Visit
20. Acknowledgments
21. About the Author
22. Copyright

1

Winter in the Air

The furniture, assembled once more under the high ceiling of a London room, seemed to be wearing a look of quiet satisfaction, as though, slightly shrugging their polished shoulders, the desk had remarked to the bookcase, the Regency armchair to the Chippendale mirror, ‘Well, here we are again.’ And then, after a creak or two, silence had fallen on the dustless room.

It was morbidly dustless, morbidly unlittered. Rolling up her apron, Mrs Darbyshire, the charwoman, said, ‘I think that is all I can do for you to-day,’ in tones of professional self-righteousness. Indeed, Barbara thought, there was nothing more to ask; everything, from the slight dampness on the floor of the kitchenette to the embonpoint of the cushions on the sofa, was as it should be. She had not seen such neatness for years.

The thought of someone like Mrs Darbyshire had confirmed her decision to live in London again. A London charwoman does her work, takes her money and goes away, sterile as the wind of the desert. She does not spongily, greedily, absorb your concerns, study your nose to see if you have been crying again, count the greying hairs of your head, proffer sympathetic sighs and vacuum pauses and then hurry off to wring herself out, spongily, all over the village, with news of what’s going on between those two at Pond 2House. Not to mention the fact that a London charwoman is immeasurably better at charing.

Except that Mrs Darbyshire went away in trousers, her exit in 1950 was just as the exits of Mrs Shelley had been in the mid-thirties—the same healing order left behind, the same tonic appearance of everything wound up for a fresh start, with a filled kettle sitting on the hot-plate ready to be heated. And the flat of now, Barbara thought, in which she was again a single lady, was not very different from the flat of then; it was smaller, and the window glass, replacing glass that had been blown out in an air-raid, was of inferior quality, and the rent was a great deal higher, but the sitting-room and bedroom of the new flat were of the same sober, Victorian proportions, and, considering the housing shortage, she was lucky to get it, above all at such short notice—only two months. Two months and eight days, to be precise, for it was on the seventeenth of August that Willie broke the news, coming slowly across the sunburned lawn to where she stood repainting the front door of Pond House, little thinking how soon she would go out by it and Annelies come in.