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.

‘But why?’ she had asked. ‘Why must she come and live with you? I thought it was all over, months ago.’

‘So did I.’

‘But Annelies doesn’t. Is that it?’

‘She is so wretched,’ he had said. ‘So desperately, incompetently wretched. I can’t let her go on suffering like this.’

While they spoke, she continued spreading the blue 3paint, brushing it into the knots and cajoling it round the door-knocker. Dreamily, under the shock of these tidings, there had persisted a small, steady dissatisfaction because the paint was not the right shade of blue.

The flat of now seemed lighter than the flat of then. This was partly because her pieces of rosewood furniture were now so much paler in tone; twelve years in a country house, with windows open and sun shining in and not enough furniture polish, had bleached the rosewood to a tint of feuille-morte. Outside there was a difference, too—more air, more light, welling like fountains from the bombed sites. The room was full of light, as full of light as it was full of silence. In the centre stood the rosewood table, and as she bent over it, it reflected her with the whole length of its uncluttered surface, darkened here and there with old ink-stains like sea-leopard skin.

‘I shall leave you the rosewood table,’ she had said to Willie. ‘It’s the only one that is the right height for you, and large enough to hold all your traps.’

‘No, don’t,’ he had said. ‘I shall take over the big kitchen table. It’s the same height. I’ve measured it.’

‘Very well. But you’ll keep the wardrobe?’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Nonsense! You must have something to keep your clothes in. Or to keep the moths in, for I suppose you’ll never remember to shut the doors.’

‘That’s all right. Annelies has one of these compactum things. It belonged to her husband.’

‘I see. How convenient.’4

‘My God, how I hate these practical conversations! Why must we have them? They always end like this.’

Planning ahead, Barbara had resolved that the furniture should not be arranged in the flat of now as in the flat of then. But London rooms impose a formula. Now, as then, the desk stood in the recess on the left side of the fireplace, and the bookcase in the recess on the right; the sofa had its back to the window; and, on the wall opposite the fireplace, the Chippendale mirror hung above the bureau. Later on, she thought, readjusting the sofa cushions (for Mrs Darbyshire, like Mrs Shelley, had a passion for putting square objects cornerwise)—later on, people too will regroup themselves in this room. Mary Mackenzie’s hand will dangle from the arm of the Regency chair as though its rings were too many and too heavy for it, and Julian will project his long legs obliquely from the stool, and Clive Thompson will stand with his back to the room, puffing at the bookcase. They will not have kept their outlines as unyieldingly as the furniture has, but their voices will be the same, and after the first constraint we shall find a great deal to talk about. It will be best, her thoughts went on, planning, foreseeing and planning as they had done during the breathless, interminable weeks before her departure from Pond House—it will be best to get them all here together one evening, when any awkwardness can be tided over by making them a trifle drunk. But that could be later on. It was still only her third day in the flat of now, and one must have a small decency-bit of time in which to lick one’s wounds and wring the sea-water of shipwreck out of one’s 5hair. Such privilege belongs to women … One of the advantages of a solitary life is that it allows one time to verify quotations instead of trailing them about all day, hanging them on gooseberry bushes, leaving them, like rings, above the sink. Such privilege … Hermione, in The Winter’s Tale, said it.

Shakespeare was in the bedroom, to countervail against her dislike of it. It was a dislikable room, mutilated by the remodelling, which had shorn it for a bathroom. The tree beyond the bedroom window, she thought, coming back into the sitting-room with the book in her hand—even the tree, in itself a pleasant thing, must be contemplated as a sparrow-rack, where, from the first light onward, sparrows would congregate and clatter, making sleep impossible.

She found The Winter’s Tale, and turned to the trial scene. Here it was:

… with immodest hatred,

The child-bed privilege denied, which ’longs

To women of all fashion. Lastly, hurried

Here, to this place, i’ the open air, before

I have got strength of limit.

Verifying quotations would indeed be an interesting pursuit if they all turned out to be as wide of the mark as this one. If Willie had shown a spark of even modest hate, she might have known a spark of hope.

She laid Shakespeare on the sofa and presently sat down beside him. To do so was a deliberate act, for she still retained, as a vestige of the last few weeks, an inability to sit down. One says ‘a glutton for work’, and during her 6last month at Pond House she had exemplified that odious phrase, rushing gluttonously from one useful deed to another, cleaning, dispatching, repairing, turning out and destroying.

‘All this revengeful housecleaning!’ Willie had lamented.

‘It’s only fair to Annelies to get my smell out of the house,’ she had replied.

In the first onset of grief, when grief was still pure enough to be magnanimous, the explanation might have been almost true, but not by the time she gave it. By then, she had no more magnanimity than a criminal on the run. There must be nothing left behind by which she could be tracked. A visual recollection of something overlooked and unscotched would strike her, as she lay sleepless—strike her violently, as though the object itself had been catapulted against her face. With her heart hammering and the blood pounding in her ears, she would begin to interrogate herself as to where, in their magpie’s nest of a house, she had last set eyes on the red flannel heart embroidered with forget-me-nots, or the mug with ‘William’ on it that she had bought at Aberdovey. And all the while the most damning piece of evidence had slipped her memory, and only came to light by chance.

Invalided after Dunkirk, Willie had retained from his equipment one of those metal slides that isolate the military button for polishing. Thinking that this would serve the same purpose for the brass knobs on the spice cupboard, she began to search for it in the collector’s cabinet, where Willie’s father had kept his birds’ eggs, where Willie 7hoarded his oddments. In the third drawer down, she came on the letters, her sight stumbling from Annelies’s crisp blue sheets to her own letters, written from the flat of then to the Willie of then. She had looked at them no longer than to think how surprisingly and for the worse her handwriting had altered during the twelve years of happy married illiteracy, when she heard Willie saying, ‘I know nothing about it. Do please go away,’ to the children at the back door who had come to fetch the things for the jumble sale. Slamming the drawer to, she ran downstairs to recall the children. When she went back to the cabinet, the drawer was locked. Embarrassment tied her tongue.

Three days later, looking like a good dog, Willie laid her letters on the dressing-table.

‘I don’t approve of what I am doing,’ he said. ‘But then I don’t approve of anything I am doing.’ After a pause, he added, ‘I think I wish I were dead.’

‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘Not really, my dear.’

They looked at each other in the mirror, then. In the mirror she watched him lay his head on her shoulder—deposit it there, as though it were a sick animal.

But it was from that hour—as though by the restitution of her letters a ghost had been laid or a cork drawn—that Willie began to recover, to ascend from being a mournful cipher in her preparations to becoming their animating spirit. The last joint days at Pond House were spent in a kind of battered exhilaration, with Willie circumventing inquiring droppers-in, beating carpets and sewing on buttons. It was not just speeding the parting guest. He had, 8somehow or other, to dispose of the mounting excitement with which he awaited Annelies, and to be the life and soul of Barbara’s departure was at once a safety valve and a tribute to conjugality.

‘Write to me, won’t you?’ he had said, tying on the last luggage label.

‘We said we wouldn’t write, except on business,’ she had replied. ‘It would hurt Annelies. You know how sensitive she is, how the least thing makes her suffer agonies.’ (She could not deny herself this shaft, and anyhow it did not penetrate.)

‘You owe me a letter, Barbara. I gave you back the others. I didn’t want to, but I did. I have never been so unhappy as I was that morning.’ It was true, as true as that he was now much less unhappy. ‘At least write and tell me that you are settled in, that you are all right, that the roof doesn’t leak, that there aren’t black beetles. It might be called a letter of business, really—though it isn’t.’

‘I will write,’ she had said.

Now she took up Shakespeare, in whose orisons all our sins are comprehended, and patted him. ‘Dear Swan!’ she said aloud, her voice, in the unexplored depths of the lofty London room, sounding like the voice of a stranger. She could feel her body furtively relaxing while she sat on the sofa, and beginning to enjoy itself. It sighed, and stretched its legs, and burrowed deeper into the cushions, and her nostrils quickened to the smell of furniture polish, as though there were promise in it. She had been happy in her former solitude; presently she would be solitarily 9happy again. Like the furniture, she would settle down in the old arrangement, and the silence of the room would not intimidate her long; it was no more than a pin-point of silence in the wide noise of London. The kettle was on the hot-plate, filled and ready to be heated. The room sat around her, attentive, ready for her to begin. But first she must write to Willie.

Crossing the room, she seemed to herself to wade through silence, as though she were wading out to sea against a mounting tide. Silence embraced her thighs and almost overthrew her. She sat down at the desk and took a sheet of paper from a pigeon-hole. The light from the window fell on the desk over her left shoulder, just as it had done in the flat of then. And, just as she had done in the flat of then, she wrote the date—the date of now—and the words ‘My Dear.’

‘I am keeping my promise,’ she wrote. ‘The flat is very comfortable. There are no black beetles, and the person overhead plays Bach by hand, which seems very old-fashioned and soothing. I have found a nice charwoman. She is called Mrs Darbyshire. She wears trousers. I hope—’ The pen stopped. What did she hope?

After birthdays and Christmases there came the hour when one was set down to write the letters of thanks. ‘Thank you so much for the gorgeous chocolates,’ one wrote, or, ‘It was very kind of you to give me that nice bottle of scent.’ The chocolates had been eaten, the scent had been spilled—but still they had to be thanked for. One’s handwriting sagged down the page as if from weariness, the 10words ‘nice’ or ‘jolly’ dogged one from sentence to sentence, and with every recommencement of gratitude the presents and the festivities became more irrevocably over and done with. One stared at the unfinished sentence and wondered what false thing to say next. Yet what she wanted to say to Willie was clear enough in her mind, clear as the printed words on India paper which had levelled themselves at her heart from that speech in The Winter’s Tale:

To me can life be no commodity;

The crown and comfort of my life, your favour

I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,

Yet know not how it went …

But in real life one cannot write so plainly the plain truth; it would look theatrical. She must think of something she could legitimately hope. A hope about Mrs Darbyshire would do nicely. She wrote, ‘I hope she will like me enough to look on me as a permanency.’

Oh, poor Willie! That sentence would not do at all. She tore up the unfinished letter and threw it into the grate, which Mrs Darbyshire had left neatly laid with crumpled paper and sticks and a few well-chosen lumps of coal, in case the lady should wish to light a fire in the evening; for a newly-moved-into place always strikes chilly at first, and though the autumn weather was keeping up wonderfully, almost as mild as spring, one could feel winter in the air.

11

Hee-Haw!

A mile or so on the hither side of the village of St Prew, Mrs Vincent stopped the taxi she had engaged at the railway station, telling the driver that she had an attack of cramp and must walk about a little. She could not give the excuse that she wanted to look at the view—the admired view of the cliffs, crested like bulls with shaggy moor and standing sullenly at bay against the Atlantic—for the forgotten, familiar sea fog obscured all but the immediate landscape of rough turf laid thinly over rocky ground, outcrops of granite, an unmortared stone wall laced with brambles and tufted with fern, and the telegraph poles. She walked forward along the road, seeming to carry this landscape with her through the surrounding mist, and looking about for something she could identify. Thirty years ago, every yard of this road had been as familiar to her as her own hand. She had walked it in all moods, in all weathers, and the last time she had come this way, but in the counter direction, she had seemed almost to fly along it, so great was the force of her anger, her frenzy to escape and never, never set foot on it again.