Free A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin Page A

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 endof 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 nothelp 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