Winter in the Air by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Author:Sylvia Townsend Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Kitchen Knife

Rachel and Trevor Gilman had been married for almost three years before they got into a house of their own. Till then, they lived with Trevor’s parents. In post-war conditions this was nothing to wonder at. Nor, since the war had levelled class distinctions as well as dwelling-houses, was there anything very odd in the fact that her husband’s home should remind Rachel of seaside lodging-houses where she had stayed as a child—except that there was no sea.

But in the seaside lodging-houses she had taken a spade and bucket and gone out to spend a day on the beach. Now it was Trevor who went out, taking a small attaché-case containing sandwiches and a thermos of milk coffee, to spend the day at a bank. At first—for they were very much in love with each other—Trevor’s departure only initiated a delightful process of waiting for Trevor’s return, the snatched embrace before the others got at him, his regular inquiry, ‘Well, my darling, how have things been going?’ Nothing had gone at all, she would reply. Life had been a blank. As time went on and the inquiries continued, it became apparent that another kind of answer was now due and must acknowledge the Gilmans. The acknowledgment was no sooner made than it seemed a guilty acknowledgment. The guilt was evasive and obscure, for it did not lie merely in occupying a bedroom which had previously been occupied by Topsy Gilman (who now doubled up with Patricia) and occupying it with Trevor (since Trevor’s parents often and amply expressed their confidence that Rachel was going to make Trevor a wonderful little wife), nor in being penniless and without useful relations (since it was a Gilman axiom that money was not everything, and a Gilman tradition that what can’t be got through unassisted effort is not worth having), nor even in speaking with a different accent and calling a serviette a table-napkin (since every Gilman knew that it takes all sorts to make a world). It was a guilt compounded of finer elements, such as not knowing the way to the fishmonger’s. Any Gilman labouring under a similar sense of guilt would have known and applied the remedy: to live it down. Rachel did not feel that she possessed enough stamina to undertake a process with so much perspective in it. She compromised by redoubling her acknowledgments of the Gilman way of life, their cheerfulness, their unselfishness, their goodness and sterling worth, their devotion to fresh air, good nourishing food and traditional laxatives, their abounding, resounding, unremitting obsession with a home that reminded her of a seaside lodging-house. She was becoming quite good at this, when her participation in a thorough Gilmanlike merry Christmas brought on a miscarriage.

It is among the weaker and more feather-pated animals that one finds the most resolute capacity for self-mutilation. Discovering herself irreparably an alien among Gilmans, she proceeded to cut herself off from all her former friends; and knowing that childless couples were the

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