Let Me Alone (12 page)

‘So all this talk of your cleverness has been so much ado about nothing,’ taunted Lauretta, her nostrils quivering in a sneer.

Anna did not reply. She made a slight motion with her shoulders, as if to turn away. It was so irritating that Lauretta almost struck her.

‘I don’t believe you are clever at all!’ she cried with a shrill laugh. ‘I’ve only got Rachel Fielding’s word for it, after all. I’ve seen no sign of it. You’ve behaved like a little fool ever since you’ve been here – a conceited, opinionated, ill-natured little fool!’

She was rather ashamed of her rudeness, her lack of restraint. But the curious, calm insolence which had suddenly come out in the girl was quite intolerable to her; it provoked her beyond all reason.

‘You’d better take care,’ she went on, agitated. ‘If you want me to send you to Oxford, you’d better be careful. Why should I keep on paying for you to do as you want? Paying and paying, and getting no return, while you take it all for granted, as your right, and don’t give me the least consideration. And now I haven’t even the satisfaction of thinking you clever.’

Lauretta stood rigid, with the tenseness of an ageing, angry woman who feels her power slipping away. She believed that Anna was defying her. And yet she could not control her, or even punish her.

Anna was indeed in a state of pure defiance. But at this last threat she felt some of her confidence ebbing, the rather fictitious recklessness began to leave her. She trembled a little, but still the hard, bright look stayed like a glaze on her face.

‘Don’t you mean to pay for me to go to Oxford then?’ she asked.

She looked queerly, even impudently, at her aunt; as if deriding her.

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Lauretta coldly. ‘It depends entirely on your behaviour.’

And she went away in frozen, outraged dignity.

Anna smiled to herself, brightly and contemptuously.
But her heart trembled in fear and distress, trembling on the edge of nightmare.

In the days that followed her interview with Drummond, she went on unobtrusively, subdued. She was quiet, tractable, reserved. The strange mood of sardonic gaiety had quite departed. But underneath her compliant exterior, she was coldly hostile and remote, set cold in resentment and enmity. There was no possible
rapprochement
between her and Lauretta. It was a complete deadlock. Each knew the resistance, the opposition that ran under the surface of their relations. Yet each remained cautiously amicable, treating the other with a semblance of consideration.

Anna was becoming tired, fear-ridden. A harassed look was coming into her face. The fear of not getting away, the fear that Lauretta would refuse to send her to Oxford, was really growing upon her. There was a dreadful, timeless futility in the life of Blue Hills. It was like a great, aimless machine that went on for ever and ever, swinging round and round in a terrible, clattering swoop of nothingness. Well might one be caught up in it, almost unawares, and swung on, helplessly, hopelessly, in the vacant orbit. A panic was beginning to overcome her; the panic fear that she might not be able to get away.

She longed sometimes to go to Lauretta and rap out a point-blank question at her: ‘Do you or do you not intend to send me to Oxford?’ But when she saw her aunt, fluttering across the room, or smiling her insincere little flicker of a smile, fluttering and flickering in her butterfly unapproachableness, away at the other end of the world from Anna – then the girl was arrested by the sheer impossibility of communicating with her. Like a pretty, bright bird, or a butterfly, Lauretta fluttered about, and
set a barrier of alienation between them. Anna gave it up.

As the summer advanced, she became more and more depressed. If she was not to go to Oxford she had nothing at all to look forward to. Not a word was spoken. Not a hint was given one way or the other. But she knew that she and Lauretta would never forgive one another. And silently, suffocatingly, she felt hostility piling up against her.

In July a visitor came to stay at Blue Hills. This was Matthew Kavan, a friend of Heyward Bland’s. They had met at the War Office, had worked together for some time. Then Kavan had gone out East, to the Shan States, and occupied a post in one of the government departments there; forestry, or something of that sort. The two men had corresponded. Now Kavan was in England on leave, and was invited to Blue Hills.

Lauretta was slightly disapproving. For some reason, although she was hospitable and fond of society, she disliked having people to stay in the house – unless she knew them well. Rather to her own surprise, she gave in to her husband for once, and wrote the letter of invitation.

I
T
was full summer when Matthew Kavan came to Blue Hills. Anna was not very interested. She was too entangled in her dismal preoccupations to give anticipatory thought to the visitor. In the interminable, rather vapid social round she was becoming numbed and indifferent; not really indifferent, but superficially so. She was always socially occupied: there was always a party of some sort which she must attend, although, socially, she was not a success.

Kavan arrived in the afternoon and was given tea on the lawn. He turned out to be quite presentable. He was thin and neat and youngish, with a brown, dry, regular face that looked curiously buttoned-up. His general impression was one of brown, closed neatness, something like a carefully-made parcel. Strangely neat and compact he was; one felt that he ought to be wearing a uniform. Not a dashing, spectacular, martial uniform, but something quiet and tidy and inconspicuous, in brown or drab. His eyes were clear, but rather prominent and bluish and opaque. A singular person.

He spoke in a slightly deprecatory way to his host and hostess: almost deferential. It was clear that he was anxious to keep on the right side of them – particularly on the right side of Lauretta, in whom he had immediately divined the centre of importance. Yet he was quite sure of himself. Really self-satisfied: even domineering, when
you got to the bottom of him. But just now – with his peculiar shrewdness which in some odd way seemed to be a purely external attribute, nothing at all to do with his intelligence – just now, he had decided that it was expedient to behave deferentially. So deferentially he behaved. It was as if some devilkin, some little familiar sprite, perched all the time quite near, but quite outside him, directing his behaviour with consistent cunning and an unwavering eye to the main chance. For although Matthew Kavan talked to Lauretta with a certain
empressement,
the sychophantic trend of which was clearly visible to Anna, still he, the man himself, seemed quite innocent of it all, almost as if unaware. He really didn’t seem to know what was going on, what line of conduct the familiar spirit was dictating to him, behind his back. Anna was rather amazed at this unawareness in him. It was really most odd, the way he had of seeming to dissociate himself – but quite, quite unconsciously – from his own behaviour.

Another odd thing was that he seemed immediately to be drawn towards Anna. Although he did not pay much attention to her. In conversation he practically ignored her, concentrating his energies upon the older people. But every now and then he gave her a look, or a little neat smile; and then there would be such a curious moment. A sort of meaning, complacent goodwill seemed to ooze out of him, towards her; the strangest silent, invisible exudation of something benevolent and yet vaguely threatening. As if the wrappings of the parcel had been loosened a little, and this mysterious something came oozing out. But the next second, the brown paper would be folded up tight again, hiding it all away inside the packet once more.

Anna looked at her surprise packet. Matthew was
smiling and well-mannered and dark-haired. He had a set of rather small, rather sharp-looking teeth, rather pointed, which showed when he smiled. But there was something rather nice about him. She felt that she might like him; if once she could get inside the wrappings.

There was a strange, unobtrusive determination about him, too.

‘Won’t you show me the garden?’ he said to her, smiling neatly over his sharp white teeth.

‘I’m afraid there isn’t time now,’ she answered, standing back from him.

He repelled her a little with his extraordinary division from himself. Was it the man speaking now, or the little devil behind his back? The smile seemed human and rather winsome. But she couldn’t be quite sure.

‘Do just walk round once with me,’ he was saying. ‘It will only take a few minutes.’

He stood beaming at her with his strange blue eyes, fixed in patient, timeless persistency, humble and yet overbearing, bearing down her resistance.

Anna felt somewhat bewildered. His gentle, obstinate, unconscious way was something quite new to her. He seemed hardly to understand what was said to him. Or, at any rate, he took no notice of it. The words simply rolled off his attention like drops of water on a greasy spoon. It made Anna a little dazed.

She moved off, to walk round the garden with him.

Matthew strolled beside her, smiling still, but quiet. He didn’t have much to say. Occasionally he asked the name of a flower. The calceolarias in particular appeared to interest him. He stood quite still opposite the bed of angry-looking, pouch-shaped flowers, inclining his head, and smiling at the fierce mottlings. Anna was not very
comfortable. He seemed so complacent. So pleased with the calceolarias, and with her, and with himself. So sure of everything. And yet, with it all, he was not in the least a real person. Inside his wrappings, as in a comfortable parcel, he moved complacently along: but who or what was walking beside her, a man, or an imp, or a void, centreless, ambulatory packet, Anna hadn’t the least idea.

As they went into the house he said to her:

‘I can see you are very fond of flowers. I must show you my photographs.’

‘Photographs?’ she repeated, rather vague. For she saw Lauretta coming downstairs, and wondered if she would be accused of monopolizing the guest.

‘Photographs of flowers that I took in the East. I’ve made rather a hobby of it,’ said Matthew, with a certain complacency, speaking to Lauretta as she came up.

‘How interesting!’ said Lauretta, taking no notice of Anna, and steering him off.

Anna escaped to her own room, away from the bewildering influence of Matthew. He made her feel all at sea, as though she were living in a queer dream. She couldn’t understand him, she couldn’t make him understand her. It was like trying to communicate with a bag of feathers. You might mouth and smile for ever and ever, but all that happened was that the feathers flew up in an uncomprehending, incomprehensible cloud, and stifled you. She was afraid of being stifled. But still there might be something nice about him; underneath the wrappings.

The following days she saw a good deal of Kavan. Wherever she went about the house, he seemed always to be in the room with her, with his neat, round, dark head and his neat flannel suit, looking at her with an odd, friendly, complacent look. She got used to the sight of
his head, a curiously inexpressive head, very round and smooth, almost ball-like, with the short, dark, stiff, rather dead-looking hair clinging so close, like a dark felt covering. It got in her eye, somehow, his head: so that wherever she looked she seemed to see it, the smooth, round, meaningless ball. It made her feel a trifle hysterical.

They played tennis together, and she was agreeably surprised. He really was a very good player, dashing about, somewhat lithe and monkeyish in spite of the stiff set of his shoulders. His long, brown, thin arms seemed to possess an enormous, monkeyish strength, as they swung up and down, and in his blue eyes an infallible judgment lurked, also somewhat simian. He wore his shirt decorously a little open, showing his neck brown right down to the chest; not with a sudden, hard, high-water mark of white, like the other men.

And he kept his attention fixed upon Anna during the game, so that – although he did not speak – she could feel the peculiar, indescribable exudation of his regard. Moreover, he picked up the balls for her when she was serving, and as he handed them to her, he looked, not at the balls on his outstretched racquet, but right into her eyes, with a very faint smile, as it were intimate, on his face. Anna did not know what to make of this. The man seemed to think that some private understanding had been established between them. She felt irritated, and also a little nervous. As though she would never be able to escape him.

Right enough, as she walked towards the house after the game, there was Matthew coming after her across the grass, quick march, with brisk, military steps, like a conscientious escort. She let him overtake her.

‘You played awfully well,’ he said, smiling, and looking
self-satisfied, as though he took the credit for her proficiency.

Anna wanted to say something rude. But what, after all, was she to say? He smiled so innocently, as though he really did
not
know how irritating he was. And there
was
something rather winning about him; about his very unawareness.

They strolled on, through the pinkish tunnel of the rose-pergola, and out into the sun again. Anna looked at his brown, sinewy arms swinging in the sunshine, very smooth and hairless, but tough-looking, like leather, with a strange movement of muscles and tendons creeping and sliding inside the tough skin.

‘What strong arms you have!’ she exclaimed, almost involuntarily, looking down at them.

‘Yes. Look here!’

He laughed with self-satisfaction, clenching his fist and swinging up his forearm with a sharp jerk. The muscles swelled and knotted, creeping strips and bundles of contorted energy under the brown, leathery hide. He was childishly proud.

‘I can crack a hazel-nut in there – easily,’ he said, fingering the bulging curve where the upper arm pressed the forearm.

He laughed again, and came a little nearer to Anna, walking with a slight swagger.

‘Hadn’t you better pull your sleeves down?’ she asked, irritated and malicious.