Let Me Alone (9 page)

Anna paused a moment before she answered truthfully:

‘I don’t know.’

In her mind she thought: ‘You will never believe me, of course; but actually I have no more idea than you have what induced me to go.’

‘So you won’t even trouble to explain!’ said Rachel bitterly. ‘I’m not even worth an explanation to you.’

Suddenly, her bitterness had got the better of her. All the gentleness, the warmth, went out of her face. She was the avenging goddess now, emanating a cold, merciless passion of revenge. And as if carried away in a deistic transport, she was just a little hysterical, a little bit out of control. Her quick, strong, eager voice struck now and then a vibrating high note of hysteria.

‘I let you go off with Sidney. I didn’t complain at you leaving me. I gave you up to her because I thought it would be good for you to have a friend of your own age.
But do you think it was easy for me to let you go? Do you think it was pleasant for me to stand aside – I who was so fond of you, who understood you so well, who would have done anything for you!’

Her voice added accusation to bitterness till it rang out, angry and shrill with its sinister undertone of exultancy in revenge.

Anna looked at her in amazement and a certain horror, because Rachel had made her realize the actual existence of vengeance as a motive force. She was silent and uneasy.

‘But this is too much,’ the elder woman went on. ‘This open rebellion against my authority is too much even for me. You have gone too far this time.’

She gazed at Anna in complete bitterness, the deadly bitterness of her wounded pride.

‘You will have to go,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you here after this.’

‘Do you mean that I am to be expelled?’ asked Anna in astonishment. She was dismayed at this sudden menace which had flourished at her from the familiar face of the woman who had been her closest friend.

‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘I shall tell your aunt not to send you back next term.’

She sat watching Anna with shining hazel eyes, and the strange, vindictive coldness hardening her face. Her anger and her vindictiveness seemed implacable and profound, and so, in a way, they were. But all the time, just out of sight, her love for Anna was lurking, a poor tormented ghost, banished, unacknowledged, but still creeping back even now to peer through the black fog of anger.

But her wounded pride was stronger than her love. She could not bear to be slighted by this cool waif of a girl. Rachel was the goddess-woman, mysterious and powerful.
She was accustomed to be adored, and perhaps feared a little as well. Most people stood a little in awe of her, for she was majestic and potent in her handsome maturity.

But Anna was quite unimpressed. She refused to feel any awe at all. Isolated in her arrogant young aloofness, she had come to look upon Rachel’s lavish female power as a sort of trick. And Rachel knew this. She even knew that Anna felt a certain repugnance for her beautiful, florid fullness, for her goddess-ship. Bread of humiliation for Rachel.

Anna shivered slightly as she went out of the study. She had really been repelled by Rachel. Really, Rachel in her slight abandonment, in her zest for revenge, seemed sinister to her, almost disgusting. A chilly breath of far-distant alarm had blown upon Anna’s spirit, a distant threat of nightmare menace from the world. She went to find Sidney, feeling somewhat dismayed.

But Sidney, when she heard of the affair, had no consolation to offer.

‘You fool!’ she cried in a harsh voice of extreme, intolerant provocation. ‘You utter fool to go and get yourself expelled and throw away our last term together!’

And she marched off with an expression of cold, disgusted exasperation on her face, and her thin nose piercing the air protestingly.

It was hard for Sidney to forgive Anna for cutting short their time together. But perhaps, more than anything, it was difficult for her to get over the fact that Anna had gone to the dance with Catherine.

‘But why with her? Why with Catherine, of all people?’ she growled irritably, in her gruff, young man’s voice.

She did not like Catherine. There was a slow, undying fire of hostility between the two of them, the hostility of
the assured, handsome, well-dressed, worldly-experienced person for the equally assured but less conventional type whose standards of values are quite different. All this in embryo, but none the less potent for that. And Anna could not explain in the least her sudden association with the bold, sophisticated girl: which only made matters worse.

‘I believe you were just showing off in front of her,’ Sidney accused.

The more or less random shot seemed to come fairly near hitting the mark.

But in the end, of course, Sidney had to allow herself to be reconciled. She couldn’t go on very long treating Anna to her disapproval. During the last few days of the term her affection flamed up with a new intensity, fanned by the poignancy of approaching separation. She enveloped Anna in a clear, bright light of love; and from time to time her amber-coloured eyes would flash at her under the tilted brows, and her mouth would give a little wry smile of pure, bottomless devotion.

Anna was very happy in this aura of affection. She became serene and assured, a little conceited in the knowledge of Sidney’s appreciation, yet at the same time naive and good-natured, something lovable in her confidence of being loved. Only in such an atmosphere did she really seem to come to fulfilment. Her nature required this assurance for its perfecting.

The two were always together during these last days. Even at night they could not be divided, but spent dark hours that passed as swiftly as a dream, talking in low voices in the sleeping house.

The last night of all was cloudy with a faint greyish gleam on the horizon. It was rather warm for the time of year. Anna sat up in bed, leaning against the pillow, and
looking out of the wide-open window which faced the low line of hills. There was no light in the room. In the dim, even pallor which came from outside, she could see Sidney sitting at the bottom of the bed, a colourless, indistinct shape in her dark dressing-gown. They had been talking for a long while, but now were silent, subdued and melancholy under the shadow of imminent parting.

Far away in the silent darkness a goods train rumbled off into the distance. It was the nightly signal for Sidney to go back to her own room. She moved and stretched herself, running her fingers through her thick hair. Then she got up.

Anna’s heart stood still at the sudden thought: ‘She is going away now, and tomorrow I am leaving Haddenham for good. It is as if she were going away from me altogether.’ She seemed to realize their parting for the first time.

‘Don’t go!’ she said impulsively, stretching out her hand.

Like a materialization, the hand of Sidney moved out of the darkness and took Anna’s in a firm, cool grip.

‘Feeling sentimental?’ The low, masculine voice was rough with tenderness, and a heavy sadness under the mockery.

Anna gave an unhappy murmur, and said:

‘It’s rather beastly, isn’t it? Having to go away like this.’

‘Damnable!’ said Sidney, her hard fingers tightening about Anna’s hand.

Anna felt tired and unreal. A deep, indefinable uneasiness stirred in her like a foreboding. Sidney seemed to have become remote, the clasp of her hand was chilly and detached as a spectral grip; there was no longer any comfort in it.

‘I feel worried,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why. As if something horrible were going to happen.’ Her face was a troubled blur in the dimness.

‘What could happen?’ Sidney said. ‘Things aren’t so bad really. It will be pleasant for you to have a lazy summer at home. You like your aunt, don’t you?’

‘I don’t
dislike
her,’ Anna replied. ‘But somehow she’s not quite a real person. One can’t talk to her at all. She’s too –’ she paused a moment, searching her mind for the descriptive word, ‘– too papilionaceous!’ she ended, with a faint smile.

A slow answering smile of complete understanding glimmered on Sidney’s face.

‘I know what you mean, exactly,’ she said.

There was silence for a moment. Then she began to draw away.

‘We will meet again soon, won’t we?’ said Anna urgently. She still felt uneasy and exhausted, very anxious for some reassurance.

‘Yes, of course,’ came Sidney’s voice, like a ghost out of the darkness.

The amber eyes looked down at Anna, with a passionate flame of devotion hidden in the dark, and an intuitive, courageous, unfailing sympathy.

Anna lay in bed sadly after Sidney had gone, seeing in imagination the clear, bright eyes of her friend, full of love and encouragement, like the faithful eyes of a very intelligent, very sensitive dog. But it was not quite the encouragement that she wanted, really. She felt uneasy, apprehensive.

The next day Sidney appeared at the station to see her off, very calm, very breezy, hiding her emotion in her odd, brusque, sardonic way.

‘Good-bye,’ she said casually, putting her cool, sunburned hand in Anna’s, through the open window of the carriage.

‘Good-bye,’ Anna replied.

She felt curiously unreal, indifferent almost. She had slept badly. In the night, a breath of fear had blown upon her from the inimical dark; the striking quarters of the hours had beaten in her ears with a vague clash of menace. So that now she scarcely realized what was going on.

Sidney looked her full in the eyes.

‘Write often,’ she said, in her aggressive, domineering voice that covered a note of wistfulness.

‘Yes,’ said Anna.

‘Well –’ Sidney checked herself with a queer impatience, and walked stiffly away.

As the train moved out of the station, Anna caught sight of Catherine, smiling good-bye and looking at her very definitely with a peculiar forced significance in her big, dark, handsome eyes, as though she intended to convey some message. Anna did not know what she meant by the look, only a significant intensity seemed centred in her, compelling attention. Rachel did not say good-bye to Anna at all.

B
LUE
H
ILLS
, the home of Lauretta and Heyward Bland, was a small, beautifully-kept-up estate near Wycombe. From the road one could see a flattish stretch of park-land, and then the house on a little knoll, appearing through the tall bulk of the elms. It was a white two-storey house with a sweep of gravel for carriages, and a careful flower garden between it and the park. Among the trees, away from the house, some sheep were usually grazing.

Anna did not feel at home there. She had not spent much time at Blue Hills. Lauretta always travelled a good deal, and Anna’s holidays had been passed in different places. Up till the end of the war the house had been a convalescent home for officers, and Anna, on her visits there, had always felt herself to be an outsider, outside the life of the place. She had kept well in the background.

Now, for the first time, it became real to her. Freed from the transient war-time atmosphere of slightly artificial busy-ness, its own individual atmosphere, the proper spirit of the place itself began to emerge.

Heyward Bland was now living at home, returned from his patriotic labours at the War Office.

The Colonel was a lean, spruce, elderly man, with a rather fierce expression, and a bald, longish head. His manner was didactic and irritable and overbearing, except towards Lauretta to whom he was always politely attentive. But he had a genial, patronizing way of talking to inferiors
that made him popular with old-style members of the lower classes: with the younger people it did not go down very well.

Anna understood him thoroughly, and was a little contemptuous. Heyward Bland was conceited and pompous like a scraggy old cockerel, and with the same bullying stupidity. She felt she had never met anyone so entirely imperceptive. But he wasn’t a bad old stick, really. According to his lights, inside his own narrow limitations, he was a good man and wanted to do his duty, as he conceived it. He even wanted to be amiable and strictly fair towards Anna, whom he disliked.

Anna knew at once that he disliked her, and that he disliked all young people. He had a profound suspicion of youth. As though the young people of the world were secretly in league against him, to make him appear ridiculous. And he hated everything to which the word ‘modern’ could possibly be applied.

But Lauretta kept him in his place. She had very decidedly got the upper hand in spite of the Colonel’s barn-yard, male domineeringness. He was rather muted in her proximity, rather subdued, his fierce expression turned a little foolish, his eyes anxiously on the watch. His whole cocksureness slightly gone off, like milk that is just beginning to turn sour on a thundery day. It was rather pathetic to see him so diminished. But once outside the sphere of Lauretta’s sedative influence he perked up again at once, fluffed out his feathers, and strutted off, crowing shrilly again.

Anna was worried as to how Lauretta would take her expulsion. She did not know what Rachel Fielding had written to her aunt. So she was nervous when Lauretta suddenly said to her:

‘I’ve had an extraordinary letter from Rachel. She seems to think you had better not go back to Haddenham for your last term, after all.’

‘She talked to me about it,’ Anna said, rather uneasy.

Lauretta darted a quick glance at her out of her bright, suspicious eyes.

‘But I thought you were so happy there,’ she said, in a surprised voice. ‘Why shouldn’t you go back?’

‘Well, there’s nothing much for me to do, really. I’m simply waiting to go up to Oxford now, you see.’

Lauretta was looking at her shrewdly, summing up the situation. She didn’t particularly want to have Anna at home all the summer. But perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing really. The girl was growing up and she ought to see more of her. Anna had improved lately, too. In appearance she was quite presentable. If only she would pay a little more attention to her clothes she would be even attractive.

‘Yes, I think it’s best that you should be here,’ she said, with the quick, flickering smile that never got beyond the corners of her mouth.