Let Me Alone Page 16

  ‘Thank you,’ said Anna.

  ‘I ought to have remembered it.’

  The look of apology was on the older woman’s face again, almost sychophantic. The girl moved, and stood in front of the glass. She was pale and grave, with a certain pure, young girl’s wistfulness. But in her eyes was the gleam of sardonic understanding.

  She looked round wearily at her mother-in-law, wishing she would depart. But she still lingered, wanting to speak for her son.

  ‘I wonder if you quite understand Matthew,’ she said, jingling her chains.

  ‘In what way?’ Anna asked.

  ‘He is so sensitive, so truly chivalrous. But he is very easily hurt although he never complains. You might hurt him quite unwittingly. You are so young. And when one is very young one is not always thoughtful.’ She smiled, deprecating, and falsely-sweet. ‘You must forgive an old woman’s frankness.’

  The chains jangled feverishly. There was a pause. Then Anna said, looking away:

  ‘Has Matthew told you that I have hurt him?’

  ‘No, of course not. He would never complain to me –’ The old lady always spoke fast, and with a sort of theatrical intenseness. ‘He is the soul of loyalty.’

  ‘Then what makes you think I have done him any harm?’

  ‘You must remember that I can see further than most people. Into your heart, perhaps.’

  Mrs. Kavan’s eyes met the direct, contemptuous-seeming eyes of Anna. There was too much cold, sarcastic weariness in them. She turned away.

  ‘Good night,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Sleep well. And forgive my interference. I only want your happiness, you know.’

  And with a final false smile of propitiation, she went out in a faint, metallic jingling.

  CHAPTER 10

  VERY much to her own bewilderment Anna found herself incorporated in the Kavan family life. River House drew her down, like a silent whirlpool, into itself. There was Mrs. Kavan, shiftless and untidy, flitting from room to room, always inefficiently busy, peering everywhere with her uncannily shrewd blue eyes. There was Winifred, silent and sullen, going about with sulky brows and an unspoken grievance against life in general. And there was Matthew. But principally, first and foremost, there was the house; the actual erection of timber and bricks and mortar.

  River House was a great, cold barrack of a place that would have housed half a regiment. A dozen servants would have run it efficiently, but the Kavans could only afford to employ a woman to come in daily for a few hours. They were poor, though not exactly poverty-stricken. Mrs. Kavan had a small widow’s pension, and Matthew added a regular annual sum from his own earnings. But the old lady was a bad manager, money seemed to slip through her fingers, the house devoured everything that came in. It was a pinched, uncomfortable regime. The two Kavan women toiled continually with their cooking and cleaning, a routine of dowdiness and poverty and monotony.

  Anna, who had never swept out a room in her life, was astonished at the endless labour that went on.

  First thing in the morning it began, the scrubbing and sweeping and grubbing with dirty plates and cutlery: then a hasty run round the shops, the meal to be prepared, eaten and cleared away: perhaps a tea-party in the afternoon, a visit to friends: and then grubbing in the house again till late at night.

  Most of the hard work devolved upon Winifred. The mother was too flighty, too unpractical to give much assistance, though all day long she was hurrying round the house with her grey hair straggling down her wrinkled neck and her chains faintly clashing. She was always starting things in a flurry of enthusiasm, and then forgetting all about them. Winifred came behind with a dour expression, clearing up the confusion.

  ‘Mother again!’ she would say with saturnine, gloomy exasperation, when she found the kettle had been left on the fire till the water had all boiled away and probably a a hole burnt in the bottom as well. ‘Mother again!’ when the drawing-room grate was discovered half emptied and the abandoned ashes blowing all over the floor. And without another word, she would set to, with a kind of dismal, sullen fanaticism, to clean up the mess and repair the damage.

  Winifred Kavan spent her days in a gloom of deep, wordless resentment. She hated the dull, grubby business of her life. Strange how hideous she found her existence, when she had never known any other. She was twenty-five years old, plain, and dressed badly in shapeless woollen dresses – ugly brown or greyish plaids mostly. Anna was sorry for her and wanted to be friends.

  She followed her into the dark bowels of River House with offers of assistance.

  ‘Let me help you,’ she said, seeing Winifred immersed in floods of greasy water and piles of dirty dishes.

  ‘Much good you’d be!’ jeered Winifred crossly. ‘I don’t suppose you know how to boil an egg for yourself.’

  Which was true.

  Anna didn’t mind her crossness. She didn’t resent her sister-in-law’s mocking rudeness. She divined, somehow, that the girl’s sullenness had its roots in a profound, black resentment, a loathing of her whole life. She understood that Winifred was jealous: jealous of her because she was not under the doom of River House, because she was not plain and dowdy and stultified by eternal house-work.

  Winifred hated Anna because she could not make toast without scorching it, or lay a fire so that it would burn. She hated and envied her for never having had to do these things. And at the same time she admired her. She wanted to debase Anna, to pull her down to her own level. When Anna offered to help her with the sweeping or the washing-up, a loud, sneering violence would come into her voice as she cried:

  ‘Run away and play! You’ll only dirty your precious clothes.’

  And when Anna, with her innate fastidiousness, accepted this and went calmly away, Winifred’s heart swelled with envy and loathing. She would have liked to drag Anna into the most menial tasks; but she admired enormously Anna’s refusal to be dragged.

  Anna rather liked her. There was something savage about Winifred that appealed to Anna – something fierce and honest. Rude and ill-tempered she was, certainly. Like a sore-headed animal. But honestly so.

  They were a good deal together, in the end. Anna had assumed some of the lighter household tasks – making beds and so on – which she performed fairly efficiently. She preferred Winifred’s society to that of Matthew, who annoyed her exceedingly by his refusal to take any part in the turmoil of work. Matthew simply sat back, pasha like, to be waited upon. The meals might have appeared on the table by magic for all the notice he took of the elaborate labour which their preparation involved, which annoyed Anna very much.

  ‘Why don’t you make him do his share?’ she said to Winifred.

  ‘Oh – he’s a man.’ Winifred made a strange, disgusted grimace, as though to anathematize the whole male creation.

  ‘But you could make him do something,’ Anna persisted.

  ‘It’s no good. Men are so hopeless,’ said Winifred, fatalistic.

  Anna was more annoyed than ever. She was most irritated by this conspiracy of the feminine Kavans to encourage the pasha-attitude in Matthew. Why shouldn’t he do his share of the work? And why was Winifred so resigned to her dreary, detested round?

  ‘If you hate living here so much, why don’t you go away?’ she asked her, frowning, irritably perplexed.

  A dark, fixed look, lowering and grim, came on the sullen face of the other girl.

  ‘Where should I go to?’ she said, heavily.

  ‘Oh – somewhere – anywhere! What does it matter? The principal thing is to get away.’

  ‘Without any money?’

  Winifred’s voice was heavy and cynical. She looked up, and Anna caught a gleam of ridicule in her eyes.

  ‘You could get some kind of work,’ she retorted, in impatiently acid tones.

  But Winifred only stood there, heavy and glum, and stared back at Anna with the jeering light in her eyes.

  ‘You could get a job, couldn’t you?’ Anna’s lip was curling impatiently.

  ‘I’
ve never been trained to do anything,’ came from Winifred.

  The impatience covered Anna’s face like a shadow, her eyes set cold in contempt. Then quickly she turned away.

  She couldn’t bear this fatalism in Winifred. This hopeless sort of laissez faire irritated her to distraction. Perhaps because she felt something of it in herself. Anyhow, she could never, never condone it; or even tolerate it. So there could never be any real friendship between them. Nonetheless, she rather liked the girl.

  There was still a fortnight before the boat sailed. Anna existed entirely in anticipation. The present, River House, was quite without meaning. What the future would mean to her she did not stop to consider. At any rate, there would be the East, and sunshine, and the absence of dreary indoor drudgery.

  After a chain of mild, grey days when the year seemed to hesitate reluctant, autumn sprang suddenly to midwinter. It grew bitterly cold, a dank, clammy mist hung about. It was so clinging, that mist, although impalpable: you could drive it off with your hands, almost. But always it was there, intangible and persistent, creeping into every cranny, and striking a chill to the very bones. The dismal kitchen, and the long stone corridors of River House were dungeon-like. The scullery was a vault.

  The two girls scurried round the shops of a morning with their basket of vegetables and eggs and oddments of grocery.

  Winifred seemed to wilt in the cold. It really got her down in some way. Under her shabby hat, her face was pinched and yellow-looking; her skin went blotchy round the mouth. She looked old. Like an old maid already, with her crabby expression and her dull, chapped skin that seemed to have suffered from too much cold water. And she grew crosser and crosser.

  ‘Do let me lend you a fur. Or a warmer coat,’ said Anna, seeing how Winifred shivered at the raw street corners in her old, thin jacket.

  But Winifred only sneered at her, viciously, savagely, repulsing her, and setting a barrier between them.

  ‘Why? Are you ashamed to be seen out with me?’ she asked cuttingly.

  What an impossible creature!

  Half-a-dozen times in a day Anna decided to give her up, to abandon her to her fate. But in the end she was always driven to seek her out wherever she was, toiling and grubbing away like a housemaid in the chilly depths of the house: partly out of pity, and partly because she really preferred her caustic remarks to Mrs. Kavan’s flyaway sugariness or Matthew’s flat incomprehension.

  ‘What on earth made you marry Matthew?’ Winifred asked her suddenly one afternoon.

  Lunch was recently over. They were in the scullery, washing the dirty plates. Winifred plunged each plate fiercely into the basin of greyish, greasy water, swilled it round, and deposited it with a jerk of loathing, upside-down on the draining-board. When Anna was to pick it up and dry it with a red-bordered cloth.

  ‘What on God’s earth induced you to do it?’

  She watched Anna’s face go still, rather cold, as if retreating from the question, and from her.

  ‘Circumstances, I suppose,’ Anna replied coldly.

  She resented the question, and the spiteful tone. But Winifred pursued it, spitefully, pressing her, her eyes black with malice like a malignant demon’s.

  ‘What you see in him I cannot imagine.’

  Anna dried a plate in silence, and added it to the pile beside her.

  ‘Lucky for us that you do see something!’ Winifred cried, not to be put off.

  ‘Why do you say for us?”’

  ‘Because we shall all be able to sponge on you’ – she paused, and her face looked ugly and tired – ‘Matthew won’t be the only one to benefit, you may be sure’ – she stared vindictively – ‘we shall all come in for a few crumbs.’

  Her voice sounded fierce. She was trying to sting Anna into retaliation, to force her out of her superiority.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Anna, startled. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing much to be got out of me.’

  ‘What? Nothing much? There’s your money, isn’t there? Do you call that nothing much?’

  Anna put down her drying-cloth, frowning a little.

  ‘But I’ve only my three hundred a year.’

  ‘Only three hundred!’ mocked Winifred, jerking her head impatiently. ‘Only! Only! That shows all you know about the value of money! You haven’t any conception what an extra three hundred a year means in a family like ours.’

  She was still savagely jeering.

  Anna looked her steadily in the face, with an expression cold, distant, and haughty. She looked at her sister-in-law as she might have looked at an Esquimaux, a creature vastly remote. And her cold grey eyes seemed to set her apart in scornful superiority. A chilly fastidiousness, like armour, divided her from the Kavans and all their works.

  ‘Do you mean that it influenced Matthew to know that I had a little money of my own? That otherwise he might not have wanted to marry me?’

  ‘Of course it influenced him. It’s very important to him. Because we have so little. He couldn’t afford to support a wife’ – Winifred sneered fierce like a demon.

  ‘So he thought I might be a financial asset to the family,’ said Anna, cold as stone.

  ‘Ask him!’ said Winifred vindictively.

  There was a note of triumph in her voice, but also a sort of wistfulness. In her anger, and her spiteful ugliness, she was rather pathetic. Anna looked at her and went to the door.

  ‘Yes. I will ask him,’ she said, a cold contempt coming into her tones. She let Winifred see that she found her contemptible and repellant; especially contemptible.

  Matthew was sitting in the drawing-room. His mother stooped over the fire, putting on more coal.

  ‘I want to speak to you, Matthew,’ Anna said coolly.

  ‘What about? Is it important?’ He sounded surprised. The stupid smile was on his face.

  ‘It’s a matter that only concerns the two of us.’

  Mrs. Kavan dropped the brass shovel with a clatter into the grate, and stood up.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone then,’ she said, darting her inquisitive looks.

  ‘But surely it’s nothing that can’t be said in front of mother,’ protested Matthew. ‘We have no secrets from her.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Anna, thoroughly disdainful.

  She turned her back on Mrs. Kavan. Then she stood in front of Matthew.

  ‘Is it true that you married me because I had money of my own?’ she asked him.

  Matthew rose, dropped his newspaper on the floor, and stared at her. The foolish, bullying look came on his face.

  ‘What? What nonsense!’ he blustered, looking foolish.

  The corner of Anna’s mouth went down disdainfully.

  ‘I’ll put the question another way then. Is it true that if I had not had the three hundred a year you would not have married me?’

  ‘How can you say such things!’ He was deeply affronted.

  Mrs. Kavan stood as if transfixed, staring from one to the other.

  ‘Is it true?’ Anna persisted, sarcastic and cold.

  He gasped at her, speechless, and turned to his mother.

  ‘You’d better go, mother,’ he said, attempting dignity. ‘There’s no need for you to listen to this painful rubbish.’

  The old lady hesitated uncertainly, opened the door, and went. She wanted to plunge into the fray, but Anna’s coldness restrained her.

  ‘Now, what do you mean by speaking to me in this way?’ Matthew could hardly contain his anger as he turned back to Anna.

  She watched him steadily, cold in distant contempt. She seemed to hold herself far away from him.

  ‘You don’t deny that you wanted more money in the family?’

  ‘No. Why should I deny it?’ he said, quivering with anger.

  ‘Then you would not have married me if I had been penniless?’

  He watched her stupidly. His face was dark with anger. He was a bit bewildered too, not quite sure of his ground.

  ‘I was glad that you had the money,’ he sai
d, the angry, blank look, so foolish, on his face.

  She looked at him with eyes that were hurt and accusing and infinitely contemptuous. She felt herself miles away from him. But still she looked at his hot, opaque blue eyes, and his meaningless head. She even saw the fists hanging clenched, strange leathery fruits dangling at the ends of his long arms. She looked: but not as one looks at a man. She felt no connection. She held herself quite aloof from him. Then she went out, up to her bedroom, leaving him alone.

  She walked off, right away from him, thinking to herself:

  ‘He didn’t even want me, particularly. It was the money as much as anything. I’ve let myself be made a fool of – by that queer fish!’

  It was a horrid blow to her pride to feel that she had been taken in. In spite of her much-prized intelligence, Matthew had got the better of her, had cheated her with his low cunning. He who was not even quite a man. And yet she did not mind very much. She was not terribly insulted; perhaps just because he had never seemed real to her.

  But she wanted to escape. She had a strong craving, suddenly, to get right away from the Kavan atmosphere. Outside it was grey and sunless; but was at least there freedom in the cold air. She felt that she had been imprisoned for a long time in River House. The place smelt like a prison in her nostrils. She put on her things and went out.

  The roads were grey and muddy. The mist condensed slowly in a cold drizzle, blotting everything out. With a face like a mask, she walked on, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. The houses were clouded spectres, half curtained by the mist. She did not see them. She seemed strangely to have taken leave of her own body. There was no thought, no sensation. A blankness was upon her. It cost her an effort to find out where she was. Then she noticed the station.

  She went in, and bought a ticket to London. There was plenty of money in her bag. The train came and went, and she sat in it, looking out of the window with a bright, composed expression, seeing nothing at all. At South Kensington she got out. There was some idea of going to the museum at the back of her mind. Queer how at any mental crisis she tended to seek a scholastic atmosphere, as though she found support in a hint of the cloister and of monasticism. But the wet, grim buildings looked forbidding. She wandered instead along the Brompton Road.