Let Me Alone Read online

  Drummond received her in his private room. She was not quite at ease with him. She felt that he was supercilious. He was a man of about thirty, bright-eyed, and rather suavely dressed, with nimble, restless hands that seemed always on the move. He was very polite, talking a good deal in his careful, demure voice. It was his voice that made Anna uneasy. She seemed to hear in it a note of arrogance, of soft, haughty superiority. As though he had superior blood in his veins, and was slightly contemptuous, and would never, never admit anyone to equality with him.

  All the same, she found him quite attractive. The two of them sat together in the little room which had a tiny balcony hanging over the street. They talked for some time and laughed often. But Anna began to wonder when he would mention her work. It was a mystery why he should find so much to say to her. And in the light from the window she saw his very bright eyes gleaming upon her, and his nostrils slightly dilating, almost as though he wanted to make love to her: although they were strangers to one another. His hands were never still.

  ‘Why do you want to write poetry?’ he asked.

  He also seemed suddenly to realize that they were strangers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, somehow disappointed.

  Drummond seemed to be looking at her with a certain faint derision. She didn’t like the thin line of his mouth with its hint of inevitable superciliousness.

  ‘I want to write. To earn my own living,’ she said, feeling empty and astray, as if she had received a rebuff.

  ‘You won’t need to do that,’ he answered, with a smile that might have meant she was making a fool of herself, and the faint suggestion of arrogance, which embarrassed her slightly.

  She knew then that he would not publish the verses. There was no definite shock of disappointment. To tell the truth, Anna herself had never quite expected him to do so. But she was deeply, emotionally distressed, nevertheless.

  ‘They are very good,’ young Drummond told her with suave politeness. ‘Very good, but not quite good enough. A little immature, perhaps. It would not really be fair to you to publish them. You are so very young.’

  His voice had the curious, slightly-affected intonation that touched some irritable nerve in her.

  She went out into the street feeling numb. She was not at all sure what had happened to her. But dimly, remotely, she realized that a crisis of some sort was imminent, precipitated by the result of the interview.

  And then, most confusingly, the personality of the young man himself loomed large, blotting out distant but more important issues. She could not get out of her mind his superior and supercilious muzzle. She heard the soft, insidious contemptuousness of Drummond’s voice drowning all other voices in her brain, even those of surpassing urgency. She felt herself bewildered – completely at sea. For she could not think.

  A call out of the blue came to astonish her.

  ‘Anna! Anna-Marie!’

  At first she hardly recognized the vivid, high-coloured face steering so unexpectedly into her preoccupation; Catherine Howard, flashing a brilliant smile at her under her smart black hat.

  This sudden apparition from the past gave Anna the strangest feeling imaginable. All in a breath she was snatched out of the turmoil of present embarrassments and plunged back into the already half-forgotten surge of Haddenham life. Strange to find that she was no longer capable of recalling the emotions of those days. But she was not. Just for one second, a shade of the old resentment fell across her heart at the sight of the girl who had cost her the loss of Sidney and the summer happiness they might have enjoyed together. A flicker of ancient emotion stirred, but very dim and unimportant, very far away, dead before it was fully awake.

  And then she was quite extraordinarily glad to see Catherine. It was an enormous relief to meet someone of her own period, someone who was interested in her as an individual human being, someone understanding. A vast relief came over her, making her talkative and almost expansive, an intoxication of relief. She really enjoyed talking to the bold, bright girl.

  And Catherine seemed to grasp the situation in her comprehending, dashing, worldly way that took everything in its stride. She was ready with a laugh and the right word, and though she did not say very much, she had an amazing faculty for appearing sympathetic and understanding beyond words, opening her fine eyes wide and turning her head in a certain way – encouraging Anna to talk. There seemed to be no end to her interest and admiration and sympathy; yet really she had given no proof of them at all.

  Anna felt happier. Amazing what a relief it was to talk to Catherine. She didn’t care how much she outraged her fundamental reticences and reserves. It was as though she took a deliberate delight in going against all her truest instincts. A little black dog of perversity sat on her shoulder and kept her unnaturally gay; a wild, febrile sort of hilarity, half pathetic, half harsh. Not at all her real self.

  Catherine was a home student and had rooms in Beaumont Street. Anna floated off there with her, and sat on the edge of a chair while the other girl made coffee in a glass apparatus like a retort. A gay, hard look was on Anna’s face. But her heart was wounded. A blank unhappiness underlay her defiant gaiety. But she had to keep on laughing and talking. The little black dog on her shoulder saw to that.

  It rather amazed her that she should be behaving in this way. She waited for her old proud, silent, somewhat secretive self to come back. But the black dog sat firm. Perhaps the soft, ingratiating voice of Drummond had put him there. Anyway, there he sat, steadily. She felt a little uneasy: as though her independence, her quiet self-sufficiency might suffer an affront.

  Catherine liked the new, lively Anna.

  ‘You’re beautiful, you know, to-day,’ she said, smiling rather enigmatic, but looking into Anna’s eyes with a curious definite look of specific meaning. She seemed almost entranced.

  Anna was pleased. The compliment deeply encouraged her. It had a deep significance, somehow, in her development, which she did not understand. But she stored it up carefully, feeling its importance; and was grateful to Catherine. She laughed, and looked out of the corners of her eyes in a way that was strange to her.

  She expected the strange brightness to vanish as she drew near to Blue Hills. And yes, to a certain extent it did leave her. But something hard and reckless still remained, almost a sort of braggadocio. She walked into the house sprightlily and boldly, swinging her arms a little. She didn’t care. And yet, all the time, her heart was sore.

  Lauretta was angry when she heard that the poems would not be published. It seemed as though Anna were deliberately trying her. Her pretty, soft face went blank with exasperation.

  ‘You have made us both look ridiculous,’ she declared, staring at Anna with hard, contracted eyes of extreme irritation. ‘Everybody has heard about the poems. What am I to tell them now?’

  ‘I asked you not to talk to people about me,’ Anna said.

  There was a cold note, like disgust, in her voice. She was defying Lauretta.

  ‘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 m
e 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT 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 o
pposite 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.