Anna (42 page)

It won and the whole business of conquest began anew. In a quarter of an hour she had doubled her fortune, and the little stacks of coloured counters surrounded her.

“It is now that you must risk everything,” Anna told herself. “Soon she will stop playing and then it will be too late.”

Leaning forward she placed her own five red counters beside the single white one of the old lady's. No one else was playing, and the croupier shot off the ball.

For a moment Anna forgot the old lady and fixed her eyes upon the ball. She watched it as it careered gaily round the perimeter of the bowl: it had been shot off powerfully and there seemed no reason why it should ever stop. But she happened for a moment to glance in the old lady's direction. The sight frightened her. She was more like a witch than ever. As she sat, bent forward in her chair, she appeared to be trying to hypnotise the ball into obeying her. Her lips were tightly pursed together and, in a mad mood of concentration, she was holding her breath. The ball, however, ignored her completely. It slid firmly and smoothly into her favourite seven.

Anna was still sitting there, conscious only of the fact that she had lost everything, when the croupier thrust a small heap of counters towards her. She glanced at them hurriedly and saw that they amounted to fifteen hundred francs. It was as though Providence by an ingenious sleight of hand had miraculously restored what she had lost.

“But this is not mine,” she said. “I won nothing.”

The mistake astonished her. Until that moment she had always assumed such men to be infallible.

The croupier, however, was unperturbed.

“It is the gentleman behind you, Madame,” he said, “who placed it there for you. I am only obeying instructions.”

The gentleman behind her! He had placed a stake brilliantly or luckily as you may happen to look at it, and he had said that he had placed it there for her. The fact angered her, and she turned round to tell him that she could not accept it.

But it was M. Moritz who was standing there. His small hands were clasped in front of him and he was smiling.

“You see,” he said. “I arrived home earlier than I expected. So I followed you here. I was only just in time to help you. You looked so sad at losing that I could not bear it.”

And he held out his arm for her to take in rising from the table.

The evening had become still fresher by the time they left the Casino. In the open phaeton, the breeze brushed against their faces like spray. M. Moritz paused long enough to draw the travelling rug closer around Anna's knees.

“… the most successful, easily the most successful trip I have ever made,” he was saying. “The whole of Paris was waiting for me. I electrified them. I was immense.”

The coolness of the night air seemed to have no effect on M. Moritz. At the thought of his achievements he threw out his chest and, unbuttoning his jacket, let the wind play upon his bare shirt-front. In his present mood he was impervious to cold. He radiated.

“And you have not yet seen what I have brought for you,” he went on. “The shops there are still astonishing. Paris remains the one city in the world where one can buy things for a woman.”

He was silent for a little while. Then he slipped his arm through hers.

“I'm still waiting for the moment when you tell me that you love me,” he said quietly. “So much of our happiness depends on it.”

THE days that followed were strangely like each other: they gradually merged together and became one. M. Moritz, his trip to Paris over and the tremendous object of his visit achieved, was content scarcely to leave the villa at all: he basked there.

His happiness in Anna's company was apparent. If he saw her walking alone in the garden, he would get up at once from his lounge and go over to her; and, if she remained within doors, he would grow restless and ask the servants if they had seen her, crossexamining them to find out how long it was since she had been within their notice, inventing little messages for them to take up to her.

“I wish that I knew if she were happy,” he kept reflecting. “She tells me that she is, when I ask her. But I cannot help wondering. It would be absurd to ask for passion, but one does expect response …”

Not that she was deliberately cold. She accompanied him to the Casino—to the high play rooms where M. Moritz was more at home; and sat with him on the terrace of the Hotel Casino—he took her there because obligingly he thought that she liked the place. She bathed with him in the pool at the villa.

But at those very moments when real love in a woman would have betrayed itself, she disappointed him. She stayed indoors, sometimes for a whole morning, reading; or chose for herself a corner of the garden where no one could find her. M. Moritz mocked her for it: he called her his nymph errant, his elusive one, he threatened to chain her; he pinched her ear.

The sense of disappointment, however, remained; and he asked himself what more there was that he could do for her. Even the jewels and the furs that he had brought back with him from Paris had left her unmoved. She had not made any attempt to wear either. M. Moritz was bewildered by it: he had never before met any woman who did not appreciate furs and jewels.

Indeed, during those early days of his return he would have been quite dejected if it had not been for the packing cases—the packing cases of stuff that the dealers in Paris had sold him—that had begun to arrive. There were porcelains, pictures, tapestries, bronzes.

He wanted Anna to share in his excitement and he searched her out. She stood by him while the lids were prised open, the wrappings removed. But the excitement somehow did not seem to have been transferred to her; it was, he told himself bitterly, almost as if she were determined not to share his pleasures with him. He wondered why: he examined and re-examined himself.

The incident of the duel had by now almost passed from his memory; and, when he recalled it, there were so many things that had happened in between that there seemed to be no special significance to be attached to it. So far as he was concerned, the heroic figure of Captain—he could not even remember his name—was fast slipping from his mind for ever …

There was one object that the dealers had sent him that did, however, arouse some kind of emotion in Anna. It was the bronze head of a child. M. Moritz had gone back to the shop three or four times before he bought it because he had not been sure of it. The thing was not quite classical, somehow. Beside the bronzes around it, it looked almost vulgar. Almost vulgar and oddly human. The cheeks were so full, so rounded, that it seemed that a mother and not a sculptor at all, might have made them. The pursed-up mouth and the plump, dimpled chin had worried M. Moritz.

“It's not quite right,” he had told himself. “Not quite as it should be.”

But he had bought it just the same. And now he was glad.

“It is beautiful,” Anna said. “I love it.”

And as Anna took it from him, he watched her face soften and saw a smile come there.

“At last I have touched her,” he told himself. “At last I have done something to her heart.”

And his mind moved forward and became filled with thoughts of the moment when there would be children of their own and not simply babies of bronze that they could love together.

It was to Anna's own surprise that she found herself surrendering to her life. There was a drugging and insidious rhythm in it, something so regular and unchanging that it seemed as if the rest of existence was in suspension. M. Moritz's business did not occupy him more than about a couple of hours in the mornings. He shut himself away in his study with Carlos until half-past eleven or thereabouts, and then sauntered out on to the terrace a free man again. He was ready to devote the rest of his day to her.

And it was always the same day. Before lunch there was the drive into the town to take an apéritif at M. Moritz's favourite café. Then there was lunch at the villa—a perfect lunch that M. Moritz chose himself. In the afternoon there were walks in the garden with sometimes a concert at the Conservatoire at which Italian tenors sang passionate songs and German baritones sentimental ones. There was another apéritif, stronger than the pre-luncheon one, between five and six. Dinner was as perfect as the lunch, only more complicated. And finally there was the Casino.

About everything they did there was the same soothing restfulness. It was soporific; and like all soporifics it worked steadily and gently until she no longer had the strength to fight against it. Even the edge of her misery had slowly been blunted. Instead of those searing, vicious stabs of unhappiness that had previously tormented her—memories of her father at Rhinehausen, glimpses of Charles in the Bois or in the suffocating stuffiness of the Latourettes' apartment, echoes of the Captain's voice—she had now sunk into a state in which unhappiness seemed natural and could no longer hurt her. The memories, the glimpses, the echoes were still there. But the power to disturb her had been taken from them.

Even when her father after her twentieth, her thirtieth letter, had still failed to reply to her and she had stopped writing to him, it did not seem any longer that she had lost. And when inside the wallet within her handbag she came upon the photograph of Captain Picard as a cadet and looked into the serious dark eyes and saw the square immature chin, her eyes did not now immediately fill with tears.

Within her mind, too, she was calmer. The impetuousness seemed to have gone from her. During those first days at the villa she had been full of wild thoughts. She had contemplated searching out Captain Picard's address from the authorities and writing to the widow, the widow with a little child, telling her everything. She had thought even of going and confessing to her in person—it seemed the only way in which she could wipe out the stain. But such thoughts came more rarely now; and, when they came, she could see the folly of them. A letter in the hand of an unknown woman, the woman herself upon the doorstep—it was not in this way that a widow would be comforted. And gradually the image of Madame Picard that she had invented for herself—a pale face like a Madonna, the Captain had said—grew fainter and seemed to fit into the misty pattern of tragedy that lay behind her. It was no longer something that tore her sleep away from her at night, and left her frightened and wretched in the darkness.

At first when M. Moritz had brought new clothes for her she had ignored them, leaving them in the boxes in which the modiste had sent them. There was no one left, she had told herself, whom she was interested in pleasing; no one left who mattered. It was M. Moritz who had insisted that she should wear them: he complained that people would think that the markets had been going against him if he were seen with her in her old ones. And gradually she had grown to accept the presence of such a wardrobe as something natural, something that she had always known. She changed her dresses, three, four times a day; she could not imagine herself unable to do so. The carriage, too: it now seemed so much a part of her that she never walked anywhere. In front of her mirror she told herself that she must be careful;that the slimness of her figure was going. She resolved on walks and special diets. But always in the end she did nothing. The new way of life had claimed her too completely.

Not that she was content. She was aware all the time of that same emptiness which was still as much unfilled as it had been when she had first come there. The books she read, the beauty of life under the shadows of the cliff, the prodigal generosity of M. Moritz, did nothing to appease it.

“It is the price that I have to pay,” she told herself a hundred times, “for having accepted such a life.”

As the thought came to her, she recognised it as the kind of thing that once she would have set down in her diary. But the diary no longer existed: it ceased abruptly at the point where she had torn out the pages about M. Duvivier. She had several times
thought of re-starting it, but somehow here at the villa she lacked even the energy to write.

And in any case, writing would only have reminded her of a lot of things that she was still trying to forget.

As the days passed, the lassitude that had come over her increased. She slept later in the mornings, was not ready when the maid brought the tray into her room. She would fall asleep again as she lay there; and often now, she rested in the afternoon, leaving the novel that she had chosen unread beside her on the couch.

At first she accepted the fact, told herself that it was simply the Mediterranean air, the sultriness of the weather. But she came gradually to realise that it was not so, that it must be that she was unwell. She chose her food carefully, avoiding all sweet or creamy things. She drank Vichy water between meals. And when the feeling of heaviness and lassitude continued, she decided that it must be the summer
grippe
that she had contracted.

Then one morning she fainted as she was getting out of bed. The room suddenly went dark and she collapsed upon the rug. The maid found her stretched out full length and deathly pale when she came back from preparing the bath.

The incident left Anna frightened and apprehensive. But outwardly she remained calm. She bathed her forehead in eau-de cologne, and said that she would rest in the chair in her room for a little. She forbade her maid to mention the affair to anyone. As soon as the girl had gone away, however, she got up and went over to the medicine-chest. She took out a bottle of quinine—it was a quarter full—from the array of scents and lotions, and drank off the contents. She was promptly sick.

The sickness, even though it might have been only the bitter draught that had caused it, alarmed her still further. Every fear that she had known returned to her. And next morning with nothing to provoke it she was sick again.

It was not, however, until another fortnight had elapsed that she had no doubt at all as to her condition. And the certainty—for it was positive by now—stunned her. She grew frightened; took further doses of medicinal quinine; asked herself if there were not other and more desperate remedies by which a child could be avoided; questioned whether she should not confess everything to her maid and solicit her help in finding a doctor somewhere who would take pity on her.