Anna (63 page)

“Isn't … isn't it something that you could overlook?” Gervase asked hesitatingly.

“It's no affair of mine any longer,” Lady Yarde answered. “My feelings don't matter. It's only herself she thinks about. She wants to get back to that child of hers.”

“She wants what?”

He knew as he asked the question that he had heard perfectly. But he still couldn't believe it. A child! It was unthinkable. Until this moment he had thought Anna the most virginal thing he had ever seen. And then suddenly the light of revelation came to him. He saw her now as a young girl bereaved while still a bride and his heart ached for her. He realised that unaware he had stumbled upon the hidden secret of her life.

“Where is the child?” he asked at last.

“Somewhere in France in a convent,” Lady Yarde told him. “I only had her because your Aunt Caroline wanted me to. I was always opposed to it.

The clock on the mantelshelf struck and Lady Yarde started.

“Good gracious,” she said. “It's dinner time. You must be starving. That horrible girl has upset everything.”

It was now obvious to Anna that Lady Yarde had somehow got to hear of her visit to the station. The whole household seemed to know of it. The maid who took her breakfast into the little sitting-room looked sideways at Anna before she departed. And at nine o'clock Mrs. Merton, as silent and quiet-voiced as ever, came in to say that there would be no lessons that morning. She did not raise her eyes from the carpet as she said it, and she offered no kind of explanation.

When she had gone Anna sat looking at the pictures of the many departed and forgotten young ladies round the walls. “What were their crimes?” she began wondering. “Why did they have to go?” She paused and shook her head. “But it couldn't have been anything very sensational,” she told herself. “They haven't got that kind of face.”

She got up and began to walk about the room.

“To-day I shall know,” she kept telling herself. “To-day Lady Yarde will tell me that I am dismissed. And it is all my fault. It was because I was too impatient. If only I had waited. If only I had saved every penny …” She remembered the dress that she had bought for the dance—the dress that at the time had seemed so cheap, so cleverly contrived—and she was ashamed of it. “As it is,” she continued, “I shall be sent away. Sent away in disgrace. It will be the convent for the rest of my life now. There will be no escape. They will never give me another chance after I have thrown away this one. I shall be there forever. And Annette …”

But she could not bear to think of Annette.

“If only I had waited,” she began again.

Her eye caught sight of yesterday's copy of the
Daily Telegraph,
and she reached out for it.

“I shall never go back to the convent,” she told herself suddenly. “Never. I can't endure it. And Annette shan't stop there either. I shall find another post as a governess over here and I shall make them let me have Annette with me.”

She had opened the paper and she began, searching down the long,
grey advertisement columns. “
Post wanted where child of seven not objected to …”; “Widow (young) with child seeks …”; “Refined lady with niece
…” they were there in their numbers, these appeals of the unwanted who were trying to re-insert themselves on any terms into a life that had once been kind to them.

“Surely,” Anna told herself, “they won't go on inserting these paragraphs if nobody answered them.”

As the thought came to her, the future seemed to open, and she saw a vista of faded schoolrooms in private houses, and breakfasts on trays, and slightly cracked china, and shabby bedrooms and the hundred and one humiliations of a cheap governess's life.

“Yes,” she told herself. “That will be my life. And it will be Annette's, too. She will never know what it is to have new clothes. And a nursery of her own. And make as much noise as she likes. She will live only on sufferance. And so shall I. We will both live on sufferance.

She paused.

“But it will not matter,” she said. “We shall be together. I shall have Annette again.”

Because there were no lessons that morning she went out into the Park alone.

“If I am going away anyhow,” she decided, “it does not matter if they want me and then cannot find me. I don't belong to them any more. I shall go to London. There must be someone there who wants a governess. I know I shall be able to find work. I know I shall.”

A feeling of relief came to her as she walked. The wind, which held rain in it, was blowing in her face and there was the damp smell of the leaves and grass and tree-trunks. A faint mushroomy smell that filled her nostrils. She began taking deep breaths of it.

But a reference! The idea of a reference had only just occurred to her. Lady Yarde would almost certainly deny her one. And were there, Anna wondered, any of the agencies to which governesses go that would take her without a reference? The thought that they might refuse her, that even within their chilly, bitter world, she would be unacceptable, suddenly terrified her. The simple matter of Lady Yarde's signature stood, it seemed, between Anna and the future, separating her for ever from Annette.

“How foolish it is,” she told herself. “To think that after everything that I have suffered, I should be afraid of Lady Yarde.”

As she reached the rough path that ran along the top of the hill, another figure came into view. It was that of a young man with a gun under his arm and two dogs at his heels. He was walking with his head thrust forward and his shoulders bent. Altogether he seemed an unusually sombre and morose young man.

It was the dogs that noticed Anna first. They stood motionless, tails held straight. One of them whined. She saw the man with them stop, and turn round, and stand watching. Then be began to come towards her. It was only as he drew near that she recognised Gervase. His hair without any pomade on it was more like a schoolboy's than ever and his face was as red as if he were still dancing. He was a little out of breath and his words came jerkily.

“I … I say,” he said, “excuse me. You're Anna, aren't you?”

As he said it, he realised that he had spoken her name, and an absurd feeling of awkwardness came over him again. He started to apologise.

“I'm afraid I … I don't know your other name,” he began.

“But Anna is right,” she told him. “It is my name. Everyone calls me Anna.”

Her voice was exactly as he had remembered it: the faint accent in it fascinated him. And her eyebrows really did slant upwards—it wasn't simply something that he had imagined.

“I hoped it was you,” he began again.

She was looking at him in some surprise as he stood there.

“Why is he always so wonderfully ill at ease?” she wondered. “He behaves as if he were frightened of me.”

She smiled.

“You were looking for me then?”

“Yes, rather,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

She did not answer, and he noticed that there was the same smile on her face that he had seen before; a faint, slightly incredulous smile that made him feel more of a fool than ever.

“Do you remember the night of the dance?” he said suddenly.

“Yes,” Anna said slowly. “I remember it.”

“So do I,” Gervase answered.

His conversation broke down there and he began to fiddle with the hammers of his gun, cocking them aimlessly back and releasing them. Then he made what was evidently a great effort.

“I'm sorry to hear you're going,” he said. “Isn't there anything we can do about it?”

The smile had gone from Anna's face by now, and he noticed that her eyebrows were raised even higher.

“Who told you that I was going?” she asked.

“I heard last night,” he said. “Rotten business. Didn't know you wanted to go.”

He wished as he said it that he could have thought of some other way of putting it: it sounded so like talking to a kitchen-maid. But Anna somehow did not seem to have been offended. She was actually smiling again.

“So that is what she told you, is it?” she asked.

“Well, it's true isn't it?” he asked.

Anna nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it's true. I
knew
I was going. It's simply that … that nobody had told me.”

Gervase took a large handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose loudly.

“I say,” he said. “I have dropped a brick.” He stopped and began fiddling with the handkerchief. “Of course, if you don't want to go it's different,” he explained. “There isn't any reason for it if
you
don't want to go.”

“Oh, but there is,” Anna told him. “Her Ladyship is very angry with me.”

Gervase felt himself at last getting possession of the conversation. He tried to put on the smile that he knew was irresistible.

“Perhaps I could arrange things,” he said. “She may feel a bit differently about it all to-morrow.”

But Anna shook her head.

“It's very kind of you,” she said. “Very kind indeed. But it isn't so easy as all that. Really it isn't.”

“You mean about Lady Yarde.”

“No, it's about …”

“About your child,” Gervase said impetuously.

He saw the eyebrows slant higher again and the eyes open wider.

“So she told you about her too, did she?” she asked. “You must have discussed me for a very long time.”

“No, really, we didn't,” Gervase answered, as if trying to excuse himself. “It's just that it seemed so rotten for you. All I wanted was to be able to help you somehow.”

Anna turned away from him.

“
Why
do I want to cry whenever people are nice to me?” she asked herself. “It is so silly of me.”

But her voice was quite steady when she replied to him.

“You can't help me,” she said. “There isn't anybody can help me. It's simply that I want to go to see my little girl and Lady Yarde says that I can't. It is all as simple as that.”

“And you're set on seeing the kid?” he asked.

“Of course. I love her.”

There was an utter finality to the statement, as though it explained everything. Gervase was silent for a moment.

“You know,” he said. “that night of the dance. I never thought of you having a child of your own.”

“But you didn't know anything about me.”

“You were going to tell me. Remember?”

Anna shrugged her shoulders.

“I forget,” she said.

“Why does he go on talking to me?” she asked herself. “There isn't anything that he can do: it has all gone too far for that now.”

“Tell me something about the child?” Gervase persisted. “Is she like you?”

Anna smiled: it really seemed to be a happy smile this time.

“The nuns say so,” she answered. “She is very …”

“I know,” Gervase interrupted her: he was twisting up the ends of his moustache now. “Very pretty.”

He was using that cultivated smile of his again, and he felt that at last he was being successful. He had felt sure from the start that he would be able to break through that reserve of hers if only he went on trying. And Anna, he was delighted to see, was blushing.

“I don't care what you say,” she replied. “She
is
very pretty. She is the prettiest little girl I have ever seen.”

She was standing quite close to him as she said it and Gervase did what he had been wanting to do. He put his arms round her and kissed her.

“And so are you,” he said. “The prettiest thing I've ever seen.”

He felt so sure of himself as he did it that he was surprised when she struggled and broke away from him.

“You are a very impudent young man,” she said. “I want you to go away from me.”

She turned her back on him and began to walk in the direction of the house.

In a few hours' time his leave would be over and he would have gone away. And he hadn't seen Anna again. It was this that upset him: he had pledged so much on it. So, in the face of Lady Yarde's opposition, he persisted.

“But what harm would it do?” he asked. “It would make her happy and solve everything.”

Lady Yarde shook her head vigorously.

“It's unthinkable,” she said. “Whoever heard of having to send over to France simply to fetch a child that nobody wants anyway.”

“
She
wants it,” Gervase said pointedly.

“I'm quite sure it wouldn't be good for her,” Lady Yarde observed. “It would be bound to take her mind off her work.”

“Not half so much as worrying about the child if she's still over there. You see what that's led to?”

Lady Yarde slid the patience cards in front of her into an angry disordered pile.

“I don't see why you're worrying about it anyway,” she said. “It's a perfectly simple thing to get another governess. Someone in Knightsbridge sent me a long list of them only yesterday.”

Gervase paused and began playing with the ends of his moustache. He knew that his mother liked him that way, liked to be reminded of what a magnificent son she had.

“It's Delia I'm thinking of,” he said simply. “She was so happy with Anna”—he was conscious of a slight thrill of pleasure, of excitement simply in using her name. “She always seemed so miserable before.”

When Lady Yarde did not answer for a moment he knew that she was wavering: she usually rushed in with a reply almost before the other person had finished.

“I'll give the girl her due,” she said at last. “She did take a lot of trouble with Delia. They got on together beautifully.” She paused and seemed to be pondering something in her mind. “There's one thing I'm quite determined on,” she said, “and that is the child shan't come here.”