Let Me Alone (21 page)

‘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 said, 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.

In sight of the gay shops, a sudden resolve came to her. She bought a small travelling case and things for the night, took a taxi, and drove to a quiet hotel where once, for some reason, she had stayed with Rachel Fielding. She engaged one of their best rooms, one with a private bath. She did not think at all, but at the very bottom of her mind, like a stone, lay the knowledge that she could never go back to River House. She did not examine it, or notice it particularly: but all the time, as she busied herself with the hot water and with her hair and clothes and complexion, this certainty lay like a small weight, stony, sunk to the bottom of her consciousness.

Having had no tea, she was hungry, and went early to dinner. The bright table, the good food, the efficient service of this meal, in the preparation of which she had taken no part, all gave her pleasure. She ate slowly, with deliberate enjoyment, appreciating each detail.

Once the thought of the evening meal at River House
came to her. She remembered the tough Welsh-rarebit, or the watery macaroni, or the poached eggs, or the scraps left over from mid-day, which usually composed it. Then the whole thing passed from her mind. She would not think of it again.

After dinner she debated whether to go out. But it was wet and cheerless. So she sat in an armchair in the lounge, near the big fire, looking at illustrated papers. She felt strangely peaceful and content. When anyone spoke to her, the waiter or the maid, she answered pleasantly, with a mildly smiling face, quiet but almost gay. At ten o’clock she went to bed.

In her bath she began to think of Sidney, who had left Haddenham and was now living with a woman friend who owned a kennel of spaniels, somewhere in the Salisbury Plain region. Sidney wanted to start dog-breeding on her own account. Some letters, short and unsatisfactory, had come from her since Anna’s marriage. Their relationship seemed to have come to an end; though no decisive deathblow had been struck. Now Anna had an impulse towards her again. She must see her, talk to her. The remembrance of Sidney’s affection came back to warm her. Together with the unreasoning faith she had put in the other girl. Once more she felt that Sidney could be her salvation – if she chose.

As she got into bed she continued to think warmly of Sidney. She would go to her the very next day.

Anna slept soundly and well. In the morning, she woke up warm and comfortable and happy. What happiness to be quite alone in a room which no one had the right to enter uninvited! What happiness simply to be free! Everything pleased and delighted her. She took a simple, childlike pleasure in the soft carpet, the clean roughness of
the towel on her body, the wintry sunshine outside the windows. Her face seemed to grow softer, and rounder, as she dressed, more innocent. Her mouth took on a gentle, bland curve, half smiling to itself. And she was going to Sidney.

She would not think of Matthew or of River House. All the time, on the floor of her consciousness, lay the small stony weight that stood for these unpleasant things. But she did not attend to it. Her thoughts would not turn that way. Like a string of ants circumventing an obstacle, her thoughts circled round that stone, calmly ignoring it. She did not think of the future, or of anything at all far away. It seemed that her mind would only consent to occupy itself with immediate things; her breakfast, her appearance, the coming journey to Sidney.

She made no effort: but everything arranged itself as if by magic. No bother, no delay, not a single hitch. Soon she was in the train, hurrying through the country again. Though she scarcely knew how she had left the hotel.