Let Me Alone (20 page)

Anna glanced at Matthew. He took a brisk step forward to accompany her.

‘I’ll show her the room, mother,’ he said.

‘But I’m not a bit tired,’ said Anna. She did not want
to be alone with him, upstairs in the hushed emptiness of the strange house.

Mrs. Kavan smiled with queer, meaning looks.

‘Yes, you are tired; and because you are tired you are not feeling very happy,’ she said. Then, with slightly theatrical emphasis: ‘I
know
.’ She looked at Matthew, as if for confirmation, with an odd, important smile, suggesting hidden labyrinths of meaning.

‘Mother has second-sight,’ said Matthew proudly.

He smiled, and tilted his round head, but Anna saw that he was quite in earnest. She looked politely, somewhat bewildered, from one to the other.

‘I can read people’s hearts a little,’ said Mrs. Kavan, gazing upon her with significant, peculiar eyes.

Anna wanted to laugh; it sounded so funny. She hoped that Mrs. Kavan, for her own sake, would not peer too deep into this particular heart before her.

‘And do you always like what you see there?’ she asked brightly. For the life of her she couldn’t keep the little tang of mockery out of her voice.

The old lady stiffened at once. The smile went from her face. She stood stiff and disapproving.

‘No, not by any means,’ she pronounced acidly.

Anna felt that the pronouncement had been made against her. The two women looked at one another. There seemed to be a vista of inevitable hostility before them. Anna was depressed and a little disgusted at the prospect.

Matthew escorted her upstairs in silence. He was rather put out because she had not taken his mother’s psychic powers sufficiently seriously. The bedroom was big and cold and looked only half furnished. There was the ominous double bed. Anna was prepared for this.

‘I must have a room to myself,’ she said pointedly.

But Matthew, with a dissembling smile of false reasonableness on his face, was out to assert himself in his own home.

‘Really Anna,’ he said, ‘I think it’s time you gave up this childish whim.’

‘It’s not a whim,’ Anna said, stolid.

He ignored her.

‘I’ve made allowance for the fact that you are very young and inexperienced. I’ve made allowance for your natural shyness’ – strange how he seemed to relish the word ‘natural’ – ‘but now that you have got accustomed to our life together, I think it is time for you to begin to be more reasonable.’

‘What do you mean by being more reasonable?’ asked Anna, coolly, quietly, giving Matthew a straight look. Whilst he glassily stared at her, with accumulating resentment.

‘I mean that you should begin to be a wife to me.’ He fixed his blank blue eyes upon her.

‘No,’ she replied steadfastly. ‘I must have my own room.’

She watched Matthew’s face. The bully was coming up to the surface again. He was trembling with repressed anger. But the spell of chivalry was not quite worn through. It still held him, against his will. He did not want to be chivalrous. He wanted Anna. But still he had to restrain himself.

‘Be sensible!’ he said sharply. ‘My mother will think it so strange if we have separate rooms.’

It was queer to see the struggle behind his neat face – the bully against the gentle knight. Anna wondered which one would win.

‘I can’t help what your mother thinks,’ she retorted. ‘That’s your affair.’

There was a pause. While Matthew rose to magnanimity again.

‘Very well,’ he said, a trifle Christ-like, at last. ‘I’ll get a bed made up somewhere else.’

His tone of voice was so long-suffering, almost martyrized. It was laughable. The victory was with Sir Galahad, for the time being. But the hysterical, brow-beating bully was not far off. His turn would come along soon.

Matthew sighed in a loud, exaggerated fashion as he went out.

Anna sat down on the bed and laughed at that sigh. It sounded too absurd to her – so sanctimonious. The whole situation was simply farcical. She laughed aloud in the cold room. And at the same time, she thought of Sidney and of Oxford, and she wanted to cry. She grew quite hysterical up there by herself.

At supper, Mrs. Kavan was definitely estranged. No doubt on account of the extra room. Anna wondered what Matthew had said to her on the subject. Her mother-in-law eyed her coldly, across the table. And yet she was very affable. All the time her jewellery gleamed and clashed, her blue eyes sent out cold rays, she talked to the girl and praised her dress, and even flattered her a little. But underneath was estrangement.

And Matthew himself gazed at Anna continually, with a wistful expression. But she would not look back at him.

Anna had fallen into a little trance. She sat in front of her plate, and ate mechanically the queer odds and ends of food that were handed to her. What
was
she doing in this extraordinary household? The old lady talked and fidgeted and darted cold glances in her direction. And the
man, the husband, stared and stared with his reproachful, opaque eyes, and the aggrieved, holy-martyr look, so incongruous on his brown, blank face – like a sentimental ape. She felt a little hysterical. And lost – absolutely at sea.

At bedtime, Mrs. Kavan insisted on coming to her room with her.

‘You will be comfortable here, I hope,’ she said. There was a sudden deprecation in her voice. Her eyes showed a queer obseqiousness. She was almost apologetic. But still hostile and suspicious.

‘Oh, quite,’ said Anna, glancing round the cheerless apartment.

‘But what a big room for one little girl!’ Mrs. Kavan exclaimed, bringing the wheedling, playful, Irish intonation into her voice, rather saccharine. But with a sharp thorn of enmity behind.

‘I always sleep alone,’ said Anna, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. ‘I can’t bear sharing a room with anyone.’

‘Can’t you? Oh, I see. I see.’

Mrs. Kavan sounded a little flustered. She was flustered by Anna’s cold, unswerving grey eyes, with their undisguised glimmer of contempt. This girl, with her reserve of silent indifference, was rather beyond her. Anna seemed in some way fundamentally inimical to her, and to her son. An enemy, come by accident into their camp, and obscurely threatening them. With what threat she did not know.

‘Well,’ she said, smiling falsely-intimate, and staring keenly. ‘I hope you will be wonderfully happy. A happy marriage is the most precious thing in the world.’

She bent and pecked Anna on the cheek. Her chains
swung and jangled. The room was cold and gloomy, the bed had not been turned down. Anna started to fold back the coverlet.

‘Let me do that,’ cried Mrs. Kavan. ‘Don’t you bother.’ And she snatched the cotton spread and pulled it over the bedrail.

‘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.

V
ERY
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.