Let Me Alone (25 page)

‘I love it!’ said Anna, in a low, clear voice. ‘I love it!’

He saw her face bright and hard in the sun, and he heard her voice, clear and cold, like the small waves breaking on the shore. He understood nothing. But now she challenged him, she wanted to force him to submit to her mood.

‘Don’t you think it beautiful?’ she asked him, in a cold voice, like a small wave breaking. There was a touch of devilment in it.

‘Not so beautiful as England,’ he answered, hostile and rather spiteful.

‘Oh – England!’ she cried, with a careless derision that stung him. ‘You and your England!’

It enraged him to hear her sneer like that, at the things that were precious to him. It was as if she stripped the clothes from his back, leaving him ridiculous and shamed.

‘England
is
beautiful,’ he answered, with heat. The
foolish blind look of anger was on his face, like a vicious animal that would hurt if it knew how to reach its tormentor. But Anna was safely out of reach, behind the bars.

‘Perhaps it is. But where can you find it? It’s all covered up with hideous towns, and main-roads, and squalid little villas, and petrol-pumps and machines. And I hate the horrible, unhealthy people everywhere, with their tinned food and wireless sets and newspapers and cinemas and cheap cars. All so ugly. And drab and paltry. I hate them all. Sham people in an imitation country.’

Her eyes stared at him coldly, he felt almost afraid. Just for a moment he saw her coldness, he saw the unyielding hardness that was in her, the unchanging remoteness; even cruelty. Not a personal, deliberate cruelty, but that much more devastating cruelty that comes from indifference, from sheer, absolute, deadly carelessness, the ultimate affront. But then his preserving insentience came back to stupify him, make him stupid. He saw nothing any more. Anna was his wife, his enviable possession, a graceful girl who attracted him, and whom he meant to keep to himself, for his own personal enjoyment. That was all he wished to see.

And Anna saw what was in his mind. The bright complacency of possession showed in his eyes. She turned away from him in disgust to the sun and the vineyards and the blue sea. She disregarded him entirely, thrusting him out of her way.

They left the car and walked about in the village. It was brown and dirty-looking, the streets were narrow and rather squalid with fish-nets and the debris of fishing everywhere. There was a strong smell of fish. And the coloured boats were lying in close to the quay. The sun
was in the sky and on the water, the air was sparkling. Fishermen stood loungingly, indolently about, boys with bare feet, or coloured, tattered espadrilles, like bedroom slippers, ran and shouted and stared. The people were brown-skinned southerners.

Anna found it delicious, and she was happy. But the thing that pleased her most was when, climbing up a little above the village, she saw the vineyards and the olives and the mountain slopes behind all swimming and golden and fantastic in the sunshine, expanded under the deep blue sky.

She felt that she would like to stay there for ever.

‘I wish we were going to live here,’ she said, her face glowing and open. ‘It is so lovely.’

A shaft of resentment penetrated Matthew’s heart. She seemed to ignore him and all his world. He wanted to assert himself.

‘The East is more wonderful,’ he said. And added, rather plaintive: ‘You will like that, too, won’t you?’

‘Yes, I shall like to see it,’ she answered. ‘But this is a place to live in.’

That was how she thought of the East; as a place to visit. But when she thought of settling down there, of living there permanently, her mind went blank and would not function. She simply could not think of it in that way.

At last it was time to go. The sun was falling towards the sea, shadows were creeping on the mountain slopes. Anna slipped off alone. She could not leave the place just yet. It was friendly and delightful to her. She could not understand how Matthew saw only the squalor and the fishes’ heads lying about. To her there was beauty in the steep houses, unevenly roofed, against the hillsides, very subtle and appealing.

She came to a path, steep, stony, and narrow, a sort of mule-track, between stone walls. One wall was in deep shadow, but the other still caught the sun and glowed yellowly. Small brown lizards were flicking and darting between the stones. On one side were houses, falling below the level of the track; above the other wall the grey heads of olives were appearing.

Anna climbed on the stones, and looked over at the olive grove. It was still and lovely, with the ancient, knotted trunks, weird-looking, standing strangely in their own purplish twilight, like old ghosts upon earth. The pale, dry grass grew up close to the exposed, gnarled roots of the trees. And there were the leaves up above, so dry and delicate, hanging in ashen showers, light as ashes, and much brighter, and silvery, tarnished-silvery like a dissolving storm-cloud, making a mysterious, pale cloudiness of their own in the upper air. The beautiful, ancient olive trees, mysterious and age-old, they had stood there for ever and ever. Nothing could be more poignant, like an apparition from Genesis.

She saw a young man sketching under the trees, sitting on a stone, half-turned from her, dipping and poising his brush. He looked intent, and seemed to be working quickly. The light changed from moment to moment.

Anna’s clear eyes, lingering on him, watched his profile tilted above the paper. The young man was thin, and looked elegant and rather well-bred and intelligent. He had the look of a certain type of young artist – careless, engaging, with a touch of the poseur, but amiable, very. Anna took him all in, even to the tip of his rather high, rather fine nose. But he was out of the picture. Resenting the intrusion of a human figure upon the solitary perfection of the place, Anna moved off to Matthew and the waiting car.

On subsequent days they drove also, to Bandol and Sanary, and places farther down the coast: La Ciotat with the strange, stark hulls of half-built ships sheering up in the curved harbour. But to Cassis they did not go again.

It was Anna who wanted the drives. Matthew really disliked them. He was so unutterably opposed to everything – opposed to the vineyards, the mountains, opposed to Anna’s self-sufficient enjoyment. He hated the spruce little Frenchman who drove the car: the way he jumped out so assiduously to open the door for Anna, and the way he sometimes turned round while they were driving, turning his sunburnt, plump cheeks and his small black moustache to smile at Anna, confidentially, as though they were in league together. Poor Matthew felt horribly out of it. And he hated the French people, the peasants and the little townspeople, whom he saw about. He couldn’t abide their casual, unhurried way of living. It roused a subterranean anger in him to watch them sauntering and lounging and sitting round little tables in the sun. They had no
right
to take life so easily. Even when they appeared to be busy or working hard in the fields, it was all a sort of game – just playing at work. So it seemed to Matthew. And at the bottom of his heart an angry resentment came; because these people seemed so ‘happy,’ in a way which he and his conscientious kind could never, never understand.

The day before the boat sailed, he met in the Cannebière some acquaintances, a Mr. and Mrs. Brett, who were also going to travel on the
Henzada.
It was an enormous relief to him to see them. It was really rather pathetic the way he cottoned to the quite insignificant pair, and the way all three of them clung together like drowning swimmers in
this sea of foreignness. They seemed to unite at once in a triangular bond of opposition – with Anna standing outside. The Bretts were kindly disposed towards her. They wanted to include her in the bond. But when they saw that she would not be included, they disapproved. They went their own way – with Matthew – and Anna went hers. She turned away from the uninteresting, middle-aged couple and went out alone.

She walked to the garage and found the trim little driver. And set out with him in the snub-nosed Renault to have a last look at Cassis.

It was fine, with the lightest, most delicate sunshine, like early summer, and a haze over the mountains. But the breeze came cold from the sea, to the pine-trees and the changing, cloud-pale olives. The olives were always changing. In stillness they were all grey shadow, but quickly the sharp breath of the sea wind came to blow them into tremulous, smoky, silver fires.

Anna sat in the jolting car and looked about. It pleased her to be sitting there by herself behind the little French driver. From the back of his head, a sort of light-hearted French gallantry seemed to extend towards her; as though in an admiring, deferential, quite respectful, but not very serious way, he had made himself responsible for her welfare. She smiled to herself, feeling this.

At Cassis he skipped out with alacrity to open the door, and smiled at her with the rather precocious, rather impudent admiration that always amused her. His smallish black eyes rolling gaily, and an exaggerated, comic-opera devotion on his plump face, as though he would die for her. But she left him at the cafe and walked up to the olive grove alone.

She would not admit that she was thinking of the young
artist; but when she saw him under the trees she was not very surprised. She looked down the vista of tree boles and dim grass, and saw him sitting on a stone against the wall, bare-headed and in a cardigan, dabbing away with his pointed brush. She knew him at once by his high, thin nose. And, although she could not see him very distinctly because of the leaves and the branches, she saw something that attracted her in him. His elegance, his youthfulness, something careless and a trifle thrilling. She was glad to get this second glimpse of him.

She walked towards him, over the short, dry grass. He looked up and saw her. She smiled in a shining, subtle fashion, changing her remote, coldly observant face.

‘May I see the picture?’ she asked, in French.

He curved his rather pale lips in an answering smile, and held out the sketch at arm’s length, so that she might look at it.

‘Is it finished?’ said Anna.

The young man looked up at her, and nodded, smiling. He was a handsome fellow, with a rather aristocratic, narrow face, and with a well-balanced appearance, graceful and debonair, and rather informal. Anna was pleased by the gay, mischievous look in his large, bold eyes. The pale, flexible curve of his mouth made him seem like a satyr to her. She looked at him inquiringly, waiting for his voice. But he only went on smiling his odd, wide, satyr’s smile.

She looked away at the sketch, which was somewhat wild and extravagant, with a great singing of blues and yellows. Anna knew nothing of painting. But he seemed to have caught a little of the day’s spirit in the strong tones.

‘I don’t know if it’s good. But I like it,’ she said.

Still he did not speak until her eyes compelled him. Then:

‘It is not very good,’ he said, rather stiltedly, to answer her.

‘You’re English!’ she cried, a little shrill with astonishment. And she watched the remarkable, pale smile growing on his mouth. It rather thrilled her to see it. His eyes twinkled with mischievous, wayward warmth, engaging: but his mouth was somehow thrilling to her.

‘Aren’t you?’ she persisted.

His eyes were joining now in the irresponsible, satiric smile. He tilted his face in a strange way, all glimmering in the pale grin.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘How extraordinary!’ she cried.

He swung his body from the waist, so lithe and shapely in the close-fitting woollen cardigan.

‘Why?’ he asked, looking up to her.

‘I should never have taken you for an Englishman,’ she said.

She intended a compliment; and so he seemed to understand, for his white teeth flashed in a grin of acknowledgement, sensitive and quick. Exciting to be understood, for a change.

Anna felt as though she were standing on the edge of time. Here she was in the silent, peaceful olive grove, under the shadowy trees. And to-morrow she would be utterly gone. Into this sequestered timelessness, where even the ancient olive trees merged unobtrusive shadows in a general shade, no worldly responsibility or consequence could penetrate. There was no future.

‘This is my last day on earth,’ she said slowly.

‘Mine too,’ he answered.

She looked at him, startled. How could he be so quick to understand her mood? It was uncanny.

‘And which is your next destination? Heaven – or the other one?’ He dropped his eyes suggestively to the ground in his careless, amused fashion.

‘Decidedly not heaven,’ she laughed. ‘A much hotter region. The tropics, in fact.’

‘Really? That is most intriguing.’ His supple body swung forward from the hips, towards her, his face peered at her intently, in a flicker of eager interest, saturnine. ‘I’m going to the tropics, too. To Ceylon. Sailing tomorrow.’ His eyes twinkled and dilated like an animal’s.

‘Are you – really? To-morrow?’ Anna half-closed her eyes and looked at him vaguely, as if she were not quite sure he was actually there.

‘Yes. On the
Henzada,’
he said, standing up, and tilting his face with strange, suggestive mischievousness at her.

‘The
Henzada
is my boat –’ her voice was full of remote wonder.

He came closer and smiled his disturbing smile, under the fine, arched nose.

‘I knew it! I knew we had to know each other.’

He flashed a little look of mocking triumph, standing with head drawn back, a trifle affected, very blithe and winsome in his casual style.

The sun was setting. A slow red fume was blowing across the west, a fiery smoke against the duskier smoke-blue of the darkening sky. Anna was excited and gay. She knew that the young man found her attractive. His name, he told her, was Rex Findlay.

T
HE
Henzada
was sailing at mid-day. Passengers must be aboard an hour or so earlier. Anna got a shock when she saw the boat lying there in the midst of the chaos of the docks. Such a wretched-looking little tub of a one-funnelled boat, it seemed scarcely larger than a channel steamer. She couldn’t believe that she was to travel for three solid weeks, day and night, in
that.
But when they got on board, and she saw the clean young stewards and the ship’s officers, quite efficient looking, she felt a bit reassured. There was quite a professional, sea-going orderliness and smartness about the men, though the boat itself was anything but up-to-date.