Let Me Alone (7 page)

She gave Anna self-confidence. This was what she wanted to do. For the moment this was her
métier,
this exaltation of the strange little creature who had come so near to losing the sense of her own value. As a goddess, she wanted to save Anna, to have her as a protégée: and as a woman she wanted her for a friend. With her mysterious feminine will she enveloped Anna most completely. She
had the most curious power in the world of making Anna feel confident and strong. She exalted her.

She convinced her of her own intelligence, and of the fact that as an intelligent being she was important. This gave Anna a satisfaction, a feeling of anchorage. She felt that never again could the nightmare come creeping back into her life. She was safe.

But the relations between the two of them were peculiar. On Anna’s side there was always a holding back, almost a trace of resentment. She distrusted that glorification of herself even while it gratified her. She felt that in some way she was being made soft. She was not standing on her own feet. It was the goddess-ship of Rachel that was exalting her for her own ends, almost making her into the victim. She rather resented the goddess aspect of Rachel: and her actual physical aspect, so lavish in its rich maturity, like a gorgeous, soft fruit. Rachel would touch her, would take her arm, or her small, cool hand, or stroke caressively her sleek, well-shaped head. And immediately she would be made uncomfortably conscious of the full, feminine body under the bright clothes, the soft, white-fleshed limbs, the rich female luxuriousness. It was as if some part of her were repelled, disgusted even, by the proximity of so much ripe, luscious femininity. She didn’t want to be touched.

She sat on the grass with her back to a low brick wall, looking up at the sprays of lilac that hung down almost touching her. Some of the florets were already wide open, like tiny purple butterflies resting there, but others were close-furled in their round buds. The open flowers looked curiously voluptuous with their small, sweet-scented, wide-spread purple petals beside the hard, dark, virginal buds.

‘I am like one of the buds, and Rachel is like a wide-open flower,’ thought Anna; and pulling off a floret, she sucked the sweet drop of honey through the tiny, delicate, silken tube.

‘Are you happy?’ asked Rachel, in her eager, musical voice.

She bent over Anna, looking into her with quick, bright hazel eyes, yearning over her. And her large, well-kept hand rested caressively, possessively, on Anna’s thin shoulder.

Anna felt a little repugnance for her; for the big, clever woman who had altered her life, the goddess-woman who had given her back the pride and beauty of herself to demand them again as a kind of sacrifice. She was determined that she would not allow herself to be made, even so very indefinably, into a victim. She would stand on her own feet. But it was not so easy. She wanted Rachel’s support; and Rachel wanted something from her. They seemed bound together.

A
NNA
took very little part in the collective life of Haddenham. The sports and team-games, all that elaborate system of struggling and competing and pseudo-manly activity that the other girls found so important, rather disgusted her. It really was rather horrible, all this ridiculous aping of masculinity. Useless and absurd and unpleasant. Why should girls wear themselves out in this feverish, unnatural struggle to imitate the physical pastimes of men! To Anna it simply wasn’t worth a single effort. Let the men go on playing their silly, brutal games, if that was what they wanted. But leave them alone in their stupidities, for heaven’s sake.

She would not take part in the degrading, pointless struggle. She would not compete with men on their ridiculous sports ground. And Rachel, with her profound womanliness, and her dignity, and her deep, intuitive understanding, she really agreed with Anna and was of the same opinion. But she would not openly oppose the system. She knew better than to expose herself uselessly to the brainless malevolence of a mad, man-aping world.

Anna would not join in the games. Only tennis she played, and played rather well, with a quick, erratic vigour of movement. It amused her to dash about the smooth court, swooping noiselessly on her rubber-soled shoes, lifting her arms with a sudden swoop upwards or down, violently, then careering on. She liked the sharp, clean,
stinging, singing sound when the ball was well hit, squarely, in the middle of the racquet; and the strong forward drive of the stiffened arm from the shoulder; and the sharp, dry, downward jerks. It was amusing. But only for a little while. She soon tired of the game, and got lazy and bored and wanted to wander off somewhere else.

She was a good player, though, on the whole, and so she was chosen to play in a tournament that was being held in the village. Six girls from the school were to play. It was rather an honour to be chosen.

Anna knew that the others didn’t want her to play; they didn’t want her to have the honour. It was their queer, school-boy code that compelled them to choose her ‘for the good of the school.’ She rather jeered at it in her heart, seeing all the smooth young faces set so stonily against her.

‘For goodness’ sake play up this afternoon,’ the games captain said to her. ‘Don’t get slack and lazy as you generally do. Show a little sporting spirit for once – if you can.’

She frowned angrily at Anna, irritated because she didn’t want her to play at all, really. But Anna smiled back, quite unconcerned, with an aggravating little air of superiority which she had acquired of late. As much as to say: ‘Of course I shan’t trouble to reply to your childish remarks. You are much too foolish a person to be taken seriously.’ Sporting spirit indeed!

Halfway through the afternoon, Rachel appeared in the stand to watch the tennis for a little while. Anna, who was winning at that moment, saw her, and waved her racquet smilingly.

It was a breach of etiquette. The stern sporting laws required that every player should be absorbed in the game, utterly, to the exclusion of any other thought. To take notice of onlookers was a crime.

Rachel felt the chilly weight of condemnation lowered upon Anna. A strange, silent emanation of disapproval, silent hostility, so foolish, yet so profound. All the girls watching, the young, foolish figures in their flannel blazers, looking at each other quickly with angry eyes, and quiet, deep, scornful disapproval. A certain unanimous condemnation in the normal hearts, a certain instinct of rejection in the embryo little women. Their condemnation was so foolish and unimportant. But at the same time, all normality was on their side, the good manners, the clean clothes and bodies, the orderly ways of life, all that immense structure of conventional mediocrity which runs the world, so fearsome and so powerful. The impulse of their disapproval was the impulse of the world’s hate. The spontaneous rejection by mediocrity of the exceptional; the horrible, world-determination to keep the norm, to reduce everything to an average dead-level, and destroy the exceptions.

Rachel looked at Anna vigorously swinging her racquet and running about the court: such a fine, graceful figure, moving so swift and as it seemed lonely in the sunlit space, with a peculiar quick beauty of physical being, and inside a strangeness, a profound, inevitable, hopeless isolation that was fatal to her and must destroy her.

And Rachel could not bear to think of her destruction. She could not bear to sit there watching that sunlit, youthful figure whom she loved, and to feel the destructive effluence, the silent, relentless hostility which came from those foolish girls whose hearts were the cruel, normal, mediocre hearts of the mediocre world.

She got up and went away, back to her study, and sat down by the open window. She pondered her own love for Anna. Was she harming her, perhaps? Did she do
wrong in keeping her so much to herself, away from the other girls, intensifying her singularity?

Who knows? But her love constrained her, and her love was very potent. She wanted to keep Anna to herself. There was nothing to be done.

Anna enjoyed herself and played better than the others. At the end of the afternoon, feeling sore, they all went off together and left her alone. She didn’t mind this in the least. She was used to it. And she wasn’t interested in the girls or their opinions. Their friendship would have bored her just as much as their animosity; it was all part of the same stupid, childish dreariness.

She went into the pavilion to change her shoes and put her racquet away. Here was another girl.

‘You and I seem to have been rather pointedly abandoned,’ she said to Anna, smiling with a hidden shyness.

‘Yes,’ said Anna, looking at her.

Sidney Reeve was about her own age, strong, dark, with short curly hair like a boy. Her eyes were bright, quick, with a glassy clearness almost amber-coloured, like the eyes of an animal. There was altogether a rather animal suggestion about her pointed face, but pleasant, the face of a very intelligent and sensitive animal. She was certainly no fool. And the irregularities of her face were rather pleasing: the curious slant of her black eyebrows, and the upward lift of her mouth. It gave her an air of detachment, as though she watched everything with a quizzical, slightly mocking expression.

‘How is it you’re not with the others?’ Anna was moved to ask.

‘You haven’t got quite the monopoly of unpopularity,’ Sidney answered, with the flicker of a one-sided smile.

There was something sharp and cool, refreshing about her. Anna was interested. Sidney could smile with keen young real amusement, and a spice of cynicism.

‘Come up to the village and have tea with me,’ Sidney suggested, suddenly, almost as if giving an order.

Her manner was perfectly assured; assertive even: but underneath was a sensitive shyness, a hint of deprecation.

‘Very well,’ Anna agreed.

They walked up the road together. Anna was slightly taller, more graceful altogether, more delicate. Sidney, with her cropped curly head and her short white tunic swinging over her sturdy knees, was like some foreign soldier youth. She moved with a steady buoyancy, but with just a trace of swagger, of conscious challenge. She was bold too: she led the way into the room where the other girls who had played in the tournament were sitting at tea with their friends, celebrating the occasion. The girls disliked her. A self-conscious movement of distaste passed over the youthful faces, a sneering look, an instinctive withdrawal. There were whispered comments ‘Sidney Reeve! Anna-Marie!’

Sidney strode on into the room, making for a corner table, taking no notice of anyone. She might have been miles away from any criticism; but all the time, Anna could tell that she was extremely, even painfully aware of the hostile faces, and yet somehow glorying in the situation.

They sat down and ordered their tea.

‘Did you enjoy the tennis?’ Sidney asked.

‘Yes, it was fun,’ said Anna.

‘But you’re not very interested in games, are you?’

‘No. I think they’re a waste of time. Pointless and boring.’

‘More boring than other things?’

‘Well – yes!’ said Anna, smiling.

Sidney too smiled. She spoke in a low, deep, rather gruff, rather stiff voice, but very intent, and her intelligent eyes rested upon Anna with a certain intensity. She was somewhat repressed by her surroundings, by the consciousness of the inimical faces in the background and her determination to be unaware of them. But there was a sort of urgency in her behaviour. She was trying to make some contact with Anna.

Anna liked her. She was interested and stimulated.

‘Why haven’t we known each other before?’ she asked.

Again the other girl smiled her sharp, one-sided smile, rather vinegary.

‘Well, it’s not exactly easy to know you. You’re usually so very obviously otherwise engaged.’

She spoke with sarcasm, not really bitter, but mocking; subtly, definitely derisive.

‘You mean with Rachel?’

‘Yes, with Rachel,’ she said, jeering a little, and accenting the name.

There was an uneasy pause. Anna was trembling on the verge of resentment. But for some reason she couldn’t really feel angry with Sidney and her peculiar mingling of effrontery and diffidence: her assurance and her naive, hidden, wistfulness.

‘Hadn’t you better go to her now?’ said Sidney ironically, her thin cheeks flushing. ‘She’ll be expecting you.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna, and instantly stood up. ‘I think I will go.’

Sidney watched her, with a bold and mocking stare. Then she smiled rather irresistibly, and Anna smiled back reluctant.

‘Good-bye for the moment,’ Anna said.

‘For the moment,’ repeated Sidney, still smiling.

She watched her across the room and until the door closed behind her.

Anna went off with a feeling of pleasure. Pleasure to be going back to Rachel. Pleasure to have got away from Sidney, and yet pleasure at having talked to her. Sidney was intriguing. But she made Anna feel uncomfortable. She had that bright, mocking cynicism that challenged her in some way. Sidney was irritating, almost aggressive; but also there was that curious
farouche
sort of nervousness about her. And her attractive, one-sided smile that you couldn’t quite trust in, and which promised so much; which, perhaps, was the token of a rare inward warmth. There was nothing easy about her. She was sharp, and stinging and stimulating and would need living up to; she would keep you on your mettle.

Anna felt again, as she had already felt, that Rachel was making her soft, almost victimising her. She was not standing on her own feet. And it seemed to her that Sidney, with her very quick amber eyes had discerned this and was mocking her.

Anna wanted to be friends with Sidney, but Rachel monopolized all her attention. She felt herself in a quandary. It was not easy to break away from Rachel. She did not really want to lose that warm, glorifying passion of tenderness the big, vivid woman was capable of. For her, Rachel was still the goddess, powerful, benevolent, full-limbed, mysterious with a strange power of exaltation and a luxuriant physical magic. Rachel was the goddess-woman to whom she owed her passionate loyalty and gratitude and devotion.