Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece

Suddenly the servant returned to say that D was at my disposal. But now I no longer wanted to see him, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I forced myself to stand up and follow the man into the room where my advisor sat at his desk. I don’t know why the sight of him sitting in his accustomed pose should have suggested to me the idea that he had not really been called out at all, but had been sitting there the whole time, keeping me waiting for some ulterior motive of his own; perhaps to produce in me just such a sensation of despair as I now experienced.

We shook hands, I sat down and began to speak, driving my sluggish tongue to frame words that seemed useless even before they were uttered. Was it my fancy that D listened less attentively than on previous occasions, fidgeting with his fountain pen or with the papers in front of him? It was not long before something in his attitude convinced me that he was thoroughly acquainted with the whole story of my letter of application and its sequel. No doubt the authorities had referred the matter to him — with what bias, with what implication? And now my indifferent mood changed to one of suspicion and alarm as I tried to guess what this intercommunication portended.

I heard myself advancing the old argument of inconvenience, explaining in hesitant tones that in order to spend less than an hour with him I must be nearly six hours on the double journey. And then I heard him answer that I should no longer have cause to complain of this tedious travelling, as he was just about to start on a holiday of indefinite length and would undertake no further work until his return.

If I felt despairing before you can imagine how this information affected me. Somehow I took leave of him, somehow found my way through the streets, somehow reached the train which carried me across the now sunless landscape.

How hard it is to sit at home with nothing to do but wait. To wait — the most difficult thing in the whole world. To wait — with no living soul in whom to confide one’s doubts, one’s fears, one’s relentless hopes. To wait — not knowing whether D’s words are to be construed into an official edict depriving me of all assistance, or whether he intends to take up my case again in the distant future, or whether the case is already concluded. To wait — only to wait — without even the final merciful deprivation of hope.

Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.

I was feeling very anxious and unhappy when I left D’s house, angry with myself and with him as well because he had refused to help me. It was quite natural that I should have gone to him in my distress. He certainly knows more than any living person about me and my affairs, he is a clever man whose judgment is to be trusted, and also, on account of his profession, he has special qualifications for advising on problems of this sort.

‘Why won’t you tell me what I ought to do?’ I asked him indignantly at the end of our interview. ‘Why can’t you give me a definite line of conduct and save me from all this suffering and uncertainty?’

‘That’s exactly what I don’t intend to do,’ he answered me. ‘The trouble with you is that you’re always avoiding responsibility. This is a case where you must act on your own initiative. I’m sorry if I appear unkind, but you must believe me when I say that it will do you far more good in the long run to see this through by yourself than blindly to follow outside advice — whether mine or anyone else’s…’

I was so hurt by D’s unexpected attitude that I believe I was thinking more about him than about my own trouble as I went out into the wintry London twilight. In my imagination I kept hearing his agreeable, soft, sympathetic voice, so out of keeping with the heartless words it was speaking, and seeing his dark-browed face which always vaguely reminded me of some other face I had seen long ago, I couldn’t remember quite where, perhaps in a painting or a newspaper photograph. I felt mortified at having asked him for a favour which he was unwilling to give. I was ashamed of having presumed too much on a friendship which might, all the time, have been a very one-sided affair. Quite possibly I had allowed my own wishes to delude me into mistaking that sympathetic manner of his for the sign of some warmth of feeling towards me personally. Now that I came to consider it, I could not recall a single occasion during our acquaintanceship when his behaviour had expressed anything more than the generalized benevolence of a humane, understanding and intelligent man. The idea of having made such a mistake was specially distressing to me because I am by nature very reserved and afraid of receiving rebuffs from the people around me. Now I felt that I had given myself away and that D must be despising me or laughing at me: though really I knew perfectly well that he understood the workings of the mind and heart too clearly to be guilty of that sort of cruelty.

Although these humiliating thoughts were far from pleasant, I clung to them as long as possible, actually exaggerating to myself my own recent mortification, as if my relations with D were of more importance than anything else in the world. But of course I couldn’t succeed in driving the real problem out of my head. It was there all the time, like a toothache which gradually grows more and more insistent until it finally drowns every other sensation.

What was I going to do about the interview at which I was shortly supposed to be present? The questions I had so desperately put to D and which he had refused to answer, now presented themselves to me with imperious urgency. Should I go to the hotel, as I had agreed to do, to meet my husband and the young woman whom he proposed to introduce into our home? Was I capable of accepting emotionally the situation to which, in discussion, I had already given an intellectual acceptance? With what smile, with what words, should I greet this stranger, younger, more beautiful, more fortunate than I? With what unnaturally hardened gaze should I observe glances, gestures, long familiar to my heart, directed towards a new recipient?

The recurring sequence of these questions, to which I seemed fundamentally incapable of replying — to which, indeed, I did not hope or expect to find any answers — began to assume by its very monotony a quality of horror and torment impossible to describe. I began to feel that if I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should suddenly become mad, scream, perpetrate some shocking act of violence in the open street. But worst of all was the knowledge that the laws of my temperament would forbid me even a relief of this kind; that I was inexorably imprisoned behind my own determination to display no emotion whatever.

I was cold and tired. I realized that I must have been walking for a long time without taking any notice of my direction. Now I saw that I was in a street which I did not know very well. Night had fallen, the lights glowed mistily through a thin haze. I looked at my watch and saw that the hour arranged for the interview had almost arrived.

No sooner had I discovered this than a change seemed to come over everything. It was as though, in some mysterious way, I had become the central point around which the night scene revolved. People walking on the pavement looked at me as they passed; some with pity, some with detached interest, some with more morbid curiosity. Some appeared to make small, concealed signs, but whether these were intended for warning or encouragement I could not be sure. The windows lighted or unlighted, were like eyes more or less piercing, but all focused upon me. The houses, the traffic, everything in sight, seemed to be watching to see what I would do.