Anna Kavan - The Parson

He was growing colder and colder, but he still didn’t move, weariness and discomfort mingling in one vast, all-embracing grievance, heavily tinged with self-pity. Surely he was at least entitled to the privacy of his own room. Longing to shut himself in there and go to sleep, he dimly saw himself as being like some hunted animal, persecuted by men and by its own kind, wanting only to crawl into its lair, unmolested and unobserved.

*

A moment later, the back door opened, releasing a stream of yellow light, not quite bright enough to reach across the courtyard to where he was standing.

‘Oswald?’

The young man heard his sister’s voice call his name, but, in his abnormal state, saw no necessity to answer — she belonged to the hostile conspiracy against him. In silence he watched her looking round, not seeing him yet, peering from inside the door, evidently reluctant to come out into the cold in her flimsy, short-sleeved dress. It was one she often wore in the evenings, with a full skirt and a flowery pattern of roses. He had seen it dozens of times without taking much notice, and had no idea why it now inspired in him an irrational annoyance. That she changed only at night because the concession to gentility pleased their mother didn’t affect his irritation at seeing the big, quiet, serious girl wearing a dress more suited to somebody frivolous and lively.

Why can’t she see she’s just making herself ridiculous? he thought, as if this was why he didn’t attempt to communicate with her. But then a more natural impulse made him step forward, moving his chilled body with difficulty, his legs stiff, his feet clattering on the cobbles like lumps of iron.

‘So it’s you.’ Vera’s voice sounded both curious and censorious. ‘What are you doing out here? Why don’t you come indoors?’

He could tell that, even before she’d really seen him, she knew something was wrong, and he longed to get into the house without having to talk to her. But her tall figure in the absurd, full, flowery dress almost filled the doorway and left him no room to pass. Still locked in a silence too difficult to break, he advanced into the light and, planting himself in front of her, stood there without opening his mouth: while she stared at him in amazement, exclaiming, ‘Heavens! What’s happened to you? Has there been an accident?’

To Oswald, her gaze seemed to jump out of her eyes — he could feel it running all over him from head to foot, investigating, with eager stealth and speed, every defect in his appearance, noting it in some invisible inventory, from which she would later deduce the whole story of his adventures. Her furtive, avid manner of conducting this swift examination was immediately, immensely repulsive to him. To avoid looking at her, he lowered his own eyes to the cobbles; which at once became identical mounds of sand, strongly lit on one side by theatrical sunset light, in a desert where he was wandering, nameless and lost. Then he was astonished to see, in a trough of darkness between two of the dunes, a tuft of dry, withered grass growing; and at once he was himself again, everything sprang back into its true perspective.

But what on earth had gone wrong with him? Why was he seeing things as they were not? He felt, for a second, really alarmed by his alien thoughts and illusions, which seemed outside his control and liable, at any moment, to escape from his skull (if they hadn’t done so already) in the form of actions equally uncontrollable. The shock made him pull himself together. When Vera asked again, ‘What’t the matter? What’s happened to you?’ he replied clearly and firmly: ‘Nothing. Nothing’s happened. Except that I slipped and fell down…’

There was an infinitesimal pause, during which he realized that he couldn’t possibly hope to get off so lightly. He would have to say something more, offer an explanation.

‘You know what the place is like inside,’ he said with difficulty, dangerously skirting the fringe of forgotten events. ‘How dark and slippery it is…’

Closer than this he dared not go, already feeling the heave of some intolerable thing, struggling to break through into consciousness. Clenching his fists with the effort of not knowing what it was, he hurried on. ‘I don’t want Mother to see me like this.’ His sensation was of having come to the very edge of a frightful precipice, from which he’d stepped back only just in time. Thinking more of this than the words, he’d already said, ‘After all the fuss this morning she’s bound to imagine the worst’, before the remembered echo of his own brutal voice speaking then silenced him abruptly. It was hopeless to expect Vera’s co-operation. She always had been against him, and now he’d given her real cause for resentment.

The last thing he expected was to hear her say kindly, ‘You look dead tired. Why not go straight up to your room? I’ll keep Mother out of the way and bring you something to eat after she’s gone to bed.’

He glanced at her with instinctive distrust but softened at once, seeing on her face a forgotten look of secret complicity, with which as children they used to help one another out of their various scrapes, in league together against adult authority. It brought him a sudden swift warmth, a glimpse of the golden glow of perpetual sunshine lighting that happy childhood world he had shared with her.

‘Thanks, V. That’s jolly decent of you.’ Without knowing it, he fell automatically into the idiom of that innocent, carefree, lost period; immeasureably more lost to him than yesterday — the thought shot, cometlike, through his head, trailing dangers at which he refused to look. He looked at his sister instead, and, noticing the goose-flesh of her bare arms, was momentarily touched.

But childhood’s radiance was already fading. And now her hungry, expectant glance extinguished it altogether and alienated him afresh. Though she asked no questions, her curiosity was to be felt, all the more noticeable because it came out of her silence and sympathy. Her eyes kept turning towards him, full of hateful inquisitiveness, and of a mute urgent appeal of some sort, incomprehensible to him — it was no concern of his. All that concerned him was their curiosity, which seemed to delve into him, searching about for his secrets in a way that was dangerous and repulsive, though he was too tired to know just where the danger lay.

Becoming exasperated in his exhaustion, with a sense of giving up the struggle, he thought, I simply can’t stand those flowers another second, allowing his irritation to swamp everything. Then he pushed past the offending dress and went into the house, through which he could have found his way blindfold, hurrying up the back stairs in the dark, and along the familiar passages to his room, where he thankfully shut himself in.

The large, cold, bare room, though it had always been his, was oddly impersonal, scrupulously clean and tidy, his few simple possessions grouped neatly and with a sort of unconscious pathos, as if ready for instant departure from a temporary encampment, where he would not stay long enough to justify any attempt at comfort.

It was the sanctuary for which he had longed, and for a moment its severe plainness had a restorative effect. But this soon wore off, and he became aware that something was wrong, making him restless and uneasy. He’d shut out of his mind the obscure threat of Vera’s curiosity as he shut the door; but something infinitely more disturbing had entered with him. Though he didn’t know what it was, deep within him his unacknowledged shame was making itself felt — suddenly the austerity of the room seemed to reproach him. He felt he defiled it in his filthy clothes. With loathing, he tore them off, bundled them up together.

But then he didn’t know what to do with them, he was at a loss. His instinct was to destroy the things; he’d have liked to push them into the kitchen stove. But he was afraid of meeting his mother or sister if he left his room, and that there would be more questions. As he stood there in his pyjamas, holding the bundle, his fair, fine, disordered hair made him look a boy, his face touchingly young, tired and bewildered.