Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

His voice had the curious, slightly-affected intonation that touched some irritable nerve in her.

She went out into the street feeling numb. She was not at all sure what had happened to her. But dimly, remotely, she realized that a crisis of some sort was imminent, precipitated by the result of the interview.

And then, most confusingly, the personality of the young man himself loomed large, blotting out distant but more important issues. She could not get out of her mind his superior and supercilious muzzle. She heard the soft, insidious contemptuousness of Drummond’s voice drowning all other voices in her brain, even those of surpassing urgency. She felt herself bewildered — completely at sea. For she could not think.

A call out of the blue came to astonish her.

‘Anna! Anna-Marie!’

At first she hardly recognized the vivid, high-coloured face steering so unexpectedly into her preoccupation; Catherine Howard, flashing a brilliant smile at her under her smart black hat.

This sudden apparition from the past gave Anna the strangest feeling imaginable. All in a breath she was snatched out of the turmoil of present embarrassments and plunged back into the already half-forgotten surge of Haddenham life. Strange to find that she was no longer capable of recalling the emotions of those days. But she was not. Just for one second, a shade of the old resentment fell across her heart at the sight of the girl who had cost her the loss of Sidney and the summer happiness they might have enjoyed together. A flicker of ancient emotion stirred, but very dim and unimportant, very far away, dead before it was fully awake.

And then she was quite extraordinarily glad to see Catherine. It was an enormous relief to meet someone of her own period, someone who was interested in her as an individual human being, someone understanding. A vast relief came over her, making her talkative and almost expansive, an intoxication of relief. She really enjoyed talking to the bold, bright girl.

And Catherine seemed to grasp the situation in her comprehending, dashing, worldly way that took everything in its stride. She was ready with a laugh and the right word, and though she did not say very much, she had an amazing faculty for appearing sympathetic and understanding beyond words, opening her fine eyes wide and turning her head in a certain way — encouraging Anna to talk. There seemed to be no end to her interest and admiration and sympathy; yet really she had given no proof of them at all.

Anna felt happier. Amazing what a relief it was to talk to Catherine. She didn’t care how much she outraged her fundamental reticences and reserves. It was as though she took a deliberate delight in going against all her truest instincts. A little black dog of perversity sat on her shoulder and kept her unnaturally gay; a wild, febrile sort of hilarity, half pathetic, half harsh. Not at all her real self.

Catherine was a home student and had rooms in Beaumont Street. Anna floated off there with her, and sat on the edge of a chair while the other girl made coffee in a glass apparatus like a retort. A gay, hard look was on Anna’s face. But her heart was wounded. A blank unhappiness underlay her defiant gaiety. But she had to keep on laughing and talking. The little black dog on her shoulder saw to that.

It rather amazed her that she should be behaving in this way. She waited for her old proud, silent, somewhat secretive self to come back. But the black dog sat firm. Perhaps the soft, ingratiating voice of Drummond had put him there. Anyway, there he sat, steadily. She felt a little uneasy: as though her independence, her quiet self-sufficiency might suffer an affront.

Catherine liked the new, lively Anna.

‘You’re beautiful, you know, to-day,’ she said, smiling rather enigmatic, but looking into Anna’s eyes with a curious definite look of specific meaning. She seemed almost entranced.

Anna was pleased. The compliment deeply encouraged her. It had a deep significance, somehow, in her development, which she did not understand. But she stored it up carefully, feeling its importance; and was grateful to Catherine. She laughed, and looked out of the corners of her eyes in a way that was strange to her.

She expected the strange brightness to vanish as she drew near to Blue Hills. And yes, to a certain extent it did leave her. But something hard and reckless still remained, almost a sort of braggadocio. She walked into the house sprightlily and boldly, swinging her arms a little. She didn’t care. And yet, all the time, her heart was sore.

Lauretta was angry when she heard that the poems would not be published. It seemed as though Anna were deliberately trying her. Her pretty, soft face went blank with exasperation.

‘You have made us both look ridiculous,’ she declared, staring at Anna with hard, contracted eyes of extreme irritation. ‘Everybody has heard about the poems. What am I to tell them now?’

‘I asked you not to talk to people about me,’ Anna said.

There was a cold note, like disgust, in her voice. She was defying Lauretta.

‘So all this talk of your cleverness has been so much ado about nothing,’ taunted Lauretta, her nostrils quivering in a sneer.

Anna did not reply. She made a slight motion with her shoulders, as if to turn away. It was so irritating that Lauretta almost struck her.

‘I don’t believe you are clever at all!’ she cried with a shrill laugh. ‘I’ve only got Rachel Fielding’s word for it, after all. I’ve seen no sign of it. You’ve behaved like a little fool ever since you’ve been here — a conceited, opinionated, ill-natured little fool!’

She was rather ashamed of her rudeness, her lack of restraint. But the curious, calm insolence which had suddenly come out in the girl was quite intolerable to her; it provoked her beyond all reason.

‘You’d better take care,’ she went on, agitated. ‘If you want me to send you to Oxford, you’d better be careful. Why should I keep on paying for you to do as you want? Paying and paying, and getting no return, while you take it all for granted, as your right, and don’t give me the least consideration. And now I haven’t even the satisfaction of thinking you clever.’

Lauretta stood rigid, with the tenseness of an ageing, angry woman who feels her power slipping away. She believed that Anna was defying her. And yet she could not control her, or even punish her.

Anna was indeed in a state of pure defiance. But at this last threat she felt some of her confidence ebbing, the rather fictitious recklessness began to leave her. She trembled a little, but still the hard, bright look stayed like a glaze on her face.

‘Don’t you mean to pay for me to go to Oxford then?’ she asked.

She looked queerly, even impudently, at her aunt; as if deriding her.

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Lauretta coldly. ‘It depends entirely on your behaviour.’

And she went away in frozen, outraged dignity.

Anna smiled to herself, brightly and contemptuously. But her heart trembled in fear and distress, trembling on the edge of nightmare.

In the days that followed her interview with Drummond, she went on unobtrusively, subdued. She was quiet, tractable, reserved. The strange mood of sardonic gaiety had quite departed. But underneath her compliant exterior, she was coldly hostile and remote, set cold in resentment and enmity. There was no possible rapprochement between her and Lauretta. It was a complete deadlock. Each knew the resistance, the opposition that ran under the surface of their relations. Yet each remained cautiously amicable, treating the other with a semblance of consideration.

Anna was becoming tired, fear-ridden. A harassed look was coming into her face. The fear of not getting away, the fear that Lauretta would refuse to send her to Oxford, was really growing upon her. There was a dreadful, timeless futility in the life of Blue Hills. It was like a great, aimless machine that went on for ever and ever, swinging round and round in a terrible, clattering swoop of nothingness. Well might one be caught up in it, almost unawares, and swung on, helplessly, hopelessly, in the vacant orbit. A panic was beginning to overcome her; the panic fear that she might not be able to get away.