Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

When it was all over and the book had been signed, the whole company emerged again into the windy daylight.

It had cleared up a bit, the wind was harrying the clouds like an angry dog, a shred of blue sky suddenly appeared over their heads.

‘Happy is the bride whom the sun shines on!’ cried Lauretta gaily.

And sure enough, a chilly radiance came spilling down from the heavens, spilling palely over them as they stood. The half-stripped trees bent and strained and swung above them. It was Lauretta’s great moment. Her triumph. But the wedding guests had a sense of flatness as they moved off in groups, back to their cars. The wedding had been, for no very definable reason, something of a fiasco. A chilly sort of affair.

And the wedding-breakfast, or the lunch-party, or what ever you like to call it, with its cold lobster mayonnaise and coldly gleaming, pale wines, was not much better. Although it was all so expensive and conscientiously festal. Everyone felt secretly a little relieved when it was over.

And then the good-byes had to be got through. All the women kissed Anna. She had changed into her travelling clothes, and stood with Matthew at the front door, all in brown, looking rather like one of the lost brown leaves that were blowing about everywhere. There was a crowd, and a confusion of good wishes. Lauretta’s turn came last of all.

‘Good-bye!’ cried her girlish, trilling voice, for the last time. ‘Good-bye!’ She put her arms round Anna and kissed her, in her slightly theatrical way. She even managed to squeeze a tear from one of her bright eyes. There was a spark of real warmth in her heart, nevertheless.

Matthew looked on, rather obliterated. Anna stood still.

‘Come along, my dear,’ said Matthew, at the door of the car.

There was the beginning of an uncomfortable pause while everyone waited for Anna to make a move. Lauretta gave her the tiniest push. The girl went forward, gazing about with clouded, cold-grey eyes, like the sky: at one with the cold, unfriendly, uncongenial sky. For a moment she seemed quite lost. Then she got into the car and sat down. Matthew got in after her, the door banged, and they drove off in a thin keening of farewells.

They were to drive to London in a hired Daimler. Matthew did not possess a car of his own.

MATTHEW and Anna were spending their honeymoon in London. It was not at all the weather for the country. And besides, Anna still had some shopping to do for her tropical outfit.

Matthew had made all the arrangements in his rather fussy, rather officious way for them to stay at a queer little hotel in Jermyn Street that he knew. Outside, it looked undistinguished, and even somewhat shady, with its dingy paint, and its closely covered windows that were like so many eyes closing in a sly and possibly disreputable wink. But once inside, treading the thick, hot, patterned carpets, surrounded by the ugly, monumental furniture, immensely solid mahogany islands set in immense oceans of florid woolliness, you knew instinctively that you were in the very stronghold of respectability.

The place was a pure survival from the past, leading straight back to the pride of the Victorian era with its vast solidity, and its stuffiness, and its cumbersome gilt mirrors, and its strangely hot-seeming, heavy, plushy, everlasting materials. Reminiscent of old volumes of Punch. And the thickly-carpeted, elephantine staircase, winding up like the moss-grown coils of some comatose, terrific serpent, up to the unimaginable, fusty recesses of roof and attics.

A porter showed Anna and Matthew to their room, set down their hand-luggage, and departed. Silence descended. A peculiar stuffy, hot, discreet silence, intensified rather than lessened by the distant growl of traffic.

Anna looked round the room, examining the furniture, the immense wardrobe, rising sheer like the hull of a battleship, and the suggestive double-bed, not quite so large. The room was far too small for the furniture. Between the bed and the wardrobe there was scarcely any floor space. The door could only be opened with difficulty. Anna was a little dismayed. And she was like a person waking uneasily from a deep sleep. In the car she had been drowsy and vague. Now she awoke slowly to this hideous apartment, and Matthew smiling and smirking at her, a bit constrained, but thoroughly pleased with himself as usual. She was a little dismayed.

‘What a small room!’ she exclaimed, glancing up and down.

The smirk was intensified on Matthew’s face.

‘Plenty of room for us. We’ll be nice and cosy here,’ he said, smirking at her, and taking her hand.

Anna was repelled, and very much surprised. This coy attitude, this almost lewd expression, was the last thing she had expected. All her alarms, which Matthew’s apparent coldness had dispersed, came hastening back to her. Up to now he had simply not existed, physically. What if he were to become physically importunate? The thought of his smooth, lean body made her shudder.

‘No. We must get another room,’ said Anna sharply. She moved as if to go to the door, but Matthew held her fast. There she was, tethered to him by her reluctant hand. She felt angry and humiliated. ‘Let me go!’ came her voice, petulant.

He took no notice.

‘We shall do very well here, in this room. I want you close to me.’

Anna looked up at him. He stood obstinate, with his neat row of teeth, his eyes smiling but opaque.

Then she looked at the bed.

‘I shall get another room,’ she said coldly. But a slow red covered her face. It angered her like a betrayal, coming when her heart was cold with resentment. She was afraid she would cry.

‘Oh no, you won’t,’ said Matthew in his soft, stupid, gentle voice, so uncomprehending; but gentle as if she were a child. ‘You’ll stay here with me.’

She stiffened at his obtuseness. And as she stiffened, he put one arm round her, possessively, and kissed her. She felt the monkeyish, sinewy strength of his long, thin arm holding her with a certain conscious mastery, a certain deliberate disregard of her, as though she belonged to him. And he kissed her on the mouth, with relish, ignoring her resistance; also as if he owned her. He made her feel his predominance; the brainless, brute predominance of the husband. The triumph of pure brawn. He infuriated her. He lighted a flame of sheerest anger in her heart. She suffered shamefully at that moment. But in her heart, the black flame kindled, indestructible.

When he realeased her and moved away, his face was closed and smiling, but innocent, as though nothing had happened. Utterly unaware he seemed; it might really have been someone else who had embraced her. Distracting, the way the man had of stepping outside himself, of cutting clear away from his own behaviour. The naïve, rather winning look that came back to him between his enormities; some humility, some wistfulness in it. She could have forgiven him, if only he had not lighted the anger in her heart that burned up all clemency.

There was silence for some moments. He thought she had given in to him. He bent down and began to unfasten the luggage.

‘Won’t you unpack your things?’ he asked, glancing up at her.

She shook her head coldly.

‘Not yet. I’m tired. I shall rest a little.’ And she sat down by the wall.

Presently he went out of the room for a minute. This was her opportunity. Off she hurried, down the lethargic staircase, down to the stuffy little manager’s office, and demanded another room.

The manager, a pallid, saturnine elderly man, was in immediate opposition to Anna. No, there was nothing else available. Every room in the place was booked. There seemed to be a look of triumph in his eyes as he thus frustrated her. As though in some way he had joined forces with Matthew, against her. The inevitable male conspiracy against the female.