Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

But Anna was quite determined. She would have another room. She would take no denial. The heat of anger kept her inflexible. She would not go away.

The manager suddenly capitulated: he had an empty suite on the second floor. He told her vindictively that it was very expensive. She asked the price and agreed to pay it. If it had been fifty pounds a night she would not have hesitated. She went upstairs with two servants to collect the luggage: she had everything taken to the new suite: she spread things over the rooms: and here she meant to stick. When Matthew appeared, she had already hastily unpacked her dressing-case. The room was littered with garments.

She felt reckless and excited. Her emotions were almost pleasurable. Matthew looked on, very annoyed, from the doorway.

‘I have changed the rooms,’ she cried, challenging.

‘So I see,’ said Matthew.

Matthew prided himself on his arrangements. He was an inveterate organizer, always planning ahead, most conscientious, albeit somewhat inefficient. He hated to have his plans disarranged.

‘Don’t you like this better?’ asked Anna.

He stared disapprovingly without answering. She wondered if he was going to make a scene.

‘It must be very expensive,’ he said.

Anna told him the price.

‘Ridiculous! We can’t possibly afford it,’ he said, bad-tempered and rather shrewish, as he often was about money matters.

‘I’ll pay the bill myself,’ said Anna, brightly contemptuous.

Matthew stared with bright, blue, disapproving eyes at the flushed, excited, determined face of the girl. He had a censorious look, which Anna did not recognize, rather mean and distrustful. Then it vanished, and the neat smile took its place. Once more she felt the exudation of his peculiar attention — so extraordinary, somehow, but with real warm-heartedness underneath.

‘We mustn’t quarrel on our wedding-day,’ he said, coming near and smiling into her face.

She knew he thought he was behaving generously.

Their first dinner together passed off fairly well. Anna was preoccupied with the other diners — they were so totally different from any collection of people she had ever seen. They were all very respectable — yes, overwhelmingly respectable; and aristocratic-looking most of them. But not attractively aristocratic. Most of the women were oldish and badly dressed. And then most of them had those haughty, heavy-jowled faces which have no humanity at all. In that museum-like show-case of ancient gentility and obsolete deportment, it was the heavy, cold, aged, repressive faces which dominated, while the scattered youthful faces looked dismal and negative, overshadowed. It was strangely inappropriate for Anna, so young and vivid and direct, to find herself sitting in the dry, airless, stagnant atmosphere of the ugly past, where no honesty could possibly draw breath.

‘What extraordinary people,’ she said to Matthew. ‘And how impressive! All the women look like dowager duchesses.’

‘Most of them are,’ he said, with a distant, surprising satisfaction in his tone.

‘Is that why you come here?’ she asked, teasing him.

He bridled in the most curious way, and cocked his bright blue eyes at her, complacent and prim.

‘Well, one likes to be among decent people; when one can,’ he said.

And the astonishing thing was that he was quite sincere. Anna became silent with astonishment. Food for consideration here, indeed.

After dinner they went to the theatre. Matthew had taken seats for a musical comedy; quite a popular show, but not the show of the moment. And the seats were quite good seats, but not the best. Fourth or fifth row of the stalls they were; one could see the stage pretty well. Anna, long accustomed to Lauretta’s lavishness in matters of this kind, was a little surprised. But in a dim, indeterminate way. The surprise was not strong enough to rise to the surface of her mind.

She hardly noticed the music, or the antics on the stage. She was tired and effaced. Things seemed dream-like to her. It was like a dream to be sitting in the hot, crowded theatre beside Matthew. It was queer to have him draw her attention to this or that. She tried to be polite and to take an interest. But her brain was drowsy.

All this time Matthew was reassuringly restrained. There was no sign of a physical advance, no return of the horrible, lewd smirk to his face. True, his sharp teeth flashed disquietingly now and then in her direction; but always under the chastening curb of the customary neat smile. She began to feel relieved.

But afterwards, back in the hotel, it was a different matter. As soon as the door was closed upon them, he kissed Anna on the cheek, putting his arms round her clumsily.

‘At last I’ve got you to myself,’ he said. ‘All to myself.’

With a strange, determined pressure, like the pull of a strong river current upon a swimmer, he tried to draw her down, on to his knee.

She twisted herself out of his grip, feeling weak and exhausted, as though she were really struggling against a river, and hurriedly began to talk about the theatre. The young man stirred uneasily, and stared in an unseeing way as he answered.

Their suite consisted of three rooms and a bathroom. A sitting-room with an uncomfortable, tightly-stuffed sofa and two plushy armchairs; then the bedroom opening out of it, and beyond that another room, very cramped and closet-like: but it had a bed in it. The bathroom was down a bit of a passage at the end.

They talked for a few minutes constrainedly. Someone had put some imitation flowers, carnations, in a ricketty silver vase on the table. The greenish table-cloth had a fringe of soft plush balls. There was an atmosphere of awkwardness and constraint. Matthew grew stiffer, his smile more meaningless, as the minutes passed, his voice became rather uneven.

‘Let’s go to bed now,’ he said. ‘It’s late. And I want to have you near me. Really to have you at last.’ His blue eyes stared with a kind of blank triumph at Anna. He stood up. ‘Come along, my dear. Come to bed.’

He opened the bedroom door. Behind him, she could see his pyjamas laid out on the bed beside her own things. It produced a fury of opposition in her, the sight of his folded pyjamas. A swift, inflexible decision formed in her mind. Matthew was watching her, waiting. She wanted to throw something at his round, complacent anticipatory head. She detested the sight of it. He stood there in the open doorway, watching her, his lips parting in the slightly lewd, smirking smile, as he waited for her to come to bed. And she had utterly decided against him. She would not go to bed with him; no, not for anything in this world. He looked as neat and brown and presentable as ever, he had still the rather attractive artlessness hanging about him. But his head had a ball-like inanity, which she so disliked, and the suggestive simper came slyly, indecently, at the ends of his mouth. He looked quite handsome; and yet there was that queer buttoned-up closeness, that insentience, that made him seem so non-human to her. He repelled her, thoroughly. And she loathed his complacency, his smirking, proprietary lewdness.

The seconds went past. Matthew began to move forward into the room. Anna suddenly sprang up and made a wild scurrying dash into the passage. He followed, trying to detain her; his head came plunging after her out into the passage.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked, beginning to be roused again.

But Anna had locked herself into the bathroom. She giggled rather breathlessly, and gazed at her face in the glass, where a curious expression was reflected. A most curious change had come over her. Her colourless, frail, rather ethereal face now wore a bold, hard, brilliant look, derisive and vicious. And her grey-blue eyes had become harder and colder, smaller apparently. In her quiet gravity and her composure, Anna’s eyes would grow large with a deep, jewel-coloured stillness, like deep water. But now, in her excited aversion, they were small and shallow and stony. Her serenity, her delicate, grave aloofness — so unusual — had vanished. Her face was pinched and malicious, like a goblin-face.