Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

At Marseilles he would have liked to go to one of the big hotels where the English people stayed. He was willing, for once, to pay exorbitantly for the reassuring presence of his fellow-countrymen. But Anna would not have it. And now it was she who made the arrangements. Matthew, a stranger in this strange world, had to stand in the background, looking on. He didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like to hear Anna chattering in the strange language while he understood nothing.

He stood in the background feeling sulky and stiff, while Anna asked questions and talked. People scrutinized him, with contempt it seemed; but nobody paid him any attention. He was simply Anna’s appendage. At last they were settled in a queer, rambling old hotel not far from the quays. There was a glimpse of prussian-blue sea from the top windows, and a great rattling and screeching of trams.

They went to eat at a tiny restuarant with lobsters painted on the walls, and a barrow of shell-fish — mussels and sea-urchins — at the door. Anna was very happy. She was almost oblivious of Matthew. He had no power to trouble her. She felt that she had returned home. After a long experience of the smallness, the neatness, the cultivated soullessness of England, where everything seems tame and vulgar and devitalized, she rejoiced to feel the world bigger, and untidier, more natural and live, around her. More of a living world, and less of an industrial machine. The horrible, mechanical middle-classness of England! The small grey uglinesses, and the meanness and the coldness — as though machine-oil ran in its veins instead of the good red blood of humanity. You have to make your escape sometimes to the nobler places — or lose your soul altogether. Anna was happy, feeling the power and bigness of the unseen mountains not far away. The potency of the mountains made itself felt.

They walked in the crowded streets, looking at the shops which were so like English shops and yet so unmistakably different. They sat in cafés, and were jostled by the noisy, cheerful crowd. Anna was very happy. It was like an intoxication to her, the feeling of freedom and escape. She was quite quiet, perfectly self-contained, with the bright light of excitement in her eyes, like a personal flame. Perfectly free she felt, centred in herself beyond all troubling, and triumphantly alive. She was unaware of Matthew. And he followed her about with a sullen expression, rather forlorn, which might have touched her if she had noticed it. He looked curiously like Winifred now and then.

They took a car and drove out into the country. It was a beautiful day, springlike, with a gold sun pouring out of the sky. Up they climbed, up a great curving ascent to a desolate roof of earth and rock and patches of stunted trees. It was all rockily bare and mountainous. Anna thought of the Old Testament. It was like Mount Sinai. It was barren and grim, but the sun was bright, hot even, and she loved it. She loved being in the high, bare, lonely place.

The car began to rattle down towards Cassis. And now there were vineyards — everywhere the striped, yellowish vineyards, and terracing of vines on the mountain slopes, right down from the dazzling white stone crags, down to the edges of the road. And houses were appearing. White houses with brownish roofs and olive trees growing about. The brownish-silver olives, dusty looking, and the tall poplars still shaking their yellow leaves: a blur of dark pine-woods on the spurs of the mountains, and always the white road looping between the vineyards and the high rocks.

‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ cried Anna, in strange, calling tones. She seemed to be in a little ecstasy.

Suddenly, swirling round a curve of the descent, a great blueness confronted them, the sea was vivid blue like a bolt of blue electric fire, vibrating with flamy waves of brilliance, upon the eastern boundaries of the world, a blinding, crystalline blaze of blue water.

‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ Anna cried. And she leaned forward in the keen rush of air, ecstatic.

But Matthew would not acknowledge it. To him, beauty was the soft, safe beauty of the English spring, all dim and delicate and confined, and deep, lush greenery in the tranquil valleys, and birds singing. Not this dazzling glitter of hard limpidity, this vast, unfriendly glare of burning light. He felt himself exposed, there between the in-closing mountains and the vibrant, flashing water.

‘I love it!’ said Anna, in a low, clear voice. ‘I love it!’

He saw her face bright and hard in the sun, and he heard her voice, clear and cold, like the small waves breaking on the shore. He understood nothing. But now she challenged him, she wanted to force him to submit to her mood.

‘Don’t you think it beautiful?’ she asked him, in a cold voice, like a small wave breaking. There was a touch of devilment in it.

‘Not so beautiful as England,’ he answered, hostile and rather spiteful.

‘Oh — England!’ she cried, with a careless derision that stung him. ‘You and your England!’

It enraged him to hear her sneer like that, at the things that were precious to him. It was as if she stripped the clothes from his back, leaving him ridiculous and shamed.

‘England is beautiful,’ he answered, with heat. The foolish blind look of anger was on his face, like a vicious animal that would hurt if it knew how to reach its tormentor. But Anna was safely out of reach, behind the bars.

‘Perhaps it is. But where can you find it? It’s all covered up with hideous towns, and main-roads, and squalid little villas, and petrol-pumps and machines. And I hate the horrible, unhealthy people everywhere, with their tinned food and wireless sets and newspapers and cinemas and cheap cars. All so ugly. And drab and paltry. I hate them all. Sham people in an imitation country.’

Her eyes stared at him coldly, he felt almost afraid. Just for a moment he saw her coldness, he saw the unyielding hardness that was in her, the unchanging remoteness; even cruelty. Not a personal, deliberate cruelty, but that much more devastating cruelty that comes from indifference, from sheer, absolute, deadly carelessness, the ultimate affront. But then his preserving insentience came back to stupify him, make him stupid. He saw nothing any more. Anna was his wife, his enviable possession, a graceful girl who attracted him, and whom he meant to keep to himself, for his own personal enjoyment. That was all he wished to see.

And Anna saw what was in his mind. The bright complacency of possession showed in his eyes. She turned away from him in disgust to the sun and the vineyards and the blue sea. She disregarded him entirely, thrusting him out of her way.

They left the car and walked about in the village. It was brown and dirty-looking, the streets were narrow and rather squalid with fish-nets and the debris of fishing everywhere. There was a strong smell of fish. And the coloured boats were lying in close to the quay. The sun was in the sky and on the water, the air was sparkling. Fishermen stood loungingly, indolently about, boys with bare feet, or coloured, tattered espadrilles, like bedroom slippers, ran and shouted and stared. The people were brown-skinned southerners.

Anna found it delicious, and she was happy. But the thing that pleased her most was when, climbing up a little above the village, she saw the vineyards and the olives and the mountain slopes behind all swimming and golden and fantastic in the sunshine, expanded under the deep blue sky.

She felt that she would like to stay there for ever.

‘I wish we were going to live here,’ she said, her face glowing and open. ‘It is so lovely.’

A shaft of resentment penetrated Matthew’s heart. She seemed to ignore him and all his world. He wanted to assert himself.

‘The East is more wonderful,’ he said. And added, rather plaintive: ‘You will like that, too, won’t you?’