Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

She did the things that were required of her, the things everyone else did. But whatever she was doing remained unreal to her, nothing had any significance. She went to the club; the talk which she heard and in which she joined was like a dialogue heard in a theatre, she seemed to listen to it from outside. With a vague surprise she heard her own voice speaking. But it was not she herself who spoke. She was simply not there. She had no contact with anything. There was no meaning in the world in which she now moved, it was made up of shapes and noises, without reality or consequence.

During the greater part of the time she was alone in the house. Then everything became blank. The loneliness completely extinguished her, it washed over even her fictitious self. She was nothing.

Matthew’s work obliged him to be away a good deal: five days, a week, sometimes ten days at a time. He took his own personal servant and the second house-boy who could cook a little, and went off into the jungle with his guns and papers and paraphernalia. Then Anna was quite alone. She became a vague, aimless portion of a vague, meaningless world. It was all a sort of empty madness, a madness of vacancy. Everything faded into blank inanity, she was a blankness, everything was blankness, there was nothing but blankness, and it was horrible, horrible. It almost killed her, it was so horrible.

The nights were worse than the days. The days were just bearable, so many stretches of interminable emptiness, that seemed really endless. But they did end, and then came the horror of the night.

Slowly the horror would accumulate, soaking into Anna as she lay on her hard, uncomfortable bed. The frogs were noisy, and their croaking rose from the marsh, a strange disharmony of sound, half-bark, half-cough, filling the silence of the house. She was quite alone. The servants slept away in their row of primitive go-downs at the back. And she knew, if she called, they would never hear her, or would pretend not to hear.

Anna would lie on her bed under the ghostly net. There was no light but the faint, discomforting pallor that came from outside. She could not even lock herself in. And she could feel the demonish exultation of the marsh gathering on the tepid air.

She thought of the horrors of the jungle, the stalking, silent creatures, tigers and panthers with their fœtid breath, and the great snakes moving unseen over the darkened ground. And she thought of the people apparently so gay and innocent, with a friendly look. But at the same time, how extraordinary they were, how incomprehensible. Who could tell what unknown devilry lurked behind their smiling insouciance?

She lay and thought in the darkness. And all the time her nerves were trembling, strained tight with horror. She heard the irregular beating of her heart, now loud and fast as though to choke her with painful speed, now slow, slow with a deathly reluctance, till she could fancy herself really dying. But always it would start again, the laborious beating, beating her back to renewed consciousness of fear.

She knew the ultimate fear of darkness, in the night. Her nerves seemed stretched to breaking, in a long pain.

She thought the morning would never come. She slept, and wakened suddenly with a fresh start of fear. She sat up and listened. From far away, out of the unknown night, the slow clanging of a gong came sullenly. Then it stopped, died away, and immediately the noise of the frogs filled up the empty darkness.

It was torture to her, the loneliness of the night. It terrified her and destroyed her. The nightmare was worse than anguish to her. It destroyed something in her mind.

In a trance of apprehension she went through the empty days. She was all the time waiting for the night, her mind was screwed up in a knot of suspense. As the days of loneliness passed, her misery increased. She wondered vaguely how she could endure the awful horror that had overtaken her. Then Matthew came back.

And immediately the horror retreated. Its edge was dulled. She was no longer quite alone in the ghastly black void of the night. She came back to herself a little. Her blood began to flow again in normality. But still there was the tension underneath. She was lonely, she was endlessly lonely. And she was afraid. The horror was gradually inflicting a permanent injury, a sort of unhealing bruise was coming on her mind.

Anna had her books and her curtains, her little odds and ends of personal possessions in the house. But she was not really settling down, although she appeared resigned. Even Matthew realized this. It rather irritated him to see her wandering aimlessly about, or sitting under the punkah, with the curious vague, lost look on her face. She seemed to have no sense of permanency. She never looked upon the bungalow as her home.

‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked her, hostile. ‘Why can’t you be like the rest of us and make the best of things?’

She smiled at the futility of the question, and would not answer. She knew the hopelessness of trying to talk to him.

It made him indignant that she still remained somehow apart. It shattered his complacency to think that he had not finally conquered her even yet. He craved so much to possess her utterly, not in the possession of love, but as one might triumph over an enemy. It came to this, that he craved to conquer her. And he had so nearly succeeded. He possessed her body, he had imprisoned her in the house with him. He had cut her off from her own world. It seemed that he must have vanquished her completely. She seemed so submissive. And yet, in some way, she still eluded him. There were moments when he could not believe in his victory over her. He had not got her altogether, even now.

This made him very angry. A frenzy of determination came to him to possess her utterly. The sense of frustration was maddening to him. He must, must conquer her.

He began to hate her for eluding him. He hated her because he knew that she despised him. He hated the way she had of looking coldly at him when he spoke to her, and then turning away her face in a gesture of cold, indifferent contempt. It made him feel he could kill her.

And Anna, when she looked at his angry face, when she saw his eyes blank and opaque like two circles of blue glass, and the strange cunning expression, almost imbecile, yet so crafty, about his mouth, then a great disgust overcame her, a shuddering repulsion. And she knew she would have to escape: or die. It really seemed at such moments as if she would die, or as if he would kill her.

And then it would be all over, suddenly. The tension would relax, the atmosphere would suddenly change. Back would come the old Matthew, the man she had known at Blue Hills, the neat, well-mannered, innocuous person, quite uninteresting and unimportant, but well-disposed towards her, and even genuinely affectionate — her husband. He would smile at her, and say quite nice things from his mouthful of sharp little teeth. There was something agreeable about him, his odd, inconsistent humility, his sincerity. It all seemed genuine enough. But, at the same time, there was the rabid hostility underneath, a sort of repressed madness, rather frightening. Sometimes Anna was a little afraid of him: sometimes a goblin perversity drove her on and on to provoke him: but for the most part she disregarded him. He did not matter.

The climate, and the loneliness were beginning to tell on her; she looked tired; she was thinner and paler.

‘You don’t feel ill, do you?’ Matthew asked.

She could see his blue eyes examining her closely, eagerly, with a curious suggestive speculation, slightly indecent. She knew he was wondering whether she had conceived. He was very anxious that she should bear his child. He wanted to set the final seal of his possession upon her. A child would surely subject her to him, would make her ultimately his.