Anna Kavan - Let Me Alone

The miserable minutes passed, in the hot, empty, dilapidated house. It was insufferably hot. The punkah swung back and forward wearily. Back and forward, back and forward, the monotony caused a deep-seated physical ache in her. She went upstairs to put some eau-de-cologne on her forehead. The things on her dressing-table, the bottles and the silver-backed brushes, were almost too hot to touch. It was strangely dark.

She went to the window and looked out. Great clouds were moving across the sky, though the air was deathly still. A curious coppery film, like a veil of electricity made visible, hung in the upper air. The parrots were making a great noise.

She stood for a minute to watch the fluttering parrots. She had a sort of fondness for them, for the small, vivid, blue-green birds, so brilliant and jewel-green, darting and poising among the dry-as-dust branches of the tamarinds. She was sorry for them when, in the heat of the midday sun, they swooned with the heat, and fell down dizzily, small green-winged fallen angels, to lie half dead and palpitating on the ground. Now they were all dithering with excitement, for some reason, flashing and beating, and screeching their thin, sharp, frail little cries.

The whole pulse of the day seemed stifled, the air heavy with suspense, burning, sinister suspense vibrating in the air under the clouds, over the still, breathless plain. It was about the time of sunset, but in the west, and over the whole sky, the threatening mass of cloud had gathered: the dark clouds roofed over the world. They looked black and massive as iron, and heavy with an ominous, diabolic portentousness. Like the iron wings of demons. And underneath the clouds, between the clouds and the earth, the strange electric luminosity hung, phosphorescent, shedding a livid gleam upon everything.

There was no one about. The world seemed swept clean of humanity. All at once a desolation had descended. Away in the village, gongs were rolling their heavy notes on the air.

Anna went downstairs again. The drawing-room was almost in darkness. She called a servant to open the shutters.

‘The rain is coming,’ said the man, stepping quickly about on his small, quick, silent feet. In him, too, the dark thrill of expectation and excitement was perceptible. The forbidden, obscure excitement of the old demon-worship. He opened the wooden shutters with deft, rapid motions. Anna could feel the secret, intense, febrile preoccupation in him, rather ghoulish and frightening. He hurried silently away. She was alone again.

Her mind and body alike were taut with suspense. It was almost more than she could bear. She did not know for what she was waiting — for the rains to break, or for the struggle with Matthew, or for her own destruction. All was strange, dreary, and desperate. Yet her inner pride held its own. Let her body be defiled, let her spirit be quenched; yet she would never yield, she would never really be touched. Just such a single, lonely spark of pure resistance glowed in her, indomitable.

She began to revive the memory of her past life. It was almost as though she evoked for the last time the spirit of her real self. It was as if, through her memories, she might return for a little to her true self, as she had been before the nightmare had enveloped her, before this doom had come upon her, this misery of thwarting and degradation.

She thought of her father and herself, and of Haddenham and her relations with Sidney and with Rachel Fielding, and of Blue Hills. And it seemed to her that her life had been a river flowing on strongly to some unknown but appropriate destination, from which her marriage had caused it to deviate. It was Lauretta who had diverted it from its proper course. But she felt no especial bitterness against Lauretta. Only she felt inclined to weep at the cruel purposelessness of her own frustration — why had it happened? And she wondered what her true life should have been, the course for which she had been destined.

It was a torment to her to recall the past. For it was like looking back on a life of lost opportunities. It had been beautiful and full of promise. She saw the promise of her beginning, which could never come to fulfilment, she saw its death. And the rare, fine self which she had lost had lived so briefly, she had not had time to realize it.

At length Matthew came back from the club. Hard and despairing and closed within herself, she waited for the start of the battle. She heard the heavy clatter of his footsteps outside. He did not look at her as he came in. His face was neat and unrevealing as ever, his eyes bright and blue and expressionless, his dark head was round and foolish-looking as it always was. But there was about him a dangerousness, a sullen, surly, slightly unbalanced air. He looked a bully. He glanced at Anna’s calm, abstracted face. Hysterical anger gushed up from his heart.

They sat down together to dinner. The lamplight fell on the heavy, gaol-made furniture, bringing out reddish gleams, like blood, in the dark wood. The heat was stifling, volcanic, like a molten mass pressing against the walls of the house. Anna felt she could not live. Outside the windows, pale flickerings of lightning came and went.

‘The rains are breaking,’ Matthew said.

‘Will the rain come to-night?’ she asked. It was difficult to speak to him.

‘Perhaps,’ he answered, churlish.

She felt she would die.

The servants hurried on with the meal. They seemed electric, vibrant with secret excitement; not so much human beings as living conductors of electricity. Anna looked at the thin, brown, delicate hands of the man who was serving her. She could not bear to take the dish from him, lest his hands should burn her with a fire of electricity, lest sparks should fly from his finger-tips.

Matthew sat silent in front of her. He was dressed in white, and his skin showed dark as leather against the white linen. She could feel the fierce, almost insane antagonism in him, the lust to conquer her. And she could feel her own resistance, unchanging, rocky.

She knew she would never let him touch her again. She would die rather. But he was so fixed, so mindless, and the stiffness of his body was so like an inanimate thing. And he was determined, obstinately, blindly determined. Her heart grew colder.

She sat at the table without eating or speaking. The lightning flickered incessantly upon the silver and on the blades of the knives.

Finally the meal came to an end. They went back to the drawing-room, which was a dark, asphyxiating tank of heavy heat. They seemed to fall into a trough of sheer ghastliness.

Anna took a book and pretended to read. The presence of Matthew was like a pressure on her head. She was all the time aware of his eyes watching with a blank, unmoving hostility. Her heart seemed to die in a last despair.

As she sat over her book the wind rose, in a sudden crash, there was a noise of something banging at the back of the house, the trees made strange rushing sounds. She looked up, startled. Matthew got to his feet.

‘I shall go to bed,’ he said. ‘I’m tired, and I want to get some sleep before the thunder begins. Once the storm starts in earnest there’ll be no rest for anybody.’

A ghastliness came over her. She was overcome by the imminence of the cruel struggle. A deep, helpless misery rose up in her. But she was quite steadfast, firmly set on her rock of resistance. He should not touch her.

They went upstairs, and she stood in her own room, very quiet, awaiting, as it seemed, his onslaught upon her. She did not begin to undress.

She looked out of the window at the black sky where great gusts of wind were tearing about. Vast hollow noises of wind or thunder were crashing behind the rushing of the trees. The lightning was beating nearer, like livid wings beating in the sky.