Anna Kavan: Let Me Alone

He was no longer harsh with her or scornfully sarcastic as before. He was always quiet and restrained, and gentle, too strangely gentle, in his manner. But he was so preoccupied; he seemed to forget Anna more and more, and to become always stranger and more absorbed in his own thoughts. And sometimes he sat staring at her in a way that made her afraid. She was afraid of his secret thoughts with which she felt that she was in some way connected.

Anna was fond of bathing in the stream where the water had been dammed back with stones to make a basin about twelve feet across. There was room to swim a few strokes, and the water was vividly clear. It was pleasant when the weather was hot to splash about in the water that came down, pure, pure melted snow from the mountains, and then to lie in the biting glare of the sun on the dry grass. Like a young pagan creature from some long-lost era before the world became vulnerable in the consciousness of sex, Anna lay on the warm grass in the sun. Her slim, hard, brown-skinned body looked small and childish in the blazing light, very pure and impersonal, with a certain primitive unearthliness of virginity. As the first dwellers on the earth might have looked in the bright, pristine freshness of creation.

Her father came to watch her. He had developed a habit, lately, of coming down to the stream while she was bathing. There he would sit under the cherry tree, isolated in a black ring of shadow, while all the world swam unsubstantially in a great flood of light. He did not speak to her, but his eyes, his bright grey eyes, would gleam out of the shadow, watching her with a piercing grey attention, and his shadowed, cold, distinguished face would wear a secret, sly, absorbed expression, very peculiar. It made Anna uncomfortable. She was embarrassed without knowing why, and stayed longer in the water than she would otherwise have done. But growing chilled, she had to climb out over the wet, slippery rocks to sit down in the sun.

But always some distance away from her father, not close to him, near the cherry tree, as would have been natural. Till one day he came to where she was sitting like a young brown nymph with her arms clasped round her knees, and touched her, just stealthily touched her wet shoulder. Anna would have liked to jump away from the stealthy touch; but she was ashamed to do that. So she sat still, very tense and uncomfortable, while James Forrester’s hand moved down her arm with the strangest, softest, most disturbing touch imaginable. Then raised itself and touched, just lightly touched with bent fingers the cool curve of her neck where tiny runnels of water were still creeping from her wet hair. This was too much for Anna; this sinister, slight touch on the sensitive skin of her neck was more than she could endure. She sprang up quickly and ran away to hide herself in the woods. She did not know what she was hiding from. But after that she no longer wanted to bathe in the bright pool.

She avoided her father as much as possible these days. The meals that they had together in the big, dark, barren room were a trial to her. She began to dislike the room, so rough and empty and severely neat, with the curtains that Miss Wilson had sewed, years before, still hanging, limp and faded, at the high windows. Then the food: the endless, monotonous, hot, greasy stews and bits of boiled meat, and old Seguela flopping back and forward from the kitchen in meaningless haste, like some stupid, clumsy bird.

And at the other end of the table sat James, looking like a dead statesman, with his grey face blank and dead, and his thoughts very far away.

He drank a good deal at times. But the alcohol did not seem to affect him. His stony expression never changed. But sometimes a strange, flashing glance from his cold eyes would rest upon Anna, full of some burning fierceness that was like hatred, and he would force her to drink with him, force her to swallow the little glassful of fiery spirit at a single gulp.

‘I ought to shoot you, really,’ he said to her once, in a dead voice. ‘Conscientiously, it would be the best thing for me to do.’

She saw from the grave concentration of his face that his conscience did actually require him to kill her. And this puzzled her because she could not understand why her death should be a conscientious necessity. The thought of being shot did not seem to cause her any concern.

‘Why? Why ought you to shoot me?’ she asked, looking at him with earnest, faithful, unfaltering eyes, very anxious to understand.

But instead of answering her question, he stared at her for a long time, tracing with his thin fingers an imaginary circle upon the table. Then suddenly he was still, and on his face there came a fanatical, fixed look, like a possession.

‘There is only one thing in life of any importance, and that is complete honesty,’ he said. ‘Honesty with oneself. The truth. Complete, stark, final honesty.’

Anna wondered if he would kill her. And once more she realized that she didn’t mind what happened to her as long as he willed it; she even didn’t mind dying if that was what he wanted. In spite of everything.

The weather grew hot and thundery. Great masses of cloud banked themselves behind the mountains. The air ran hot with electricity. There was no breath of wind. Anna could not bear the threatening quiet, the threat of electric devilment in the stillness. She went down to the chestnut-forest to search for a little breeze.

But there was none. Only, after a time, came old Seguela running, flapping grotesquely down the stony path, with the staring face of some dark, dishevelled prophetess of doom, calling harsh, brutal words like the cries of a distracted bird.

James Forrester was dead. He had burned his private papers, reduced the closely-covered pages of beautiful Greek letters to a handful of ash. Then he had shot himself. His body looked handsome and powerful, lying incongruously on the bare floor. But he was quite dead. No more important than the ashes on the hearth. He had carried honesty to its logical conclusion.

WHEN Lauretta heard of James Forrester’s death she made one of her generous gestures.

‘Of course, we must be responsible for Anna-Marie,’ she said to Heyward Bland.

Lauretta was capable of sudden impulses of rather spectacular generosity; it was part of her Lady Bountiful attitude towards life. But on this occasion there was real virtue in the decision, for the unfavourable impression which Anna had made upon her was still fairly fresh in her mind, and, moreover, she was very pre-occupied. She had other fish to fry just then. For the war was starting, and Lauretta, carried on the crest of a wave of hysterio-mystical-patriotic excitement, was feverishly converting her house into an amateur nursing home. It was really laudable that she should find time at such a moment to consider an insignificant and unprepossessing waif hidden away in the mountains half across Europe.

The difficulty was to know what to do with her. Obviously, an officers’ convalescent home in war time was no place for a girl-child of thirteen.

‘She would only be in the way here,’ thought Lauretta, who, besides, was very averse to the actual presence of her disconcerting niece. Her generosity did not extend to having Anna to live in the house with her — not just then, at any rate.

Boarding-school seemed to be the only solution. And if at first Lauretta felt any qualms at plunging this child, so unprepared and so unusual, into the rigidly-disciplined scholastic world which makes no allowance for individual peculiarities, she soon stifled them with the vague and comfortable reflection that it would be all for the best. Heyward Bland, conspicuous neither for his understanding nor his humanity, lent his moral support.