Anna Kavan - Guilty

Suddenly the Head looked up, fixed upon me an unrelenting gaze, without recognition, as if he’d never seen me before, and said in an icy voice, ‘Your protectors have seen fit to inform me that an armistice has been signed. I shall give out the news at lunchtime. I was instructed to tell you privately to expect a visit sometime during the day. That’s all. You may go.’

To my disorganized brain, the sight of his implacable face seemed like a confirmation of the triumphant philosophy of hate, already paramount in the world, and, though it registered the meaning of what he’d said, this for the moment was put aside, as, without a word, I saluted again and left the room. My equilibrium slowly returned as the distance increased between me and the remorseless antagonism of the man, so much older and wiser than I, who, after so many years, could still look upon me as an enemy and a stranger with such assurance of rectitude; but, still unable to face the antique deriding presences of the chess-garden, which I identified with him, I walked a long way round to my study and remained there in a very queer frame of mind till the bell rang for lunch.

The news of the armistice, as the Head gave it out, aroused very little excitement in his hearers, who had already, for the past week, been experiencing the maximum excitement of which they were capable. And, in any case, demonstrations of rejoicing, or even of relief, were forbidden. Our troubles, and those of our country, were far from over, he told us ominously; indeed, the worst might still be to come. There was to be no relaxation of the defensive measures we had adopted; so, when the time came, I went out with my rifle to patrol the wide boundary wall.

A part of my daily duty was to assign new stations to everyone there, on the assumption that the eye, growing accustomed to a particular view, transmitted to the brain a sense of familiarity, resulting in a slackening of the protective mechanism. Remembering the visitors I’d been told to expect, I myself took a position commanding an extensive view of the road, from the point where it left the forest borders and crossed the flat cultivated ground to our gates. The post happened to be one I hadn’t occupied before; but the prolonged heat wave had given a depressing sameness to every vista, a barren brown lifelessness, the trees already autumnal, their leaves falling or turning yellow as if scorched by invisible flames. For the first time since the patrols began, I felt profoundly apprehensive; the appearance of a belligerent crowd, bent on vicious attack, wouldn’t have been half so alarming as the prospect of this coming encounter with people unknown to me but doubtless connected with the ‘authorities’ of the Head’s original oration. My recent interview with him, short as it had been, seemed to have resurrected and infused with new life obscure semi-superstitious fears of childhood I’d almost forgotten. Once more I felt vulnerable, lonely, outside the pale, as I’d done years ago; unfit to love or be loved, overshadowed by some obscure nightmare menace beyond my understanding. Deep within me, old remembered horrors opened their bleeding throats like wounds. The personality I’d built up through the years, the sixth-form prefect, confident and admired, on good terms with people, had been no more than a ghost, exorcized by a single glance. The Head’s inexorable expression, his cold look that had turned me into an enemy stranger, had also made me a stranger to myself and to this world of school in which I’d believed I was at home. I was an intruder here; I had never been accepted. And now, looking back, I seemed to remember seeing similar hostile distrustful looks on many faces beside his. I remembered silences when I’d entered a room, topics suddenly dropped, because the speakers could not go on speaking freely before a stranger suspected of being a traitor.

If, as I half believed, the Headmaster was in spiritual communication with the green monstrous shapes outside his window, he must have been highly amused by the torment they’d devised for me between them, reducing me to the victim of childish terrors I’d thought I had long outgrown, as I waited, in fear and trembling, for the nightmare visitors I couldn’t even imagine. Presently, shamed out of my abasement, I started to patrol the section of wall under my supervision, as each of us was supposed to do at least once while on duty; and the effort of keeping my balance exchanged occult fears for the more bearable fear of the laughter I should arouse by toppling into the currant bushes below or the nettles outside the wall. I had a few words with my next-door neighbour, who seemed gratifyingly friendly, and was feeling much more confident when I returned to my post.

Could the war really be over so soon? I wondered. So little did we know then of its horrors that it was possible for me, with childish autism, to regret the return of peace, which to me then meant only going back to my parents and all the business of our proposed departure that war had providentially shelved. I was so far from realizing the chaos into which the whole world had been thrown that, though vaguely envisaging some delay, I quite expected ships to be carrying passengers about the globe as before.

Noticing a change in the light, I looked up and saw that, as usual, the cloudless sky, out of which the sun had all day been blazing down, had grown overcast with the approach of evening. Very soon the sun would go down, which meant, as far as I was concerned, that it would soon be too late for visitors to arrive from the city. I started to feel relieved; then, to make sure nobody was in sight, carefully surveyed the stretch of country before me. Finding it empty, I again raised my eyes to the sky.

Every evening the same thing happened. Once again the great anthracite-coloured clouds had piled stealthily in the west. But now a change was occurring: a few thin unexpected rays fanned out above and sprayed the vacant landscape with their expiring light, a weird radiance in which details emerged with a trick-like strangeness, as if flood-lit.

Nothing about the view had as yet actually changed; the grey-black head of cloud still obscured the sky, wearing its rayed diadem; the drab stretch of country, the thinning trees, were just the same. Only the solid permanence of reality seemed to have gone and with it all that made sense to my understanding — the reliability of appearances on which sanity depends. It can’t be real, I thought blankly, staring at the approaching car like an hallucination. Already within our gates, it came in a cloud of yellowish dust along the road just below me at a speed that must have made it difficult for the occupants to distinguish between the young figures posted along the wall. On it came unhesitatingly, to stop directly beneath the spot where I stood.

Simultaneously the descending sun reached a crack between cloud and horizon and through this narrow aperture, to my confusion, hurled its last light in a lurid flare, distorting everything, and falsifying proportions, so that for a moment I seemed to see the world through the eyes of a child on a bank, apprehensively looking down at the great black beetle-like car filling the narrow lane, a queer medicinal scent teasing my memory with its elusive association — before I could catch it, three people got out of the car now below me.

This was certainly a mistake. There ought not to be three, I wished to protest. One of them I knew I should recognize; I did recognize Mr Spector, though he seemed different in some way, strange. Before I’d decided what was strange about him, his accustomed appearance reassembled itself, the two superfluous armed figures ceased to perplex me, I was dazzled no longer. Suddenly I saw my surroundings real, concrete again, in dun-coloured dusk; while, apparently dissociated from everything and instantly lost, the thought came to me that the child I’d once been wasn’t yet so completely forgotten that he could be considered dead.