Let Me Alone

CHAPTER 5

BLUE HILLS, the home of Lauretta and Heyward Bland, was a small, beautifully-kept-up estate near Wycombe. From the road one could see a flattish stretch of park-land, and then the house on a little knoll, appearing through the tall bulk of the elms. It was a white two-storey house with a sweep of gravel for carriages, and a careful flower garden between it and the park. Among the trees, away from the house, some sheep were usually grazing.

Anna did not feel at home there. She had not spent much time at Blue Hills. Lauretta always travelled a good deal, and Anna’s holidays had been passed in different places. Up till the end of the war the house had been a convalescent home for officers, and Anna, on her visits there, had always felt herself to be an outsider, outside the life of the place. She had kept well in the background.

Now, for the first time, it became real to her. Freed from the transient war-time atmosphere of slightly artificial busy-ness, its own individual atmosphere, the proper spirit of the place itself began to emerge.

Heyward Bland was now living at home, returned from his patriotic labours at the War Office.

The Colonel was a lean, spruce, elderly man, with a rather fierce expression, and a bald, longish head. His manner was didactic and irritable and overbearing, except towards Lauretta to whom he was always politely attentive. But he had a genial, patronizing way of talking to inferiors that made him popular with old-style members of the lower classes: with the younger people it did not go down very well.

Anna understood him thoroughly, and was a little contemptuous. Heyward Bland was conceited and pompous like a scraggy old cockerel, and with the same bullying stupidity. She felt she had never met anyone so entirely imperceptive. But he wasn’t a bad old stick, really. According to his lights, inside his own narrow limitations, he was a good man and wanted to do his duty, as he conceived it. He even wanted to be amiable and strictly fair towards Anna, whom he disliked.

Anna knew at once that he disliked her, and that he disliked all young people. He had a profound suspicion of youth. As though the young people of the world were secretly in league against him, to make him appear ridiculous. And he hated everything to which the word ‘modern’ could possibly be applied.

But Lauretta kept him in his place. She had very decidedly got the upper hand in spite of the Colonel’s barn-yard, male domineeringness. He was rather muted in her proximity, rather subdued, his fierce expression turned a little foolish, his eyes anxiously on the watch. His whole cocksureness slightly gone off, like milk that is just beginning to turn sour on a thundery day. It was rather pathetic to see him so diminished. But once outside the sphere of Lauretta’s sedative influence he perked up again at once, fluffed out his feathers, and strutted off, crowing shrilly again.

Anna was worried as to how Lauretta would take her expulsion. She did not know what Rachel Fielding had written to her aunt. So she was nervous when Lauretta suddenly said to her:

‘I’ve had an extraordinary letter from Rachel. She seems to think you had better not go back to Haddenham for your last term, after all.’

‘She talked to me about it,’ Anna said, rather uneasy.

Lauretta darted a quick glance at her out of her bright, suspicious eyes.

‘But I thought you were so happy there,’ she said, in a surprised voice. ‘Why shouldn’t you go back?’

‘Well, there’s nothing much for me to do, really. I’m simply waiting to go up to Oxford now, you see.’

Lauretta was looking at her shrewdly, summing up the situation. She didn’t particularly want to have Anna at home all the summer. But perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing really. The girl was growing up and she ought to see more of her. Anna had improved lately, too. In appearance she was quite presentable. If only she would pay a little more attention to her clothes she would be even attractive.

‘Yes, I think it’s best that you should be here,’ she said, with the quick, flickering smile that never got beyond the corners of her mouth.

Anna felt that she had been let off lightly: and she saw that Lauretta had experienced a friendly impulse towards her.

‘Yes, we must get to know each other better,’ said Lauretta. ‘Now that you are older, we must be great friends.’

And she took Anna’s arm and pressed it, smiling with that affected girlish simplicity of hers that never deceived Anna for a moment.

‘Yes,’ Anna replied.

But she very much doubted whether the friendship would ever materialize. She wondered what Lauretta was playing at. How did Lauretta want her to behave?

Anna stayed at Blue Hills, and almost before she knew it, she had settled down into a sort of routine there. Lauretta led rather a gay life for the country: plenty of lunches and teas and dinners and dances and bridge and tennis parties that filled up the days and made them pass quickly. She lived for her social amusements and for herself, for her own body — its clothing and feeding and bathing and scenting and beautifying and preserving. She was proud of the knowledge that she was the most fascinating woman within a thirty-mile range — in spite of her age.

Anna saw more of this social life than she had ever done before. She went out often with Lauretta to different parties. The various houses round about followed Lauretta’s hospitable lead, and a good deal of fairly lavish entertaining went on, especially among the older people. There was a rather noticeable scarcity of young people. Elderly successful people, youngish married couples and their children, but no really young people. Anna sometimes wondered what had become of everyone between school age and the later thirties. Their absence left a blank, a curious gap in the structure of the community.

Lauretta went everywhere, and Anna with her. Whether it was a formal dinner in one of the big houses, or an impromptu affair devised to fill some unexpectedly vacant evening, or a tea-party, or tennis, or a picnic, or a dance, or cards to be played with all the accessories of coffee cups and glasses and ash-trays and gold-painted, silk-tasselled pencils and velvet covered tables; she took part in it with Lauretta. She did not enjoy herself, and she was not much of a success. But she went everywhere and watched everything with her clear, blue-grey eyes, that were so steady, and in many ways so impersonal.

She was astonished at the enormous, persistent determination behind it all. All these parties and frivolities were the outcome of a sustained, deliberate effort of will; a universal will to gaiety. A sort of tyrannical, unquestioned law that gaiety was essential and must be maintained. Nothing spontaneous, ever. She felt that if once the revellers honestly considered the matter, they would find that they did not really enjoy the parties or want them at all, and the whole system would collapse. It was just determination that made them keep on: determination and habit. But then, supposing they abandoned their amusements, what were they to do? They did not seem to have or to be capable of having any other interests. Anna, who had been through a socialistic phase at Haddenham, disapproved of their existence. With her socialistic tendencies she disapproved of their pleasure-greedy, butterfly life. But she had to admit that there seemed to be no alternative.

Lauretta told everyone that Anna was clever.

‘A most talented young lady,’ she said coyly, smiling at the girl with a sort of glancing, fictitious roguishness. ‘I’d have you know that she’s a fully-fledged authoress already. A book of her poems is coming out soon.’

Anna was made extremely uncomfortable by these remarks.

‘Why did you say that?’ she asked Lauretta afterwards. ‘It’s not at all certain yet that Drummond will publish my verses.’

‘Of course he will publish them,’ Lauretta said. And from her quick, impatient manner it was obvious that she was determined that it should be so — or else there would be trouble. ‘Of course!’ she repeated, looking at Anna with a smiling mouth, but a hard, bright gleam in her eyes that was like a threat.

Anna was very uneasy.

Towards the end of May the weather became hot suddenly, and Anna needed some new summer dresses. She went into Lauretta’s bedroom to try them on. The big, lemon-and-silver room always fascinated her. With its silver walls and ceiling, its lemon silk curtains, its soft, soft carpet of slightly darker lemon, like lemon-curd, its sleek, silvery furniture, it seemed to exhale an actual perfume of femininity, an anima of female luxuriousness. The bathroom next door was like a laboratory with its pale gleaming purity and its rows of glistening bottles and appliances; a work-room of feminine beauty.

Anna was uneasy and fascinated. This refinement of female elegance, this insistence on the actual mechanism of producing female beauty, was rather too much for her. It made her uncomfortable. But at the same time, she was attracted by it, in a way.

She looked with a show of interest at the dresses, particularly at a dull green one, very simply made.

‘Don’t you like this blue frock?’ said Lauretta, holding up a frilled garment the colour of forget-me-nots, and watching the thin, straight figure in front of the mirror.

A thin body, with sloping shoulders, underneath a pale, grave face. And straight brown hair, rather untidy, over a too-high forehead. An uncomfortable, unfeminine sort of creature, Lauretta thought to herself.

But she knew that Anna was not unattractive. In that pale face, in those severely graceful limbs, was a strange potency that might draw a man, even draw him away from Lauretta herself.

Over the back of a chair lay the dull green dress that Lauretta did not care much about. It was a bluish, arsenical green, beautiful, but rather unusual. Anna was fingering the smooth, fresh-feeling material.

‘I like this one,’ she said.

‘But you could never wear that. Green isn’t a young girl’s colour. It wouldn’t suit you at all.’

Lauretta came forward and stretched out her hand with its flashing rings as if to take the dress away. But Anna held the cold, soft green against her neck, watching herself in the mirror, and a new light came into her eyes, greenish, as if reflected from the green stuff.

‘Yes!’ she said softly. ‘I like it immensely.’

‘Then I’m afraid your taste isn’t very good. Green is the last colour you should wear. Why, with your sallow skin it makes you look like a suet-pudding!’

Lauretta could be swiftly roused to irritation if she was opposed in any way. She seemed to take the disagreement as a personal affront.

Anna had almost forgotten her aunt, enthralled by the contrast of the lovely greenish stuff with the yellow-pale flesh. Now the angry, impatient voice brought her quickly back to earth. She put down the dress, smiling gravely at Lauretta.

‘I’m sorry you don’t like me in green,’ she said, with a hint of propitiatory gentleness. ‘I’m so fond of it. I think it suits my personality.’

‘Suits your personality! What an expression!’ Lauretta laughed a hard, tinkling, malicious laugh, as at some stupid absurdity. ‘What a mass of affectations you are! When I was your age, girls didn’t use words like that.’

‘Would you rather I spoke always in words of one syllable?’ asked Anna, in her calm, involuntarily supercilious voice.

‘There is no need to be insolent,’ said Lauretta, turning away.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude,’ Anna said, rather confused. ‘Please don’t be angry.’ She looked shyly at her aunt, not knowing how to behave.

‘Why am I not more careful what I say? I must think before I speak,’ she thought unhappily.

Lauretta was really offended. Her eyes rested upon Anna with disapproval.

‘I put up with a lot from you,’ she said, with her cold, almost cruel brightness, like a beautiful, cruel bird darting and flashing with vivid, brilliant plumage and vicious, stiletto-sharp beak. ‘I put up with a lot because Rachel says you are clever. I believe in what she tells me. Otherwise I should not be so lenient with you.’

Anna felt that she was being threatened. Lauretta’s words contained a warning and a threat. Something definite; almost some one specific thing. She thought she knew what it was. To herself she said: ‘She is thinking about my verses. If my book of verse is published, she will be nice to me. Otherwise she will not. Everything depends upon that.’ The book of poems was being made an issue, between them. Anna sighed, thinking of the future.

She began to make a definite effort to please Lauretta. She felt that after the long security of her Haddenham life, her existence was again becoming precarious, and that if she were not careful some disaster would overtake her. It was the end of security and the beginning of something dangerous and uncertain; a new life, new dangers. It was Lauretta, the hard, bright, beautiful Lauretta, with her brittle, tinkling laugh, who threatened her. Lauretta had the power in her delicate, fluttering, be-ringed hands to call down disaster upon Anna’s head. So Anna had to try and please her, to placate her, and avert the disasters.

She had her hair waved, and wore the dress with the blue frills that made her feel clumsy and uncomfortable. And she tried to make herself pleasant to everyone, to the complacent young-old people, and the rather febrile old-young people with their curious bright faces that seemed strained in an effort to be always smiling; to everybody she met.

She made a tremendous effort. But it was not much good, really. She might just as well have spared herself the pains. She simply could not get on with them, any more than they could get on with her. There seemed to be no possible point of contact between them. Anna would dance with them, and play games with them, with the best will in the world. But as soon as she tried to talk to them, an invisible, impassable barrier seemed to slip into place, like a glass dome over an old-fashioned clock, shutting her off, absolutely on her own little pedestal of isolation.

It was at the same time dreary and discouraging; a tedious round of discouragement. After the congenial fullness, the completeness of her life at Haddenham, this futile pursuit of amusements which failed to amuse was both irritating and distressing. Only the thought of going to Oxford in the autumn helped her through the days. That, and her correspondence with Sidney.

Now that Anna found herself in an unsympathetic atmosphere, she relied more and more on the consciousness of Sidney’s affection. From day to day she was made to feel that the atmosphere of Blue Hills was one of covert, undeclared but growing hostility towards herself. She was, in some way, in complete, basic, involuntary opposition to the whole life of the place. And in some way, everyone seemed instinctively to be aware of her opposition, though she tried hard to conceal it.

Anna knew that Lauretta was aware of the distaste, the slight involuntary contempt, which she felt for this empty, aimless existence, of the sort of faint horror which it inspired in her. She knew that Lauretta bitterly resented her attitude, that she thought of her as conceited, supercilious and affected. But for the life of her she could not conceal her feelings. By her silences, by her expressions, by the very inflexions of her voice she seemed, against her will, to reveal the truth. And the hostility mounted against her day by day.

So that now, for her consolation and support, she had only her letters from Sidney, and those which she wrote in reply. Sidney wrote almost every day, short, disjointed sentences that were like her conversation, but full of encouragement for Anna, full of Sidney’s own wild, proud charm, reckless and half savage, faithful in a shy intensity of love. A sort of wild strength of devotion behind the abrupt phrases.

Anna wrote back daily, long, carefully-worded, rather consciously-clever letters, analytical and introspective. A certain pathos in the well-selected phrases; and also a soullessness, a hardness, rather repulsive. But nevertheless a vast sincerity.

She was always writing or reading. Whenever she could snatch a few minutes from the exacting, boring social round, she would slip away into some corner or other with a book, or a block of writing-paper. A habit which annoyed Heyward Bland.

He couldn’t bear it. It made him indignant. And immediately, he had to swoop down upon her, when he saw her sitting quietly somewhere, furious that she should be quiet.

‘What are you up to now?’ he snapped, snarling at Anna’s book as if it had been a deadly insult offered to him, personally. ‘Always reading and lounging about! Why can’t you behave like other girls of your age — Be a bit more coltish instead of going about with your nose in the air all day!’

And Anna, quietly but definitely, would walk away to escape the old man’s bullying rudeness, eyeing him contemptuously with grey, stone-like eyes, not saying a word.

One morning the expected letter from Sidney failed to appear, and Anna went about the house disconsolate and wondering, till, in Lauretta’s room, she saw the familiar square white envelope addressed in Sidney’s small writing, lying on the silver quilt with its incrustations of pale flowers. And Lauretta sitting up in bed in her lacy wrapper with a kind of pointed, bird-like ferocity on her pretty face where the slackness of middle-age was just beginning to show itself.

Queer, the sharp, bright malevolence on Lauretta’s face, as she sat and looked at her niece. A cruel, tormenting look, with something ugly behind — jealousy, perhaps.

‘My letter —’ Anna began, and put out her hand to pick it up.

But Lauretta was quicker. With a pouncing, darting movement, her hand with its small, sharp, pink-tinted nails flashed out, and took the letter away.

Anna’s arm dropped to her side. She stood quite motionless, as if paralysed.

On Lauretta’s face a slight smirk of ferocity came, as she touched the letter.

‘Yes, your letter,’ she said, with a peculiar sharp insolence, like the jab of a bird’s beak. ‘Your letter,’ she repeated: and paused.

‘What about it?’ said Anna, suddenly angry. ‘Give it to me, please.’

Lauretta’s eyes gleamed with malevolent ridicule, watching her.

‘I have read it,’ she said, not making any move, but watching, watching, her eyes fixed mockingly on Anna’s face, with a kind of satisfaction.

‘Why did you read it?’ asked Anna coldly. ‘What right have you to read my letters?’

‘As your guardian I have the right to watch over your morals. More than a right — it is a duty.’

The subtle gleam of satisfaction lurked in Lauretta’s eyes as she spoke. She was doing her best to get her own back, to trample over Anna.

Anna was very quiet. She would not show her anger. She knew how to stand very still, isolating herself from the woman in the bed.

‘I don’t approve of your friendship with this girl — Sidney, or whatever she calls herself.’ The strange, vicious insolence of the tone!

‘Sidney is her name.’ Anna’s voice dropped, cold as a stone, into the silence.

Lauretta made a faint, insulting grimace.

‘It would be something like that, of course.’

There was a little blank pause, heavy with anger. Then:

‘Perhaps you think that because I don’t say very much I don’t notice what is going on, in my own house, under my very nose. Perhaps you imagine that I haven’t seen you creeping off day after day to write your secret letters. And this girl’s letters that come for you every day.’

Anna did not want to speak. She would rather have kept silent. But since the mocking, insulting voice had paused as if for a reply from her, she said:

‘Well, why shouldn’t we write to one another? We were friends at Haddenham for a long time, and no one there objected to our friendship.’

A peculiar light flashed in Lauretta’s eyes. Her whole face assumed a secret and somewhat blenched expression, a sly look of wicked, secret cunning and knowingness, like an evil little bird.

‘I’m beginning to think that Haddenham was not a very desirable place. It seems to have had a remarkably bad effect upon you.’

Anna felt herself beginning to tremble inwardly. An irritable disgust had fallen upon her, so that she wanted to make some violent gesture, to smash something, and to run out of the room. But outwardly she remained perfectly calm.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘I hope for your sake that is true; that you don’t understand me.’

It was perfectly clear that Lauretta was enjoying herself. She rejoiced because she had been able to bring that pale, disgusted look to Anna’s face. Her eyes were bright points of malice in her soft face.

‘But, anyhow, your friendship with this Sidney must stop. It’s unhealthy, and I won’t allow it to continue.’

‘Unhealthy!’ cried Anna, in a voice quivering with anger. ‘Sidney’s the healthiest person alive!’

Lauretta gave a little triumphant smirk. Her desire to wound and insult Anna was gratified. She had touched her on the raw.

‘I think not,’ she said. ‘This is an unhealthy letter. It is not at all a normal, harmless letter from one girl to another. It’s a love letter, neither more nor less!’

Sitting up against her pillows she was staring at Anna with a sharp, evil enjoyment of knowledge, like a bird that had just picked a tasty morsel out of the dust-bin. Anna shrank from the bright, detestable knowingness of her gaze. She resented it furiously. And yet she had to stand quietly beside the bed. And still Lauretta stared at her, with the sharp, unspeakable look of secret evil knowledge, that seemed to smear her heart. She looked aside at the window, which had a patterned chintz blind. A quivering blankness had come upon her, as though she were going out of her mind.

‘You will not write to her, or receive any more letters from her,’ Lauretta said.

Anna could hear the insolent satisfaction in the voice, the vicious delight in hurting and humiliating. She did not turn to her at once. It was horrible to her to see the slightly sagging face, on which was a tormenting, ugly look. She hated to see the cruel smirk of triumph on the relaxed mouth. And the bright eyes watching her like a wicked, predatory bird, with a sly gleam of ferocity, sinister.

Anna went to her own room — sat there silent, trembling, with the ugly smear on her heart, and a numbness also: she who was so independent and so strong.

She knew the sneaking, covert horror which is the world’s horror of evil. She knew that Lauretta had stabbed a venomous point of knowledge into her soul.

And she had lost Sidney. The loneliness of being cut off from Sidney, the blank loneliness of isolation in a hostile camp; the self-reproach, the regret; the reproach of Sidney’s faithful, amber-coloured eyes, hurt and loyal and bewildered, left without explanation!

Anna was bitterly defiant under her stubborn calmness. Only she knew that it was useless to fight against Lauretta. Lauretta had her in her power, utterly. She was forced to submit. But underneath surged such a tide of bitterness and revolt that she felt her heart almost burst.

‘I shall never forgive her,’ she said to herself, looking at Lauretta in her hard way, with a distraught, inward shudder of too-much enmity.

It was not only the loss of Sidney that she had suffered at her hands. It was some sort of horror that Lauretta had inflicted upon her. The loathsome, creeping horror of the world’s evil. For the poisonous point of evil-knowledge had really stabbed her to the heart. There was a horrible smear now, unalterable, upon her heart. And an uncertainty, a nightmare creeping back into her life. Her self-confidence had been undermined.

When she spoke to Lauretta there was a new reserve in her cool voice, the reservation of sheer enmity.

Lauretta herself didn’t care a bit that she had done these things to Anna. She felt no responsibility. She was rather disappointed that Anna was not more obviously distressed by the loss of her friend.

‘I don’t believe she really cared for the girl at all,’ she thought. ‘She seems incapable of any feeling whatever.’ At which her indignation and resentment increased.

The life of Blue Hills ran on. But for Anna it had lost all interest and reality. She was waiting now, just waiting to get away. Waiting for her real life to begin. She was conscious all the time of a sense of impermanence. And the three of them, herself and Lauretta and Heyward Bland, were no more than spectres moving in the house, until such time as she could make her escape.

‘Oxford. Oxford,’ she said to herself, thinking of the autumn. The summer, the present, was no more. Blank and restless she waited for the days to pass, like someone on the eve of a long voyage.

Drummond, the Oxford publisher, was taking an interest in Anna. He had written to her once or twice about her poems. He seemed to think they had merit in them. Then for a long time she heard nothing more. It looked as if she had been forgotten. But the manuscripts were not returned: she persuaded herself that this was a good sign.

Suddenly a letter came. Drummond wanted to see her, to talk to her. In a drift of hidden excitement she started for Oxford. She would not let anyone see her excitement. Instead, she went in an off-hand way, deliberately casual, albeit somewhat unnatural. There was an eager, intent look at the back of her eyes, a look of concentrated anxiety. She did not know it was there. But she was aware that much more than the personal literary issue was at stake.

Drummond received her in his private room. She was not quite at ease with him. She felt that he was supercilious. He was a man of about thirty, bright-eyed, and rather suavely dressed, with nimble, restless hands that seemed always on the move. He was very polite, talking a good deal in his careful, demure voice. It was his voice that made Anna uneasy. She seemed to hear in it a note of arrogance, of soft, haughty superiority. As though he had superior blood in his veins, and was slightly contemptuous, and would never, never admit anyone to equality with him.

All the same, she found him quite attractive. The two of them sat together in the little room which had a tiny balcony hanging over the street. They talked for some time and laughed often. But Anna began to wonder when he would mention her work. It was a mystery why he should find so much to say to her. And in the light from the window she saw his very bright eyes gleaming upon her, and his nostrils slightly dilating, almost as though he wanted to make love to her: although they were strangers to one another. His hands were never still.

‘Why do you want to write poetry?’ he asked.

He also seemed suddenly to realize that they were strangers.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, somehow disappointed.

Drummond seemed to be looking at her with a certain faint derision. She didn’t like the thin line of his mouth with its hint of inevitable superciliousness.

‘I want to write. To earn my own living,’ she said, feeling empty and astray, as if she had received a rebuff.

‘You won’t need to do that,’ he answered, with a smile that might have meant she was making a fool of herself, and the faint suggestion of arrogance, which embarrassed her slightly.

She knew then that he would not publish the verses. There was no definite shock of disappointment. To tell the truth, Anna herself had never quite expected him to do so. But she was deeply, emotionally distressed, nevertheless.

‘They are very good,’ young Drummond told her with suave politeness. ‘Very good, but not quite good enough. A little immature, perhaps. It would not really be fair to you to publish them. You are so very young.’

His voice had the curious, slightly-affected intonation that touched some irritable nerve in her.

She went out into the street feeling numb. She was not at all sure what had happened to her. But dimly, remotely, she realized that a crisis of some sort was imminent, precipitated by the result of the interview.

And then, most confusingly, the personality of the young man himself loomed large, blotting out distant but more important issues. She could not get out of her mind his superior and supercilious muzzle. She heard the soft, insidious contemptuousness of Drummond’s voice drowning all other voices in her brain, even those of surpassing urgency. She felt herself bewildered — completely at sea. For she could not think.

A call out of the blue came to astonish her.

‘Anna! Anna-Marie!’

At first she hardly recognized the vivid, high-coloured face steering so unexpectedly into her preoccupation; Catherine Howard, flashing a brilliant smile at her under her smart black hat.

This sudden apparition from the past gave Anna the strangest feeling imaginable. All in a breath she was snatched out of the turmoil of present embarrassments and plunged back into the already half-forgotten surge of Haddenham life. Strange to find that she was no longer capable of recalling the emotions of those days. But she was not. Just for one second, a shade of the old resentment fell across her heart at the sight of the girl who had cost her the loss of Sidney and the summer happiness they might have enjoyed together. A flicker of ancient emotion stirred, but very dim and unimportant, very far away, dead before it was fully awake.

And then she was quite extraordinarily glad to see Catherine. It was an enormous relief to meet someone of her own period, someone who was interested in her as an individual human being, someone understanding. A vast relief came over her, making her talkative and almost expansive, an intoxication of relief. She really enjoyed talking to the bold, bright girl.

And Catherine seemed to grasp the situation in her comprehending, dashing, worldly way that took everything in its stride. She was ready with a laugh and the right word, and though she did not say very much, she had an amazing faculty for appearing sympathetic and understanding beyond words, opening her fine eyes wide and turning her head in a certain way — encouraging Anna to talk. There seemed to be no end to her interest and admiration and sympathy; yet really she had given no proof of them at all.

Anna felt happier. Amazing what a relief it was to talk to Catherine. She didn’t care how much she outraged her fundamental reticences and reserves. It was as though she took a deliberate delight in going against all her truest instincts. A little black dog of perversity sat on her shoulder and kept her unnaturally gay; a wild, febrile sort of hilarity, half pathetic, half harsh. Not at all her real self.

Catherine was a home student and had rooms in Beaumont Street. Anna floated off there with her, and sat on the edge of a chair while the other girl made coffee in a glass apparatus like a retort. A gay, hard look was on Anna’s face. But her heart was wounded. A blank unhappiness underlay her defiant gaiety. But she had to keep on laughing and talking. The little black dog on her shoulder saw to that.

It rather amazed her that she should be behaving in this way. She waited for her old proud, silent, somewhat secretive self to come back. But the black dog sat firm. Perhaps the soft, ingratiating voice of Drummond had put him there. Anyway, there he sat, steadily. She felt a little uneasy: as though her independence, her quiet self-sufficiency might suffer an affront.

Catherine liked the new, lively Anna.

‘You’re beautiful, you know, to-day,’ she said, smiling rather enigmatic, but looking into Anna’s eyes with a curious definite look of specific meaning. She seemed almost entranced.

Anna was pleased. The compliment deeply encouraged her. It had a deep significance, somehow, in her development, which she did not understand. But she stored it up carefully, feeling its importance; and was grateful to Catherine. She laughed, and looked out of the corners of her eyes in a way that was strange to her.

She expected the strange brightness to vanish as she drew near to Blue Hills. And yes, to a certain extent it did leave her. But something hard and reckless still remained, almost a sort of braggadocio. She walked into the house sprightlily and boldly, swinging her arms a little. She didn’t care. And yet, all the time, her heart was sore.

Lauretta was angry when she heard that the poems would not be published. It seemed as though Anna were deliberately trying her. Her pretty, soft face went blank with exasperation.

‘You have made us both look ridiculous,’ she declared, staring at Anna with hard, contracted eyes of extreme irritation. ‘Everybody has heard about the poems. What am I to tell them now?’

‘I asked you not to talk to people about me,’ Anna said.

There was a cold note, like disgust, in her voice. She was defying Lauretta.

‘So all this talk of your cleverness has been so much ado about nothing,’ taunted Lauretta, her nostrils quivering in a sneer.

Anna did not reply. She made a slight motion with her shoulders, as if to turn away. It was so irritating that Lauretta almost struck her.

‘I don’t believe you are clever at all!’ she cried with a shrill laugh. ‘I’ve only got Rachel Fielding’s word for it, after all. I’ve seen no sign of it. You’ve behaved like a little fool ever since you’ve been here — a conceited, opinionated, ill-natured little fool!’

She was rather ashamed of her rudeness, her lack of restraint. But the curious, calm insolence which had suddenly come out in the girl was quite intolerable to her; it provoked her beyond all reason.

‘You’d better take care,’ she went on, agitated. ‘If you want me to send you to Oxford, you’d better be careful. Why should I keep on paying for you to do as you want? Paying and paying, and getting no return, while you take it all for granted, as your right, and don’t give me the least consideration. And now I haven’t even the satisfaction of thinking you clever.’

Lauretta stood rigid, with the tenseness of an ageing, angry woman who feels her power slipping away. She believed that Anna was defying her. And yet she could not control her, or even punish her.

Anna was indeed in a state of pure defiance. But at this last threat she felt some of her confidence ebbing, the rather fictitious recklessness began to leave her. She trembled a little, but still the hard, bright look stayed like a glaze on her face.

‘Don’t you mean to pay for me to go to Oxford then?’ she asked.

She looked queerly, even impudently, at her aunt; as if deriding her.

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Lauretta coldly. ‘It depends entirely on your behaviour.’

And she went away in frozen, outraged dignity.

Anna smiled to herself, brightly and contemptuously. But her heart trembled in fear and distress, trembling on the edge of nightmare.

In the days that followed her interview with Drummond, she went on unobtrusively, subdued. She was quiet, tractable, reserved. The strange mood of sardonic gaiety had quite departed. But underneath her compliant exterior, she was coldly hostile and remote, set cold in resentment and enmity. There was no possible rapprochement between her and Lauretta. It was a complete deadlock. Each knew the resistance, the opposition that ran under the surface of their relations. Yet each remained cautiously amicable, treating the other with a semblance of consideration.

Anna was becoming tired, fear-ridden. A harassed look was coming into her face. The fear of not getting away, the fear that Lauretta would refuse to send her to Oxford, was really growing upon her. There was a dreadful, timeless futility in the life of Blue Hills. It was like a great, aimless machine that went on for ever and ever, swinging round and round in a terrible, clattering swoop of nothingness. Well might one be caught up in it, almost unawares, and swung on, helplessly, hopelessly, in the vacant orbit. A panic was beginning to overcome her; the panic fear that she might not be able to get away.

She longed sometimes to go to Lauretta and rap out a point-blank question at her: ‘Do you or do you not intend to send me to Oxford?’ But when she saw her aunt, fluttering across the room, or smiling her insincere little flicker of a smile, fluttering and flickering in her butterfly unapproachableness, away at the other end of the world from Anna — then the girl was arrested by the sheer impossibility of communicating with her. Like a pretty, bright bird, or a butterfly, Lauretta fluttered about, and set a barrier of alienation between them. Anna gave it up.

As the summer advanced, she became more and more depressed. If she was not to go to Oxford she had nothing at all to look forward to. Not a word was spoken. Not a hint was given one way or the other. But she knew that she and Lauretta would never forgive one another. And silently, suffocatingly, she felt hostility piling up against her.

In July a visitor came to stay at Blue Hills. This was Matthew Kavan, a friend of Heyward Bland’s. They had met at the War Office, had worked together for some time. Then Kavan had gone out East, to the Shan States, and occupied a post in one of the government departments there; forestry, or something of that sort. The two men had corresponded. Now Kavan was in England on leave, and was invited to Blue Hills.

Lauretta was slightly disapproving. For some reason, although she was hospitable and fond of society, she disliked having people to stay in the house — unless she knew them well. Rather to her own surprise, she gave in to her husband for once, and wrote the letter of invitation.