The Girl in the Cellar

CHAPTER 46

Anne went on remembering. It was here a little and there a little. Then, suddenly, something that made sense of a lot of things. She sat in her bedroom, and in her mind she went round the house. Every time she did this she remembered something fresh. You couldn’t push your memories, they just came. And they came in the funniest way. It was when she was going up the attic stair in her mind that she remembered why she had gone to the London hotel, and its name, the Hood.

Aunt Letty had always stayed there. It was the sort of hotel where ladies like Aunt Letty stay-very dignified, rather expensive, thoroughly respectable. It had not the faintest connection with the attics, and why she should remember it when she was thinking about going up the attic stair in this house she couldn’t imagine.

She put the hotel away and went on picking her way round the house. She had been going up the attic stair-she would go on. The stair was very steep. She could remember Aunt Letty telling her to be careful as she came and went. She even remembered what she had said… No, that wasn’t Aunt Letty-that was Grammy. How curious to have no consciousness at all of someone, and then to have her back as if she had never been away. Dear, dear Grammy, who was the cook until the second year of the war, when she left to take charge of her sister’s children when her sister had been killed by a bomb. Grammy had always said, ‘Now you mind your feet, my dear. Don’t you look at them and don’t you hurry them, and you won’t fall.’

The attic was large and dark. Anne always thought it was like a hospital, because there were broken things everywhere-a screen with a hole in the panel, a chair with a broken leg, a picture with a broken frame. She remembered so many broken things. How strange that she could remember these things which had never mattered very much-remember them quite accurately and distinctly as she sat on the side of her bed in a locked room on the floor below-things that she hadn’t seen or thought of for three years. And yet she couldn’t remember what had happened so short a time ago.

The attic-it was curious how she came back to it. Perhaps it was an association of ideas. She would have to think that out. Everything in the attic was mixed up, nothing was in order. That was how her mind was-old things, new things. Not so many of those. Things that had had their value and lost it, things that had never had any value at all. In her mind’s eye she stood in the doorway of the attic and looked into its dimly lighted depths. There seemed to be no end to the things that were in it, as there was no end to the things that were in her mind-things half forgotten, things half remembered, things that showed vaguely and were half glimpsed and then wholly lost again. Time went by.

The house began to stir. Someone came along the passage. The key turned in the lock. Anne sat quite still. The handle turned, and the door opened a very little way. Ross’s voice said her name.

‘Anne-’

She said, ‘Yes.’

‘How are you? Do you feel like getting up?’

She said, ‘Yes,’ again.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

He stayed for a minute, twisting the handle, not opening the door any more, and then shutting it carefully so as not to make any noise. He went downstairs then, moving very quietly and carefully.

Anne found herself laughing. That was Ross all over, to get himself into an indefensible position and not have the courage to brazen it out. She remembered that she had always despised him, and that cheered her. He had not locked the door when he had gone, so she was no longer a prisoner. She went to the bathroom, emptied the water she had washed in, made her bed. She began to wonder whether she was alone with Ross-whether the other man was gone. She did not count on it, but she wondered.

When she had finished the things she had to do she went to the dressing-table and looked at herself in the glass. There were dark marks under her eyes that did not please her. She thought she looked as if she had been ill. She rubbed her cheeks, and then wished that she hadn’t. It was all right for her to look pale. Besides, it didn’t matter how she looked.

She went downstairs. Someone was frying bacon and sausages. She came into the kitchen and saw the other man. As always, the sight of him did things to her courage. She felt the same horrid inward shaking that had come on her in the garden at Chantreys when she had looked up and seen him leaning against the gate. But this time she was at some pains to hide her fear. She was horribly afraid, but she mustn’t let him see it.

‘Ah, you’ve waked,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Ross said you’d be down. We brought the bacon with us. No sense in making talk in the village.’

‘I suppose not.’

He burst out laughing.

‘Very cool and calm, aren’t you! Going to be a sensible girl?’

Anne made herself look at him. She kept her eyes level and calm on his.

‘It depends on what you mean by sensible.’

He gave her an insolent look.

‘Do what you’re told. Make yourself useful. Speak when you’re spoken to. Hold your tongue when you’re bid.’

‘Why should I?’

He set down his pan of sausages a little to one side of the fire and came towards her. Anne went back as far as she could go. The wall stopped her, and she stood. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down on her.

‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ he said. ‘Is that quite clear? Is it? Is it?’ His voice didn’t get any louder, it softened. That softening of a harsh voice was the most horrible thing that Anne had ever heard.

A dizziness came over her. She tried to keep her head up and her eyes steady. His eyes were like a hawk’s, dominant, ferocious. She couldn’t go any farther back. And then there was a footstep outside, and she called out. He said on a low growling note, ‘You watch your step,’ and turned round and went back to the fire.

When Ross came in she was so glad to see him that it was all she could do not to show it. It was all she could do, but she did it. To let them know how terribly afraid she was would be to give away her last scrap of protection. She moved to a chair and sat down.

It was at this moment that she remembered everything.