The house was in waiting; low, and still, and grey, with clean curtains in the long windows, and a fresh line of white across the edge of the steps. They had repainted the door in the spring, a soft colour, between blue and grey, which seemed to retreat coolly before the sparkle of the wide lawns under the sun. It was very hot; the air hung, rising and shivering in little fountains over the hedges and the gateposts, snaking in busy rivers across the lawns, and curving round past the steps into the shadows, where it suddenly became invisible again. The roses, massed tidily in beds upon and around the lawns, were damp with it, the petals weighed softly against each other where yesterday they had been crisp, standing out as though they were sugared. But the grass, greener here than at the back of the house where it was less shadowed, was violent; it thrust itself into the sun in neat metallic ranks, its blades shorn away and the fine planes of it catching the light, throwing it about on the lawn like crossed threads of spun glass, silver, green and white. There were no daisies; one of their minor tidinesses was this expanse of lawn, formal in front of the formal house. At the back, where some nineteenth-century owner had added an untidy terrace with a verandah, and where they played croquet or badminton all summer, there were hundreds of daisies and a thriving patch of plantains. But it was here at the front, here in the unbroken order of house and garden and drive, that the waiting was apparent – a certain tension in the placidity, the stiffening of the formation before the attack. It was that time between lunch and tea, when everything is very still, and heavy enough to be sleepy; but here, outside in the silence, the brilliance of the sun gave an extra sharpness, an extra clarity to everything, made it all so definite that it had the brittle quality of a mirage, and it was somehow only too easy to feel, given the transitory lucidity of English sunshine, that it might shatter like a mirage, might flake away and dissolve under pressure, into something grey and ordinary and dispersed.
In the hall, inside, Caroline Severell stood over a white bowl of flowers, and pushed delicately at the blue spike of the tallest delphinium. Her mind ran wordlessly over her preparations; the little tablets of soap, the clean towels, the lavender bags in the drawers, the carafe, the bowl of roses in the spare room followed each other, rapid little pictures across her inner eye. She had collected and disposed of all the books which her husband had scattered across the drawing room, along the landings, in the bathroom. It was only a matter of time until he discovered their loss, and reclaimed them to pile them up again in some more awkward place, but by then the arrival at least would be over. She had removed her daughter’s riding crop and boots from the kitchen table, a pile of her dirty underwear from the bathroom floor, two filthy Aertex shirts from the banisters where they were hanging – this with a certain distaste – and her son’s electric railway from under the dining table with some compunction – she saw, after all, that it was reasonable for him to need space to play with it – he made so little mess for a boy of his age – but visitors were visitors, and the trains could come out again later. The dinner was prepared, the tea-tray was set, and the kettle was filled and ready on the stove. Caroline thought coolly that that was all; she gave a final organizing twitch to the stems of the flowers, already bitten securely by the wire mesh in the bowl, and untied the strings of her apron. It had all been managed very neatly.
She looked at her watch. Three ten. Time was slipping away. There was an unwritten rule that her husband was never to be disturbed when he was in his study, which Caroline took pride in keeping, but she was aware without bothering to wonder how, that he had entirely forgotten that he had promised to fetch the visitors from the station, which was some miles away. She went to hang her apron in the kitchen, to give him time, to make quite certain, and then came back through the house and knocked firmly on the study door.
There was no reply, but she had not expected one. She waited a moment for politeness’ sake, and then walked in.
The study, for a study, was very large, and full of light, which flooded in through a large french window which opened onto the terrace at the back. It had nothing of the dark leather and silver and tobacco comfort of the gentleman’s study, no steel cabinets, on the other hand, no deliberate austerity, not even the threadbare untidiness of the don’s room, with paper everywhere, and stones collected on odd beaches and brought home because they were interesting. If it had any character, it was that of the outgrown schoolroom – books, on shelves, all round the walls, not glassed in, a huge, square ugly desk in light wood, a wooden armchair, and a desk chair. There was a typewriter on the desk, and a jug of flowers, arranged by Caroline, on one of the book-cases. There was a large fireplace, and a sage green carpet, slightly silky, and nothing else remarkable but space – clear, uninhabited, sunlit space. The study was the centre of the house, and round what went on in it everything else was ordered – by Caroline, because she had decided that this was how her life should be, by the children because they had never supposed that it could be otherwise, by friends and visitors because they were almost always in awe of the idea of Henry Severell, and assumed that his needs must be different from and more pressing than those of others, a feeling which Caroline did her best to encourage. Whether Henry himself was aware of all the protecting and arranging that went on, whether he expected it or took it for granted or never noticed it at all, it was difficult to tell: he spent most of his time, most of the year, closed in the study, and what he did there was his own business. He was not a communicative man.
Caroline looked automatically for him where he always was, at his desk under the window, and felt a tiny flicker of apprehension when she located him, standing in the opposite corner, doing nothing, and looking as though he had been doing nothing for some time. He looked down on her, and blinked, but did not offer to say anything. Caroline looked back at the desk again, and saw that it was unusually littered – with books, with great piles of frayed manuscript, with boxfiles dusty and bulging with notes. She went across, and turned over one or two of the books. Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, Boehme, Coleridge’s Notebooks, Aids to Reflection, Henry More’s Conjectura Cabbalistica, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal. Then she turned back to Henry, and could not keep back the reproach, although she knew it would do no good.
‘Did you have to start on all this again just now? Just when Oliver will be here?’
‘Oliver?’ Henry asked flatly, without showing any real interest, and without answering Caroline’s question. He came back to the desk, rearranged the books Caroline had disturbed, and began to turn his pages of manuscript, smiling intently over them, but standing restlessly, Caroline noticed uneasily, as though at any moment he might plunge into the garden and disappear. She said with patience, ‘You knew they had been asked for this week. I told you. You agreed that Margaret didn’t look well. You promised to fetch them from the station this afternoon.’
‘Did I?’ said Henry, still turning papers, and smiling.
‘They will be here in half an hour. You will have to hurry to be at the station in time.’
‘Can’t Anna go?’
‘They won’t want to see Anna,’ Caroline explained as though this was self-evident. She was finding it difficult to concentrate on getting Henry to the station – she could not help being preoccupied by the unexpected recurrence of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and all that this entailed, just when it was most awkward. She examined her husband for any further signs of over-excitement, or wildness – he was now leaning over the desk and pencilling rapid notes on one of the odd pieces of scrap paper which were scattered there – and thought, as she always thought, how splendid he was, and then that she must try to keep it to Coleridge in the study, whatever happened, whilst the Cannings were there, and that Henry must be made to come to meals, and that this would all be very difficult. Henry became aware of her scrutiny at last, and swung away to the window, where he stood, looking out, his back to her. This was worse. She said miserably, ‘Did something go wrong with the novel, then? It seemed to be going so well. I mean, you were working so hard. I thought it was nearly finished. I told Oliver –’
‘I wish,’ said Henry, surprisingly fiercely, ‘that you – that people – wouldn’t tell Oliver anything. He pries, he nibbles, he draws conclusions, he defines, on scraps of information no one with any real tact would try to make anything out of. He will ask questions all the time. I have to make an effort to ignore him. I can’t think what he was invited for.’
‘He has been very useful to you.’
‘I could do without him.’
‘And he is really quite devoted to you. You must admit that. He would do anything for you. You said once that he saw what you were getting at better than anyone. Didn’t you? And then, Margaret looked so ill, and I’m sure bringing them here is the only way to make him give her a holiday this summer – he drives himself so hard, he doesn’t notice what she needs.’ Caroline, a sacrificially devoted wife herself, explained this perfectly practically without any hint of censure. Margaret must look after herself; men’s work came first, but if it was possible to help her, she would. Henry looked put out. He said vaguely, ‘I forgot, that’s all. I’m very busy. And I do wish that man would learn not to ask questions.’
‘It’s only because he’s so interested.’
‘I should get on better if he kept quiet. He should have the sense to see that. And just at the moment –’ His gaze wandered back to the papers on his desk. ‘Just at the moment I want to get this in order.’ He always said that, too. ‘I might finish it this time – it’s surprising how exhilarating it is to do a little purely intellectual work, when one’s been writing for some time – lots of fresh air and sunshine. And I’m really getting somewhere.’
Caroline was genuinely distressed now. She said unwisely, ‘But you never do get anywhere. You just make more and more notes. And then – oh well, you know as well as I do what happens then. It’s been years, now –’
‘It needs years –’
‘And just at the moment it really will be difficult if you go off into one of these – moods – you must see that. With Oliver here – who only comes to see you. Can’t you manage to finish the novel first?’
‘I’ll finish that,’ Henry said, obviously retreating from the conversation entirely, and no longer ready to explain himself or his intentions. ‘That’s all right. That can wait, it’ll do it good.’ He repeated, distantly, patiently, ‘I’ve just seen the way to get this in order,’ and sat down at the desk, sifting what looked like the most recent set of notes, and dismissing the whole issue entirely. Caroline considered him with exasperation – when he was writing the novels she would guard him from any disturbance, would alter meals, would entertain and placate people like Oliver Canning, who were useful, as well as deserving, Caroline thought, a real gratitude for their devotion to Henry. But she had been dubious some years ago when he had begun on his Analysis of the English Romantic Movement and was now entirely sceptical: it was not his kind of work, it never seemed to be any nearer completion, he was unsettled and difficult when occupied with it – less distant and more aggressive than when he was writing novels – and it was, moreover, almost always only a prelude to fits of really strange behaviour which she feared because they were quite out of her range. And Henry, normally a mild man, was surprisingly touchy about the Analysis – any criticism of it made him angry to the point of rudeness. And Oliver Canning – in Caroline’s opinion, rightly – would be bound to criticize. She looked at her watch again, and then at Henry, and the lapse of time over the argument made her momentarily panic-stricken about her ability to deal with any of this.
‘Please, Henry, at least don’t miss the train. They rely on being met: I told them you were coming: it’s important to them, whatever you think.’
Surprisingly, he gave in. He stood up, smiled with a sudden huge gentleness, and looked about for his jacket, which she found hastily, and helped him into, handing him the car-keys from the desk.
‘There’s just time, if you hurry. Besides, it’s almost certain to be late. It’s very good of you.’
‘I know,’ said Henry, still warmly. He added, ‘If that man treats me again with the proprietary air of a don with a good undergraduate who’s produced a first-class paper entirely through his help and advice, I shall tip him out on the side of the road and leave him there. No, don’t worry, I’ll get there. I’ll be back before you’ve had time to worry. And then you can take over and make them feel at home and I’ll get back to work. That’s fair.’
‘Yes,’ said Caroline, more hopefully. He seemed at least willing now, and thoroughly aware of what was going on. Perhaps it would be all right, after all. Perhaps they could last the fortnight. Perhaps Coleridge, and whatever he did to Henry could be kept at bay. She felt confident enough to begin to plan, tentatively, how it could be done, considering Henry as though he was a chess piece, and so intent on her problem that she did not catch the amusement with which he noticed her look. It was not easy, in any case, to catch his precise expressions. The first impression of him was overwhelming – he was an enormous man, well over six feet tall, broad shouldered, with strong, wide hands, and a huge head, covered with a very thick, springing crop of prematurely white hair, which merged into an equally live, almost patriarchal beard. This had been grown originally to cover scars left by the war, but had the effect now of a deliberate flamboyance, of a pose, aesthetically entirely satisfactory, it had to be admitted, as the successful literary giant – if the idea of posing had not entailed the idea of fraud, which few people would have accused him of. He was successful, and he was generally considered to be one of the few living giants. He looked like a cross between God, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Blake’s Job, respectable, odd, and powerful all at once. But if all the hair made an immediate impact, it made it difficult to tell more about him. The mobile features seemed to retreat; his eyes, under the exuberant silver eyebrows, were pale and shy, retiring until they seemed almost empty; his mouth, hidden amongst fronds of hair, suggested gentleness, and very little else. He could smile with tremendous kindness from time to time, but there was a curious reticence about him, a lack of presence, a lack of openness, which caused people meeting him to feel obscurely cheated – an impression which they usually had strongly on a first meeting, and later dismissed as unreasonable, remembering it only intermittently.
Caroline was so used to looking at him that she saw both that he was splendid, and that his shirt collar was dirty, and more vaguely that he seemed at ease now, and would almost certainly get as far as the railway station efficiently, and come back. She repeated, ‘It is good of you,’ shepherded him out of the door, and stood for a few moments on the step until she heard the car starting up in the garage. Then she went back into the drawing room, to sit in the window and watch for their arrival. She allowed herself a satisfied smile – what she could do, at least for the time being, had been done. The rest was outside her province.
A moment or so later Anna, who had also heard the car start in the garage, came cautiously down the stairs and stood for a moment in the hall, listening to the silence of the house. She was seventeen, the elder of the Severell children by five years, and had always been much the less prepossessing, a fact of which she was aggressively aware. She was small for her age apparently, and thin, with pronounced hollows above the bones at the base of her neck; she suffered, nevertheless, from that late adolescent padding of flesh which cannot be called fat, or even puppy fat, but contributes a certain squareness to the whole appearance of girls of a certain age, adds a heaviness to the cheeks and chin, makes the waist less marked, and the ankles thicker than they may later be, and suggests even in those who carry themselves well, a certain inevitable clumsiness. Anna did not carry herself well most of the time – on horseback and occupied she had grace, but otherwise she slouched, as though attempting to conceal an over prominent bust, which was not necessary. She was dressed, as usual, in a shapeless Aertex shirt, which had been her school hockey shirt, and boys’ heavy jeans, held somewhere between the waist and the hips by an old Girl Guides’ belt. She wore no shoes, and her feet, wrists and throat were a deep coffee brown: it was a good summer and she had been out most of the time. Her hair, straight and dark and fine, was like Caroline’s but suffered from Anna’s indecision over whether or not she was growing it. It had been cropped by regulation at school – a precaution, it was to be assumed, even in that highly expensive establishment for young ladies, against nits – and now it hung, half-way between long and short and bunched irritatingly in her shirt collar. She had Caroline’s large dark eyes, and Caroline’s narrow nose, but her mouth where Caroline’s was wide and generous was prim and round, and was pursed in an expression of habitual vague disapproval. She looked younger than seventeen, and was aware of this too.
She was, at the moment, intent on getting out of the house and hidden before the visitors arrived. She knew that Caroline would have liked her to appear, in a clean dress with her hair pinned back, on the doorstep to greet them, and she had magnified this piece of ordinary politeness into a kind of elaborate social torture contrived by her mother to humiliate her – her dresses, left over from school, were so shapeless, she would be put at such a disadvantage, and her mother knew it. Jeremy would be there, in a clean shirt with his hair brushed, smiling with just the right amount of diffident charm, and that made it worse. It was all right for Jeremy to take part in a family tableau as one of the children, he was young enough, he could carry it off, but for her it was a mockery, it made her even less certain of who she was, and her presence must be embarrassing not only to herself but to the Cannings and everyone else. She was annoyed, with part of herself, that so small an incident should seem so overwhelmingly important, and she could with the same part of herself entirely understand her father’s accusation that she was humourless, but the rest of her knew quite certainly that it was important, vastly important, that something would be destroyed if she did not get away and hide.
It was not that she disliked the Cannings. Indeed, in different ways she approved of both of them. Oliver had always been sharply polite to her and had otherwise left her alone, for which she was grateful. Margaret possessed a bright beauty which Anna on the occasion of their last visit had worshipped and envied. She was also happy, in an obvious, wholehearted, exhilarating way which Anna had not believed was possible until she had seen it, and had tried clumsily to share in a way that must have been as upsetting for Margaret as it had become for her. Margaret had been kind to Anna – had tried to talk to her about clothes, about school, about her future, as though she was really interested in Anna’s views on these things. Anna had not had any views to offer in recompense for all this attention and had responded only with a slavish, pink-faced, clumsy devotion, a belated schoolgirl crush, over which, remembering it now, she blushed and wriggled again. Margaret was so elegant, she was all golden and perfumed and swept down to breakfast to fling her arms round Oliver’s neck with a vigour which no one else Anna knew would have permitted themselves. She would say ‘I like that, that’s splendid’ and leave for a moment amongst those who were listening the feeling that everything was equally likeable, equally splendid, if only one could achieve the initial enthusiasm to come at it as Margaret did. She would have been sympathetic to Anna’s doubts and troubles, Anna supposed, but they were alien to her, they were things she must always have known how to avoid and Anna was ashamed.
It was not as likely as Anna supposed that Margaret had been embarrassed by her behaviour. She had then, as she intended to do now, sulked and hidden, and neither her devotion nor her embarrassment had been very obtrusive. Anna herself was not very obtrusive. And perhaps, if she got out of sight before the car came back, everything could really be avoided. If she came in again at dinner time she could, she thought optimistically, be legitimately silent over her food.
She peered cautiously into the kitchen, just in case Caroline might be there, although she knew her well enough to be fairly certain that she was waiting in the drawing room window by now. Then she went through, and out through the kitchen door into the back garden, under the ash tree and onto the terrace. Out there the heat was solid and stepping into it was like stepping into something thicker and slower than air, a hot bath. Anna pulled her shirt tail out over her jeans and shook it so that the air spread, almost cool for the moment, round her body. She gave a little wriggle of pleasure: she could stand any amount of heat, and had always been able to. This she was proud of – it was one of the few things she had in common with her distant and largely unknown father.
She jumped down the three feet from the terrace onto the back lawn; this was one of her rituals, she never went down by the steps, always leaped from this corner so that the earth was worn bare in one patch, which annoyed the gardener. Then she looked back cautiously and saw that she had been seen.
Her brother, in a spotless white shirt and his school tie, leaned over his bedroom window-sill and called to her in a round boy’s voice, ‘Anna! Where’re you going?’
‘Down the garden,’ Anna said, driving her hands into her pockets and looking back at him darkly over one hunched shoulder. Jeremy’s voice rose anxiously – he was as compulsively sociable as Anna was solitary, but she was not clever enough to see that, and knew merely that he was well-behaved and generally liked where she was not.
‘But they’ll be here any minute. You know they will. Honestly, Anna, it’s rude –’
‘I don’t care. Nor do Oliver and Margaret I should think. Don’t fuss.’
‘You know Mummy’s been looking for you. She was calling you all over the house. Gosh, I don’t think you care what anybody feels.’
‘Nobody cares what I feel,’ Anna retorted, and was ashamed of the childishness of this as soon as it was said. She tried to recover herself and said mockingly, ‘Don’t create,’ in the voice of a maid they had once had whose favourite saying this had been: for some reason it always drove Jeremy into a frenzy.
It did now. Jeremy was always, unsupported, less strong than Anna, who had never liked him and had, since he could walk, avoided any contact with him with a quiet and complete desperation. Like everyone else, he was uncertain of how she fitted in or what to expect of her – now, suddenly visited by an imagined picture of how she might behave if forced to be present at the welcoming, he was not at all sure that she was not better at the bottom of the garden. He said miserably, ‘Well, I don’t care what you do,’ pouted slightly and looked vaguely away over her head at the hills beyond. Jeremy had never been one for prolonging a difficult situation, or fighting a losing battle. Anna saw that he had given up, said, not very hopefully, ‘And you might have the decency not to go and tell them where I’ve gone,’ and set out again for the orchard, quivering with rage and self-pity. It was horrible to dislike one’s family so much.
The orchard was reached through a gate in the fence at the other end of the garden. It was well kept, but not tidy, and very cool and green after the dryness under the sun. Anna dodged between the trees to the far end where there was the messy corner common to all gardens, the place for bonfires, the carefully built compost heaps, piles of canes and old flowerpots, all collected against the high beech hedge, beyond which was the country – lanes, cornfields and low rolling hills. In this corner they had a hut – neither a summer house nor a toolshed but something in between, made of planks and tarpaulin with a wide window onto ‘the view’ which had been put in at Henry’s suggestion. This window was against a gap in the hedge and looked out through it. From the orchard side it was impossible to tell whether anyone was in the hut or not, and Anna had a latch on the inside.
It had been designed as a place to play in for both children once Jeremy was old enough to take an interest in it. Before that it had been for Anna to play house in, which she hadn’t done, very much, and there were still the child-sized shelves and benches and cupboards which had been put in for her. They had never played there together – Jeremy had taken it over first as a fort and then as a workshop, and at those times Anna, who had always used it quite simply as a hiding-place, had not gone near it. But lately Jeremy had spent most of his time out of doors, playing tennis and cricket and badminton and above all riding, and Anna had come back. She had been very secret about it, did not go there very often when there was any chance of a real search being put out for her, and had been careful not to shift any of the signs of Jeremy’s last occupation – tools in boxes, unsuccessful pieces of carpentry, woodshavings, nails – so that anyone looking in quickly would have seen no sign of her habitation. She did not know what they thought she did down the garden and suspected they thought she left it altogether and went out into the country. So the hut was safe so far, and she could be still there. Anywhere would do; she had no real urge to go further afield.
Once inside, with the latch closed, she spent some time wondering what to do next, thinking that she could sit in the sun if she didn’t have to hide, or that she could have got right out and gone to the stables if there had not been a chance of meeting people there whom she had decided not to meet. It had become, as usual, a matter of getting through time until bedtime, of letting the day run through itself somehow without allowing herself to upset herself too much by thinking about intangibles like sex, or her own future, or why she was alive at all. She had become quite adept at not thinking of these things – sometimes she could not remember having thought of anything for some hours together – but as she got older it became more difficult. She saw that this was perhaps inevitable but did not like it. She could not imagine being able to deal with things in any other way.
Having spent some time tucking her shirt back into her jeans and then letting it out again she fetched out from a cardboard box at the back of a large drawer which had once held Jeremy’s screwdrivers the exercise book and ball-point pen with which she believed spasmodically that she was writing a novel. It was to be expected that she would want to write. People who met her, knowing that she was Henry’s daughter, assumed it, and it was certainly true that at school she had shown no interest in, or aptitude for, anything but the Arts subjects, particularly English. She had been good enough at those for it to be assumed that she would go to the University and read English, at least before the trouble with the school, after which she had left under a cloud. It was still assumed that this was what she would do, but nothing was done about it. Anna did no work, and expressed no interest in applying to colleges or preparing for examinations; Caroline, discouraged by her own lack of knowledge about universities, Anna’s unhelpfulness, and the need not to disturb Henry, had done little more than reproach her from time to time, and feel that she must tackle the situation before Anna would have been due to go back to school in the autumn. It was so tiresome, she would say; the school would have arranged it all for them if there had not been all this awkwardness, and really Anna seemed to care so little about anything at the moment that it was probably a waste of time to arrange anything until she knew better what she wanted. There was no real hurry – she could always stay at home until she found out.
Anna turned the pages vaguely, looking at what she had written. From time to time she took intense pleasure in writing, in the act of putting pen to paper, but this never lasted for more than a sentence or at most a paragraph at a time. So that all she had in her notebook was a series of flat mnemonics – phrases, ‘light like knives’, ‘we are all alone’ and half a poem. ‘Why trees were green once Was of course yourself’ – all ordinary enough, but intensely important to her, because she had only just first met them, had only just, for the first time, taken possession of them by writing them down. And the proposed novel, in so far as it had any plot, or life, or impetus, was a string of the same jaded literary mnemonics – the Heathcliff hero whose wickedness Anna, possibly unusually naive for her years, had only just realized the attractiveness of, the heroine, a little timid, a little self-willed, with her face ‘framed in a bell of’ metallic hair – alternately copper, bronze, silver, whatever Anna pleased – and the worn mixed metaphor really suggested to Anna a new and startling beauty.
But nevertheless, however real and possibly valuable the pleasure Anna might derive from the largely inactive, largely fantastic reconstruction of such a tale, she could not indulge herself, as it is probable most other clever girls of her age could quite profitably have done, with vague dreams of literary fame in the future, caused by some written product entirely different from what she was now amusing herself with, resulting from a labour of writing which at this stage she was, properly, not only not willing to embark on, but not capable of. Day-dreaming and indulgence in stock emotions might well quite simply have been Anna’s way to writing, had she been left to herself. But in this area, of course, she was not left to herself. There was Henry Severell. It was likely enough – though not certain – Anna often reflected, that it was almost entirely because of him that it was writing, and writing novels, which so occupied her meditations. That in itself was not an encouraging thought – it made it so much more difficult for her to see her way clearly, or to see who she was, or what she wanted, in her own right. But when it came to the writing itself he was crushing. He presented a standard that it was already impossible for her to attain; he sat in his study, for long hours, and wrote and wrote (he had the tremendous productivity, at the least, of genius) with a slow, satisfied smile under his beard which Anna knew she could never emulate. She could see how it was, in fact, and she could not attain it, and watching Henry drained her dreams of their force. And therefore she could not know, or see clearly enough to wonder, how much force they might have had; she shouldn’t have been needing to think about them, but there it was, and sooner or later, whenever she began to think in that direction, she came up against Henry.
This was particularly true at home; at school, distance had given her a certain freedom to work in; so that now she merely turned her notebook over once or twice before putting it aside and climbing up onto the bench to lean up against the hot glass of the window and stare out at the fields. She had learned to short-circuit the thought of Henry before she got there, to stop thinking automatically before she reached anything troubling, and now she spent some time feeling the glass, and stirring the dust in the corners, before coming round to considering anything else.
There hadn’t, until lately, been very much else. Anna was embedded in that section of the English middle classes which prolongs childhood deep into late adolescence. The deb. or the shopgirl would by Anna’s age have had social lives and love affairs of their own to brood over, but Anna still spent her time either with other girls in a girls’ boarding school in the country, where her nearest contact with any other form of life was the nostalgic tattle after lights of those more advanced than herself, or at home, again in the country, where she was still officially a child, on a school holiday, and where such entertainment as was provided for her was holiday entertainment for children – tennis, riding, picnics, family parties – with a vista of packing hockey sticks, knee-socks and woolly gloves back into her trunk at the end of a recognizably limited period of pure amusement of this kind.
She had always been outwardly placid and had been possessed of an incredible capacity for living in the present. Being a child had, on the whole, bored her; she had not wanted to be one, and had not wanted what children want. She spent a wartime childhood in a solitary way, living at first alone with her mother in the large house at Darton, and later with her maternal grandparents in the Derbyshire vicarage, sharing a governess with the three daughters of a local bishop. She cared very little for these children, and less for the governess, an intensely Christian woman who spent most of her time encouraging the children to read the Bible and make paper models of Jael and Sisera, David and Goliath, or the crucifixion; Anna’s saints and patriarchs, owing to an inbred clumsiness, were more monstrous than Goliath himself, and their monstrosity was what chiefly struck her on looking back at her early schooling; no Homer, no discoveries, no excitement, no golden land, nothing else. Caroline in those days, subdued by the presence of her own parents, and by Henry’s absence – Henry had been in a Japanese prison camp in Burma – was difficult to love and perhaps too ready to assume that Anna was content because she always seemed more or less occupied, and did not have fits of hysteria, temper tantrums, asthma, or any of the other troubles which assailed children she knew.
And Anna herself acquiesced, more or less, not unhappily. There had grown in her from as far back as she could remember a sense that she was, as it were, in cold storage, that she was waiting for a sign, for a signal of release, for some event following which she would be able to move into violent action, to be, and to do, and to understand what she was for. It was all there, in the future, it was all possible; what she had now was so insignificant partly by contrast. In the very early days she identified this event with Henry’s return from Burma; when he did return, and changed nothing, leaving her still a child and occupied with nothing, it was pushed further into the future. Childhood is so large an area, and seems interminable, so that all that had been possible had been to wait quietly, from day to day, like a prisoner whose life sentence, although he knows that he may be released eventually if he behaves well and does not die first, seems to surround him completely, to cut him off from any future and any brightness there may be. Anna had known, at times almost passionately, that there must be an end to this life which was only eating and sleeping and playing, and, knowing it, had for most of the time put it out of her mind with an extraordinary calm, and had eaten, and slept, and played as though she were a child completely, with a deliberation that amounted to the carrying out of a ritual.
The torments of physical adolescence, which came upon her later than is usual, took her entirely by surprise. She was suddenly clutched by too much energy, by wild fits of bodily anguish during which she was driven to occupy herself by banging her head rhythmically against a wall, to bite her hands, or at the least to go for long miserable walks which left her more tense, and apparently more straining, than she had been when she set out. She went about with her hands clenched until the nails marked her palms, and her teeth set unconsciously together so that she noticed that her jaw ached with the effort, and still could not relax it. Things became suddenly beautiful, intolerably beautiful, and she intolerably aware of them: she found herself, despite herself, driven to tears by the intense green she saw, looking up through the apple trees at the summer sky, unable to reduce the profusion of the gold-edged crossing twigs and the overlapping, deepening, glittering rounds of the leaves against that uncompromising midsummer blue to any order that she could comprehend. Her senses were assailed that summer, everything was disproportionate – the feel of damp grass, the smell of wet earth, even the odd patterns of the light shining on her mother’s polished tables, distressed her altogether. It was all too much, and yet it was not final; it was as though something had grabbed her and flung her wildly about, however she protested, and yet would never shake her quite into submission: the times of wild excitement and distress always alternated with times of extreme dullness, where she could hardly summon strength to creep out of the house into the garden, or strength when she was out there, to lift her hands from her sides or her eyes from her path in front of her to notice the trees or the hills and sky beyond. And so she endured; she was capable of enduring because the strain of laziness deep in her allowed for this uproar as it had allowed for the boredom of childhood. She believed she would ride this storm as she had ridden the calm, and this exasperated her curiously – why, if she could endure, if she could arrive at her event, which was not yet, must she be subjected to so much embarrassment? It was not real, even the immediate agony was only momentarily complete, and that was the worst thing.
Finally, some weeks through her enforcedly extra long holiday, she had fallen in love. His name was Michael Farne, and he had kissed her unexpectedly one afternoon in the stables, belonging to a certain John Ellis, where he kept his horse and where Anna and Jeremy went to ride. Until that time she had not noticed him particularly, although she had envied him his horse, a huge black hunter which won prizes in the open jumping throughout the county. He was large, blond, square-shouldered and pleasant. He had just come down from Cambridge, where he had taken a Third in History, and was waiting to be called into the Navy. This was all that Anna knew about him, and all that she had dared to attempt to find out. Once she had decided she was in love with him she did not know what to do with his presence. She could not meet his eye, or speak to him, or offer him any encouragement. He called, once or twice, casually, at the Severells’ house, and was offered tea by a puzzled Caroline. He took Anna to the cinema once, too, and held her hand all the way through, whilst Anna shivered, and suffered, and waited with awful longing for the moment when she could relive all this for herself, alone in bed at night. In the end, discouraged possibly by her silence, and by the apparently cold and defiant gaze she had turned on him, he had not come back.
Anna made no attempt to find out why – partly because she had never been in the habit of doing anything about anything, and partly because it was not until he had gone, and she was not preoccupied with what to say to him next, that she came to see how much she loved him. She did go to the stables, once or twice, to stare at him mutely and desperately across the yard, but she did not cross to him, or address him, only looked, as though she was intent on learning him off; his clothes, his face, the ways his bones fitted, the shape of his haunches in his breeches, the silver bleached line of shaved hair above his ear. He glanced at her curiously once or twice, and she hunched her shoulders, drawing miserably into herself, hoping not to be seen. There was nothing provocative about her, only this intense, painful stare. Michael did not come over.
Once she was sure he would not, she dropped into love like a stone into water, and submerged tracelessly and altogether. She spent her time constructing conversations and embraces which had never taken place and were not likely to; she dreamed of Michael, naturally and obsessively, night after night: she imagined, when out walking, that he was about to appear around every next corner. She found, curiously, that although bad at drawing, she could produce a recognizable likeness of him, and filled page after page of her notebooks with the same square, blond, slightly smiling face, or the same solid body, set lightly on its feet in every conceivable and inconceivable posture. He became a way of seeing, a way of possessing by incantation the things seen which had so distressed her. She would look up at the branches and say ‘Michael, Michael, Michael’, confusing the one intense feeling in the other, reducing the earlier loose distress into something comprehensible because it was love, which was expected, and could be mastered at least to the extent of being named.
This was in some sense an advance. The nastiness was that deep down Anna knew it was an advance and knew why, and despised herself for it. Something in her withdrew cautiously from this love, preparing already for when it should end and no longer be enough. It was a coldness, a wariness, a holding back. Anna did not like it, and ignored it as far as possible, and yet rested lazily on it since it was her last strength.
But now, for the moment, Michael was a way to a first tentative sense of power. She relaxed on her bench and considered the cornfields through the blurred and dusty glass, seeing the lanes across his imaged face and his hair in all the reticulated gold of the corn, and she had a first faint, wary sense of having her place in the world, a way of taking possession of the bright things seen, and she was elated and afraid.