The train from London to Darton was a stopping train with no corridor, and high, benched uncomfortable seats without arm-rests. The Cannings had a compartment to themselves and sat in one corner of it facing each other. Oliver was working. He had opened his briefcase, and surrounded himself with papers, the moment they were settled, and now he read, and scribbled, and tapped his teeth with his pen, altogether closed in. Margaret watched him. In her lap her gloved hands were crossed over a copy of the Listener, which she had bought because it had a picture of Henry, a commentary on a dramatized reading of one of his novels on the Third Programme, and a letter from Oliver, pointing out mistakes that had been made in the reading. Underneath the Listener she was hiding one of the glossier cheap women’s magazines, which she had bought from the station bookstall when it became apparent that Oliver was not going to talk to her during the journey. She was ashamed of this now, and had not opened it, had tried to pretend she hadn’t got it, although she was almost certain that Oliver had seen her buy it. She had always been addicted to these magazines, seeing them, she believed, as an alien but comfortable world, full of bright little hints for improving one’s ‘home’ or appearance, which she never followed but knew her way about in altogether, and stories and letters which managed at the same time to make love a glamorous and uncomplicated and energetic passion, and to cast some of this glamour and energy into the ordinariness of secretaries and suburbs and bachelor girls in London flats. Margaret herself was not ordinary in this sense, but nevertheless her interest had not, perhaps, entirely the quality of amused looking in that she attributed to it. She believed in love, and the power of love to invigorate and transform and illuminate, in love as a last resort from dullness, and derived genuine comfort from the stories, with their endings so final and certain, cast as she was on a shore where things were strange and dry, and both love and dullness wore forms so alien and complicated that she could not always distinguish one from the other or recognize either for what it was until too late.
Oliver, she had discovered, believed the reading of such papers to be positively morally wrong. She had continued to read them for some time after her marriage, and he had said nothing to her; she had discovered what he felt quite accidentally, by overhearing a speech he was making to one of his friends about the students at the training college for women where he worked, one of his fierce, absolute little speeches, which frightened both her and the students. ‘One has never time to read that kind of stuff,’ he said. ‘One has so short a life, and there is always something one could be reading that would add to one’s knowledge, or give one some insight into things.’ Oliver’s friend had acquiesced, as he had been expected to do, as a matter of course, and Margaret had received another of the small shocks she was always open to, living with Oliver: she had never managed to learn in time which things carried this tremendous moral importance, and now and then she went, as she saw it, badly wrong.
Now, having looked at the photograph of Henry and taken pride in Oliver’s name, solid and undeniable at the bottom of his letter, she did not want to read any further in the Listener. She had heard Oliver talk it all over, before. She turned instead to watching Oliver write, and to looking out of the window anticipating Darton, her spirits rising with every further rattle and plunge of the train.
The Cannings were an odd couple; everyone thought so, including Margaret herself, who used to brood over their oddity from time to time with feelings that ranged from a kind of illicit excitement, a feeling of freedom from anything she had known, to a completely bewildered sense of having lost her bearings, and having let herself in for coping with something she would never be competent to understand. She liked this too, most of the time; she had always approached even the least likely relationship with zest, as though if she applied herself entirely to it something supremely important must emerge. Sometimes it did. Sometimes, on the other hand, people suspected her, in her innocence, of trying to get round them, of wanting vaguely to get something out of them, although what, beyond a quite straightforward personal contact, that something might be these people never stopped to ask, and would have found no answer if they had. It was probably partly her look which gave that impression; she had the well-ordered classical beauty, with not a hair out of place, that always seems a little remote; there was something languorous and elegant in her from which one does not normally expect the first advances. She was tall – a good six inches taller than Oliver – and rose blonde, with a gold skin and large yellow-brown eyes. She wore her hair long, having the theory that what men liked was hair, as long as it was good hair, and that too much arrangement only distracted them from it. Like many real blondes, she was never quite sure that what she had was not slightly vulgar, and believed she would have liked to be black-haired and dark-skinned and mysterious; this did not stop her understanding and exploiting her blondeness to the full.
Oliver was a little man, and had the little man’s way of sitting with his shoulders stiff, his back straight, and his head pointing slightly upwards; he had the little man’s compact command over his own body, too, and sat drawn together in a way that made him look even littler, like a small animal, a field vole, a water rat, which can shrink itself through holes one would never dream of putting it through. His head was large for his body, long and thin and pointed, his nose and mouth sharpened, his eyebrows cornered at the top. His skin was pale, and looked as though it would mark easily; his hair, black, and wispy, was short back and sides, but grew to a widow’s peak on his forehead and straggled a little across the top of his head in one or two long locks which occasionally fell into his eyes. He had little, useless-looking hands and feet, the bones so slender that it seemed possible to crush his hand on shaking it. From the way he gripped his pen it was apparent that there was more strength in them than that; there was a determined, wiry precision; it was even possible for him to write legibly on a train. Margaret watched him, as she had always done, with a certain basic excitement. He was that kind of man – usually a little man – in whom almost all women can immediately sense great sexual energy, very near the surface, very controlled and directed.
Nobody, when they had married, had predicted it, or been able immediately to explain it. They had been married five years now, and had met, the summer before their marriage, in Cambridge, where Oliver, a post-war graduate, had been finishing a Ph.D. thesis, and applying for Fellowships. He had been an old student; born in 1922 he had been called into the army in 1940, and had gone up to Cambridge in 1946, taken his degree in 1949, and had spent the next three years writing his doctoral thesis. Margaret, five years younger, felt in many ways a generation younger when she met him – this was partly because she was herself, at twenty-three, slightly older in fact than the young men she came to visit, although nobody noticed it.
She looked out of the window at cornfields and allotments which glowed, even the grimiest of them, in that sun, like glimpses, constantly whisked in and out of sight, of the summer holiday in the country to which she was at last being carried, full ears of corn, tall lupins, dusty-blue scabious, sweet peas and bachelors’ buttons, hot pink and gold, so much sharper and clearer than the dying sparks and the grit which the train cast on them, and then down at her own lap again and met the small blurred newsprint eyes of Henry Severell. The Cannings’ life lately had not been easy and the thought of Henry was to Margaret a promise not only of physical comfort and rest which they both, she thought, needed, but of a larger space for living, for understanding how they were living, which she thought they needed even more. It would be good for Oliver, she thought, to be able to talk daily with a man with a mind like that; she did not specify in what way she thought it would be good, but she knew it would be. Henry Severell was after all a genius, they said; he saw some things more clearly than other people, and was preoccupied with larger issues than those they were struggling with. She hoped vaguely that some of all this might rub off on Oliver, and for that matter on herself: it was like first communion, like first saying ‘I love you’, it was time, to reflect and make contact with the depths.
He looked up, frowning, to ask, ‘Where are we?’
‘Darton, next stop,’ said Margaret. ‘It can only be ten minutes.’
‘I suppose Henry will be late,’ Oliver said, packing papers into his briefcase. ‘Do I look tidy?’
‘Beautiful,’ said Margaret, meaning it.
Oliver looked suspiciously at her, and stood up to comb his hair, very carefully, in the railway mirror.
The train came into Darton Station. Oliver removed his spectacles, with a click, from his nose to his pocket, and began to lift suitcases from the rack. Margaret hung dangerously from a half-open door, gripping her hat and surveying the platform. Henry was there, striding amongst milk churns sparkling with sun, mopping his face with his handkerchief. He had nearly been late. Margaret thought, Henry was there, it was going to be all right, with a hugely disproportionate feeling of relief, stumbled to the platform as the train jerked to a halt and began to run, noisily on high heels, towards him. People turned to stare as she came up to him, throwing herself against him, and burying her face in his solid shoulder.
‘Henry,’ she said. ‘Henry, oh, Henry. Dear Henry, what a wonderful day. Oh, Henry, how good to see you!’
‘And you,’ said Henry. ‘I was rather afraid I was going to be late.’
Oliver came up with the suitcases, a line of sweat already along his lip.
‘Hullo, Oliver,’ said Henry. ‘Give me those.’ He disengaged himself from Margaret’s embrace, took the suitcases, put them down to shake Oliver’s hand, gathered them up again and set off towards the ticket barrier with his guests hurrying behind him. The ticket collector said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Severell,’ and enquired after Jeremy, whose departures for school were made into charming social occasions by Jeremy’s polite questions about the station master’s wife, and the difficulty of formulating the summer time table. Henry replied that Jeremy was healthy, and turned back half-way across the car park to shout that he had taken a First in the junior open jumping at Aruncester show. The ticket collector roared back his congratulations whilst Henry pushed Oliver and the suitcases into the back of the car, Margaret into the front, and started with a jerk.
‘They like you here,’ Margaret said to him.
‘They like Jeremy,’ Henry said. ‘He’ll wear himself out, getting people to love him.’
‘But if they do –’ Margaret began. Henry did not take her up, and sank into a silence which seemed quite natural to him and so determined that neither of the Cannings broke it until they reached the house. Margaret was content to relax and enjoy her coming; Oliver, on the other hand, sat bolt upright on the back seat, pressing his hands into the leather, and studying Henry’s erratic driving with an apparently growing concern.
When they turned into the drive, breaking into the stillness of the garden with a crunch and spurt of gravel, Margaret saw Caroline on the doorstep, one hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, and prepared with pleasure for the ceremonial of arrival. Henry opened her door for her, and she came out into the sun, shaking her skirts free and smiling at the roses; Caroline and Jeremy came down from the steps to meet them in the path; for a moment she put her face against Caroline’s cool cheek; and then they were telling each other that the weather could not have been better, that the journey had been very easy, meaning, Margaret thought with joy, that they understood this talk, they could do it, they knew where they were. She could have hugged Caroline, except that that would have been out of order, and would have spoiled it.
Jeremy came up and held out his hand to her, and told her, slightly husky with shyness, how much he had been looking forward to her coming. Margaret smiled vaguely at him. He was a very beautiful child, although she had assumed boys didn’t like to be told so, dark like Caroline and Anna, with high cheek-bones, and clear eyes under unusually long lashes, and a skin so smooth and glowing that she nearly put out a finger to touch it. She assumed he would really dislike that, and may have been right, although he had already begun to encourage older boys at school who felt the same desire – with nothing more than a gentle smile, it was true. Jeremy simply liked to be liked. He said now, ‘May I take your hat, Aunt Margaret, and your bag?’ and Margaret was pleased again to be so accepted by all of them. It had been Caroline’s idea that Oliver and Margaret should be uncle and aunt to her children – a procedure she followed with most of her fairly regular adult guests. This amused Oliver, delighted Margaret, and gave full scope to Jeremy for the intimate use of first names which was to be such an asset to him in his later life. Anna called them nothing at all when she could manage this, and otherwise alternated clumsily and unmethodically between Mr Canning, Uncle Oliver, and plain Oliver, depending on her mood, and her current theory as to how much Oliver disliked her.
Caroline took Margaret upstairs to her rose and silver room, and showed her drawers, towels, cupboards, smiled when Margaret admired her flowers, and then sat down in a friendly way on the edge of the bed to wait until Margaret should be ready to go down to tea. This was a sign of intimacy, that she should wait like a girl with a school friend, rather than leaving Margaret politely alone, and Margaret took it as such, but neither of them spoke, Margaret because she did not want to spoil this silent friendliness, this moment of calm communion which she felt was between them, and Caroline because she was suddenly extremely angry with Anna, and found it, for a moment, all she could do not to burst out with some exclamation of fury and disappointment.
She was not given to questioning herself, but even so she had lately wondered why she was so often reduced to trembling with rage over all Anna’s small misdemeanours. She had been one of those clean little girls who had cried when put down on her first beach because the sand was dirty, and now felt a positive nausea at the sight of Anna’s shirt collars, or her grimy bare feet, trailing up the stairs. When she wanted Anna, as she did now, she thought, her underclothes sticking to her with heat and crossness, Anna was away sulking somewhere, and never thought of welcoming visitors, taking them off Henry’s hands, or carrying tea-trays. When she did not want Anna, she was sure to fall over her, stretched full length and grubby on the drawing-room carpet, involved in some private agony which she imposed upon Caroline without any intention of allowing her to share it or alleviate it, as Jeremy might have done. Her shoulders, folded in grief, were hunched over every meal table, however little she said, so that Caroline felt that she was some evil spirit who had taken possession of the life she had arranged round her husband and her house, and was brooding over it, was weighing on it, would never leave it.
She had been prepared to feel, and suppress, some small annoyance over the growing up of another woman in her house, but Anna could hardly be called a woman, she had no idea of anything, Caroline thought more and more wildly, no will and no intentions, she would never go away, and she, Caroline, was growing older and would hardly manage to get rid of Anna in time to enjoy what she had spent so long building before she would become tired and restricted herself. She was never so much a mother that she did not still dream of a privacy which excluded children and left her as young as she chose to be; this had intensified with the onset of the menopause. Anna would not go unless someone made her; it was time all the talk about universities was brought to something, one way or the other. She resolved to speak to Oliver about it. He would know, and was efficient; he would find out whether it was any use thinking of sending Anna to any university. This would have the added advantage of not troubling Henry. Having made a decision brought her a little peace, although she still felt sick at the prospect of Anna’s appearance at dinner, in jeans doubtless, with unwashed hands and unbrushed hair. She said, rather proud of herself for having sat still and unruffled through all this distress:
‘I think it’s hotter today than ever, don’t you?’
‘Terribly hot,’ said Margaret, ‘but so much fresher here than in London, one doesn’t mind so much.’ She had washed her hands and face and was now sitting at the dressing table, brushing out her hair; when she was in someone else’s house she always took advantage of spare room cleanness and neatness to attend to herself in a more leisurely and thorough way than at home; she was on show, to herself as well as to others, and liked to watch her face in strange mirrors and play to herself the fine lady that all little girls pretend to be and all women still imagine to be somewhere either in the future or some other surroundings, whose possibility is suddenly glimpsed again in places bare of personal associations, spare rooms, cloakrooms in restaurants, mirrors across the table at public dinners. She turned quickly to Caroline, gathering her warm hair between the brush and her hand, coiling it gently and stabbing it with long, bronze coloured pins. She did not really need to look at it. ‘You’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘how much coming here means to me. After even so much of this kind of summer in London, to be really in the country, really resting. Heaven!’
‘I thought you seemed a little tired, when we last met.’
‘I have been very tired,’ Margaret burst out. ‘It hasn’t been easy lately. I –’ She stifled a confessional impulse; it would not do to break the peace so soon, it might not be necessary, and she was not sure how Caroline would take anything of that kind. She went on, ‘I don’t stand heat well –’ and turned back to the mirror, brushing mascara into her lashes, and colour into her lips, turning a dark pencil once or twice on a beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. Her face sloped this way and that, stretched and contracted as she treated it, all planes in all directions, and then suddenly slipped into place again as she took out a tissue and blotted her lipstick. She gave herself a long look, enjoying herself, and was gathered together, made up. Caroline looked at her incuriously. She had long ago passed the age where confidences were usual or desirable, and from feeling that talk of clothes and children and housekeeping was a useful and civilized clue to the woman beneath the talk, she had come to be genuinely more interested in clothes and children and housekeeping. She registered Margaret’s trouble and skirted it, and said gently, ‘If you’re ready …’
Margaret stood up and ran over to the window, to look out and establish her position in the place. She looked down into the garden, and over it to the fruit trees, and beyond them to the hills. It was all still shining with heat. Beneath her, Henry and Oliver were crossing the lawn towards the orchard, Henry striding, and Oliver, just behind him, hunching his shoulders to counterbalance the weight of an imaginary gown, clenching his fists in the small of his back. Margaret almost called down to them to ask if they would wait, if she could come with them, and then thought better of it. Oliver would like to be alone with Henry. It was something, after all, to be walking intimately with Henry Severell in his own orchard. Margaret turned to Caroline.
‘I’m quite ready,’ she said. ‘For anything at all, here.’
In the garden, Anna heard their progress between the trees, and shrank into herself on her bench, peering out with one eye between two boards so that as they came nearer they crossed her line of vision once or twice, first her father, with his head huge among the branches, then Oliver, almost scurrying after him, small and black. ‘So they’re here,’ she said to herself, clasping her hands round her knees, motionless, ‘and Oliver’s after him already.’ Protecting Henry from questions was bred in her, and she had seen the two of them together before. ‘Not that it’s anything to do with me,’ she finished to herself, and heard their voices clear through the orchard.
‘Nice,’ said Oliver, ‘to have this on one’s doorstep.’ They had come now to the hedge and were standing over the gate, not far from Anna, looking out into the cornfield, beyond which were a few trees, hawthorn and birch, and beyond that the rise of the first hill, warm green and russet with bracken, grey with the odd, uncovered stone.
‘Is any of it yours?’
‘Not beyond the garden.’
‘You always wear such an air of the landowner, I’d thought all this was yours, too. Why should I have thought that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Henry, who did know.
‘A pocket of England as it used to be,’ said Oliver, ‘before subtopia got it, before concrete and corrugated iron and diesel fumes, before London and Birmingham and Manchester started putting out feelers towards each other and spreading smoke further than that. You’re a lucky man.’ Henry stirred with something which was possibly irritation.
‘It’s terrible now,’ Oliver went on, as Henry said nothing, ‘when I come to the country, when I see real grass and trees, I don’t believe in it, I imagine it’s all a show specially put on and preserved for my benefit, you know, like ancient monuments – filled up with period chairs fetched from everywhere else to make the house look lived in again – as it never was, not with those chairs. I think they’ve put a tree here and corn there, and let some water run across the corner of the picture, so I can have a bit of everything and see what country used to be. But all so permitted, so contrived. Don’t you find that? I’m sure now, if I walked out of your bottom of the garden frame, I’d find something quite horrid before I went very far. Oh, I know it’s all here, but I don’t believe in it, it’s not relevant.’
‘You would find something quite horrid. They’re putting up asbestos pig sheds in rows, in the field just down the road. Very subtopian pigsheds. I don’t know if you mind subtopia for pigs.’
Oliver laughed, small and sharp. After a time he said, ‘No, but don’t you feel, sometimes, that this is a bit thin, now, you must know what I mean – that it’s not what’s important now? Doesn’t it make you feel guilty? Don’t you think you should go out and come to grips with the horror?’
‘Come to grips?’ asked Henry, in his slow, singing voice. ‘Do you mean describe, or condemn, or both? No, I can’t say I do. And I wouldn’t know how else to come to grips. I’m not going to live in it, or near it. I don’t have to. Why should I?’
‘Because it’s real. Because it’s urgent.’
‘I find this real and urgent enough,’ Henry muttered into his beard. He looked away from Oliver, and down at his own hands side by side on the top of his gate, large and clumsy and very passive. His face became vacant; this was because he was angry that Oliver, with his concern, should act as the forerunner of his condemned subtopia, imposing it where it was not, talking limits into land Henry lived in, and found, easily, limitless. Oliver seemed aware, if not of his anger, of a certain constraint; he was silent for a moment, and then began again, coming round at his companion another way.
‘I suppose all this,’ he said, sticking doggedly for some reason to the scene in front of them, ‘must seem a bit comfortable to you now, after your war in the jungle, and so forth. I always find the south a bit tame, myself, even, coming from where I do – I expect the land to be all rocks and heather, and sharp edges, and ups and downs, you know. The south’s a bit rounded off, for me. A bit too finished.’
‘I haven’t much sense of proportion,’ Henry said oddly. He moved slightly, twisting his head down and then up, to ease his neck muscles, so that Anna saw his face for a moment, the eyes, then the mouth, open and drawn tight, then the flash of the beard. Like a cross horse, she thought. Oliver should learn not to tackle him so, like a newspaperman; anyone can see he doesn’t like it.
‘Ah,’ said Oliver. He waited a moment, then said, ‘Now I’ve annoyed you; why?’
Henry laughed. ‘I suppose because you bring so much with you. All the problems of urban sprawl, the north against the south, mining villages in Derbyshire, jungles in Burma – oh, yes, and my work – you go on driving that round and round. Why can’t you just look at it, and leave it alone? I like looking at that hill.’
‘We all bring so much with us. We can’t help it.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Henry, making a flattening motion with one of his hands. ‘But let it lie, let it lie.’
‘It’s not in me,’ said Oliver, with mock sorrow. ‘It’s not the way I go on. It may work for you. Only I am full of care, and I don’t stare, I think.’
He sounded a little patronizing and a little defensive. Then he came closer to Henry, and said, very fiercely, ‘And you think too. Why else do you write novels and not lyrics? When shall we see the next novel?’ Henry swung away from him.
‘I don’t know. I’m doing a little academic work.’
‘On what?’
‘Oh – Coleridge –’ said Henry unwillingly, thinking that it was a curious intimacy, between a writer and his intelligent reader. There was so much less space either for privacy or for discovery than there should be. He and Oliver had been so explicit on paper; he about his world and Oliver about his intelligent reading of that world; they knew, in this one area, more than most men ever knew about each other, so that to talk was ridiculous. And yet, as men, they had no touch. Oliver made a series of experimental holes with his screw-driver mind, and he, Henry, did as best he could. He did not like to be researched into in the flesh. He wished he had not said as much as he had about what he was doing. He gathered himself together and expended his energies on retreat, staring at his hands on the gate until he was conscious of nothing but them, the lines on the knuckles, the rough, flaking paint on the wood under them, the short hairs, that stood up and shone along his wrists. ‘I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it,’ Blake said. Henry could look at anything until he was lost and saw, and heard, nothing beyond it. The shadow of leaves on his right hand was peculiarly satisfactory, small rounds and long dashes; on his left, in the sun, the sweat glittered slightly in the pores. His hands grew and glowed at him; he felt slightly dizzy; from a long way away Oliver’s patient voice repeated firmly, ‘And Anna? Where is Anna?’
That was a safe question; it was conversation, not interrogation, nor exploration. He said, ‘I don’t know. She’s been moody lately. She’s in love.’
‘Happily?’
‘Naturally not.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver dryly. ‘I suppose she goes back to school shortly?’
‘No, she was – we were asked to remove her. She ran away from school, you know, last term. Not in this direction.’
‘Who enticed her? Where did she go?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Henry. It was apparent that the idea that she might have gone to someone else was new to him. ‘I don’t know, she doesn’t seem to want to say. We don’t interfere.’
‘You should find out. What will she do now?’
Henry looked vague, and began to move away from the gate. ‘Nobody seems to know. I believe she’s quite clever. The school seemed to think so, before all this trouble.’
‘Isn’t it time,’ said Oliver professionally, ‘she was making her mind up?’
Anna saw them for a moment and then heard them weaving back as they had come, between the trees, one behind the other. They said something indistinguishable and then Henry’s voice reached her for a moment, ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ and then she heard the creak, very small, of the gate into the garden. Grow out of it, she thought. Of course I’ll grow out of it. I’m growing out of it now, that’s what hurts. I’m growing out of everything, all the time, too quickly. One gets sore. Of course, she thought, hating her father now, too, for betraying her so casually, so carelessly; of course, I’m silly. I know I’m silly, I know I’ll grow out of it. But meanwhile, until I’m not silly, there’s nothing. One is trapped in one’s own silliness, quite as much as in love. Probably more.
And they had broken her mood, obtruded things she was deliberately not thinking of, her future and, worse, her abortive attempt to escape, which she would have preferred to forget altogether. She had left quietly one Sunday morning whilst the other girls were putting on their Sunday hats for church and had taken the train north as far as the nearest large city, which was York. Here she went out into the city to look at it; there was nothing she could do that day, it was Sunday, nothing was ever done on a Sunday. She climbed up onto the walls, with her suitcase knocking against her knees, and walked briskly round them, looking out brightly at roofs and sloping grass ramparts. Just not to be at school was a release, to be doing something on her own, alone, was to be light and singing.
But in the evening she began walking from hotel to hotel, hesitating at every front door, afraid to go in. She felt that inside, under bright lights, porters and receptionists would immediately see that she was in some way a fraud. They would know she was out without leave from somewhere where she should have been shut up, and they would find out from her where it was, and make telephone calls. She walked a long way in this indecision, and in the end, when it was already dark, she came back to the station and sat on her suitcase, staring miserably at the bulk of the Station Hotel. She was very tired and there was a fine rain falling. Looking back at this time from the garden Anna told herself that she had had no reason to be afraid, no reason at all, that she had behaved extremely stupidly – and nevertheless she shuddered, remembering the heavy street, and the cold gas lamps, the sudden grim and oppressive northernness of the city that had been by day so lightly poised, and carved, and clean.
Finally she walked into the first house she came to – a small Victorian tenement house, painted an uneven chocolate-brown, with narrow, dirty windows and a hand-painted notice in red ink. Bed and Breakfast, 10/6. Her room was horrid – a sloping attic with frosted glass in the window, and grey, limp curtains and sheets which seemed slightly greasy to the touch. The bed was cast iron and rattled. There was no mirror, only a huge wash hand stand with a bowl of water, filmed over with dust. She felt suddenly and finally trapped – when she pushed up the window with a great deal of effort to look at the sky, she was confronted by a blank wall and a dark window. Once up, the window would not close again, and the draught sucked directly across the bed. Anna slept badly.
And then, failure set in. Looking back, Anna could still not understand it, and jibbed, so painful was the remembering, as trying to do so. She hadn’t known, when she got there, quite what she meant to do, but there seemed, from the garden, to have been so many things. She could have got a job. She could have sat, alternatively, in the Minster, which was beautiful, and have thought out what she wanted. She could have worked all day and written the novel at night. But she had gone to the cinema, afternoon and evening, sitting in the red warmth in the cheapest seats, sometimes seeing the whole programme through twice. At first she had been filling a putative ‘waiting time’ and later she could not think of anything else to do. When she had visited all the cinemas, and her money was running out, she packed her suitcase, paid the landlady and spent her last shillings on a ticket back to school. She had been quite calm over all this at the time, as though mesmerized by her daily routine, cold breakfast, cold early lunch, the cinema, supper, the cinema and cold bed, into thinking not that this course of action was inevitable, it was nothing as forceful as that, but that all her actions had no weight and no importance, that she was living in a vacuum, and might as well do any one thing as any other. It had been a running down, an unwinding, and when her mind was moving slowly enough, she saw, in blinkers, no road except the one back to school. So, with this curious calmness, she went back.
When she arrived late at night, she was hustled crossly into the san., isolated, and allowed to speak to no one. In a day’s time, Henry appeared and told her she was to go and pack her trunk, they were going home, now. Anna, who had spent her period of isolation sitting on the bed and looking out of the window, had not got up when he came in; now she looked up at him and said, ‘Why? When’m I coming back?’
‘You aren’t,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve been asked to remove you.’
‘Why?’
‘They say they can’t do anything with you, and you don’t participate in the life of the school in the slightest. They think they’ve failed with you, and you’d be better in some other kind of place.’
‘They seem to have said a lot.’
‘They have. They’ve been on the telephone every day for the last week. At great length.’
Anna put her hand to her mouth; this counted very badly as disturbing Henry’s work. She said sulkily, ‘I don’t see why they don’t leave me alone.’
‘The police were out after you, you know.’
Anna digested this and was silent. Outside the san. there was the sound of tennis balls, plucking against taut strings; Henry seemed to listen, and count for a moment. Then he said, in his vaguest voice, looking up out of the high window at the summer sky or the dangling blind cord, ‘Well, where did you go, and why?’
Anna could only see his beard, and chin, turned away from her. She said, ‘I went north. It was all right. You can see I’ve not come to any harm. There’s no need to fuss.’
She was conscious of a desire that Henry should hammer at her with questions, should find out for her why she had gone, and what she had wanted, and why it had been so peculiarly nasty, but he said nothing more, neither then nor later.
She saw that this was meant as a delicacy, a respect for her privacy, and was grateful. At least, she believed she was grateful; underneath the gratitude there was a feeling that this very delicacy was a casting off, and that she would have been happier if her parent had not left her alone with the responsibility of knowing what had happened.
She sat for some time exploring, in spite of herself, the York back streets over again, and wishing that there was not such a paucity of other things to think about instead. It became very slightly cooler. Then she heard steps in the orchard, and, as they came closer, smelt, faintly, the bitterness of cheap cigarette smoke. Someone tried the door, which opened as far as the latch, a hook on a ring, would let it.
‘Anna,’ said Oliver, ‘let me in.’
Anna sat still, and said nothing.
‘I can open it myself, of course,’ he said, and curled two thin fingers, stained dull yellow with nicotine, round the door and under the latch. Anna shrank into her corner and watched him come in. He closed the door behind him, and brushed his hands together, the cigarette hanging for a moment, incongruously, from his mouth corner. Then he put up his fingers again and took it, and the momentary look he had had of street corner gangsterhood vanished altogether.
‘Well?’ he said. Anna remained curled on her bench and looked at him defiantly over her knees. She repeated after him, ‘Well?’ and did not move.
‘I knew you were here, of course. What are you doing?’
‘Nothing in particular.’
‘All afternoon? I don’t like the idea that you should find it necessary to hide from us, particularly if you’re not otherwise occupied with anything. I shouldn’t think it’s politic, either. Your mother’s looking all over for you, and she’s not getting any more reconciled. Why don’t you come in to tea?’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Anna. She added, unwillingly, exposing herself, ‘It’s not as though it made any real difference to anyone whether I was there or not.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Oliver, as though she had offered him an important confidence. He seemed to think that she had given him the right to settle in; at least, he drew forward one of Jeremy’s boxes from the wall, dusted it, and sat on it, facing her.
‘Even if that’s so, there’s something to be said for managing people in their own terms. You get more out of them that way. For instance, why don’t you do something about your hair? Surely it’s better to be able to see? And do you always wear those trousers?’
‘I don’t see that it matters what I look like,’ Anna said, stung. ‘I’m comfortable.’
‘One should always be some sort of presence to the world. All this messiness – so ordinary – such a usual protest. I should have thought you could do better than jeans and shagginess if you did want to be against things.’
‘I just want,’ said Anna, sliding hastily down the bench, and standing with her back against it, ready to escape – ‘I just want to be left alone. If you don’t mind.’
‘No one can be.’ Anna moved towards the door, and Oliver put out a hand to stop her. ‘No, wait. You should be glad that I’m paying so much attention to you. Now, tell me, what do you mean to do with yourself?’
‘Wash my hands and go in to tea, like a good girl.’
‘Don’t be silly. I mean, what are you going to do next? With your life?’
‘I don’t know –’
‘Any ideas?’
‘No – I – I shall think. There’s plenty of time. Something’ll turn up.’
‘That’s a phrase I intensely dislike. How old are you? Eighteen? It’s time you thought. For instance, if you don’t do something soon, university’ll be out of the question, and that’s all sorts of paths closed to you. Already. I gather you’re bright.’
‘At some things.’
‘That’s enough. I’ll look into it for you.’
‘I don’t think I want –’
‘We’ll try and find out what you do want.’
‘Please,’ Anna cried, ‘leave me alone.’
‘You’ve been left alone too much. I should have thought that was obvious.’ His voice changed; he said, much more gently, ‘Why did you run away from school?’ Now that the question had been asked, Anna found it intolerable.
‘It isn’t your business. It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t know why I did. Please –’
‘You should have been asked before –’
‘And don’t criticize us. Nobody should have mentioned it to you at all, don’t you see. It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Anna –’ said Oliver. But she had brushed past him, and was moving through the trees, her own feet so heavy on her ears that she thought he was behind her. But when she came up to the gate and clutched it, and looked back, he was standing stiffly by the hut, expressionless, both hands rather awkwardly in his pockets. So she went on into the house, and washed her hands for tea.