In the house, Henry’s absence informed the holiday feeling; it was tiresome of him to go, Caroline felt, if only because everybody immediately began to wait and watch for him to come back; people brushed past the windows more slowly, looked up at the hill behind the garden, if they lunched there, once too often. She herself preferred, although troubled about his physical safety, to treat these absences as business trips, from which he would bring back, in due course, material for one or two more novels. She wished she could have persuaded others to behave with as much restraint. Particularly Anna, who, when her father had been gone two or three days, became extraordinarily difficult, did not turn up to some of Oliver’s lessons, and replied to questions about her work with the statement that it was all a joke, they were making fools of themselves to think that anything academic could be made of her, and that anyway she saw no point in it. Oliver too became tight-lipped, and carried with him an atmosphere of unspoken criticism. Once at dinner he said, ‘I must say, you take all this very calmly, how do you know he hasn’t broken his neck?’ and Caroline was only saved from the embarrassment of defending herself by Anna, who cried, ‘Leave him alone, you make us all so much smaller by criticizing,’ burst into tears and rushed from the table. Caroline apologized to Oliver for Anna’s bad taste, and was saved from the unpleasantness of mentioning his own.
She took the opportunity of clearing up Henry’s study, or at least of dusting everything, sweeping the floor, and moving as little as possible. When he came home, he was very unlikely to want all this paper, that was one blessing. Then she began on all the other work that had been forgotten, laying in food, cleaning things, moving things, so that when Henry came back she would have all her time free for coping with whatever he had done to himself. There were cans of liquid fertilizer which they bought at a discount from John Ellis, who owned the stables; no one had collected those before Henry went; she thought now that it would be something for Anna to do, since she was being difficult, and went out into the garden to find her.
Anna was with Oliver at the table, which was encouraging, but as Caroline crossed the grass she heard him ask three questions, and wait for an answer after each which was not forthcoming, so she saw that Anna was, nevertheless, still being difficult.
She came up to them, and said, ‘I don’t want to break into anything, if you’re busy, Anna, but if you had time it would be a great help if you would go and get those cans from Ellis – you know the ones I mean. Ellis will know if you don’t.’
Oliver said, ‘Anna seems a little jaded, it’ll do her good to take time off.’
Anna said, ‘I don’t want to go. I’m sorry.’
‘Anna.’
‘Someone else might like to.’
‘I’ll go, of course,’ said Oliver firmly. ‘And Anna will come with me. Don’t be silly, Anna.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ Anna repeated. Caroline stood by, dangling the car key, which she had brought out for Anna. Something in her was annoyed that this stranger should so firmly have taken charge of her own child, but she saw that the outcome would be what she intended; they would both go. Oliver gave one of his by now familiar sidelong glances at the hill over which Henry had vanished.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t you?’ Anna wriggled under his glance, afraid that if he looked long enough he might find out why, said, stupidly, ‘It’s too hot,’ and burst out, with that disproportionate childish fury that had been growing in her lately, ‘I wonder when I shall ever be able to call my life my own.’
‘The answer to that is never, and if you aren’t old enough by now to know it, you ought to be. I suppose I ought to have been teaching adolescents long enough by now to be ready for these childish fits of petulance, but I can’t say I like it, and I don’t see why I should put up with it. Why won’t you come? Give me a reason, is there someone you don’t want to see? A reason’s a reason, I can recognize a reason well enough, I hope I’m not unfair. Tell me why.’
‘I don’t see why I have to come, if you’re going anyway.’
‘Because I don’t know where to go, because a change of surroundings will be good for you, because if I leave you, you’ll brood, and because you can tell me any thoughts you may have on the relationship between literature and morals on the way. Those are all reasons.’ He stood up, and took the car key from Caroline. ‘Come along, Anna.’
Anna stood up and followed him, without looking at her mother, who said, ‘It shouldn’t take long,’ and stood expressionless, in the middle of the lawn, watching them make their way to the garage. She felt, in fact, uneasy, as though someone were managing her affairs from inside, for her; at that moment, her feeling for Oliver crystallized into dislike.
In the car Oliver said, ‘There, I told you she doesn’t like you, she doesn’t care at all what I say to you, does she?’
‘I expect she thinks you’re right.’
‘That doesn’t alter it, and she ought to mind my telling you. Imagine, if you were Jeremy.’
‘Why do you keep on about it?’ Anna cried. ‘What are you trying to do?’
‘Make your mind up,’ Oliver said, changed gears violently, and swore. ‘Make you see. Where do I go now?’
‘Left.’
‘Good. He still isn’t back. Aren’t you worried, any of you?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder why not. It seems to be a family habit, this running away. I don’t like it. Was that what it was? Were you emulating him?’
‘Asking like that,’ Anna said, as rudely as she could, ‘over and over again, isn’t the way to find out. I thought that was obvious by now. Take the right here, it’s a cart track. What about literature and morals then?’ She was often, now, driven into asking questions about her work, on her own initiative, only to avoid Oliver’s other sharp ‘psychological’ questions about why she had run away, what she would do, all the rest.
John Ellis’s farm, and stables, were at the end of a long narrow track. Anna pointed this out to Oliver and said, ‘It’s up there. You can park on the verge here. Then you walk.’
Oliver pulled in obediently, then leaned out of his window, and peered between the hedges.
He said, ‘I can get the car up there.’
‘I know you can. The tractor goes up. The point is, they don’t like the cars going up because of the horses and because there’s no room if the tractor or the horse-box happens to be coming down.’
Anna would in fact have driven up herself, if she had been alone, since she was not strong enough to carry the cans back down the track, but now she repeated, ‘They don’t like it,’ and climbed out of the car before anything else could be said. Oliver sat for a moment with the engine running, drumming his fingers, and then shut it off, and followed her.
The track ran slightly uphill, narrow between high hawthorn hedges which were hung with long strands and tangles of hay from carts which had passed, and dangled with twigs, broken by the lurching passage of the tractor. The ground was deeply rutted by wheels on each side, trimmed and grassed over in the middle, and the baked mud in the ruts was marked by countless hoofs. There was a smell of dust, and a smell of drying grass. Anna, who knew this track so well that she remembered every curve and puddle accurately in her dreams, began to walk rapidly in the ruts, watching the dust collect and settle in the pores between her sandalled toes. She had her father’s turn of speed, and thrust her head forward and down in his way. She did not wait for Oliver to come up to her at first, and was now aware that he was some distance behind her.
‘We are not racing, you know,’ the small voice came after a time behind her. Anna swung round on a tuft of grass.
‘Am I going too fast for you? I’m sorry.’
Oliver in his black townsman’s shoes walked up to her and said rather breathlessly, ‘I like to look about, that’s all. You Severells swallow up the land so, walking’s a battle. Why the hurry?’
‘I didn’t think I was hurrying. I expect I walk fast naturally. It’s uncomfortable not to go at one’s own speed, I think.’
‘Of course,’ said Oliver. ‘Do you think we might compromise? I’d like to arrive in some order.’ He looked at her steadily, and said, putting her in the wrong, but nevertheless apologizing, ‘I’m sorry you had to come out, when you didn’t want to.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’ She surveyed him from her small eminence. He was very hot, almost steaming; his face shone, his clothes were too thick for the weather and he seemed uncomfortable inside them. It was the first time she had seen him really at a disadvantage, and she could afford to feel friendly. Oliver held out his hand, she took it, and allowed him to help her down; when they arrived together at the stable gate, she was still holding it.
The stable yard was large, and paved, with bright green moss growing between the stones, and docks tall beside the water-trough. It was surrounded by a brick wall, faded to a soft crumbling dark colour that bore no relation to newer tomato-sauce coloured bricks, which was topped by tombstone like slabs of grey-green stone. Anna and Oliver looked in between high gateposts, each carrying a ball of the same stone, like the heads of massive chessmen. Across the yard from them were the looseboxes, the paint on them dark blue, old and faded, but not untidy. It was all very sunlit and empty; the only sound was the occasional movement of a horse in one of the boxes, with the scrape of metal on stone.
Tied to a ring beside the mounting-block in the far wall to their left was a huge black gelding, a good 16 hh., heavy and powerful, but now dropping his head, half asleep. Anna, seeing him, twisted her hand away and walked into the yard. Oliver, his hands clasped behind his back like Napoleon, came after.
‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘Some horses live better than many men, don’t you think? Maybe that’s right, of course, but it’s a thought at least, isn’t it? Eight to a room the size of one of those looseboxes, in London. I’ve seen for myself. The main room of the house I was born in wasn’t much better.’
Anna wondered vaguely when and why he had taken to slum visiting; there was so much of him one knew nothing about; and thought, he was hardly here before he had made it uncomfortable, the world topsy-turvy, one’s values intolerable.
‘Well, what would you do?’ she mocked distantly, knowing he could have no exact answer, only a consciousness to prick with.
‘Shoot the horses,’ he said so that Anna could only just see that it was a joke. ‘Start with what’s concrete, at the bottom.’ She watched him enjoy her horror. He said, conversationally, ‘Seems to be no one here.’ He stood, stockily, in the middle of the yard, and looked around himself. ‘That’s a nice animal. Not that I know anything about horses.’
‘That’s the Wizard,’ Anna told him, taking a step towards the horse and then moving away again. ‘He wins in point to points; he jumps too, but he’s unreliable, he has a nasty temper.’
‘Do you ride it?’
‘No, at least I did once, but I got scraped off under a tree. I’m not strong enough to hold him.’
Oliver laughed loudly, as though this was very funny indeed. He showed no disposition to move away from the middle of the yard. His laugh sounded very clear off the stone; the horse rolled an eye at him, and Anna became panicky.
She said, ‘Mr Ellis’ll be in the saddle-room,’ and had to restrain herself from tugging at his coat. ‘Unless he’s away. Shall we go and look? I expect we’d better hurry –’
‘Severells again,’ said Oliver, following her however. ‘Rushing me, hurrying about. You don’t remember, I’m not used to the scene, I like to take it in, I don’t see many horses where I come from. The Great English Past, concentrated to –’
‘Please!’ Anna said. They stooped under a door at the right end of the row of looseboxes, and were in the saddle-room, which at first sight seemed uninhabited. That was all right, Anna was flooded with relief, if he were there one could not for a moment not notice. But her hands were trembling; that was bad. It did no good …
John Ellis was in fact asleep in one corner; a small man, with a leather face in a deep leather armchair, with his short legs in their breeches crossed neatly above the level of his head, and resting on the glass case which contained the ribbons, the rosettes, and the cups. Around him, like a liana jungle, the dark bridles dangled from the ceiling, smelling of leather soap and wax, bits and chains glinting amongst them, and plaited thongs of hunting crops snaking between them. John Ellis snored, no more than the whisper of a whistle.
This world of stables had been the only one of Anna’s childhood rituals into which she had ever hoped to enter completely. She had felt love for the horses, animals so good to touch, and so beautiful, who kept silence and expected nothing, unlike human beings. It had been, for once, much more than knowing that this was the sort of thing that at her age it was necessary for her to be interested in. She had touched saddle soap and sponge with the reverence of the novice for the implements of his new ceremonial, and had learned the horseman’s esoteric vocabulary with the fervour of the initiate for the language of the mysteries. But, of course, she reflected now, as the old feeling of wonder and wistfulness crept over her with the dark smell of the saddle-room, she had never managed it, she had never belonged. The observance of a ritual is not adequate to ensure belonging until it has ceased to be observed to be a ritual, studied from the outside; it must be accepted, absorbed, worked out from, and that she had never achieved; this was worse with horsemanship than with many other more deliberately aesthetic rituals, since it was based so much on practicals, on common sense and healthiness. The whole ethos of the pony books with their emphasis on the tomboy, their bludgeoning mockery of sentiment and sensibility, was against her.
And she was such a watcher, she was so conscious of little rituals, the whole unreal performances of nursery tea and school prayers, that here, where she would have been thankful to take what she could, she was against herself. Her conscious pleasure in the act as she ran her hands down the bridles, adjusted a buckle, sifted quantities of oats and bran between her fingers, had damned her. She set herself impossible standards; she thought it wrong to be conscious of enjoying pure speed in the show-ring – she felt, from the talk she heard, that she must think only of the jump ahead, and the possible prize at the end. But the practical note, in conversation, eluded her, and although she rode well, and tremendously enjoyed other people’s references to colic, and splints and spavins, she could never, partly because she was so anxiously enjoying them, follow them up. John Ellis thought she rode well, and had often asked her to show his horses for him, but he treated her unconsciously as someone from another world who amused herself by playing with his. Anna wanted him to respect her for doing her job – a child who rides for pleasure is one who has a whole existence of different pleasures, or one for whom some other pursuit is the important life, and who finds riding a pleasant relaxation. Anna as a child had had no pleasures – she had thought this out and was sure it was really true – but she had had no life either, and therefore no right to look on. But there it was; lately, since she had been avoiding the stables because Jeremy was there now so much, and because of Michael, it was less important.
Anna knelt on the tiled floor beside John Ellis and touched him timidly on the knee. He woke easily, without starting, and gave a creased little smile.
‘Mr Ellis – I’m sorry to disturb you –’
‘Anna Severell. Well, well, Anna Severell. I was beginning to think you’d deserted us. Why haven’t you been in? We’ve seen a lot of young Jeremy – he’s shaping very nicely – but you’ve been missed. Something better to do, maybe?’
Anna smiled up at him. He was one of the very few people whom she thought she liked, without reservations.
‘They’ve been making me work for some exams. You know how it is.’
‘In midsummer? What kind of exams, then?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, let’s not talk about it.’
‘You look well enough on it. Very pretty, if I may say so.’
Anna blinked at him, surprised; she remembered that she had never been to see him in anything but jodhpurs, and would have thought it bad form to come in a skirt, if she had had time to think, but the compliment was so unusual that she was flattered, and taken aback.
‘It’s not only been myself that’s missed you, either. Young Michael Farne’s in nearly every day, now, and he usually asks after you. “Where’s Anna?” he says. “Why’s she not been down?”’
‘Michael –’ said Anna, slowly, transparently. ‘Michael – does he really?’
‘Every day –’ he insisted, enjoying himself. ‘He says, “I can’t understand what’s got her.” I must tell him, it’s these exams. I suppose he might like to know about that.’
Anna put her head down, so that her hair swung across her face, to hide it, and clenched her hands in her lap. There was a dry little cough amongst the hanging leather, and she became aware of Oliver, quiet and stiff behind her.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot altogether.’
‘Not at all,’ said Oliver, advancing.
‘Mr Ellis, this is my – this is – this is Mr Canning, who is staying with us. We came for those cans.’
Ellis took his feet down, wiped his hands on his breeches, and offered one to Oliver.
‘How do you do? I didn’t see you there, at all. Sorry to be rude.’
‘Not at all,’ said Oliver.
‘I’ll have to get those cans down from the house. It’s not too far. If you’d not mind helping –’
‘Not at –’ said Oliver.
‘I’ll help,’ said Anna. ‘It’s my fault, we should’ve let you know we were coming, it was silly of us.’
‘No, you won’t. Too heavy for you. You stay here, and if anyone comes, tell them to wait. Two of us is quite enough. This way please, Mr …?’
Anna followed them into the yard and watched them out through the gate behind the stables. The house and farm buildings were some distance away. Anna stood alone in the yard for a moment, looking across at the Wizard, and then went back into the saddle-room and fetched his brush. She began to work on him slowly, pressing her face against his side, smelling his warm smell, moving her hands, one with the brush, one naked against him, in little circular movements over his haunches and flanks. The horse, who was used to her, and enjoyed being groomed, pushed at her once with his nose, and then stood squarely relaxed, nearly leaning against her. Little by little the hot sun, and the warm smell of the animal and the rhythmic movement overcame her; she relaxed, and dreamed, and closed her eyes. She was awakened by the horse, who suddenly pulled away from her, and gave a little ruffle of sound.
Opening her eyes again into the sun, she could barely see; the yard, smoke dark like a negative, tilted this way and that through concentric turning circles of black and flame. The familiar figure stepped jauntily across the square, gold head erect on the gold neck, rising out of the blue shirt. Michael, real Michael, invested with all the summer and all her dreams. The light settled as she looked, and the yard became again an ordered square pool of pale sunlight. She found herself out of breath, stepped back, put the brush down on the mounting-block and after a moment’s hesitation swung herself up beside it. She felt safer sitting down.
Michael held out his large golden hand to the horse, who bent and pushed happily at it, with soft lips.
‘Hello, Anna,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’
‘I was brushing him. I hope you didn’t mind.’ Her voice was weak, would hardly hold to the end of the sentence. And inside, her stomach turned and jumped.
‘Good for him. He likes it. Sensual old brute.’ Michael slapped his neck, and the horse moved sideways twitching his skin with pleasure. There was a long silence; Anna began involuntarily to work out the pattern of how she would remember this meeting.
Michael said, ‘It seems a long time –’
‘Yes, yes it does.’
‘I never seem to see you about, now.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t know why –’
It was part of Anna’s peculiar code that things – important things, like Michael kissing her – must never be mentioned, must be assumed never to have happened. One must behave as usual; this may well have been what he found daunting. If pressed for a reason she would have said that it would not have been fair to force him to remember what he would almost certainly rather forget, but this was not the root of it, the root of it, the will to forget, was in herself, although its cause was maybe impossible to hunt out.
She said now, hastily, ‘I’ve had to work, they’ve decided I ought to do these stupid exams. And we’ve had visitors, for a long time now. And things, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Michael. He said, ‘What I wondered was – you know, you used to be here all the time. And now you don’t come. So I wondered if it was anything to do with me.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Anna hastily. Michael scrutinized her, wrinkling his broad brow.
‘You’re a funny girl. I don’t understand you. I’ve been thinking about you,’ he explained.
‘Oh.’
‘And –’ he elaborated magnificently, ‘I can’t make you out. One never knows where one is, with you.’
‘Oh,’ said Anna again, seeing suddenly that he was being brave with her.
‘If – if I’ve upset you, or anything, you mustn’t not come here because of me. I mean – a chap can’t help wondering whether you’re avoiding one – or anything. I’d rather you didn’t, that is. If –’
Anna said nothing because she was trying to catch up on herself. It had been an essential part of her picture that Michael should have been carefree, self-assured, even slightly cruel; he was easiest to admire like that. She did not quite know what to do with his anxiety; it was encouraging, but it diminished him in some way. She gave him back the upper hand, as far as she could, and said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. I was only afraid you didn’t want to see me any more.’
‘But why?’ Michael almost shouted.
‘Well, I thought –’ Anna hesitated.
Michael smiled suddenly, beautifully, and put his arm round her shoulder.
‘Then it’s all right. Isn’t it? It’s all been about nothing, surely? What a waste of good weather. And you’ll come back, now?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, ‘I want to.’
‘I’ve missed you,’ Michael said simply but so certainly and with so honest, so happy, so hopeful a smile that Anna’s doubts suddenly dropped away, and she began, tentatively, to see a further ritual that might be acted out. It might be possible to be a girl, with a boy friend, like any other. She could imagine being entirely absorbed in walking, and riding with Michael, for days together. And this afternoon he was so pleased to see her, that the usual impossibility of ever talking to him seemed foolish and remote. There was a lot to say, there was an ease, it was so much better after all than admiration from a distance. It was real, whatever real was. The word stirred an echo of another voice, but she shut it off without recognizing it. Michael said, ‘Do you know, I’ve never seen you not in jeans before? You look rather nice. Sort of faraway, but nice.’
‘It’s because of the visitors,’ Anna said, deprecating. She twisted her fingers self-consciously in her hair.
‘It’s not bad, to be feminine, whatever for,’ Michael said, settling himself beside her on the block and drawing her towards him. There was a silence; the next thing was the embrace; Anna waited, intolerably conscious of Michael so large and golden, and her blood hummed.
‘Anna –’ said Michael, leaning over her.
‘Anna,’ said Oliver. ‘Are you ready? It’s time we went home.’
‘I see you found each other,’ said John Ellis, behind him, quickly. Anna thought crossly, it isn’t your home, and Michael jumped hastily down from the mounting-block.
‘Uncle Oliver, this is Michael Farne. Michael, my uncle, Mr Canning.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Oliver, like a real uncle with a small boy who needs encouraging. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ Which was not even true, Anna thought, staring at her knees and hiding miserably behind her hair. She wished Oliver would at least collect his cans and go quickly back to Darton, now that he was here. But he showed no hurry; he stood with an interested look on his pointed face, and waited, expectant, for Michael to say something. Michael was hideously embarrassed; he was, though Anna didn’t know enough men to be able to generalize, the kind who is put out entirely by being seen to be serious, or display emotions, in public. Now he blushed, a dull, hot red, under the gold surface of his skin; the colour was very beautiful, but Anna was not disposed to look at it in that way.
‘You ride a lot here, I take it?’ Oliver said, and then, ‘What else do you do? How do you spend your life? I’m curious.’ Michael answered, already apologizing; Oliver proceeded with his catechism as though he was interviewing a scholarship candidate who had never had, and should have known he had never had, a chance of an award.
His degree, what use would it be? Did he think he had any right to live on the land and pursue – sports – of this kind effectively at other people’s expense? Why had he gone to university at all, Oliver was professionally interested, he must excuse the question. Wouldn’t he – if he wanted to breed horses – have been better at an agricultural college? Had he got anything out of his history, then? There were answers to these questions, but Michael was not the man to find them, and Oliver’s tone as he asked them delivered his judgment in advance. Anna only listened to the beginning of the conversation. She sat in an agony of rage and embarrassment, hating, not Oliver for his rudeness but Michael for his inability to stand up for himself, for his rapid disintegration into a very young man with an unsteady voice. This was a little unkind of her; it was surely in Michael’s favour that he should be sensitive to Oliver’s standards or, however dimly, troubled by the injustices Oliver saw. The kind of young man Oliver was really getting at would have been quite impervious to such criticism and would have dealt with a god-like impatience with Oliver himself, so obviously not a part of any world that ‘mattered’. Except that there was a disproportionate intensity of feeling to the whole exchange – Oliver was putting so much more of himself than was apparently necessary into his biting little questions that it would have taken a very strong man not to feel himself, in Michael’s place, in the dock. But Anna was at the age where dignity – her own or her friends’ – is of paramount importance; Michael was so ‘right’, this was what had made her so certain of love in the first place. And now, as he searched with a troubled smile for reasons for courses of action she didn’t see why he should give reasons for, or murmured, ‘Oh, I do agree really, I do see your point,’ she kept still and made no movement to show that she had heard anything. Already she was thinking, what shall I do now?
It was Ellis who put an end to the interrogation which seemed to Oliver to have limitless possibilities. Ellis had decided with unusual vehemence during the short walk between the house and stables that Oliver Canning was an extremely unpleasant little man, and now to see him, strutting like a fighting cock and tearing feathers from Michael Farne, who was a nice boy, and kind, only in order to impress Anna Severell, for that was how he saw it, made him mad. He said, ‘Excuse me – I’ve a lot to do, and I’ll do it better with these cans out of the way, if you don’t mind.’
Anna slid off the block, with relief.
‘My best wishes to your parents, Anna, and young Jeremy.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Thank you.’ Her face was sullen and withdrawn again. Oliver picked up his cans, and set out towards the gate.
‘Thank you,’ he said shortly, obviously accepting Ellis’s dislike and finding it proper, making no move to overcome it. Michael said, ‘Let me help with those. I’m going anyway.’
‘Thank you,’ said Oliver. ‘That will be kind. Only we must hurry.’
‘Come back and see us,’ Ellis said to Anna, aware of her constraint, and anxious to dispel it.
‘Thank you,’ Anna said. ‘I’d like to come. I’ve these exams, you know how one gets pushed about. But I’d like to.’ They both saw that she did not mean to come.
‘Hurry,’ said Oliver from the gate, and turned it. Anna hung about in the yard, whilst Michael saddled his horse, and then they set out together, Michael leading the horse with one hand and carrying the heavy can with the other, Anna loitering deliberately, dragging her feet in the dust. Michael laughed uneasily.
‘He’s fierce, your uncle. Made me feel terrible. One doesn’t like people to think one’s really worthless, you know. Why did he –?’
‘You shouldn’t let him,’ Anna said savagely.
‘Oh, I don’t know. One has to admire him. I suppose he might be right in a sort of way. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘I don’t. Let’s not talk about him, shall we?’
‘You aren’t worried about anything?’
‘No,’ said Anna, in Oliver’s clipped voice. ‘Why should I be?’
When they reached the car, Oliver had already stowed his can, and was leaning against the bonnet, watching them. He said, ‘You seem to be less anxious to hurry in this direction, Anna,’ and took Michael’s can to push it into the boot. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Get in, Anna.’
Anna stood beside the horse and looked steadily at Michael, a little forbidding, showing nothing of her desperation that he should do the right thing, and restore what had been. Michael hesitated a moment, and then put his foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. The horse plunged, shied towards the hedge, and dug at the earth, with one curved hoof, delicately.
‘He’s restive,’ said Michael.
‘Anna …’ said Oliver.
‘Anna …’ said Michael. ‘I’ll see you, won’t I?’ Anna clenched her fists and stared dumbly at him. He said, ‘I’ll expect you. I’m here most days now.’ In the saddle, he had regained all his beauty and strength; he sat easily, whilst the horse shifted and snorted, like a gold St George. Anna, looking up at him, was dazzled by the sun behind him, so that it seemed concentrated into flames around his head, and his face danced against it, a shifting, empty circle, framed with light. He said, through his halo, ‘I’d better be off.’
‘Michael –’
‘I’ll see you, Anna.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, desolate, and Michael touched the horse with his heels, and turned to smile as they leaped forward, black and golden, with the air parting round them. Anna stepped automatically out into the cloud of dust they left.
‘Michael,’ she said. ‘Oh Michael, Michael, Michael –’ Behind her the dry voice said, ‘You’re making what my mother would have called an exhibition of yourself, I suppose you realize that.’
Anna turned on him. ‘And what do you think you are doing?’
‘That’s enough,’ said Oliver. ‘Get into the car.’
Henry was still walking. He moved very slowly now, automatically, lightly, the division of his senses and the sense of his own identity disintegrating from moment to moment. He was in the last stages of exhaustion, and very dirty. In the odd moments when he was conscious of his body at all, it seemed to him attenuated, brittle, entirely weightless. He was walking along the top of a curving ridge; when he came to the end, he was suddenly over a wide harvest land. He stood and swayed for a moment, and nearly fell; then he gathered himself to look.
The corn was all colours, field after field, from red gold to parchment, to a white wheat – Capelle-Desprez, Henry’s memory murmured – like spears of glass. The barley was necked, in the fields near him, the awn was down, the whiskers pointing into the earth, and across the plain, on the side of another round ridge, a field of oats had been tangled by the wind, and strange troughs of shadow moved amongst the bright paleness of it, as it swayed, with its own weight, this way and that. For a moment he stared at a field of yellow mustard, sharp and painful, throwing light at his eyes until he was dizzy with it; when he looked back at the corn the yellow glare superimposed itself on the glossy waves so that they were at once clear and ablaze. Light began to move, lines of poppies were nooses of fire, rushing upwards out of the ground. He began to move again with it, running awkwardly down the hill into the burning harvest; trees and bushes flamed, slid past him, hissed in the heat and crashed behind him; he could hear the air burning with an angry singing. He had the feeling that both he himself and the bushes were struggling hopelessly to hold their shape in the crushing brilliance of the live air, in danger of collapsing like tin cans in which a vacuum has been created, under its battery. He saw the whole turning bowl of light which was the valley held into shape, dangerously, tenuously, by cords of light drawn from the corn, the angry, magnificently dark trees, the hedges, flecked with little bursts of intense white, and himself, straining to breaking point against the glittering ropes, in a balance that could hardly endure any longer.
And still the light poured, heavy, and white, and hot, into the valley before him and collected, molten and seething, on the corn beneath him; he could hear it thundering into the silence; and still he had to see, so that his cone was now an hourglass funnel, opening both ways, and the wide light all pressed and weighed in the point of intersection which was himself, and the gold figures, hieratic, with gold faces and swords of flame, walked in the sea of corn in ordered patterns, like reapers; he recognized them from before, and he knew that he had come to the end. They burst like dragon’s teeth men, one by one, from the bright land; he knew they were not tangible, nor presences, nor differentiated one from the other; they were a way of seeing, when too much light was accumulated to see unshaped, without being struck blind. To see like this was to be alive, he knew, before everything was conflagration, and he crumpled and rolled on to the edge of the fields, whilst, very slow, very still, his inner eye opened on cool, wide, white plains, in which he rested.
‘Anna –’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re very angry, now. Why?’
‘You know why I am.’
‘I assume I’ve offended against your canons of good taste. I’m not sorry.’
‘I can see that. I don’t think there’s any point in talking about it. It would count as being rude to grown-ups. You’ve taken two wrong turnings’ – she thought she must point this out since she had at last been driven into speaking – ‘and I want to get home. Take a right next, we may hit the road again.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t lean forward and grip the car. It’s distracting.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna, not relaxing. There was a silence. The car bumped and spat, and there was a smell of burning rubber. Oliver sat stiffly behind the wheel, stared ahead of him, and frowned. He seemed determined to discuss the episode: Anna wondered whether he made situations only because he then so much enjoyed dealing with them, overcoming them, arranging. If so, it was rather expensive from her own point of view. She said nothing; that was easiest as well as probably most effective. After a time Oliver began again, ‘I suppose you think it was terribly simple minded and earnest of me to intrude large social questions into your happy afternoon with the horsey young man?’
‘I’m trying not to think.’
‘That’s irresponsible, you’d better. For myself, I can’t help knowing that there is one clever, innocent, unsophisticated boy from a grammar school who’s been deprived of a whole life because your friend had the money, or the schooling and the initial intelligence, to ensure that he could spend his socially obligatory three years doing nothing gracefully in an educational institution.
‘I suppose you think that’s all very obvious and can’t be helped. I don’t see it that way. I don’t mean them to get away with it.’
‘How do you know that he – that Michael – isn’t intelligent, then?’
‘Well, is he?’
Anna did not reply. ‘You see,’ said Oliver. He went on, ‘I know them, I’ve taught them. Nice jolly puppies, with no pretensions to brains, normally very friendly, sorry they can’t produce essays that will interest me, but never mind, it’s easier for me not to have to make an effort to understand anything. Once a year they get horribly drunk over some boat that bumped some boat – I may be without humour, I persist in thinking that childish – and they systematically destroy the room of some outsider who can’t run, or went to the wrong school, or works a bit too obviously for a First. I suppose you’ll say they’ll grow out of it, but some of us do better and don’t grow into it. Again, I may not see the joke, I’m an outsider myself, but I call that irresponsible and wicked. I suppose you may say this doesn’t happen any more, but it does, I’ve seen it, we’ve heard all this before, but that doesn’t do away with it, on the contrary. And when I meet it, I don’t pretend to like it. One must be honest.’
‘You don’t have to be … unpleasant.’
‘I don’t have to cover up, or lie by implication.’
‘Michael is my friend – he never tried to be anything but nice to you. He’s my friend – he’s not a symbol, he’s not a way of life, he’s himself. And he’s nothing to do with you. Why can’t you leave me alone?’
‘And you –’ said Oliver savagely. ‘Where do you think you’re going? Have you tried to think?’ He imitated her. ‘Michael, Michael, Michael – where do you think that will get you? What do you think he’s got to give that will add anything to you? An intelligent girl with a future and a responsibility to try to understand yourself – and the world – soberly – what do you think you’ve got in common with that dead way of living? Oh my God … can’t you see yourself married to him, hunt balls and county dinner parties, church on Sunday, inherited Nanny, hampers at pony shows, tweed skirts, talk about dogs and horses, and Conservative women, hanging and flogging –? Look, this is the truth, you just can’t shut yourself into that, it’s insuperable, it isn’t real, it’s a substitute for life, I mean it, real human beings just don’t happen where your friend is. And you’ve got to try, damn you.’
‘I don’t think that’s the point –’
‘Of course you don’t. And it isn’t entirely. Shall I tell you what it is? It isn’t an accident, is it, that that young man is just the kind of young man your mother would like to imagine her daughter married to? I say her daughter, I don’t suppose she thinks in terms of you – what’s wrong, and you must accept it, is that neither of them have noticed or approved of you for so long that you don’t know where you are. But you must believe me, this rather pathetic attempt to fit yourself into a picture where your mother might be able to approve of you won’t make it any better and it’ll ruin your own chances of anything worthwhile. In the end you’ve only yourself to account to.’
Anna felt battered; she said weakly, ‘You always take things much too far.’ And Oliver retorted, ‘And you persist in refusing to look beyond your nose.’
‘All this psychological explaining … I don’t …’
‘But it’s right, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna wailed. ‘It doesn’t seem like that to me.’
She thought how like Oliver it was to insist on thinking of her being married to Michael; she had not got as far as thinking of marriage at all, that was in a future, with the event she was waiting for, far too far away to affect her. What mattered about Michael Oliver had left out entirely, his gentleness, his beautiful body, the way he was part of the sun and the summer and not having to think ahead. And it was cruel of him to suggest that he thought Michael might please Caroline, from whose disapproval Anna, she believed, had seen him partly as an escape route. The suggestion, once planted, was difficult to uproot; how horrid, Anna thought, if it was even half-way true.
‘You’re always telling me what not to do. But what shall I do then?’
‘I’ve told you. Leave home, find out what you can honestly make of yourself – school-teacher, librarian, secretary – and be that. On your own ground. One thing’s sure, you’ll not be anything if you just sit about and wait and breathe your father’s rarefied air. A ghost, a shadow; I’m not exaggerating.’
‘But if I want to be here?’
‘You don’t look to me as though you do.’
Anna cast about for what was disproportionate in all this, and said slowly, ‘I can’t see why you mind so much. Why do you go on so? I still can’t see why you had to be so nasty to Michael.’
‘Because I like you, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but why?’
‘I told you, I’ve come to like you. That’s enough. I get personally angry.’
Anna had provoked him to this, and she took a pleasure, both malicious and innocent, in his agitation; she liked to feel, simply, that she had power enough to have caused it. She had not the slightest idea what to do next and certainly no desire to provoke him further, and she was extremely angry with him, but there was a certain pride of possession in her as she looked secretly across at his set face, bright with sweat, and slightly pink. She had done it, and this, she thought in her innocence, gave her a hold over him.
Henry rolled over and sat up. This took him some time. He was hardly used to his body, and bruises and cuts and grazes of which, before, he had been altogether unaware, were now stiffening and very painful. It was strange how he could not remember, already, what he had seen or how he had been, except that he knew, as he always knew, how unnecessary it had been to be afraid – fear had nothing to do with so absolute a loss of time and excitement. He propped himself carefully on his hands in the dust, and looked up at the sun, the same sun, but no longer blazing, swimming it seemed to him, infinitely remote, through depth after depth of an air clear, substantial, lucid as water. He was extremely happy, he thought – and added, being capable again of deliberation, how we have murdered our superlatives, how can we now, at the edges of experience like this, find adequate words to replace extremely, intolerably, perfectly, infinitely? One must find a language new and washed clean, and the things it is necessary to say require these superlatives. He was becoming a craftsman again, and took pleasure in that too; he thought of his desk and the novel he had been writing, and the thought of the words on the paper warmed him, and excited him so that he smiled involuntarily.
But he was in no hurry. He sat for some time, still considering the sun, remarking how earlier it had drawn everything into its own Phaethon career across the heavens and was now still and solitary; mildly, distantly alight, but nothing to do with anything else. More than anything, quite basically, he was surprised at the human capacity for reflecting – a nice metaphorical, Platonic touch, he thought, still considering the sun, if I were sure that the metaphor didn’t distort a little what I mean, didn’t draw too close a connection between myself and that, which is far too much a fact to be for me any symbol of consciousness, or intelligence, or power, in myself, without losing something of its own certain solidity, there deep in the sky. Metaphysics fascinated him, religious symbolism even more – his visionary times gained a tremendous life from his knowledge of Platonic ideas of the intellectual meanings of sun, and light, or Coleridge’s complex ideas of the reflective nature of the moon’s light and minds like the moon. He became angry only when these figures were translated into assurances and the leap was made into faith, of one kind or another; intimations of immortality, the assurance that there was a creative mind behind the universe. These detracted; he had no need of immortality, he could not get beyond the fact of where he was.
He would never, he thought, get over looking up there at the light and knowing that he was looking up there. He was so constantly, so consistently surprised to think, here is a man seeing and knowing – if not precisely what – that he is seeing. He imagined his death as a progress into a more and more lucent inactivity – or at least, at these times he did. He had other moods, but that summer they had become less frequent, and he was even beginning to wonder if he had established a way of life which was both possible, satisfactory and peculiarly valuable.
An arrowhead of tiny black birds came, direct, whirring beneath him and the sun, and distracted him; they glittered white for a moment as they wheeled, and soared on into emptiness. Henry stood up as though they were a signal. Round him, the corn was all milky, and melting, the ears formless, the edges lapping into air, and there was an illusory sound of water far away, breaking softly. Henry said to himself, Beulah, the delectable mountains, of course, and saw almost immediately that the curious haziness of everything was due to his own extreme fatigue. ‘It will be tiresome,’ he said aloud, enunciating clearly in the empty humming silence of the cornfields, ‘if I have made myself really ill this time. I shall have to see. If I walk I shall find out.’
He went along the edge of the field, shambling in the dust, lurching every now and then, falling once entirely, into the corn. It was an agonizingly slow progress. Henry was so intent on the next few inches that everything narrowed to them. What he did, he did entirely. As he walked, the cuts on his feet and legs began to bleed again. The pain was excruciating.
Oliver was all wound up, Anna thought. She was sure by now that he was losing the way on purpose, only to be able to lecture her longer. She was doing her best not to listen to him, but he spoke on, explaining to her ‘reality’ as he saw it, commitment, the society she might not like but with which she must come to terms, her own terms, ‘if you are to do anything meaningful at all’. Lawrence had left England, Anna pointed out, having by now ascertained the importance of Lawrence in relation to these themes. Lawrence, Oliver retorted, had been a great man, and a prophet, whereas she, Anna, was a moderately intelligent girl with, as far as he, Oliver, had discovered, no particular skills – and moreover Lawrence had written nothing really relevant after forgetting the society he knew.
‘That’s two contradictory points,’ Anna said.
‘Not at all. It’s two points, both apply to him, that is not to you, not to me. What would we make of Mexico, anyway? I wouldn’t feel I’d a right to ask anyone to give us the money to go. We’ve got to keep things running the way we can. I teach people reality. You set about finding out what you are. Never mind whose shadow you’re under.’
‘You tell me I’m someone with one hand and take it away with the other. That’s what I can’t bear.’
‘What you can’t face is finding out precisely what kind of someone. As long as you don’t do anything you don’t have to admit that there are some things you might be unable to do –’
‘I do,’ said Anna.
‘No, you don’t. You say to yourself, I’m young. I don’t have to think yet, when I do I expect I’ll be able to do this or that? Don’t you? Isn’t that how it is? But you’re not so young. And it isn’t true, at any time. Think how short your life is, and there’s only one of it.’ He was exalted.
‘I do,’ said Anna.
They turned a corner into a narrow lane: at one side a field, all stubble, early harvested, sloped steeply into them, hardly contained by a sparse hedge. Henry came, staggering and stumbling, in full view down the field; he fell once to his knees and righted himself, rushed suddenly down the last few yards, and through the hedge, unseeing, and crashed flat into the side of the car. Anna saw his eyes roll up as he put out his hands, clumsily, and went down in the road.
‘Oliver,’ she said. ‘Oh, no. Oliver. It’s father.’
‘Don’t touch me, damn you, when I’m driving,’ Oliver said, trembling.
Anna removed her hands from his arm. She said, ‘What shall we do? What, then?’
‘Shut up,’ said Oliver. He got down into the road and Anna followed him. They stood looking down on Henry, who lay spread on his back with his arms above him. He was grotesque: Anna’s first feeling was one of furious embarrassment. His clothes were ripped, and hardly wrapped round him; the hair on his chest was matted with mud and spangled with slivers of bright straw dust; these shone too on his head, and his beard. His beard was horrid, blood had run into it in several places from scratches more or less deep, and had caked on it; there was still black river mud round his throat; his hair was twisted, damply, into horns and spikes, like the corkscrew rays of the conventional pictorial sun, but these were all colours, grey, green, straw, blood brown, earth black. His mouth was open and he breathed heavily through it. From one corner of it blood still ran slow and bright, into the grey dust which lay like a mask on his face. His face, owing to the caking down of the beard and hair, appeared surprisingly naked and surprisingly thin. He looked empty, lifeless altogether. His eyes, closed, were very deep in his head; now and then the lids twitched up, and showed an empty ball. There was a lot of him in the road, limp but solid, and lying at such an angle, the dusty feet together, that it seemed as though he had been broken across by a heavy blow at the base of the spine. Anna thought, for one terrible moment, that she was going to disgrace herself entirely by being sick.
‘He’s alive, anyway,’ said Oliver.
‘Yes,’ said Anna.
‘Which is something.’
‘What shall we do?’
Neither of them could bring themselves to touch him. Oliver said, ‘He looks as though he’s been in a fight.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Or entirely at odds with the vegetation, which is unlikely. Though according to him, it’s intractable, the vegetation.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘He looks as though he’s come pretty well to grips with it, whatever it was he went roaring out after. He looks as though it got the better of him, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Don’t –’
‘Well, what did happen then? Have you no curiosity? He looks as though he’s been trying to do what a bulldozer could do much better for him. Now, if he’d gone out on a bulldozer –’
‘Don’t, stop it –’
‘If he had, I’d understand. I can’t get away from this feeling that all this struggling with the elements just won’t wash any longer. We’ve got it under control – it’s a lie to pretend we haven’t.’
‘Please don’t go on. You don’t seem to see. You don’t seem to care. He may be very ill. Don’t treat him as an object all the time.’
‘He doesn’t precisely encourage treating him any other way, does he? It’s a kind of respect.’
‘Please, Oliver –’
‘All right. What shall we do then? We’re a pretty ineffectual pair when it comes to it, aren’t we? What do you advise? Moving him? Or do you think that might damage internal injuries? I really am trying to think. I wonder what he has been doing, though, so many days?’
Anna’s lips trembled. At that moment Henry opened his eyes and gazed calmly up at them. He said, weakly, the civilized voice sounding odd enough amongst the scarecrow wildness of his face, ‘Dear me, how convenient. How do you happen to be here? I was very much afraid I would not have got back alone.’
‘Where did you go?’ asked Oliver, staccato. Henry’s eyelids flicked and closed again. Anna knelt down beside him and took his hand.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Are you all right? Can you get up? Will you come home? It’s been horrible without you, will you come home, now?’
Henry, very faintly, returned the pressure of her hand. He said, ‘Of course, just a moment and I’ll be perfectly well.’
‘How has this happened?’ Oliver persisted.
‘Can’t you see,’ Anna cried, ‘he doesn’t want to say? Anyway, what does it matter? And who do you think you are, to find out?’
‘Don’t be rude,’ Oliver said, retreating unfairly into his adult privileges. Henry sat up, with more ease then any of them would have expected. Anna said, ‘Let me help. There, lean on me. Now, if you can get into the car, just –’
‘He doesn’t need all that help,’ Oliver said. Anna nevertheless helped Henry into the back seat of the car and propped him in one corner. Then she climbed in beside him and slammed the door. Oliver drove them home, very slowly, agonizingly slowly for Anna, and did not speak again. Nor did Henry, who leaned back into his corner, jerked like a skeleton with every bump of the car, and closed his eyes. Anna surveyed him covetously – she thought, I would like to do anything at all as much as he seems to have done whatever it was he was doing. He was rather terrible, so distant. It seemed suddenly, enormously important that he should be her ally, that he should support her in some way against Oliver’s common sense, or she was lost. There was an answer to what Oliver said and to what he did not say and Henry must know it. She was, after all, Henry’s daughter. She edged closer to him, and looked up at him imploring. There was a slight smile on his mouth, visible since it was for once not covered by the beard, but he did not open his eyes.
The house, when they came back to it, was exactly the same, and Anna found the sight of it shocking and defeating. To go in there and wash her hands and eat supper would be an admission of ultimate defeat – by Oliver, or by Caroline? she was not even sure. Better to make a scene and keep everything still in a state of flux, however childish and silly. Better to do anything rather than drop, unprotesting, into yesterday’s – or tomorrow’s? – orders and restrictions. It was humiliating and it was frightening and she did not even know precisely what was so wrong. But Henry, if he could be brought to tell her, Henry back from goodness knew where, with the relics of goodness knew what strange knowledge adhering to him, the shreds of another brighter world, Henry would know.
They all three got out of the car in the drive, and looked at the house. No one was there to meet them. No one seemed to be there at all. Henry, who seemed much recovered, said abruptly, ‘Must get cleaned up, before Caroline sees me,’ and made off into the house. Oliver began, ‘Well –’ in a tone of dry amusement, but Anna would not let him go on, she said, ‘Don’t say anything else to me, not just now –’ and went after Henry. ‘I must speak to you,’ said Oliver behind her, but she pretended not to hear.
She pushed open the door of her father’s dressing room without knocking, and went in. He was sitting on the bed, his chin jutting forward, looking out of the window. He looked, she thought, rather pleased with himself, but not, not precisely, helpful.
‘It’s you,’ he said, accepting her. ‘Get me a sponge, will you, and I’ll start on some of this.’ Anna squeezed a sponge obediently under the hot tap and handed it to him: he began to wipe, rather ineffectually, at some of the dried blood; Anna went and leaned in the doorway, watching him. After a bit, she asked, for a beginning, ‘Where did you go?’
‘I don’t know. I walked.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I don’t know. I must have walked in a circle. I think I’ve a touch of sunstroke.’
‘No, but do you feel different, now? What difference does it make? I want to know –’
Henry tilted his slow head sideways and considered her. He said, ‘Don’t you know?’
‘I try to guess –’ Anna said in a rush. ‘But, I don’t know, no, I don’t know. I want to ask you …’
‘Well –?’ asked Henry, encouraging. Anna struggled dispiritedly to find out what she did, precisely, want to ask him. Henry felt a dismay which he tried very hard to hide. People, particularly the unfortunate Anna, were always at their most urgent just when he was exhausted, or preoccupied entirely with something of his own. His head was swimming now; he gave up the attempt on his beard, and leaned back carefully on to the bed; then he said, ‘Go on, please,’ in a voice which he hoped was non-committal, neither formidably parental nor yet artificially man to man. But it was an effort. If things had been different, if it had been some other time, he could have helped her more than that.
Anna ran furiously over beginnings in her mind, and rejected them one after the other. She could not touch on Michael; that was humiliating, and anyway Henry would not understand. She could not – because he was himself parental authority, it was his mandate which kept her inactive in the garden, if only by default – protest that she was in some way being kept from knowledge she should have. She was still not sure precisely what Oliver was advising her to do, but only of its general area. The area of ‘life as it is lived’, by most human beings, or at least most English ones, jobs and marriages and culture, town planning and the Obscene Publications Act, little magazines, science for the layman, the divorce rate, the birth rate, lung cancer, teenage crime, and the monotony of factories – Oliver had told her about all these and she had given them in her imagination a background which would have shocked him, the bed-sitter, the ‘cocktail party’, the boy meets girl in London of the women’s magazine, innocently, because this was all she really knew about jobs, having never even begun to consider her schoolmistresses, who were creatures, in her eyes (and probably in Oliver’s), isolated from life as irreparably as schoolgirls were.
So she could not say to Henry – ‘Oliver says I must do such and such, why do I feel I must not, when I see he is right?’ Besides the crux was not there; if it were not for Henry himself, there would be no real problem, nothing she could even begin to hold on to to set against Oliver. Or alternatively, without him, she would know it for herself, and not need to ask for a way out of Oliver’s line-up. When one was six or seven, she thought, or twelve or thirteen even, one might not have liked only sitting in the garden, only taking things in, but remembered now all of it seemed valuable, because then there had been no alternative. She had thought then, as she did now, that she was getting through the days somehow. But it had been much more than that. It seemed, looking back, she thought in confusion, that she had had time to be herself and see how things were. But, like an expanding gas in a narrow jar, she grew, and remained confined in a little space, the same garden, the same school, the same girl, and something must blow up: Oliver was right there, she had been thinking so before he came, something must happen. But the something was – it was desperately to be hoped – nothing of his order. It was her event, her change, her sudden recognition of her proper activity after being necessarily passive for so long.
Because she agreed with Oliver, she had to, she began in a circle again, and he was right that being at home and not changing for years was bad for her, and he was right that most of Michael’s likely ways and views were not tolerable. It was only that something else was going too, maybe a capacity to wait without anxiety and take what came, which was not heroic, but had been leading certainly to her event. Or had it? In this homer pen, this goldfish bowl, how could she know? But Henry knew, it was still on his face, no other face she had seen had ever been so peaceful and so live as his was now. He had found the third way, neither into the enclosure, nor out into Oliver’s myriad concerns, but an extension, a development, of what she thought she had already.
Having reached the end of this by no means clear or exhaustive survey of her worry, she felt irrationally that she had already explained it to Henry, and that it was now there between them to be discussed. So she waited for him to speak. When he did not, she said, in a voice aggrieved and slightly petulant, ‘I don’t know what to do with myself.’
I have a genius for making myself sound insignificant, she told herself immediately.
Henry sat up again and rubbed at the back of his neck. He said, ‘I think I must’ve wrenched something. Surprisingly tough, the human body.’
‘Please!’ said Anna sharply.
‘I’m not not listening,’ Henry assured her, probing the muscles at the back of his neck with careful fingers.
Anna said, ‘I’ve had a ghastly day. I can’t begin to tell you. I can’t bear to go on like this. I don’t do anything and nothing seems important – look, you ought to understand, I mean, really, nothing seems important, just think how trivial all the things I do are, carrying cans, laying the breakfast table, washing things, changing clothes, going on walks and coming back. Have you ever felt like that?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. He felt he must say more, but tiredness was lapping round him again, and his daughter’s shrill, childish voice jarred on him. He made an effort and added, ‘At your age, I did. It often gets worse just before one finds something that is important.’ An avuncular generalization, he thought guiltily. Anna ignored it, after a moment; it was what she wanted to hear, but had been said so perfunctorily and had indicated no direction.
She said, ‘All right, it’s my age. I tell you what, I hate adolescent novels, they’re so boring. I tell you what, they’re not interesting, they’re not important, and neither am I, they’re all about nothing, and so am I. People think muddles are interesting – anything at all, if it can be put on paper – but I don’t. And I’m not. I wouldn’t mind so much if – that is, I wish they hadn’t set Oliver Canning on to me. He finds me so interesting I could scream. He keeps telling me why I’ve grown up’ – she tortured herself – ‘useless, and unloveable, and purposeless and ineffectual … he keeps telling me what to do. And he keeps telling me why I don’t. I can’t bear much more, I’m warning you.’
‘Why hasn’t he gone home?’
‘Because he’s stayed to get me into University. Where I don’t want to go. There doesn’t seem much point, does there, if I don’t have the slightest idea what I want to do with myself?’
‘You must do something.’
‘That sounds just like him!’ Anna said desperately. Henry showed no sign of telling her what it was that he knew, and she had no skill to make him, apparently.
‘I’m sorry. You mustn’t listen too much to him. You’ve plenty of time … There is so much else –’ He could not rouse himself out of his weariness enough to tell her what there was, it was no good, he hardly saw her, half the time, at all. Her desperation hit him in little bursts, and could not stir him, and faded again. He felt bad. He was aware of what she wanted, well enough. But even if he was not tired, he was always desperately shy; there had been no habit of communication between them, or indeed between himself and anyone, about what he knew. So he lay on the bed, his arms dangling, and peered at her gently and apologetically under his wild and dirty eyebrows.
He said, timidly, ‘Don’t bother so much, Anna,’ and she, taking his timidity for dismissal or lack of interest, thought Oliver must be right after all, and began, noisily, with mounting violence, to weep, making the scene which was, as she had foreseen, her last resort from acquiescence. Henry lay still, drawn into himself, his face as beautifully expressionless amongst the wreckage of his patriarchal good looks as a sleeping child’s, and, even overcast with the greyness of fatigue, potentially as vigorous. His limbs were all anyhow, as abandoned as a child’s, one could see that he was taking pleasure simply in not moving them, in letting them be heavy and inert. And the mud and blood on his face looked sculpted at last, the carefully applied ceremonial paint of the medicine man. Anna stared at him, and wailed at him, at Oliver, at the strangeness of things, which up till now she had taken for granted. The noise she made attracted Caroline, who was passing on the landing with a pile of sheets in her arms, and came in now, busily, laid them on the chest of drawers and said, ‘Henry!’
He opened his eyes, narrowly, and began to sit up.
‘No, don’t sit up, don’t be silly, you may damage yourself. What have you been doing?’ She expected no answer; things were in her hands, now; she went across and examined him carefully. ‘Migraine?’ she said, and fetched him codeine, and a glass of water. ‘Anything else, besides dirt?’ Henry shook his head. ‘Have you had any food?’ Henry shook his head again, deprecating. ‘You don’t deserve looking after. You’d better get to bed, I think. Take your clothes off.’ She sat down abstractedly beside him, and began very gently to wipe his face with the sponge. ‘My poor Henry,’ she said, very lightly, asking to be allowed to care. Henry put his hand on hers and smiled at her. Anna, in the corner, began to weep again, making an ugly, raucous noise, breathless and importunate. Caroline turned on her.
‘Ah, yes, you. What’s the matter with you? What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell me he was back?’
‘She’s overwrought,’ Henry said. ‘Something’s upset her.’
‘Something has always upset her lately; I’m running out of patience with it. You might at least think, Anna, before you come and bother your father when he isn’t well and needs to rest. Do you ever think about anyone else?’
Anna made a hopeless little gesture and stood stock still, and continued to weep, the tears running salt off her nose into her mouth corners, and down behind her cheeks into her neck.
‘It’s this sun,’ said Caroline more kindly. ‘And neither of you has any sense of proportion. You’d better go to bed, too, Anna. Take some of these, here’s some water, and get to bed. I’ll bring you both some supper, later.’ She snapped down Henry’s blind and his room became a dim, coffee-coloured tent. ‘That’s better.’ The thought of Anna safe behind her door for the evening was very pleasant; as Anna showed still no sign of leaving she said again, ‘Hurry now, I told you. Go to bed.’ Henry said nothing. Anna looked at him desperately, and then stumbled out onto the landing and began to trail towards her own room. Caroline squeezed out the sponge again and set to work on his face, with extreme gentleness: she said, ‘I’m glad you always come back. It’s funny, I’m still frightened you might not.’
‘Why?’ asked Henry easily.
‘Oh, there must be so many more interesting places you could go to, I sometimes think.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Henry. Caroline’s hand stopped over his face. He looked up, and saw that she was really anxious. He said, ‘I don’t mean to leave, you mustn’t think that. I’d say if I did. I mean – I wouldn’t go without you. You know what I mean, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Caroline, and began again to clean him, like someone cleaning moss from an effigy in a churchyard.
Outside Anna’s door, as she had half feared, Oliver was waiting with his harrying look. Anna knew that her face was mottled and bulging with tears, and that Oliver would be able to work out his own not too inaccurate reasons for this. She hesitated, turned back indecisively towards Henry, then gathered herself, and went on, towards him. He began immediately:
‘Please listen to me for a moment, Anna. I want you to understand. I don’t think you’re being quite fair.’
Anna licked up a tear. She said, ‘I’ve been sent to bed. At least let me go there.’
Oliver looked as though he was thinking, in some general direction, ‘I told you so,’ but at least he did not say it. He was in her way: she would have had to push past him to get at the handle of her door, and at that moment, wound up as she was, she was physically terrified of him; if she had had to touch him, with both of them so angry, she would have broken down completely. So she stood, and trembled, and faced him, very forlorn.
‘I want to say, I didn’t mean to hurt you, this afternoon. I’m sorry you think I’m interfering, I really only mean to help. I’m sorry if we have to quarrel. You’re one of the last people I’d willingly hurt. I –’
‘It doesn’t matter, I can see you don’t mean any harm. I think you make too much of things.’
‘But you’re half frightened I don’t.’
Anna began to cry again. ‘Don’t keep telling me. If I’ve got to be adolescent, at least let me get on with it my own way.’
‘It isn’t just adolescence.’
‘Stop telling me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver, very red. ‘I didn’t mean to start again. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that at all. I meant to say – I know I go about it the wrong way – I’d like you to think I was there. I mean, that I care what happens to you. I thought you might like to know there was someone who really cared – but –’
‘It’s a funny kind of caring,’ Anna said ungraciously; she was frightened by this new attempt at intimacy much more than by his earlier pontifications. It was harder to defend oneself against him in this position. She said, ‘It’s nice of you. But I really do think you think there’s more wrong than there is.’
Oliver looked at his shoes, and said gloomily, as though he was trying to extract some residual comfort from the situation, ‘I’m glad you find it possible to be honest with me, at any rate.’
Anna felt suddenly very mean. It was true what he said, he was trying to help, and it was kind of him to care, she had no right to reject him, or to hurt his feelings, which were obviously very susceptible, just because her own were hurt, partly over Michael it was true, but partly at least by her father about whom Oliver had been, it appeared, however hatefully, right, and for whom he was certainly not responsible. She said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m just being nasty because everything’s so muddled. I don’t mean it. You’ve done a lot for me and I’m grateful, honestly …’
‘Let’s forget it, all of it,’ said Oliver, brightening up immediately. He held out his hand. Anna could not bring herself to take it; it was still immensely important not to touch him, she knew that without thinking about it at all. She began, instead, to droop at him, deliberately playing for sympathy, hanging her head and leaning drunkenly against the doorpost. She said, ‘I feel terrible. So tired. All the heat and all this fuss …’
Oliver became immediately, in his own way, solicitous.
‘You look done in. Poor Anna. You’d better lie down and try to sleep. Very important to develop a capacity for rest.’ He held the door open for her. ‘Now, get along with you, go to bed and relax. We may well have been over-working you, you must take the evening off.’
Anna scurried past him before he could pat her shoulder, gave him a weak smile, and closed the door firmly on his sharp enquiring face. She was not sure that it had not entered his head to come after her and tuck her in. The idea crossed her mind that he had manoeuvred her in such a way that she had to be grateful to him for opening her door and encouraging her to lie down, when it had been he who had prevented her in the first place. But, as she took off her clothes, and climbed in between the sheets, she was able to smile to herself with a new feminine indulgence over him. He was very tiresome, but what he said was true, he did care for her, he seemed to think she was worth caring about. And, however many reservations she might make about the direction of his caring it would be uncharitable not to accept it. She was so lonely, she thought, with a new access of self-pity, she couldn’t afford to refuse anybody’s interest. He thinks I’m someone, he thinks I’m too good to leave alone, she told herself, remembering his fury over her theoretical future as a country wife, and was almost amused. And he’s a clever man, he should know, I’d better be nice to him, she thought further as she fell asleep.
The next day went on as usual. The day after that, Michael telephoned twice, but Anna put him off with vague, expressionless little promises about next week, if she wasn’t working too hard. By that time they were all involved in preparations for the picnic.