The grey weather continued, and Henry went to Cambridge. He came out of the station into a fine drizzle, and found a long queue waiting for the taxis, of undergraduates, debutantes and girl friends up for the weekend, brandishing umbrellas, clutching hat boxes, chattering. He felt a distaste for their youth and urgency and would not join them. He was afraid, too, that one of them might recognize him and try to talk to him. To take the bus was out of the question. There was not really room for him inside one; he banged about, fell over people’s feet, hit his head on the hanging bars, took up more than his share of a seat and became suffocated and unpopular. So he set off, hatless and without an umbrella, to walk through the grim and dirty part of Cambridge that leads from the station, thinking that this neutrally unpleasant weather and grime that could have been any English town were letting him easily into something he knew he was not going to like. He did not allow himself to think about Oliver Canning. The more he did that the more distasteful the whole expedition, and more than just this expedition, seemed to him.
He was incapable of not striding, nevertheless. He came too quickly to Christ’s and crossed the road into Petty Cury. Here unease took complete possession of him. He suspected that it attacked most of those who came back, whether three weeks, or, as he did, thirty-five years after going down.
Nostalgia was the response Cambridge seemed to evoke even from those who lived there, perhaps because their stay was so short that the end was in sight at the moment of beginning. But if his own unease could be called nostalgia, it was tainted. It was a constricting, sickening feeling. This was not the first time he had returned, but it was the first when he had been back alone. On other occasions there had been Caroline, who relied on him to behave as she saw him. Or, when once or twice he had come to give literary talks, there had been an admiring and talkative reception committee who waited for him to prophesy. Here was a place where he wondered whether he would not be better not to be alone.
He went, for no particular reason, except that he remembered it as a beaten track, up through King’s, and down through Trinity, and out onto the Backs, where he sat on a damp seat facing Trinity Library and the wedding cake on the top of John’s, and watched the rain frill the surface of the river and drop off the willows. It was heavier now. It was appropriate. He sat hunched up, looking at the water and avoiding the eyes of the passers-by, in case any of them might have been Oliver Canning.
He had been an insignificant undergraduate, large, timid, not apparently bright, and yet conscious, superbly, that he was capable of something enormous, and constantly tormenting himself over whether this consciousness was wishful thinking or not. People found him, as far as he knew, amiable enough, but he intensely disliked himself. His college was not fashionable, and he had never known the men it was considered desirable to know. But he wanted intensely to. He wanted to be remarkable for his wit and his waistcoats, to give parties with plovers’ eggs and to go to bed with beautiful women and be known to have gone to bed with them.
He shifted himself on the seat, sweeping its covering of tiny drops into one bright swash, and was hot under his tweeds with distress over the women he had not embraced, the lordly young men who had never slapped him on the shoulder nor addressed him familiarly, the singing and dancing he had heard on the next staircase and to which he had not been invited. And what had he instead? he thought, in an access of adolescent misery. Reverence, a pedestal, like D. H. Lawrence. Well, Lawrence was dead and he had never known him. He might as well have been dead himself here. These young men might speak his name religiously, but they wouldn’t slap him on the shoulder and ask him to come round and have a drink. That was something he had irrevocably not had.
They went past him in twos and threes, their hoods down over their faces, yellow, fawn, grey and blue. It was the depth of the duffle coat days, and these pacing figures with their heads turned down against the rain gave the illusion of a return to monasticism. He felt powerless; casting about for something to do which would save him both from his own uncomfortable memories and from what was worse, an attempt to come to grips with Oliver Canning, he suddenly remembered Anna, and was ashamed that he should have forgotten her. He supposed that she might know these young men, might even take part in whatever was the present fashionable substitute for plovers’ egg lunches and champagne trains. He had really not the slightest idea how she lived, here; the thought of her substantially doing anything at all was difficult to entertain. He stood up, and set out towards her college.
Here he had the usual masculine difficulty with porters, directions and long red tiled corridors which seemed to lead to nowhere inhabited. In his day one had not visited here, except to attend a chaperoned tea party if one happened to be related to one of the young ladies, which he had not been. He had thought it was splendid for the women to be allowed to be there, and had paid no further attention to them. They had not been, in those days, the kind he would have wanted or been able to sleep with, and would not have made him remarkable had he been seen with them. Now, he went in for the first time with a group of hooded boys who hurried purposefully past him, sure where they were going, and disappeared into odd turnings and staircases. Henry stopped and bent to the porter’s window, his shoulders bulging behind him.
‘Excuse me. Miss Severell, Miss Anna Severell. How can I find her?’ The porter gave him complex directions, to which Henry, as one does, once one has got as far as being directed, did not listen.
‘Are you Miss Severell’s father, Sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, stiffening.
‘One of the friendliest of our young ladies,’ said the porter. Henry was sure he lied.
The corridors seemed interminable. Henry went too far, came back on himself, climbed several staircases and came down again, hearing shrill female voices behind closed doors and his own heavy masculine tread on tiles and lino and a hush in each room as he passed. At the end of a corridor he desperately opened a door and collided with a wild girl in a quilted dressing-gown, heavy breasts loose under it, towel and sponge bag over her arm, streaming wet hair over her shoulders and down her back. She smelt of steam and shampoo. She seemed quite unperturbed, even grinned at him between pink polished cheeks, but Henry, remembering the young ladies of his own day, backed wildly across the corridor, banged his spine on a doorknob, turned to read the name on the door and found that it was his daughter’s. He knocked loudly. There was no immediate answer, but he could feel the silence in the room, weighed and inhabited. He knocked again. Anna opened the door a few inches with her hand against it inside, as though she was prepared to slam it again. She did not look as Henry had expected her to look. He could not have said what it was that he expected, but he had had some sense of a space to be filled by Anna, his daughter, and this suspicious stranger was not her.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’ She asked shrilly, nervously, ‘What have you come for?’
‘To see you. May I come in?’
Anna still held the door and stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was searching for courage to close it in his face. But she opened it wider, and stood aside for him, and let him in to the little, high-roofed box of a room, where he stood dripping rain on the carpet, stiff with shyness.
‘Give me your coat. I’ll put it in the bathroom.’ She took it from him and put it on a hanger and carried it out, motioning him to sit down. He took the only armchair, a little, dumpy Victorian thing, round with a calico frill, which he dwarfed. He waited. Anna came back with a towel.
‘Your hair’s soaked. Shall I rub it for you?’
‘Please.’
‘I’ll put the tea on first. I’m afraid I’ve only got one or two stale biscuits. I don’t have many visitors.’
‘I don’t mind about tea.’
‘Ah, but I want to make it for you. I like the idea of you being a visitor.’
She knelt in the hearth and turned on the gas ring. She was wearing a black woollen shirt and tight trousers; her spine stood out like a knife and her hips were sharp.
‘You’ve got very thin, Anna.’
‘I know. Don’t tell Mummy, that’s all.’ She put on the kettle. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Your hair. Mummy’d have a fit if she saw you now, wouldn’t she?’
She took the towel, stood behind him, and rubbed the wet mass of his hair vigorously between her hands until it stood up in peaks all over. Then she rubbed the back of his neck and the sides above the ears, around and around, until his head tingled. She said nothing as she worked on him, and Henry said nothing either, only looked at his knees and waited. When she had finished she smoothed his head, rested her hand for a moment on it, and went back to the kettle in the hearth.
She became busy with tea, sniffed the half pint bottle of milk to see if it was sour, wiped out the cups with a tea-towel, and prised open the biscuit tin.
All the light came from one of the twisted wrought-iron lamps peculiar to Cambridge women’s colleges, which stood on a pile of books and trailed a thick flex across the floor and up to the ceiling. The light was very weak; the red glow of the fire on Anna’s cheek and hair was stronger. Outside the rain spattered and rattled on the window, and the sky sagged, slate grey. It was one of those autumnal Cambridge afternoons on which he had, in his day, toasted innumerable crumpets on a coal fire and felt cosy.
Anna’s room was not cosy. It seemed that it had not changed since she moved in; there were the haircord carpet, the tidy bed with its college bedspread, green with buff flowers on, curtains to match the bedspread, desk cupboard, coffin chest, book-case with a few library books. Nothing of Anna’s. She means to leave no mark, he thought. Anna brought his tea, and knelt to display before him milk and sugar and spoon, plate and biscuits, with a submissive feminine gesture that made him stir with a sudden exasperation. He had been impinged upon and accused so much during the last few days by female preoccupations with the little things, the details of servitude. It was all wrong that Anna, already, should have begun to take up the same gestures. She bowed her head and shuffled back on her knees into the hearth corner where she sat, bent over, gripping her knees in her arms. He had no idea how to begin to speak to her. She, for her part, stared into the fire for some time and then obviously gathered herself together, and burst out abruptly, ‘Now, let’s have it. What have you come for, really. Who sent you?’
‘No one sent me. Why should they?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It just seems a bit unlikely.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he brought out painfully, ‘I only wanted to see you, I seem to have come at a bad time.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What’s wrong with you, Anna? You are so uneasy.’
‘Am I?’ said Anna, turning away. ‘I suppose I’m just surprised. I didn’t expect you.’ There was a silence. Henry turned his head to look out of the window, although there was nothing to see but the thickening sky. When he moved, Anna looked up at him cautiously, trying to assess his unexpected concern for her. When he brought his head down again, and met her eye, she said, forced to it, ‘Are you sure no one sent you?’
‘No, I told you not. I wish you’d –’ He broke off and examined her as though, she thought, he had never seen her before. Then he looked away, and there was another silence. What Anna’s thoughts were, Henry did not know. His own were confused, and largely distasteful. He studied his daughter’s brooding face, the dropped eyelids, the lips drawn together, secretively, and the tension in the clasped hands round her knees. A certainty grew in him that he was up against something now, to which the disturbance of the past few days had inexorably been leading him, whatever their appearances might have been. It hurt him, who had been so unresponsive to those other claims, that Anna should sit there, making no attempt to touch him, hiding herself. He moved angrily on the dumpy chair and Anna jerked herself uncurled.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not paying attention. More tea?’
‘No. I don’t want any more tea. Leave the tea alone. What are you going to do with yourself, Anna?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. What kind of a life do you mean to live? What are you going to make of yourself?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ Anna said, with an attempt at lightness. ‘I don’t have to make up my mind yet, do I?’
‘Please, don’t try to evade me.’
Anna stood up, and walked away from him, over to the corner with the bed, so that he had to twist himself to see her. She said, ‘Don’t get all concerned about me. I can’t cope. I honestly think one has to consider oneself responsible for one’s own life, don’t you, one has to think of it in terms of what one can do with oneself, or one will never get round to doing anything? It would make it a lot worse for me if I thought you were going to get worried about me. I should feel responsible for you too and that would be terrible. You’ve always been good, that way – left me alone, not nagged or lectured me, I’ve been grateful. So leave me alone now. Please.’
Henry, who had used much the same argument to himself over Caroline, that one was responsible for oneself, was now quite sure that this was perverse and wrong. He said, roughly and with love, ‘You’re my daughter. I do care what happens to you. So I mean to sort this out. Why are you unhappy? Is there something else you want to do?’
‘No –’ Anna said suddenly, it seemed to him, accepting his concern. ‘I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything at all. That’s half the trouble. And of course I’m unhappy. I can’t remember being anything else for as long as I can remember. I get used to it. I suppose most people are unhappy.’
‘No –’
‘Oh, not people like you, who have something important to do, that they can do, and get on with it. But most of us …’
‘Don’t,’ said Henry, feeling that she was setting him apart again, refusing him the right to care, telling him that she was unhappy because it was accepted that he was not interested. ‘Sit down. I want to talk to you.’ He told her carefully, as he would have told the kind of friend he had not had, how he had been at her age, in Cambridge. He told her about the women and the poor degree he had ended with, and how he had been so nervous that he had shouted and spat in supervisions. He wondered whether she would feel that he was lecturing her, offering her himself as an example of someone who had made good, to be imitated. He was sure that this was not why he was telling her – he was telling her quite largely for his own sake, he liked watching her take in and understand what he said. He ended, ‘What I mean is, I was awful, I was a silly great clumsy young man. And I was sure I could do something. Sure I could do something enormous. Bursting at the seams with it. But I couldn’t start, I’d nothing to say and no idea how to say it. Only this energy, burning me up. Like putting cold hands in front of a fire in winter. Bone pains.’
Anna was silent. He said, ‘Do I sound stuffy and preaching? I don’t mean to.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Anna, weighing something obviously in her mind. He had thought that to talk about himself might be a guarantee of good faith, of a willingness to step in deep here, a guarantee he needed himself as much as she could. But once it was done he remembered all the times when other people’s confidences had reduced entirely in him the desire to communicate anything in return. So often, communication was only possible to establish in one direction. Now, remembering his own father, and his own tolerant wish to protect him from himself, and his feelings for his son, he thought he had made a mistake with Anna, that she would have trusted him more if he had continued quiet and not attempted to be human. But he had wanted to tell her he was human. He felt they both ought to know.
Anna was bewildered so much by the wish she sensed in him to know her, or to be known, to establish some communication, that she forgot for the time the reasons she had had to be afraid of his coming. Perhaps if there had been more contact between them in the past she would have been more simply embarrassed than she now was; it would have been worse if there had been any form of parent–child contact to discard. As it was, she was simply ready to love him, and to tell him what only he would accept; she had been waiting long enough to do so, in one sense. So she said eagerly, falling over the words, as he turned to her, surprised and pleased, ‘Oh yes, you know, that’s how one feels – how I feel, too. Not only unhappy, not necessarily, unhappy, that’s what makes it so bad. A lot of the time I feel as though I could live life tremendously – as though if I could find just the one thing, the event that would happen, all these little annoying bits of life would fall into place, and become important. Because I would be so sure I’d make them bright just by looking at them. I can see you know. I’ve watched you working, I’ve watched you just going about, I know you know. But I seem to get no nearer, and sometimes I think I’d better get down to something more obviously possible – my own limitations and the kitchen sink – or I’ll have had worse than nothing.’
‘It’s a question simply of the best way of finding it,’ said Henry, with a roar of triumph that lifted Anna’s head so that for a moment they smiled steadily at each other. He said, ‘You’re all right, that’s all right, everything’s all right as long as that’s what you feel. You can be as unhappy as you like, now, as long as you go on waiting and don’t give in. Pay no attention to the kitchen sink. Why should you? You must never believe things can be no better. You must put yourself in the way of finding what you can do. That’s all. Now how?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you will know.’ He hesitated. ‘You’re like me, you know. Whether you like it or not. You’re my daughter.’
Anna studied him with a gentleness that was not his, but Caroline’s. A sceptical, female gentleness. She saw that he had been carried away by a picture of her, having inherited his power, advancing further along his path, and she was touched by a faith in her which she had never hoped to see. But she had thought more about it than he had, and was more aware than he was of the difference there was between his power, and whatever she had inherited from him. She feared that she lacked his bodily strength, that she was not his size, that she could not be prodigal of power as he was, but must husband her resources or be easily exhausted, even when she had found out how to use them. This was partly because she was a woman; also because she was a woman she was constantly tempted as he would never have been, to give up, to rest on someone else’s endeavour, to expend her energy ‘usefully’ at the kitchen sink. And this, she thought, made it harder to go on looking for ways to go forward, when one had to fight against the temptation – socially approved – to stay where one was. She thought, he doesn’t really know, with a certain scorn. But the warmth of his hope for her was stronger. She said,
‘Anything I’ve wanted to do has been what you do. I haven’t had much chance to want anything else, perhaps. I wish I was a mathematician. But again, perhaps I am like you, perhaps I have inherited something? I am a bit cowardly about finding out. I do want to write a lot of the time; but I can’t start, when you’re there, doing things so well. How can I tell what I really want?’
Henry was silent.
‘Perhaps I’m just too young to know.’ Or perhaps, she thought, I tell myself I’m too young, to avoid having to decide.
Henry said, ‘I think you should do something now. I think you can’t wait any longer. If you want to start writing, you must write. What are you getting out of Cambridge?’
‘Nothing,’ said Anna too quickly.
‘I thought not. I never thought you’d make a scholar of any kind.’ Anna thought, you might have said so at the time, letting them force me through those exams, letting them torment me. But she kept quiet. Henry said, ‘Ancient spells were supposed to lose their power if you put water between yourself and the place where the spell was cast, or the witch who cast it. If you want to give up here, I’m prepared to support you. Why don’t you go away – from me, from people who know me, from all these books, the whole thing? I’ll give you a sum of money and ask no questions – you could go to Mexico or somewhere, and write something, or do whatever else you pleased. And don’t say that a change of scene doesn’t change the heart, or the problem, that’s a facile defeatism, if it doesn’t change things, it makes it possible for you to change them yourself. I should know. If I were you I’d take as little as possible and just move into the sun. But you must choose.’
Henry wanted very badly to discover a precise help he could offer to Anna; talk was not enough, he must do something for her, give her something to hold. Now, they both sat, watching the fire, and the imagined, alien sun he had conjured up in the little room glowed between them, round, burnishing, something first conceived, that they could have touched the smooth bright sides of. But this grew, as they considered it, and expanded and burst into light, so that they had opened to them within it a bright airy country under a clear sky. Their pictures were more or less the same, expanses of shifting sand, stylized mountains, blue-grey in the distance, little white houses inside whose thick walls shade was cool and welcome. Neither of them wanted to imagine anything more precise; to the urban English a hot sun and wide spaces are mystery and freedom enough.
Outside, it was nearly dark, the window was misted blue-black, the colour of a sloe berry. Henry, brooding on the bright sun, studied his daughter’s face in the dim light of the gas fire and looked for a sign that she was stirred. Anna thought of cactus flowers, crimson and white, bursting mysteriously open in the heat, amongst the fur and spines, on their knobbed pillars in the sand. I should like to see things like that, she thought. And to be alone. Why not escape? One did not after all believe any more that God had put one in one’s present station as part of his pattern for the best of all possible worlds. Why not fly in the face of this bureaucratic deity, why not take what was offered, what one could get, gather up one’s roots – if one had any – and move into the sun? Why should I stay here, she thought, and know so little, about so little?
She said, ‘I hadn’t thought of anything like that. One always thought one could move after one knew – but –’
‘One must try to know –’
‘Oh, I know. I – it seems unbearably exciting. Just to go. Would you really?’
‘I promise,’ said Henry.
‘I think I’m glad you came.’
Henry flung himself happily back in his chair, which creaked and protested. He was warm with achievement. He had found an answer for Anna, he had helped, he had made contact. And before he had had time to possess any of his achievements, he made his mistake.
He thought he could say anything to Anna, now; he wanted, having begun to talk, to talk on, to tell her how he saw things, to confirm in her the power to see things his way that he had decided she possessed.
He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about waste, lately: about the way most people spend their lives – or at least, most of their time – on little actions that at the best leave them no more of a human being than when they set out on them and at worst bring them a bit nearer to the machine. You know; there are men who work machines that put tops on bottles – I know miserably little about it – and women who type out stuff they don’t understand day after day – it’s the building of it into an importance that’s wrong, not the doing, it’s the pride taken in these littlenesses that add nothing to a man. Do you know what I mean, Anna?
‘Take Margaret Canning. I came to Cambridge partly because she asked me to. That marriage seems to be crumbling fairly rapidly, but she won’t face it, because she believes in it – in that sort of way – so I’m to see Oliver. Not my kind of job at all. I keep putting it off. Now she was a woman with a great deal of life in her – and some natural instinct for how to live under all the beliefs she’s come to have. I went to see her in their flat, and one could see it had failed, all the cleaning and eating left undone. In an odd way I admire her for admitting defeat. She was messy and the place was dirty, and everything smelt. But she won’t let go of the principle, that horrid little man, who must be the husband. I’m getting to see him as a symbol – a sort of black destructive hole into which everything gets sucked, and churned out again, dead and masticated and labelled for future reference, my books and Margaret’s sexual energy – and love.’
He thought he sounded a little strident – he had not realized until he began to speak, how much he hated Oliver. Hatred was not something he usually needed to feel. He thought he could have coped with Oliver if Oliver had written against him. It was the absorption and appropriation of his own work into Oliver’s scheme of things which so ground on him. He could not disentangle his feelings about Oliver on his own account from his feeling on Margaret’s, and thought he would tell this too, to Anna, and ask her advice. He began again.
‘And she will tell me about their sex life – all sorts of elaborate sadisms …’
‘Don’t,’ said Anna. ‘Stop. Please, stop that.’
She got up, and ran blindly over to the door. But she did not go out, only put the palms of her hands and her face against the door and began after a moment to move her head rhythmically from side to side, sliding along the panels, bumping over and over the central strut. Henry listened to this bump, bump, bump of his daughter’s head, and watched her thin shoulders working. It came to him that he knew what she was going to tell him, but he waited with an apprehension every bit as sick as ignorance would have been, for the telling.
‘No,’ she said, between the bump and her own tight breathing. ‘No, no, no. Go away, now. Get out. I should’ve known better. It was a ghastly mistake, you coming. Please go away, now.’
She could only think that she must somehow get through the time which was still left before she could finally get Henry to go away. He must go away some time, he could not stay and this could not go on for ever. She had believed when he came that someone had told him about Oliver, and had not been able to imagine what he could say or do – accusations and reproaches were so far outside his range. She thought now, Henry saw, catching up on and understanding her earlier fears, that he did know, and had known all along; that his offer of movement was a bribe to give up Oliver; that he had been manipulating her like a child which must be humoured out of a wrongdoing for which its wise parents prefer not to hold it responsible.
‘Anna –’
‘No, it’s no good, it’s no good, just go away.’
Neither of them had any wish to embark upon the scene which had to ensue before he could, in fact, go away. Earlier that afternoon, he might even have been shamed into leaving at that point, and then wondering why. But now he could only think that Anna was something to him that he did not want to lose; that he should have been able, as all parents think they should have been able, to prevent her from suffering this, that he loved her, and she was to be like him. So he stood up, and took a step towards her.
‘How can I go? Anna –’
‘Don’t touch me.’ She turned round and faced him then, staring out of the window over his head. He had thought he would be relieved if the head banging stopped, but he was not.
‘Can’t you see, there’s no point in your talking? That there’s nothing you can do?’
‘You’re my daughter.’
‘Ah yes, but he, Oliver, he thinks I’m like him. And he’s more right than you are, and I shouldn’t forget it. It’s all right for you to talk about meaninglessness and dreariness, as though you’d just discovered them. They may horrify you quite genuinely, but you – you’re not involved in them, you’re interested in them because they’re a new fact. I bet you even think you could write about Margaret. Or me, I suppose? Well maybe you could, maybe that makes it exciting. You know what you are, you’re the man with ten talents, you get busy, and make another ten. Christ was pretty clever, he knew who did the burying, the man with one. He hadn’t got enough to get started on, poor thing. But I can’t see it that way, I have to think what to do, it means me.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Oh, at the moment, maybe, you see me as your daughter, you think I can do – something. But there’s not been much evidence of it. I ought to have known better. It’s no good talking to you. You’re as much good as the Blessed Damozel, leaning out of heaven along the golden bar, and weeping for us. You’d better stay in your heaven and weep.’
‘Don’t, Anna.’
‘And I should have thought,’ Anna said, ‘that you could have afforded not to – hate him so much. How can you judge him? How can you say anything about him reading your books? You publish them, don’t you? It isn’t his fault if he has to get things at second hand – or mine – if all the glory we can get is reflected glory? Some people have to be readers and followers. Oh, he knows how I feel, he does know, though I pretended for long enough that he didn’t. He knows what I’m like and what it’s like to be like that. I ought to trust him. That’s why I – love him.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘You didn’t want to know.’
‘You didn’t think all this a moment ago.’
But Anna had swung wildly into the other of her two moods, the imaged sun was shrunk and dead and powerless. She said roughly, ‘If I didn’t ought to have. It’s true. When you started saying that about him I saw – I belong with him. Not with you. I can never see things your way.’
Henry hesitated. Both of them saw clearly that conventional anger, or remonstrance, were quite out of his power; Anna even seemed to take some pleasure in watching him struggle. He said eventually, ‘There is Margaret. I promised her I would see Oliver. I must see him, I think.’
‘Oh, no, don’t, don’t, don’t do that. That would be terrible. I can’t think what she can be thinking of. You are the last person. I can’t think what can be wrong with her. I should have thought she was all right. It would be terrible if you talked to him. He’d be nasty – much nastier than I’m being. He’d enjoy telling you there was nothing you could do, that you’d no right to tell me to do anything – you know why, you can imagine what he’d say. Please – look, please – just go home, and forget all about it. Please.’
‘How can I? You’re my daughter –’
‘I don’t know what difference that makes any more. I don’t know anything. Please, leave me alone. Please, let me try and think.’
‘I want to help,’ Henry said, but with a gesture of defeat. He began to move towards the door. ‘I shall try and see Oliver,’ he said. ‘I feel I must. That’s all I can say. But, Anna –’
‘Yes.’
‘When all this is clearer – if you want me – or if you want to go away – I will help. I want to help. You must promise to come to me.’
‘I will, if I want help.’ Anna began to cry. ‘But I shan’t, I know I shan’t. Now, go.’
Henry got himself round the door somehow; there was a last slight anticlimactic contact when he had to return and ask Anna to extricate his damp coat from the bathroom for him. It took some time to find his way out of the building.
Upstairs Anna stood for a moment just inside the door, wondering whether it would do any good to have a good cry. She thought not, on the whole; she saw herself from somewhere outside herself, pointlessly silly, standing there, staring into the night, and snorting with indignation or strain. Heroics of any kind she found embarrassing when alone; she was a poor audience for herself, and always had been. So she dried up the remaining tears, breathed deeply, and began to clear up the tea things, washing and drying the cups, something she normally never did until just before they were needed again. She was to have gone to Oliver that night. That’s something I won’t do now, she told herself. Let father go, if he will interfere. Then we’ll see what happens. She felt better, once Henry had left, as she had known she would; events were always more comfortable once they began to revolve at some distance from her, once her connection with them was remote and speculative, with a door in between. She could face what had been done with some solidness. It was doing, undergoing, that she did not like. And now any further doing was out of her hands, for the time, which was what she required.
Henry had so disliked the last scene, she thought, that he would hardly come back for more. She had been surprised that he had been prepared to sustain such involvement for as long as he had: she didn’t suppose it could last much longer. Henry was out of the way now. But there was Oliver.
And there was also, it seemed, Margaret.
She had accepted, immediately and without question, Henry’s picture of Margaret. But any thought of Margaret distressed or put out had never entered her head, before. Her thinking about Margaret had been confined to thinking about the attitude she herself would have taken in Margaret’s position. She had assumed that Margaret, securely and happily married to an Oliver who had little connection with the Oliver she herself slept with, would have cared very little, as she was sure she herself would have cared very little, what he did when he was away from her. It was ironic that the only person to have been entirely convinced by Margaret’s married face was Anna, who had watched her at Darton, kissing Oliver all over the face at the breakfast table, folding her arms suddenly round his neck from behind, kneeling gracefully at his feet to consult him about the shopping or the train timetable, bringing him back silly little presents from the village every time she went, and had seen in all this a glow of love, a real intimacy, an inherent brightness of spirit and body which she had associated unthinkingly, and uncritically, with the state of live satisfaction she had already recognized in Henry, and had stored in her mind as a touchstone for life, a state of living to some end which it was possible to recognize if not share. She could not quite, now, associate Oliver with this state, but that had only added a necessary mystery; a love like that changed a man, changed Oliver, to being capable of sharing it. And she supposed it axiomatic that to be completely in love, and certain, like Margaret, brought a kind of satisfaction which would say something along the lines of ‘I don’t care what you do provided you don’t think you have to hide it from me. I’m sure nothing can matter to you as much as I do, and that’s enough.’
Besides, everything she did herself, since it was not what she was looking for, was so unreal to her that she could not imagine its having any essential effect on anyone else. Any particular moment of action had a certain importance, because it was what was happening, and nothing else was happening. But it could have no repercussions, no extension in time, no effect on other people – her time had not yet come, and she was no one to be reckoned with. She believed Oliver sheltered sometimes in her lack of interest, her sense of unreality, because he shared it and could not sustain, knowing the shadows so well, a life continually in the sun. But she was for him, she supposed, as he was for her, only a temporary refuge from the search for the sun, or their own limitations, and Margaret should possibly even be grateful that he had this place to hide, and did not have to take out on her his need for this Limbo, this no life.
So now, if Henry was right, if Margaret had ‘admitted defeat’, where was she? And where was Oliver?
If Margaret was defeated, what had she, Anna, done to defeat her? And if Oliver was not happily married to Margaret, did he give, and take, as little in his affair with Anna as she had believed – and so hoped, and needed? She thought, I can’t bear it to get important, I can’t, I won’t be responsible for Margaret. Or Oliver. Or Oliver.
She had told Henry she loved Oliver. That had been the wrong word; if there had been one thing that she had need to be certain of, it was that she did not ‘love’ Oliver. She had used the word out of a kind of prudery, due to her reluctance to bring out in front of her father, and an imagined Caroline, any other word which might conjure up any more precise picture of sexual relations. As a child, she had refused to imagine the possibility of her parents having sexual intercourse together. They just didn’t, in her child’s world, for long after she had known for a fact that they must. And now, as she had refused to imagine them, they must refuse to imagine her, they must be incapable of picturing her ever, undressed, in the act. It was indecent, and ugly. So she could not say to Henry, affair, sleep with, go to bed with; only love, the child’s word, the honourable vague word which covered everything from Anna Karenina through Cinderella to Woman’s Own.
And Oliver? She could see him so well, when Henry came. He so enjoyed precise discussion, elaborate classification, situations, scenes. The trap was closing.
All I can do is sit still.
And Oliver? She wished suddenly that she could after all go to him and tell him what Henry had said, how her mind was turning on itself. Perhaps there was a sympathetic word-magic about the word she had used; it seemed in retrospect that they had been so happy since that first night; they had done everything so well, and so carelessly. Oliver was so amused a lover, he would explain things in his precise little voice which made everything ridiculously more exciting; I was happy in bed with him, she thought, like riding horses. It had turned out to be something she could do. And they had talked; when they had exhausted the subject of Anna’s future, and agreed tacitly to avoid the subject of Henry, they had talked about all sorts of things over baked beans in Professor Ainger’s kitchen – nothing close to Anna, but things she found she liked to have views on; not English literature but things it was possible to talk about for ever without being touched by: abortion, capital punishment, the public schools’ reform, Christianity; Anna had never had any feelings about things before, it had been an education, taking her out of herself, reducing, for both of them, the world of art and the world of love and the sun to manageable proportions. People like us need things, she thought, and things need us. I shall miss you Oliver, horribly.
He would be sitting in the kitchen now, waiting for her. He had a fine charcoal grey sweater with a V neck, that she liked to put her face against; he would have his tins of beans and Nescafé out on the table ready for her, and his sharp little face would be drawn together, waiting. His mouth, so thin, could move and change its shape as gently as it looked hard and set; whenever he heard a sound he would look up apprehensively and harden the whole area of his face round his mouth into a beak, to protect himself from being seen. And if she had come, he would have smiled, his special, eager opening smile that she supposed Henry had never seen.
Henry … Henry was impossible, he was just not possible, that was all.
But she was going to let things go their own way and not interfere. She wrapped her arms round herself, and imagined Oliver’s shoulder blades, sharp and hard under the fine grey wool, and his ridiculously narrow waist under her hands, and his own hands, small and certain – Perhaps to do nothing was to betray him?
All the same, she was just going to sit still. She looked out of the window for a time and found that after all she was going to need to cry.