Some weeks later, about the time when Anna should have come home for the Christmas vacation, Henry had a letter from her. Caroline brought it with his breakfast, like Margaret’s letters; she had not opened it, since it was addressed only to Henry. This was not usual; Anna wrote very rarely and when she did produced a schoolgirl scrawl with thank-yous for cakes and biscuits and shorthand accounts of largely fictitious social activities in answer to her mother’s repeated requests for news. Caroline continued to send food parcels and a weekly account of all the family’s small doings to Anna at Cambridge as she had done to Anna at school. The difference was that at school Anna had been expected to write to her parents every Sunday afternoon, and had complied. Caroline thought it delicate not to mention this extraordinary letter of Henry’s before he did. She handed it to him, and left him, thinking that Anna had probably, inconsiderately, decided to come home without giving her enough time to change the butcher’s order, or buy more breakfast cereal.
Henry knew the letter must contain something nasty, but he opened it with a kind of relief; he had spent his time since he came back from Cambridge feeling that he must act, must find an answer, must do something about Anna, and had not been able, as Oliver had predicted, to think at all what this something might be. But he had nevertheless tormented himself, and now hoped the letter, however unpleasant, might jolt him into action of some kind, might indicate a direction.
‘My dear father,’ Anna wrote, ‘I don’t want to tell you anything, I don’t want ever to have to try to communicate anything again, but there are some things I’d be grateful if you could do for me, if you can bear to, so I shall have to explain a certain amount. I want to get married as soon as possible to Peter Hughes-Winterton. We want it soon, his mother says not until he goes down (this summer). We’re still arguing that one out. If you could get it into The Times and the Telegraph, or whatever, I’d be grateful. I’d like a Registry Office in a hurry to get it over, but I’m afraid it will be orange blossom and champagne and a cousin who’s a Bishop to please Lady Hughes-Winterton. I hope you think that’s funny. I suppose I’ll have to come home to get married, but I’m staying with the Hughes-Wintertons over Christmas and I don’t want to have to come home again. I can’t face you – I really mean, I can just about go on, if I don’t have to face you. You know why, don’t you? I write now partly because of The Times and keeping Lady Hughes-Winterton quiet and happy about that, and partly because if anyone can stop Mummy making a fuss and wanting me home and trying to inspect Peter, etc., you can. You do see? If we – Peter and I – win, we can get married in the New Year and live in digs until Peter gets his degree (which no one but Lady Hughes-Winterton thinks will be a good one anyway so no need to feel guilty about that).
‘I ought to stop there, really, and let you think what you like. But in a sense you deserve an explanation (a back-hander that, I know) and if I don’t tell you, you might be clever in all the wrong directions. Or try to say something to me, and I don’t want you to do that, above all not that. I don’t suppose anybody else’s father could say nothing, but there’s a chance you might.
‘What happened was, I found out I was pregnant. I was a bit silly not to guess earlier, really. Except it seemed in such bad taste, and one knew so many people who did all sorts of things and managed not to be. And I went into a blind panic and couldn’t cope, and saw I would never manage without someone to arrange things for me, like Mummy used to. Things seem to happen to me even when I don’t do anything at all, life seems like that. So I went to Peter and said help, which is just what he loves. No, I’m not wickedly letting him think it’s his, or anything like that, I just told him all about it, he’s worked out a lovely psychological explanation of how Oliver and everything – my instability – all goes back to you, and parental neglect, and inferiority (me) and all that. He may even be right. He says I need to be loved and looked after, and I think I do – at least, I’m happy in a sort of way, letting him love me, and he obviously thinks I might never have married him if I hadn’t got into such an awful mess and broken down completely, and I might not at that. I don’t know why he wants me, but that’s his business. It’s nice somebody does. I mean to be so good to him, really I do.
‘What I want is an abortion. I know of lots of people who seem to have managed them – and it must be easy to arrange one if I can only get away to London from Lady Hughes-Winterton’s eagle eye. But Peter is all full of respect for life, and says no, let it be born, and adopted, unless we keep it – there’s going to be a ghastly muddle, can’t you see – I mean, how can it be adopted, Lady Hughes-Winterton must notice its presence before then – I think Peter’s rather splendid, but I’d better win this argument or we’ll never be able to begin to be married at all, will we? And I mean to try. I mean, Peter can’t keep it up at that pitch, even I can see.
‘This letter is getting too long after all, isn’t it, in spite of my not wanting to tell you things? Perhaps you think Mexico would still be better. It would, if I were you, absolutely it would. But I’m not you, I’ve not got the power, I’ve not got – you know, what I’ve not got – so I shall just go on and do what Mummy would like and marry Peter. And be a human being. Wife, and so on. You can tell Mummy what you like. I’m nastily leaving it to you. You know what she can take, I never had been able to, I don’t think she can take anything from me. You would tell her how unutterably suitable Peter is, just what she wanted.
‘I must stop writing. It does no good. If things were different I’d like to talk to you – about the way life traps one, the way things decided themselves by default – but I can’t talk to you and go on, you ask too much. Peter gives me a warmth, a real warmth, that’s worth something. Isn’t it? Don’t answer more than you have to, just fix things for me. And love, really, love, Anna.’
Henry sat for some time with the letter spread in front of him, taking it in. It was nasty, but not in the way he had expected, in so far as he had known what he expected. He was too involved to work out what mattered most immediately to him, which was Anna’s attitude to himself; he could read the letter both ways, as a final gesture to his interest in her, or as a plea to him to disregard her bravado, her practical tone, to overbear her distance and fetch her home to himself. She wants me to know, he thought. She wants me to know what has happened to her. Or perhaps she only wants to write it down for someone to read, and thinks I’m the most harmless reader, because whatever I think of her marrying this boy, or getting rid of this baby, I shan’t interfere. Probably she’s regretting having written so much already. She is sure enough that she doesn’t want to see me; that we have nothing to say to each other. We never have had. Perhaps I should keep out. Or perhaps she wants me to assert that there is something to say. But what?
He had so little experience of people wanting things from him. He had made enough mess of Margaret.
He thought of Peter Hughes-Winterton and wondered how long this combination of heroism and opportunism would bear up under the strain of Anna’s condition; at least, he thought, Anna seemed well enough aware of where the strains would be. It might all be more possible than he had immediately thought.
But there was this fact, the pregnancy. The thought of abortion repelled him, and in connection with Anna stirred his body into shuddering too. Morally he had nothing against it, he thought. It might be best. But … should he fix it himself, or pay, or leave it to Peter, or …? It was so much what should not have been.
And there was Caroline, who was, he was aware, waiting tactfully in the kitchen until he came to tell her what had been in the letter. What could he tell Caroline? For her own sake? And for Anna’s? He stuffed the letter into his pocket, threw back his chair, and went out through the window, into the garden.
Caroline saw him cross the lawn, and thought that Anna had done something really tiresome this time; he was walking violently, straining all his muscles obsessively, in the way he had when he was put out, or under extreme literary pressure. Caroline did not think he was under extreme literary pressure this time. Caroline thought, damn that girl, and, he doesn’t know what to say to me, and, he can’t keep that up for long, he’ll be back. He had been walking a great deal lately, not like this, but slowly, heavily, stopping from time to time and turning, as though he was up against a series of invisible walls. Caroline had assumed that his work was proving intransigent. Now, she watched him into the orchard and began to polish silver, waiting for his return.
Under his feet the leaves were frozen crisply to the ground, in layers, stiff at the edges, soft in the middle, like a galette of potatoes. They creaked and crunched under his shoes like new snow. His breath came in visible puffs and spread on the cold air; the trees were spread with grey, furry frost like fungus. Henry threaded them without much direction, stopping to take his corners like an inefficient horse in a bending race. He had told himself that he was coming out to think, but in fact, he was walking so fast in order to put off thinking.
He came in a zig-zag to the hut and went in. It smelled of damp wood, and there was frost on the outside of the windows. Opening the drawer in what he thought of still as ‘Jeremy’s work-bench’ he found Anna’s notebook; a mass of damp empty pages, one page covered entirely with Michael, Michael, Michael, the beginning of the poem, ‘Why trees were green once, Was, of course, yourself’, and underneath that, in very careful writing, with decorated flourishes, the flat statement, ‘We are all very much alone.’
Michael? he asked himself, and had no answer. He had never bothered to learn Michael’s name. He turned the limp pages over again, and thought that here, too, Anna had left no clue, nothing which he could take as a sign of a mind burning in her, or a talent to develop; nothing in the light of which he could take the train to York, and say to her, look, you must come home, you must go away by yourself and do this, or this. Nothing, even, bad and gushing and undeveloped, that showed at least the will to work. Only the name, and the final sentence, and the bit of poem. Even her love poetry, at a distance, in the past tense, Henry thought – something which should have been felt urgently, here made remote, in this hesitant language, examined from outside. Had this Michael been past or present when this was written? He thought he knew it would have been the same whatever Michael had been. That was like Anna. She would never go up to things, or grasp them, or let herself in for knowing them.
Oh, Anna, Anna, Anna, he said to himself, I would like to give you something to hold. I would like to start you off again.
‘We are all very much alone.’
Ever since he came back from Cambridge, he had been tormented by love; he had thought over and over what he could or should have said to Anna, then, last summer, two summers ago; he would have told her what he knew, he would have taken her to his places and made her see them as he saw them; he would have made her look pleased, and smile, and catch her breath as she had when he first mentioned Mexico. But he could not bring himself to approach her, afraid as he was of Oliver, and unused as he was to action, and he had felt, with this love, he was heavy with a complete helplessness he had not known before. He had not been able to write. At first this had not mattered, had been only a transitory prick of irritation in his trouble. But lately, with a letter from his publisher, and the strain of days spent with nothing done, nothing achieved, no progress, only the same circle of love, and responsibility, and helplessness, and decisions not made, he had begun to worry about the writing too. He felt that he was not a man without it; after he had spent enough time away from pen and paper he lost touch with himself and had no centre to judge from.
He had always known he was spiritually gambling on being able to continue his own cycle of vision and thought and construction and walking into old age without interruption. Then, he assumed tacitly and with no medical evidence, he would pop off with a convenient heart attack. Or at the worst, if something died, and the line of novels petered out, become a meaningless repetition of the same watered down formulas, as he had seen happen with others, he would know, he would give up gracefully and come to grips with his book on romanticism. If he were not capable of reading a little each day, and organizing notes, he reasoned, he would be as good as dead in any case and only obliged to wait with dignity. He was luckier than most; there was no need for his occupation to be gone ‘at age sixty-five’ as it said in the insurance brochures.
Oh, he had been well prepared for the future, he had taken it into account. He had thought that a man’s job now was his religion often enough; the first thing he would bring up in his mind if asked suddenly, ‘Why do you think you are alive?’ He did not think this generally satisfactory, but in his own case it was a truth; he was a knot of what he saw, and his job, what he made of what he saw, what he wrote – there seemed to be nothing of him except physical functions hanging over to be mistrusted or accused before death. Or so he had thought; a curious over-simplification for anyone pretending to be a novelist, he told himself, looking at Anna’s damp little notebook, even a novelist as little concerned with idiosyncratic human relations as himself. Except that it had been a deliberate over-simplification that had worked. A man cannot go down all paths and at the same time travel any distance, he said; a man must choose, and I could not have stayed in my own clearing and explored myself to all ends. I had to close off ways, and to strike out.
It should have been easy enough to act, with Anna’s news in his pocket. He touched that, and then pushed the little notebook down to join it, pocketing it a little like a love token, the private possession acquired without the beloved’s knowledge, the traditional lost glove, the page of doodled drawings, the magic symbol which gives a secret power over its owner, in other hands.
Anna must be very frightened, he thought suddenly. She’s not used to having to act either. And her need to act is more immediate than mine. He could not bear the thought of Anna being frightened, and turned and went in again. Caroline had always told him what to do, and he would have, after all, to turn to her.
When he came in, Caroline looked up, alert for the ordinary tiresomeness she expected from Anna. He said gloomily, ‘I must talk to you,’ and stood at the window with his back to her, falling into a silence that seemed designed to convey that he had said all that was necessary, all he could. Caroline began to say, ‘What has Anna done now?’ and changed it, feeling her way more carefully, to, ‘When are we to expect Anna home?’ ‘Not for some time,’ Henry said. ‘She’s staying with some people called Hughes-Winterton. Near York.’ He looked surreptitiously at the address engraved on Anna’s letter. ‘Near York.’
‘I wish she’d let us know earlier. Will she come home for Christmas? Jeremy will be very upset if the family isn’t together for Christmas.’
‘I doubt that. No, she won’t. She wants to stay there.’ Caroline could not think how to get at what he could not say. She asked, rather hopelessly, ‘Who are these Hughes-Wintertons?’
‘There’s a Lady Hughes-Winterton with a husband in the Foreign Office. Sir Walter Hughes-Winterton, I believe it is. And a son, Peter. Up at Cambridge.’ He seemed about to plunge into silence again, and then brought out with an effort, ‘Anna says she is going to marry him.’
It was Caroline’s turn now to be silent. She was willing to rejoice; she wanted Anna married and the Hughes-Wintertons sounded much more possible than she had even dared hope from Anna. Her imagination ran out into The Times and the Telegraph, her own wise, and friendly, and balanced welcome for Peter on his first visit after Christmas – no rushing at him, but no sense of inspection, immediate acceptance – a summer reception on the lawn? Jeremy in morning dress, how charming, one of her own relatives who was a clergyman, her own hat – something a bit dashing this time, a silk cartwheel on a grand scale – Henry giving his daughter away, looking splendid – and here she came up against Henry’s entirely unexplained and disproportionate gloom. She knew that fathers traditionally thought no one good enough for their daughters – even Anna – and would have been indulgently amused by doubt or apprehension. But Henry was plainly miserable. There was something she did not know.
‘Do they approve then? His parents?’
‘Oh yes. Anna wants it in the papers, she says. They seem only to be arguing over when it shall be. They, Peter and Anna – want it in a few weeks’ time. Lady Hughes-Winterton would prefer the summer.’
‘I see. We should be rather rushed … It takes time to get a dress made … People might think … Will Anna not finish at Cambridge?’
‘No. I don’t think that matters. She wasn’t doing much good there.’ This was obviously what he thought; the trouble was not there. Caroline would have liked to shake words from him.
‘Hadn’t you better let me read Anna’s letter, so that I can make arrangements?’
‘No,’ said Henry, too quickly. ‘I think it was – meant for me.’
‘Henry – what is the trouble? Is Anna not happy? Has she … is she … does she have to get married?’
Henry waited too long to be able to lie convincingly.
‘I see. I assume Lady Hughes-Winterton doesn’t know.’ There was a stridency in her voice, now. ‘I should have expected something like this from Anna, I suppose. She can’t do anything – she can’t keep out of any trouble.’ She considered. ‘Still, if the wedding is as soon as possible, no one may … Henry, I wish you would treat me responsibly. How long has this been going on? This Peter – is he only marrying her because of this? Do they love each other? Because – if he is – he must be told that he need not. Nobody need marry for that. It’s a bad beginning. Anna should have looked after herself.’
Caroline believed that trouble of this kind was always the woman’s fault. Men were naturally lascivious, even the nicest of them, and out for what they could get. In a curious female way she admired this in them. It was a woman’s responsibility to keep out of harm, and her intelligence to know what men were and how to manage them. She must have ‘self-control’, which she must also know men were incapable of. Caroline finished, ‘Anna will not be responsible for herself. She will not think of consequences. I do not want this young man to feel coerced.’
‘I don’t think he is,’ said Henry, not knowing where he was leading himself. ‘I think it is Anna who is fundamentally uncertain …’
‘In that case they had better be married quickly. Anna will never make her mind up. She wasn’t uncertain, I suppose, when –’
‘You don’t understand,’ Henry said in spite of himself. ‘Peter – Peter isn’t responsible.’
Caroline sat down at the kitchen table and looked onto her silver things, spoons and bowls spread neatly in front of her, some shining, some smeared with jeweller’s rouge. She looked at them for some time, as though steadying herself. Then she said, almost inaudibly, ‘Who is?’
‘Oliver Canning.’ Henry felt the answer was not unexpected. He also knew suddenly that he had passed a boundary, had made a decision; that the handing over of this piece of information had decided the way things were to be. He felt bad, very bad. And he had never seen Caroline so shaken. She whispered, from a dry throat, ‘I knew he was dangerous, that summer. But I thought he went away in time. He was that sort. But I thought he went in time.’ She asked, not looking at Henry. ‘And Anna – dragged – this boy – into this?’
‘He knows –’
‘How disgusting,’ Caroline cried. ‘How disgusting. How horrible.’ She put her face down on the table between the coasters and began to shake, and then to weep. Once she cried, ‘I don’t know how she could, she was taught what was right.’ Henry shifted slightly; if you read that line, somewhere, it was almost trite, everyone said it; but here to Caroline it was as though they had all, all the family, lost virtue; a terrible pain.
Henry made no move to help his wife, to pat her on the shoulder, or wipe her tears, or tell her what she wanted to be told, that what fault there was was not hers. Something had happened to him. When he turned round from the window he wore his old look, abstracted, retreating under the camouflage of his generous eyebrows; he watched Caroline’s twisting shoulders with a curious compound of sharp interest and something like relief. It was, he remarked with some surprise, as though Caroline’s family anguish, Caroline’s outrage, Caroline’s sense of failure in her part, relieved him of his own burden. As though her misery cancelled his different and more single misery; as though he had handed this too over to her, with the butcher, the baker, the income tax, the journalists, and all the other like responsibilities he didn’t even know about. As though to share his knowledge of Anna had changed the face of Anna; to let Caroline see her had moved her into Caroline’s world. Caroline’s tears moved him in one way more deeply than Margaret’s, or even Anna’s, whose cause he felt more clearly – Caroline was closer to him, the eruption was within the boundary of his land, and less expected.
But he was not, he thought, a sufferer, any more than he was an actor. He was no Christian, let alone no Christ. He remembered what Oliver had said, in the library – something about ‘all of us like dead albatrosses, tumbling out of the sky, to be hung round your neck as evidence of your spiritual progress’. Well, if they were, he didn’t feel that he had died with the albatross after all, he did not share its flurry and struggle; if it was round his neck, it impeded his progress a little, and he studied how its feathers lay, white and smooth, and its claws curled, cold and limp.
He remembered now, there was always a point at which misery snapped in him, at which he was impelled to stand aside, and watch, at which he had to say, ‘I have had enough of this,’ and retreat into solitude. And write? It had been like this after his worst clumsinesses in Cambridge, after his friends had been tortured in Burma – and now, after Anna. He began to recognize himself again, felt down tentatively, and touched a secret excitement over his knowledge of Anna, of Caroline, of Oliver, of Peter, of the way things were working.
Caroline said, ‘I’m sorry, Henry, I didn’t mean to do that.’ She straightened herself and wiped her eyes. ‘I can see it’s bad enough for you without my getting worked up too.’ The thought struck her. ‘How long have you known?’
‘About Oliver Canning since I went to Cambridge. I saw them both then, but there seemed to be nothing I could do. About the other matter, only since this morning.’
‘I see,’ said Caroline. She did not ask why he had not told her; that was not the sort of question she asked. ‘Why didn’t you make Anna come home?’
‘I didn’t feel I had any right.’
‘I would have made her come home.’ She was allowing herself to grow angry, and as her anger increased her back stiffened and her hands ceased to tremble. ‘What does Oliver Canning think of this latest idea?’
Henry had not thought of Oliver at all, except as a ciphered nastiness who was the cause of the pregnancy; certainly not as anyone who might have any feeling for Anna or personal interest in the possible child. He said, mildly surprised, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if he even knows. I hadn’t thought of him.’
‘Well,’ said Caroline briskly, ‘he’s responsible, and he must pay. However much we dislike the idea, we must see him and tell him so. We must move quickly. Anna must come here – we’ll see her through, we must do so much – and Oliver Canning must pay. If that poor boy really wants to marry Anna he can do so when the baby’s over – and personally I doubt if he will, once he’s had time to think. Anna had better go right away. She won’t have much future left in this country as things are; she’d better go and teach in the Colonies, and be useful at least.’
‘I don’t think she wants to have the baby,’ Henry suggested, knowing what the answer would be.
‘Well, she must. She must take what comes when she behaves wrongly. She can’t do anything else – for one thing, it’s wicked, and for another, it’s dangerous. None of us are going to enjoy the next year, but that can’t be helped. You must make her come home.’
‘I don’t think I can.’
‘Someone must. He must – Oliver Canning must, if no one else will. I shall make him.’
‘Don’t you think we’d do better to leave him out?’
‘No,’ said Caroline, who was now in a fine rage and was holding herself together with plans and action. ‘He must take what he deserves, he must pay, and I shall see that he does. I shall write now.’ She looked at Henry with tears still in her eyelashes, quite incapable of admitting that some of her rage was directed at him. She said, ‘We must get on with it, quickly,’ and then bowed down over the table again, and muttered to herself, ‘He was such a nasty little man, I don’t know how she could bear to let him touch her. I knew he was like that, he can’t leave people alone, he used to look at Anna in a way I didn’t like, that summer – and at me, sometimes – he can’t bear women who aren’t under his power, I know that kind. But I thought Anna was too stupid to notice, that’s what I thought, such a lump she was then, not a woman at all, and I didn’t think he’d dare, depending on you as he does.’
‘That was partly why,’ Henry suggested.
‘I can see that it might have been. That makes it worse. I blame myself, partly. I instinctively didn’t want him in my house, but I was sorry for poor Margaret.’
The thought of Margaret was a small shock to both of them.
‘Does Margaret know?’ Caroline demanded. ‘Was that why she –’
‘No. I think she is living in her own quite private tragedy. I don’t think she leaves herself time to notice – things like – Anna.’
‘It’s a pity,’ Caroline observed dispassionately, ‘that it was only Anna. If it had been someone more – less – more possible, at least Margaret would have been rid of him. She always floundered about him so. Just what he wouldn’t like. And she needn’t be like that – she’d have made a splendid wife for all sorts of people – almost anyone, except that inconsiderate little horror.’
‘Poor Margaret,’ said Henry. ‘She’s going to suffer for all these decisions we’ve all been making or refusing to make and she’s never going to know what went wrong. Like the girl on the roundabout whose skirt got caught up in the machinery, who got rather nastily mangled, quite by mistake. I don’t know what we’re going to do with her.’
‘That’s Oliver’s business.’
‘I’m afraid Margaret won’t think so.’ Henry’s sudden prick of conscience over not having communicated with Margaret gave a further blow to his personal distress for Anna, which had not been grounded on conscience but was now completely shunted into association with it. He was growing together again, alone with himself, only morally associated with all the trouble. He felt now, guilty in all directions. But lighter, clearer, all the same. Distanced. He stood up, and left Caroline abruptly, and wandered, like a discoverer, back into his study.