Anna, unlike the rest of them, was not much concerned with Henry; she was too occupied with her present circumstances. When she had first run to Peter, he had wisely taken her, immediately, to London, where they had spent some days in his parents’ empty town flat. Here, Anna lay in the double bed, not moving, and Peter shopped, and cooked, and put on records, and talked and held her hand, and Anna let him slowly construct the story as he saw it; the great emptiness that had been her childhood, Henry’s large shadow, Oliver’s determined move into the emptiness, how she had managed finally, at what cost to herself, to evade his clutches, and last, almost casually, the pregnancy, as though this solid difficulty was just another strand in the psychological net she was or had been entangled in. Peter took it all, as information he himself with admirable calmness had elicited, because he wanted to understand, and loved her. When they had talked it out, he suggested that they should go home to his mother: it was now understood that they would marry.
Anna had left Cambridge without clothes. Peter insisted on buying her a wardrobe and showed himself surprisingly knowledgeable and concerned about sweater and shoes; he insisted on a camel coat, which was something Anna had always disliked, and a coral felt hat with a deep brim which reminded Anna of Margaret. Coral was Margaret’s colour, it should have been Margaret’s warm gold face looking out from under that hat, her mouth with a browny coral lipstick she had, just the one for this, Anna remembered clearly, not Anna’s own small secretive face, so much too pale, and pinched. But Peter liked that hat, he said it gave her ‘poise’, and Anna planted it carefully on her head, a badge of good intentions, before they drove north to Lady Hughes-Winterton and a new life.
Peter had warned or informed his mother by telephone of their arrival, and of the fact that he intended to marry Anna. ‘She won’t want to have been told by telephone,’ he had said, ‘but she’d like still less to think she hadn’t been told as soon as possible. It’s rather difficult, I don’t know what’s best.’ He had spent the journey telling Anna how kind and understanding his mother was, what a refuge she would be to her, how she had always wished for a daughter … Anna discounted half of it, but had nevertheless, in some curious way that harked back to Caroline, come to regard Lady Hughes-Winterton’s quiet country life as a final means to peace, as something to be settled in, for a lifetime. She had been visited by an uncharacteristic but powerful nostalgia for the things Caroline had known of, had tried for, but with Henry and herself and the war to contend with, had never managed ideally to achieve. It was what she had once been fighting, but that, somehow, no longer seemed to matter. It was silly to prolong old battles.
It was apparent, immediately, that Peter’s telephone call had given Lady Hughes-Winterton time to prepare herself for Anna. She came, just quickly enough to suggest eagerness, out into the drive to help them out of the car, embraced Peter, and laid her own solid cheek against Anna’s under the coral hat just long enough to make it certain that this was unusual in her, a gracious acknowledgment of Anna’s right to special treatment, a signification that she herself intended to make no trouble, to be as helpful as possible. Anna thought, seeing her lucidly during this first meeting only, that she had had all this scene neatly staged before they ever arrived, and wondered how much more of her stay would be simply a matter of finding her own predetermined lines at the right moment, and speaking them. Arriving, with the help of the hat and the camel coat, was easy enough; Anna was soon to find that it was all that was easy.
Lady Hughes-Winterton was not what Anna had expected, which was odd, since she fitted both Peter’s description, and Anna’s private modifications of it, well enough. She looked as she should have looked, not tall, not dumpy, but giving the impression of a trimness of figure achieved only by ruthless slimming of the hips, and even more ruthless corseting of an abundant bosom: God had designed her to be a cottage loaf, and she had thwarted him. She had the willpower to thwart anyone. She wore tweeds, certainly, oatmeal and a deceptively gentle violet, but the tweeds were not seated, were not worn for comfort, Anna could see how they had been pressed, could observe how Lady Hughes-Winterton smoothed them before she sat down in them although she was nevertheless, paradoxically, one of those women who sit defiantly easily, their knees thrust apart, revealing to those who happen to be facing them from the right angle, a patch of solid thigh, the join of suspender and stocking, the scalloped edge of thick violet silk knickers.
She had the clear soft skin of the woman who is naturally a cottage loaf, and used little make-up beyond an irrelevant splash of bright lipstick. They will all wear red, Anna thought, all these women who affect not to care, and it doesn’t suit one of them but looks like a uniform; something softer and more subtle would make them, in fact, look slightly overdone, I suppose. The hair was short, thick, and simple, and the colour had been left alone – a tweedy colour, gold and silver, chestnut, chocolate, all mixed, not unattractive, and beautifully set. Caroline’s coil would have looked dowdy beside it, just because a coil was an easy way out, which was unfair. She takes trouble where it matters, Anna thought, and watched Lady Hughes-Winterton notice one of her own finger nails, broken and bitten down. She thought she could detect distaste, there, but all Lady Hughes-Winterton said was, ‘A simple ring would be best, wouldn’t it, Peter? Great Aunt Emily’s little emerald, maybe?’
Anna came to see that making it up to Peter would involve, largely, a superhuman effort to get on with Peter’s mother, and she was angry, because there was no apparent reason why this should not be easy. Lady Hughes-Winterton was so willing. Anna had guessed, from Peter’s descriptions, that trying to marry Peter might be like trying to prise Jeremy away from Caroline. But it looked now as though it should have been easier, in a way much easier, because Peter’s mother was less distressed and more rational, held and repeated so firmly the view that she had always hoped to see Peter married, she was not like some women, she looked forward, had always looked forward to a daughter-in-law. Anna came to see that she could say this because in fact she believed – even admitted to herself – that unlike most women she was in no danger of losing her son to any daughter-in-law, that she knew too well how not to make demands, or scenes, or side comments, for Peter to need to make any change in their relationship. Anna, or whoever else it might be, would just be added to it. So she accepted Anna easily enough, and made quite a little ceremony over the handing-over of Great Aunt Emily’s little emerald, which she fetched from a leather box to give it to Peter to put onto Anna’s chewed finger, which it fitted, as Lady Hughes-Winterton had declared it would, perfectly.
Anna liked the ring; it was one she might even have chosen; and she did not care for Peter in a way which made her miss any romantic choosing or handing over of it alone together. But she was now apprehensive. She thought, as the ring-giving developed into a private showing of the Hughes-Winterton jewels – some valuable, one or two very valuable, most purely pretty, with Peter dismissed somewhere to see about something, and Lady Hughes-Winterton handing garnet collars to Anna saying, ‘This would suit you; I must see about letting you have this, when you’re married’ – that what was really meant was that Lady Hughes-Winterton should take her, Anna, over, should spend her time with her, whilst Peter went off to do whatever men in the country do do; that she should become, should be, how graciously, how generously, made to become, no less, and no more, than part of the household.
Lady Hughes-Winterton had had time between Peter’s telephone call and the arrival to buy new copies of all Henry’s books, and, more incredibly, to look at them. They stood conspicuously on a bookshelf in the drawing room, with Henry’s great face, retiring and challenging, staring sideways from the back of every new cover. Anna did not think Lady Hughes-Winterton could possibly like these books: her own bedroom was furnished with all seventy-two of Angela Thirkell’s novels, Trollope’s Barsetshire novels in a uniform edition, obviously bought post if not propter Angela Thirkell, Nancy Mitford, and Pride and Prejudice. And a rack of Harper’s and Country Life. But Lady Hughes-Winterton managed to spin an incredible amount of intelligent comment out of her cursory reading of them, comment which might even have interested Henry himself, but by which Anna, whose day was divided between answering it, and answering the more usual motherly catechism about people she ought to have been acquainted with, was irritated to screaming point.
‘I think,’ Lady Hughes-Winterton would say, ‘it’s so clever of him to make Teresa’s contempt for death so convincing, don’t you? I mean, it isn’t anything we usually feel, is it, and I don’t believe people in books when they say they do. I just say, that all sounds very fine, but I’d be more impressed if you said you were terrified. Don’t you think? But your father is so overbearing he’s quite uncontradictable. His characters make me feel positively small. Don’t they you? I suppose,’ she added, ‘that all that can’t make him very easy to live with.’ This last was Peter’s understanding mother, who had been told something, Anna did not know how much, offering a delicate sympathy to Anna. For Peter’s sake, Anna must not refuse it, she must offer herself in return, she must allow herself to be understood. But she did not know how to begin. And was made, very gently, to feel that her reticence was a shortcoming, if not a positive failure.
The other line of conversation was as bad. It ran, ‘And the Salters perhaps? They must have lived quite near you? Victoria Salter, so nice, was quite an intelligent girl too, went to LMH and married, quite recently, into the Anlotts. You must have been nearly the same age. No? What a pity, I’m sure you’d have liked Vicky, she was so warm and open. Or there were the Wade-Thomases, he was in publishing, your father might have known him that way, he wrote a little book himself, once, Walks and Anecdotes of Dartmoor, rather a clever idea, in very good taste for that kind of thing, the son was your age, he was at school with Peter, he hopes to go into the Foreign Office with him. Geoffrey his name is, a nice boy, so clean looking. No? What a pity. If there had been daughters, maybe – they wanted a daughter, but were always unlucky. Like me. I tell Charlotte Wade-Thomas, we must just possess our souls in patience, until the daughters-in-law come along. Not that she’s so anxious to see Geoffrey married, they’ve been very close, and I’m afraid she’s a bit possessive about him, poor dear. Something one really should have sense to avoid. I say to her, of course you won’t like the poor girl if you expect her to be everything you would like someone to be for Geoffrey; it isn’t as though she’s going to take your place; you must just treat her like every other human being, take the rough with the smooth as we all must, it’d be a pity if being a mother-in-law made that impossible. Don’t you agree?’
Anna agreed. But she sensed that she herself was not liked; she could not respond openly, was too demure, too quiet, agreed too much. She could never find an opening in the conversation where it would be possible to disagree, with that rush of frankness, earnestness, even laughter, which she sensed would be acceptable, and could not, to save herself, produce. And she saw that Peter’s mother was coming to suspect her of a basic dishonesty – which indeed, with the pregnancy, there was, although luckily she was no longer very sick – and, although this was not what was meant, to suspect her of a scheming, a plot, something to hide, which made the whole thing impossible and fraudulent. Her lack of acquaintance with the people on the list was set down as extra evidence in the count against her, and rather ostentatiously stated not to matter; so far, she was allowed to feel, her being Henry’s daughter, which left space for a certain amount of forgiveable eccentricity, just about balanced it out. But she was found wanting; she knew it, and was hurt; she was too tired not to be hurt, and Peter was so much her last refuge that she could not even tell herself it did not matter. And then, she felt that something ought to be done about getting rid of the baby, and, thanks to Lady Hughes-Winterton’s arrangements for her own and Peter’s time, she saw little enough chance of getting away to manage it quickly enough. She tried, once or twice, to tackle Peter about it late at night when his mother had gone to bed, but discovered that this, too, was nearly impossible – partly because Peter, since coming home, had developed a great guilt about making love to her, and seemed anxious to avoid temptation, partly because he was showing a new reluctance even to talk about the baby, whether because he meant it to survive or wanted to pretend it wasn’t there, Anna was not certain; but mostly because he had an old custom of sitting on the end of his mother’s bed at that time, and telling her everything, at least when his father was not at home.
Anna could imagine them so well, nested amongst shell-pink satin, Lady Hughes-Winterton in cap and gown of ivory silk and lace, Peter curled up on the eiderdown in stocking feet, and no light but the deep pink silk light on the dressing table – talking ‘sensibly’, and so earnestly. She had felt, ridiculously, that she must make Peter promise not to tell his mother about the baby, and was shocked to realize, from his slight air of guilt as he promised, how necessary this had been. She wondered what Lady Hughes-Winterton had already been told – Oliver? In what way, in what light? Peter was so sure of his mother’s superior understanding, he would never see how her knowing could hurt Anna since she was so certain not to ‘mind’. This new fear hampered her conversation with Lady Hughes-Winterton even more; she could no longer be sure that anything she said could not be proved to be a lie. And she was aware that this new nervousness was marked, in its turn.
Nevertheless, she took a certain dogged pleasure in dealing with her new circumstances, in surviving at all as Peter’s prospective wife, or Lady Hughes-Winterton’s prospective daughter-in-law. She hoped for something from Sir Walter – men tended to like her more than women did – and was brought to realize that the present disposition of her time had the advantage of showing her how much she really needed, and liked, Peter. The prospect of living comfortably alone with him became golden, days when the only physical contact between them was a hasty hug in a corridor or a stableyard brought her by degrees to look forward to sleeping warmly with him, all night, every night; she told herself triumphantly that she had known it was something that came gradually, something to be relaxed into. She was ready now. She was positively eager. She could do it.
So that Oliver’s telephone call, which she had answered thinking it must be from her mother, made her feel very angry. It was quite outside her calculations that he should make any further move, let alone that he should be angry with her, or have expected to be told about the baby, or feel that he should be consulted about its future. She was angry too that he obviously dismissed her carefully chosen way of life as something quite out of the question, not even worth discussing. What was he to know of the reality of Lady Hughes-Winterton – or was Peter any less substantial because he was kind, and to be expected? She swore at him down the telephone, cried Don’t, don’t, don’t, and would at first listen to nothing. When he said, finally, that he expected her at least to meet him in the Station Hotel in York to discuss the baby – which was his baby, he reminded her – his small voice was so cold, so tight, that she hesitated a moment, and then said, ‘I might well not come. You’ll have to risk that.’ She had always found making and breaking appointments easier than refusing them outright.
‘I’ll risk that,’ the small voice said, ‘because if you don’t come that won’t be the last of it, and I mean you to know that for certain. When you’ve thought it over, you’ll see it’ll be easier to get away tomorrow than to have me badgering Lady Twiddly for access to you. I shall be quite unscrupulous. So I’ll expect you. You may have to wait, I don’t know how long it takes or when I’ll set out. I’ve not finished with your father yet. Any messages?’
‘No. He might have left you out of things. But he’ll know that. He’ll know I’ve nothing to say. He’ll know why. Let him be.’
‘He ought to be shot,’ the small voice said cheerfully, ‘but never mind. Just hang on, and I’ll be with you, and it’ll all look quite different. We can deal with this, love.’
He had rung off before Anna could get over her surprise at his incredible assumption that she could be reassured and comforted by his coming. For a moment she was outraged, and then, for a moment, hot with a sudden desire for him, for his sharpness, for his lack of cushioning, for the dry, grey place where they had met and knew each other. She grew hotter and hotter, tears pricked her eyes, she thought, ‘He doesn’t make me lie to him,’ and was brought to her senses by a maid, peering round a corner to see what she was doing, so that she went hastily back to Lady Hughes-Winterton’s coffee table to assure her that it had been ‘only a friend, who might be in York; I told him to ring up if he’s free’.
The next day was curiously long and ominous. It began well enough; she had half an hour alone with Peter after breakfast, whilst Lady Hughes-Winterton ordered meals and telephoned tradesmen, and paid bills. They sat together on a long stool (petit point, worked by Great Aunt Emily) in front of a newly-lit log fire in the drawing room; outside, frost was on the lawn, and on the gravel in the terrace; inside, the air was clear and thin, and light, and the fire crackled, trying to catch altogether. Peter put his arm round Anna’s shoulder, and said, ‘Happy?’
‘Yes. More than I’d hoped. That was Oliver, last night.’
‘I thought it might be.’
‘He wants to see me.’
‘I supposed he would,’ said Peter, who had always been less ready than Anna herself to assume that they had heard the last of Oliver. He could not imagine anyone abandoning Anna with so little struggle.
‘No, it’s because of the baby. Father must have told him. He thinks he ought to have some say. It’s a funny line for him to take – I’d always supposed he was responsible for Margaret not having any – but anyway, he thinks he has a right to – to say what happens. I told you, we ought to have dealt with it by now. I’m sure it’ll be dangerous if it goes on much longer.’
‘It might anyway,’ Peter said. ‘I wish you’d have it. They say it – getting rid of them – can mean you can’t have any more. I’d rather keep this one, really, and make certain of several more of my own, than risk that. You see, I’m not being heroic, I’m being selfish. But I’m not sure it’s right, anyway.’
Anna felt like crying. She said, ‘But I don’t want it, Peter, I don’t want it, I can’t bear the thought of it, I’m not ready.’ She did not want any child, she was not fit to have one, she thought, and how would she ever know her place in the world, so hampered; even on the bridge she had not seen, and that may have been to do with it; femina gravida, weighed down, weighed down … Peter patted her shoulder, and went on, ‘Besides, I’m not sure he hasn’t a right to – to be consulted, at least. If he really wants to be, I respect him for it, in a way. But you don’t have to see him, unless you want to.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Very well then, you don’t have to. That’s simple.’
‘He’ll come here, he said as much.’
‘If he does, I’ll see him. I imagine I can cope with him. He’s not a violent man, is he? You needn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t want you upset – it won’t do you any good – and it won’t help anything.’
Anna was dubious for a moment about his assertion that he could ‘deal with’ Oliver, remembering Oliver’s contempt for young men like Peter, the grimness with which he went into battle. And then she thought she was guilty of a constant injustice, Peter’s honesty was very strong, and it was the kind of strength Oliver would recognize.
He was possessed by a generous indignation, a genuine moral superiority, that would appeal to Oliver’s natural puritanism and to a certain extent disarm him. It would appeal more to Oliver, who was more moral than she was, than it did to herself, she thought. But she recognized it, she admired it, she needed it, she thought. People like herself and Oliver found it too easy to dismiss Peter’s decency, Peter’s simplicity, Peter’s real power – except in the last resort. Peter was not precisely what they would have called ‘interesting’, but ultimately he was necessary, ultimately he was life, to be lived with, to hold her to the earth. She looked up at his golden head and saw it bright and warm in the clear, cold light, and thought that Oliver and Henry did not allow for the kind of reality that Peter was, that she possessed an awareness that they knew nothing about. She said impulsively, ‘You won’t ever know how grateful I am for you, Peter. You make things seem solid enough to make plans about, and live with. I really think I might manage, married to you. I get to love you more, and more, really.’
‘There’s a lot to just going on,’ Peter said, ‘if you’re sure things are there to go on with. I love you, so I’m sure.’
‘And I am, truly, Peter.’
‘I hope so. I mean you to be.’
‘And I won’t see Oliver.’
‘I don’t want to make your mind up for you. But candidly, I think better not.’
‘Much better not.’
Lady Hughes-Winterton came in and smiled, and said, ‘There you are, both of you, how comfortable you look,’ and stood in the doorway until Anna felt impelled to move away from Peter, over to the window.
She went on, ‘You’ll remember about going to see the Porters about those pheasants, won’t you darling? And tell them it’s quite all right about Daphne borrowing Mayfly for the Meet, she must feel quite free, you’ll fix it, won’t you? I don’t know if you and Anna will be going out that day but there’s still Marina, she’s quite enough …’
‘Anna rides very well, mother …’
‘Yes, I’m sure she does. So will you do that for me, then?’
Peter stood up. ‘Would you like to come, Anna?’
Lady Hughes-Winterton said nothing; Anna looked at both of them and neither met her eye; after a moment she looked down and said mildly, ‘No – no – I don’t think – that is, I think I’ll stay in.’
‘Take the big car, Peter, in case any of them want a lift later. And do stay to lunch, if they ask you. Anna and I will manage very well together. We’ve lots to talk about, so don’t you hurry back.’
Peter went, striding and upright, kissing Anna on the way and whispering, ‘If there’s any trouble, hold it, till I get back.’ This caused Anna to realize suddenly that the main trouble still had not been met. If she did not go to Oliver, what if he came out here, as was only too likely, when Peter was not there? It was certain that Lady Hughes-Winterton’s understanding would not extend to an encounter with Oliver. For a moment she allowed her desolation to show in her face, but Peter went without remarking it, and all she achieved was a quick look of calculation from Lady Hughes-Winterton, who had seen. Another point lost. Damn Oliver, Anna thought savagely. One trails so much mess after one, even into retreat, even back to the land. Not even only the baby, but all this arranging. Like a fly that got away, trailing sticky threads of web, picking up dust, stopping from time to time to try ineffectually to clean itself up a bit. And laying itself open to goodness knows what.
Lady Hughes-Winterton had the day arranged. First they went out, and Anna held the basket whilst Lady Hughes-Winterton collected autumn leaves for the house. Then there were hens and pigs and horses to be inspected, for no real purpose, just because Lady Hughes-Winterton took pleasure in seeing them. Anna would have taken pleasure in them too, she would have liked to stand and talk to the mares in the looseboxes, or hunt eggs; that was the kind of thing she had come to do. But she found her companion’s presence irritating. Not because Lady Hughes-Winterton saw the animals as things, which she might have expected. She did not, she obviously cared for them; the horses whickered with pleasure when she came into the yard, and the hand which moved the warm bundle of hen aside in its box and lifted eggs out, so gently, was assured and accepted. It was basically the same feeling that Anna had had over Margaret’s admiration of St Anne, or over Cambridge. Some things were solitary things, some things could only be possessed if no one else possessed them or loved them. The hens and horses were Lady Hughes-Winterton’s who knew them, and loved them quite adequately. So Anna followed her and carried eggs and admired like a stranger, feeling the sharp autumn air, and the horse smell, and the brittle hedges and the garden paths crackling with frost, beautiful but not hers, like a tourist, or a mere hirer of horses in a stable where someone lives and works constantly.
In the house, they arranged the leaves, and finally confirmed the meals: a simple lunch, since Peter might be out, a large dinner, since he would be in. Then Lady Hughes-Winterton discussed Anna’s wedding with her. It occurred to Anna that previous discussions of this had been incredibly tactful. No surprise had been expressed about her own parents’ lack of communication with the Hughes-Wintertons, no questions had been asked which would involve a direct statement on Anna’s part of their views, their plans, their arrangements. It had all been clothes and timing, nebulous undefined bridesmaids, colours and flowers. Showing an interest, but never forcing Anna’s hand. Anna saw that this must be put down to one of Peter’s midnight discussions with his mother, and wished he wouldn’t. She could not, after all, get married without Caroline, even without Henry. It had been only from her first panic that she had wanted to exclude them altogether, but now that she did not know what had been so effectively said to make her family and her own attitude to them unmentionable, she dared not bring up the subject herself. And so she disappointed again.
Lady Hughes-Winterton said, ‘And of course, if you do marry as ridiculously early as you want to – don’t think I don’t understand, dear, I ought to, I had enough battles with my parents to get married at all, with Walter off on missions all over the place – if you do marry so soon, I shall expect you to live with me here in term time until Peter gets his degree over with. I think that’s the best we can do for him, don’t you agree? Hardly fair to divide his attention, so close to the time. And then we’ve to get him through the Civil Service exams, which shouldn’t be too bad – and then you really will be able to start house hunting. I do want you to feel that – just like Peter – you always have a home here.’
Anna said that was very kind; she could summon up no more adequate response. Desolation invaded her again. She had had a horrible experience once as a child, going to stay with a family where the children had a nanny and a nursery. They had spent all day living a life shut up, shut away, a half life, a horrible grey unplaced life, visiting the adults for tea, for an hour in the afternoon, to hear a story and return to nursery tea, supper and bed. It had been intolerably less than was possible. And living here with Peter’s mother would be like that.
Over lunch, Lady Hughes-Winterton returned to the catechism. Anna had been hopeful that it must end, when Lady Hughes-Winterton finally ran out of friends. But although this had happened, almost altogether, by now, it had had no deterrent effect. She assumed an absence of mind which, Anna was certain, was not natural to her, and began again, introducing longer and longer anecdotes about the unknown families, Vicky Salter’s strange experience at a Hunt Ball, Geoffrey Wade-Thomas’s peculiar skill, no doubt inherited from his father, at finding paths over apparently trackless moors. And then, when they were having tea, after lunch – Lady Hughes-Winterton always took tea after lunch, she was of the opinion that it sat more lightly on the stomach, which was important since she also always took a rest after lunch, owing to a slight cardiac trouble, nothing serious, but it was best to take care – when they were having tea, Lady Hughes-Winterton suddenly turned up what must have been the one name they had in common.
‘Or did you,’ she asked, clattering her teaspoon, ‘by any chance know a young man whose father was a great friend of mine? Michael Farne?’
‘Michael?’ Anna said stupidly, feeling the colour spreading hot in her face. ‘Michael? Of course I know him. I – we used to ride a lot together. He was – we were friends. We spent all one summer riding together …’
‘Indeed?’ said Lady Hughes-Winterton, at a loss now, apparently, over what to do with the information she had elicited. ‘I believe he was very good with horses.’
‘He was,’ Anna said, troubled by this irrelevant calling up of so much she had thought renounced, remembering, far too vividly, far too urgently, the golden figure on the huge horse, trampling off under a burning sun, throwing the dust back at her and Oliver. And everything else that went with it – docks in the stable yard, bridles in the warm dark of the saddle room, the brightness and dustiness of straw stacks, the green and blue and gold perturbation of the orchard at Darton and the burning bracken on the hills over the hedge, Michael in a white shirt like an avenging angel treading the hay and laughing, and herself, imagining something huge, and possible, and bright, and transfiguring, to be met round every corner.
‘It was a very hot summer,’ she said hopelessly to Lady Hughes-Winterton, almost unable to contain her memory of it enough to speak rationally, ‘the hottest for years.’
‘Indeed?’ said Lady Hughes-Winterton. Anna was still blushing, still so troubled that she did not this time notice Lady Hughes-Winterton looking at her carefully, taking note; she was aware only of a tremendous sense of relief when that lady, a little disturbed, moved off to her rest.
When she had gone, Anna looked round the Hughes-Winterton drawing room with new eyes. It had a birch-grey carpet, and ice-green slipper satin curtains, fluted under a castellated pelmet; it had green and silver damasked walls and would have been airy in the summer, but now in the winter it was chill. In the hearth, the log fire flaked, pink for a moment, into whitish ash. There was a lot of petit point, worked on a grey background; a screen, several stools, all in Victorian roses.
She thought, with new clarity, ‘I came here because of Michael. I wanted Peter to be Michael. I wanted the country to be bright and the sun shining, and nobody thinking, as they were for Michael, and me to be in it, part of it.’
But Peter was not Michael, and she saw suddenly that however right she may have been about Peter’s peculiar strength, or life, her rightness had been purely irrelevant. She had not allowed for herself, or her own modes of knowledge; here she would be half-human; a child in a nursery. Which she might have wanted blindly for a moment, but she could do better than that.
‘I was terribly unhappy then but I knew something,’ she thought, whilst memory selected patches of sun, a heroic gesture from Michael, bright trees from the whole orchard, and significance from a tangle of distress. ‘I did know,’ she insisted to herself, meaning: I have come to know, now. Whatever had been learned, not to be unlearned, on the bridge at night. She would come to remember the flakes of ash in this hearth with the same sense of significance, but that would be years later. Now the past rose bright and decisive; Peter was not Michael; nothing here mattered to her, nothing was live, as Michael had been. She must go away from here, before she could find what was. Not Michael himself, she had never supposed that, but something of the same weight. I thought it was a retreat, a dead end, she told herself, as she searched Peter’s jackets in the hall cupboards for the keys to Peter’s sports car. But there are no ends and I must do something.
The keys were in Peter’s riding-mac finally; Anna had been gambling on his not having taken them; the rich, luckily, have so many pockets to leave things in that the chances are more often that things are not on them or with them. Anna put on the camel coat and the coral hat, because they were to hand, and wrote a note to Peter, which after some deliberation she pushed into his pocket, in place of the keys. It would never do for his mother to find it.
‘Dear Peter, I have suddenly come to see that I must do things for myself. Because what one does affects one more than it looks as though it is going to when one does it. Like the baby. So I am going to start by seeing Oliver for myself. I might not come back, it’s only fair to say, but this doesn’t mean I won’t. I want to, partly, I mean that. I have taken your car. If I don’t come back I’ll let you know where I’ve left it. It’s easier to write because I suspect you suspected this might happen. My love, whatever happens, Anna.’
She drove out of the garage as quietly as she could, in order not to wake the sleeper, and out onto the road down through the Yorkshire moors, into York. She felt alive, driving the tiny car over twisting grey roads between dead frost-bitten bracken and grass; she sat up, and felt the wheel live under her hands, and her eyes awake to the road. She had not been alone with herself for some time. She thought of the baby, without bitterness for the first time. Oliver cared what happened to it; let it be born then; it must live its own life, as she must, it was not really a part of her, it was itself. It might be like Henry, or Oliver, or Caroline, or even Jeremy. One might as well let it have its life. Thinking of it as someone who might be like someone held her imagination to it for a moment; it would be difficult, now, to treat it as a thing again.
York came, surprisingly quickly, solid pale gold walls, fine grey Minster, narrow streets, ceremonial gates. Last time she had been there, she had been running away too, she remembered, and had been dreadfully lost. Running away did just as much damage as any other form of activity or refusal to act. After that she had run to school, and from school home, and from home to Oliver, and from Oliver to Peter. And now from Peter, to where? she thought, drawing up Peter’s car outside the Station Hotel of which as a schoolgirl she had been so much afraid. This looks very like simple running away, too. But it isn’t – it can’t be.
Oliver was not inside, that she could see. It was not opening time so she sat down in the main hall, in the well of the great, curving, gilt staircase, in an armchair like a tub, stretched her tidy feet in their countrywoman’s shoes, out on a thick carpet, and ate four ruinously expensive ham sandwiches to provide an excuse for being there. She ate them slowly, and when she had finished them Oliver still did not come; this hardly surprised her, though her stomach was tight with expecting him; she did not quite believe in Oliver.
What I always do, she thought, is run not quite far enough. I don’t have courage to get right out. To give myself time to take stock and try. The thing to do, when I’ve dealt with Oliver, would be to go to Mexico or somewhere – London, now, tonight, for a start, and get this baby over, and find someone to want it – the thought crossed her mind of Ernest Pontifex’s children, happy in the sands with the waterman – and try to do something. Father will pay. And away from him I might write something, even if I’m not him, and shan’t be. After all, I’ve never tried yet, I’ve never put pen to paper.
And then she thought, you are doing it again, Anna, thinking you must wait to deal with Oliver, it is just like all the other times, all you are doing is running away from Peter to Oliver. Which is worse, surely. The thing to do is go, now. Alone.
She stood up, in a blaze of decision, her mind humming over the bright summer, and left the hall without looking back. In the Station Hotel’s bright, clean pink lavatory, she powdered her nose, and pushed a wisp of hair under the coral hat, seeing her own face, new and shining, and to be cared for, and embellished. She smiled at herself, with love, and went back, out into the entrance hall, towards the main door, and Peter’s car. She would leave it in safe hands for him, in London.
In the doorway, Oliver caught her elbow. He said, ‘Where are you going, in that inappropriate hat?’
Anna turned slowly to him, waking up out of a dream, seeing that what one did was indeed done, one was what one did, this as well, this above all, watching her last chance, or illusion, which? slip away as Oliver held her from it.
‘I was just going,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have gone far, I suspect.’
Oliver’s grip was like a claw on her elbow; he was holding himself together terribly; he looked at her directly, with a tremendous effort, but his face twitched, and Anna noticed suddenly that his knees were trembling.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t trouble. Darling. Come and sit down. I couldn’t really go far without you, now.’
The relief of her saying this was quite unexpected, to both of them. Oliver smiled slowly, and then more broadly, and said, ‘Then we must just get on with things together.’ He looked quite incongruous in the furred, palatial hotel. He had not even shaved, and had a raffish air, quite different from his normal constricted neatness. Anna said, ‘Yes, it’s about time we did.’
Greyness, and remembered brightness, things done and things to do; one had to contain them, and continue somehow. Seeing Oliver, now, Anna saw that it was silly to imagine it could have been done without him. This really was the feared and expected end. At that time, she was surprisingly content.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ Oliver said. ‘We’ve a lot to discuss.’