‘I didn’t like him,’ Anna repeated, falling into her sullen manner.
‘Of course, nobody ever would be good enough for you!’ sneered Lauretta bitingly.
She fluttered out of the room, leaving Anna with a nasty taste in her mouth.
A fastidious look of disgust came upon Anna’s face, partly because of Matthew, partly because of Lauretta, and partly because of her own position. It was not at all pleasant for her at Blue Hills in an atmosphere of Lauretta’s permanent displeasure. Things seemed to get worse and worse. Between her and her uncle and aunt there was now a decided coldness. They did not try to keep up even a superficial friendliness with her — or she with them. She went about in silence.
It was really very disagreeable. As August came on, Anna’s heart failed her. She began to feel nervous and distracted. For day after day passed, and nothing was said about Oxford. She had not advanced a step in that direction. In fact, it seemed highly improbable that Lauretta in her present mood would allow her to go. And then, what sort of a life remained to her? To live on at Blue Hills, hurrying out to parties, playing games and attending dances, trailing after Lauretta who would grow older and sharper and more exacting as time went on.
Anna began to think seriously about Matthew Kavan. Perhaps she really had made a mistake in not marrying him. At any rate it would have been an adventure, a way out. An escape from the horrible empty rush of the Blue Hills social existence, and the horrible, vicious, fluttering persecution of Lauretta. And surely with him she would have had some sort of an independence.
In his absence, she found it difficult to recall what it was about Kavan that was so distasteful to her. It was hard to bring back to mind that feeling she had had of vainly shouting at him through deadening wads of incomprehension: the feeling of his unreality, his strangely inhuman side. It was chiefly his shadowy insentience which had repelled her. And now she could not quite believe in it. It seemed that she must have exaggerated it, to herself.
He had not written to her, but she had received one parcel, a neat little packet not much larger than an ordinary envelope. She knew at once that it was from Matthew. Only he would have folded the stiff paper with such precision, creasing the ends so neatly to a point, knotting the string so exactly in the centre. It brought back something of his own closed neatness to her. She shivered a little as she opened it. Inside was a sachet, or a pin-cushion, or something like that, stuffed with rose-leaves and embroidered in silk with a bunch of pansies. On one side was some writing — also embroidered in mauve silk: ‘There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts.’ No letter of any description.
Anna put the sachet into a drawer. Sometimes she took it out and looked at it. How his face came back to her then; his neat, small-featured, complacent-seeming face, with its row of sharp white teeth. And the stiff set of his shoulders, like a clock. She wondered if he had done the embroidery himself.
Lauretta would not abandon her schemes.
‘I’ve invited Matthew Kavan for next week-end,’ she announced shortly, in her clear, fluty voice, looking hard at Anna.
This time her meaning was quite evident. She didn’t trouble, even for decency’s sake, to cover up the threat.
‘I hope you’ve thought better of your stupid prejudice against him,’ she said, with a cruel twang in her voice, that made Anna feel humiliated and exposed.
The result of Lauretta’s taunt was to set her against Matthew, quite definitely, on this occasion. She would not be bullied into marrying him by her aunt’s flickering vindictiveness. She would not; she would not. Her obstinate, independent spirit was aroused.
Nevertheless, as Friday drew near, she felt her emotions accumulating. She would see him again; find out what he really was like, this time. Perhaps she had been mistaken. Perhaps she would find that it was possible to contemplate him as a husband, after all. She felt her nervous excitement growing.
And when he finally appeared, rather late in the evening, she was favourably impressed. There was no doubt that she did like him, in a way. There was something odd and naive about him, which pleased her. He was not in the least affected. In his strange fashion he was sincere and humble. And that innocence in him — that strange, strange unawareness; as though his right hand really did not know what his left was doing. Only with him it was his whole self that was somehow unaware. It baffled her, and repelled her a little; but she was not sure that, in a queer way, it was not rather attractive too.
So much in his favour. But as she watched him, at dinner, sitting stiffly on the other side of the table, and smiling at her with just the same look of a private understanding between them, her heart palpitated with irritation and dread. It was repulsive to her, his assumption of understanding, sympathetic intimacy: when she knew only too well the seas of flat incomprehension that flowed between them. And to make matters worse, there was now just a suggestion of reproach in the staring blue eyes, reproach overlaid with forgiveness. A Christ-like ‘to understand all is to forgive all’ expression: intensely irritating. She shuddered and looked away.
She felt her heart like a jelly, or a lump of butter, that is alternately hardened on ice and thawed out in front of the fire. At one moment she warmed towards Matthew; the next, she was frozen stiff in repugnance. She couldn’t make up her mind. And yet she knew that it was absolutely essential for her to decide, one way or another, for him or against.
After dinner, Lauretta planned to leave the two young people alone. When Anna saw her fluttering out of the room with an air of feathery archness, a wave of anger swept up in her. It was unbearable to be left alone like that, deliberately, to the tender mercies of that queer fish of a Kavan. She had to look away, to hide the anger on her face. She turned back to the room. And there, across the furniture, she saw his foolish round head awaiting her, expectant. Without a word, she sped out of the door and upstairs. She did not come down for a long time.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ asked Lauretta, meeting her in the hall. ‘I left you to talk to Matthew.’
‘Oh, really, you know, you’re in too much of a hurry,’ cried Anna brightly. There was a metallic ring in her voice that surprised her. She felt not very far from tears. ‘You can’t rush things like this. Why, it’s positively indecent!’
And away she dashed again, away from her aunt’s shocked indignation.
But the situation was becoming acute. She had to make some decision.
‘I’ll think it out in bed,’ she said to herself. But as if some perverse demon had overheard and determined to frustrate her design, no sooner was her head on the pillow than she was sound asleep. All night she slept profoundly, drowned in a heaviness that was somewhat unnatural, and only woke when the housemaid came to call her in the morning.
She almost groaned when she found that daylight had come again and caught her without a decision. She felt half distracted — in a nervous trough of hysteria. But she could not decide.
In a torment of restlessness, she went out to cut flowers for the house. With the large, flat baskets, she went round the garden beds gathering the brilliant, rather gaudy flowers of late summer, geraniums, salpiglossis, antirrhinums, and the tall, frilly phloxes on their tough stems.
It was a pale, sunless morning. The light was quite strong, each tree stood in an impalpable circle of gauzy shade, without definite boundary. Above in the branches, the wood-pigeons were cooing. Anna piled her flowers in the baskets, great heaps of orange and vermilion and purple and flamy white. Like strong, hot, steady fires the heaped baskets burned, kaleidoscopic, vibrating gorgeously in the grey day. The morning was all very grey and still.