Anna scarcely heard what he was saying to her. She sat with her hands in her lap, feeling far away. What had she to do with this man, with this situation? She knew that all the people in the room were thinking about her, and looking at her: that she was the centre of interest for the moment. This made her feel rather important. But nothing more — nothing in the world. Matthew sat on, and inclined his shoulders towards her, and beamed upon her. Why? — what was it all about?
She wondered when it would be time to go to bed. Her head felt empty and light. Without a thought in her head, she sat and waited for the time to pass. At last the clock struck eleven, and Matthew went away, off to his hotel.
Lauretta came to Anna’s room for a last-night talk. Her slightly theatrical sense of the appropriate demanded an intimate little midnight conversation. She wanted to play the part of the wise, understanding, experienced woman of the world enlightening and encouraging the timid neophyte. She wanted Anna to be in a state of hesitant trepidation: then she would talk to her, so tactfully, so beautifully. The sentences formed themselves in her mind as she came along. She went into Anna’s room, and found the girl in one of her queer, hard moods.
‘Our last night together, dear,’ said Lauretta, with somewhat over-emphasized affection, smiling her charming smile.
The tone in which she spoke revealed vast implications of sentimental posturing, a whole liturgy of artificial emotionalism. Anna lifted her cool grey eyes, undeceived, half-derisive, towards her aunt, half clouded with heavy indifference.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling coolly. ‘My last night at Blue Hills. What a relief for you.’
Lauretta started and frowned, shaken rudely out of her histrionic glow. But she clung to the skirts of her role.
‘Whatever makes you say that?’ she asked, falsely smooth. ‘Surely you can’t imagine that we want to get rid of you, you foolish child!’ She kept smiling; but her smoothness was costing her an effort.
‘Of course you want to get rid of me,’ said Anna bluntly.
Lauretta made a quick, irritable movement of her hands, clenching them. The rings flashed in the light, spinning swift webs of brilliance.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said, on an edge of sharpness, looking away.
Anna laughed rudely.
‘You know perfectly well you’ve forced me into this marriage,’ she retorted.
Lauretta was shocked and offended. In a way, she was even a little alarmed. She was always rather defeated by that insolent hardness that came out occasionally in the girl and was so uncomfortably reminiscent of James Forrester. It put her out of action for the moment.
‘How can you say such a thing?’ she exclaimed, clasping her hands in agitation.
‘But you know it’s true,’ said Anna, staring at her in a way that was highly disconcerting. There was neither anger nor resentment in her eyes, nor heat of any kind. Nothing but a cold, insulting perspicacity, like an affront.
Lauretta was deeply offended. But she dared not reveal her feelings, just then. She quailed too much before Anna’s disquieting inheritance from James Forrester. Nothing is so upsetting as a resurrection.
‘Of course you mustn’t marry Matthew against your will,’ said poor Lauretta. ‘It’s not too late even now.’ She glanced round at the packed luggage, all in readiness for the following day.
‘Oh yes, it is. Much too late. You’re quite safe now,’ said Anna, smiling coldly. She looked callously, even brutally, at her aunt. ‘You’ve got me nicely landed.’
Lauretta’s rings span distracted little rainbows in the air. She was really horrified by Anna’s remarks — not merely offended, but horrified. There seemed to be something so heartless and repulsive about the girl just now; unnatural. And it really was rather shocking the way she spoke, so coldly and tauntingly, with the insolent perspicacious look on her young face, inhumanly direct, as though some mitigating skin of illusion were missing. And Anna intended to be shocking and brutal and repulsive. The more repulsive the better. It was the dark, alien strain in her blood urging her to a curious perverseness. Lauretta couldn’t stand any more of it.
‘You’re tired and overwrought,’ she said, as soothingly as she could manage. ‘You’ll feel quite different in the morning after a good sleep.’ And she went away, her charming part of womanly adviser and confidante unacted.
Anna got into bed and lay staring at the wall. She was glad that she had behaved brutally to Lauretta. A little demon of perverseness made her smile even now. But the hard mood was not quite genuine, all the same. There was more indifference than hardness in her heart. She wanted to escape, to break loose from Matthew and from everyone, to run away and be by herself somewhere. She wanted to want these things. But she couldn’t. No, she really couldn’t want her freedom or anything else. Not actively. A horrid dead-weight of indifference crushed her down.
The next day was blustery, with great clouds lurching across the sky, and occasional vicious onslaughts of cold, grey rain. Next, the sun swinging out into a torn fragment of pale-washed blue, and the wet paths drying quickly in the high wind, puddles gleaming like grey, dropped mirrors. Then the clouds closing up again over the pallid blue, and the fierce, chilly rattle of the rain once more.
Anna went up to her room when it was time to dress, feeling cold and unnatural. It seemed strange to be changing one’s clothes in the middle of the morning. The dress in which she was to be married was a plain affair, straight and parchment-coloured; not really a wedding-dress at all. It would do later on for afternoons. She was soon ready. The sky darkened, and rain came hissing down, hissing like steam against the window-panes. Her light dress seemed out of place in the rainy twilight. She sighed. For the pale dress was so incongruous: it made her feel more and more unnatural, like a victim. Surely, in some way, she was being victimized. And yet, really, in her heart, she felt nothing at all. There was a blank indifference in her heart.
She went downstairs, a restless ghost in her pale clothes, feeling lost. The corners of the rooms were darkly shadowed, there seemed to be no one about. Outside, the rain fell angrily, but with declining power. The sky was lightening.
Anna went from room to room, opening and shutting doors, peering through the obscurity at the familiar places. But now she seemed to see it all strangely, from the angle of her approaching departure. Her light skirt rippled in the draught — how unsuitable it felt to her.
In the dining-room, the servants had already begun to prepare the big table for the lunch party. No edibles as yet, but the best table-linen, the most delicate glasses, the brightest silver, all gleaming with a chaste pure white gleam, and a glitter of facetted glass like sparks rising in the dimness. Some white flowers were stirring as she opened the door and the curtains blew about. It was all rather desolate. She shivered, thinking of funerals, and of her father. She felt so cold, so empty. And everything seemed meaningless and far away. The indifference — the horrible indifference.
It was clearing up outside. The room brightened slowly. Anna stood still, staring at the brightest thing in the room: a bright globe of glowing green, like a huge drop-emerald. She did not realize it at first. What was it? Looking more objectively, she recognized a bottle of bright green liqueur, forgotten and temporarily abandoned on the sideboard. She took hold of it, feeling the slight, velvety stickiness overlaying the cold, brittle smoothness of the glass. Without thinking much, she tilted it, and the green stuff ran out quickly, quicker than she had expected, up the long, tube-like neck of the bottle, and filled the glass. It was a surprise to find that it flowed so quickly, the sticky, heavy-looking stuff. She drank it up, rather disliking it, the burning, sharp-sweet taste of it. But it was hot. She felt warmer afterwards