The uncomfortable meal came to an end. Winifred packed the tea things on the tray and carried it off. There appeared to be no servant in the house.
Mrs. Kavan rose to her feet and smiled at Anna.
‘Now, my dear, I will take you to your room. You would like to rest.’
Anna glanced at Matthew. He took a brisk step forward to accompany her.
‘I’ll show her the room, mother,’ he said.
‘But I’m not a bit tired,’ said Anna. She did not want to be alone with him, upstairs in the hushed emptiness of the strange house.
Mrs. Kavan smiled with queer, meaning looks.
‘Yes, you are tired; and because you are tired you are not feeling very happy,’ she said. Then, with slightly theatrical emphasis: ‘I know.’ She looked at Matthew, as if for confirmation, with an odd, important smile, suggesting hidden labyrinths of meaning.
‘Mother has second-sight,’ said Matthew proudly.
He smiled, and tilted his round head, but Anna saw that he was quite in earnest. She looked politely, somewhat bewildered, from one to the other.
‘I can read people’s hearts a little,’ said Mrs. Kavan, gazing upon her with significant, peculiar eyes.
Anna wanted to laugh; it sounded so funny. She hoped that Mrs. Kavan, for her own sake, would not peer too deep into this particular heart before her.
‘And do you always like what you see there?’ she asked brightly. For the life of her she couldn’t keep the little tang of mockery out of her voice.
The old lady stiffened at once. The smile went from her face. She stood stiff and disapproving.
‘No, not by any means,’ she pronounced acidly.
Anna felt that the pronouncement had been made against her. The two women looked at one another. There seemed to be a vista of inevitable hostility before them. Anna was depressed and a little disgusted at the prospect.
Matthew escorted her upstairs in silence. He was rather put out because she had not taken his mother’s psychic powers sufficiently seriously. The bedroom was big and cold and looked only half furnished. There was the ominous double bed. Anna was prepared for this.
‘I must have a room to myself,’ she said pointedly.
But Matthew, with a dissembling smile of false reasonableness on his face, was out to assert himself in his own home.
‘Really Anna,’ he said, ‘I think it’s time you gave up this childish whim.’
‘It’s not a whim,’ Anna said, stolid.
He ignored her.
‘I’ve made allowance for the fact that you are very young and inexperienced. I’ve made allowance for your natural shyness’ — strange how he seemed to relish the word ‘natural’ — ‘but now that you have got accustomed to our life together, I think it is time for you to begin to be more reasonable.’
‘What do you mean by being more reasonable?’ asked Anna, coolly, quietly, giving Matthew a straight look. Whilst he glassily stared at her, with accumulating resentment.
‘I mean that you should begin to be a wife to me.’ He fixed his blank blue eyes upon her.
‘No,’ she replied steadfastly. ‘I must have my own room.’
She watched Matthew’s face. The bully was coming up to the surface again. He was trembling with repressed anger. But the spell of chivalry was not quite worn through. It still held him, against his will. He did not want to be chivalrous. He wanted Anna. But still he had to restrain himself.
‘Be sensible!’ he said sharply. ‘My mother will think it so strange if we have separate rooms.’
It was queer to see the struggle behind his neat face — the bully against the gentle knight. Anna wondered which one would win.
‘I can’t help what your mother thinks,’ she retorted. ‘That’s your affair.’
There was a pause. While Matthew rose to magnanimity again.
‘Very well,’ he said, a trifle Christ-like, at last. ‘I’ll get a bed made up somewhere else.’
His tone of voice was so long-suffering, almost martyrized. It was laughable. The victory was with Sir Galahad, for the time being. But the hysterical, brow-beating bully was not far off. His turn would come along soon.
Matthew sighed in a loud, exaggerated fashion as he went out.
Anna sat down on the bed and laughed at that sigh. It sounded too absurd to her — so sanctimonious. The whole situation was simply farcical. She laughed aloud in the cold room. And at the same time, she thought of Sidney and of Oxford, and she wanted to cry. She grew quite hysterical up there by herself.
At supper, Mrs. Kavan was definitely estranged. No doubt on account of the extra room. Anna wondered what Matthew had said to her on the subject. Her mother-in-law eyed her coldly, across the table. And yet she was very affable. All the time her jewellery gleamed and clashed, her blue eyes sent out cold rays, she talked to the girl and praised her dress, and even flattered her a little. But underneath was estrangement.
And Matthew himself gazed at Anna continually, with a wistful expression. But she would not look back at him.
Anna had fallen into a little trance. She sat in front of her plate, and ate mechanically the queer odds and ends of food that were handed to her. What was she doing in this extraordinary household? The old lady talked and fidgeted and darted cold glances in her direction. And the man, the husband, stared and stared with his reproachful, opaque eyes, and the aggrieved, holy-martyr look, so incongruous on his brown, blank face — like a sentimental ape. She felt a little hysterical. And lost — absolutely at sea.
At bedtime, Mrs. Kavan insisted on coming to her room with her.
‘You will be comfortable here, I hope,’ she said. There was a sudden deprecation in her voice. Her eyes showed a queer obseqiousness. She was almost apologetic. But still hostile and suspicious.
‘Oh, quite,’ said Anna, glancing round the cheerless apartment.
‘But what a big room for one little girl!’ Mrs. Kavan exclaimed, bringing the wheedling, playful, Irish intonation into her voice, rather saccharine. But with a sharp thorn of enmity behind.
‘I always sleep alone,’ said Anna, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. ‘I can’t bear sharing a room with anyone.’
‘Can’t you? Oh, I see. I see.’
Mrs. Kavan sounded a little flustered. She was flustered by Anna’s cold, unswerving grey eyes, with their undisguised glimmer of contempt. This girl, with her reserve of silent indifference, was rather beyond her. Anna seemed in some way fundamentally inimical to her, and to her son. An enemy, come by accident into their camp, and obscurely threatening them. With what threat she did not know.
‘Well,’ she said, smiling falsely-intimate, and staring keenly. ‘I hope you will be wonderfully happy. A happy marriage is the most precious thing in the world.’
She bent and pecked Anna on the cheek. Her chains swung and jangled. The room was cold and gloomy, the bed had not been turned down. Anna started to fold back the coverlet.
‘Let me do that,’ cried Mrs. Kavan. ‘Don’t you bother.’ And she snatched the cotton spread and pulled it over the bedrail.
‘Thank you,’ said Anna.
‘I ought to have remembered it.’
The look of apology was on the older woman’s face again, almost sychophantic. The girl moved, and stood in front of the glass. She was pale and grave, with a certain pure, young girl’s wistfulness. But in her eyes was the gleam of sardonic understanding.