She looked round wearily at her mother-in-law, wishing she would depart. But she still lingered, wanting to speak for her son.
‘I wonder if you quite understand Matthew,’ she said, jingling her chains.
‘In what way?’ Anna asked.
‘He is so sensitive, so truly chivalrous. But he is very easily hurt although he never complains. You might hurt him quite unwittingly. You are so young. And when one is very young one is not always thoughtful.’ She smiled, deprecating, and falsely-sweet. ‘You must forgive an old woman’s frankness.’
The chains jangled feverishly. There was a pause. Then Anna said, looking away:
‘Has Matthew told you that I have hurt him?’
‘No, of course not. He would never complain to me —’ The old lady always spoke fast, and with a sort of theatrical intenseness. ‘He is the soul of loyalty.’
‘Then what makes you think I have done him any harm?’
‘You must remember that I can see further than most people. Into your heart, perhaps.’
Mrs. Kavan’s eyes met the direct, contemptuous-seeming eyes of Anna. There was too much cold, sarcastic weariness in them. She turned away.
‘Good night,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Sleep well. And forgive my interference. I only want your happiness, you know.’
And with a final false smile of propitiation, she went out in a faint, metallic jingling.
CHAPTER 10
VERY much to her own bewilderment Anna found herself incorporated in the Kavan family life. River House drew her down, like a silent whirlpool, into itself. There was Mrs. Kavan, shiftless and untidy, flitting from room to room, always inefficiently busy, peering everywhere with her uncannily shrewd blue eyes. There was Winifred, silent and sullen, going about with sulky brows and an unspoken grievance against life in general. And there was Matthew. But principally, first and foremost, there was the house; the actual erection of timber and bricks and mortar.
River House was a great, cold barrack of a place that would have housed half a regiment. A dozen servants would have run it efficiently, but the Kavans could only afford to employ a woman to come in daily for a few hours. They were poor, though not exactly poverty-stricken. Mrs. Kavan had a small widow’s pension, and Matthew added a regular annual sum from his own earnings. But the old lady was a bad manager, money seemed to slip through her fingers, the house devoured everything that came in. It was a pinched, uncomfortable regime. The two Kavan women toiled continually with their cooking and cleaning, a routine of dowdiness and poverty and monotony.
Anna, who had never swept out a room in her life, was astonished at the endless labour that went on.
First thing in the morning it began, the scrubbing and sweeping and grubbing with dirty plates and cutlery: then a hasty run round the shops, the meal to be prepared, eaten and cleared away: perhaps a tea-party in the afternoon, a visit to friends: and then grubbing in the house again till late at night.
Most of the hard work devolved upon Winifred. The mother was too flighty, too unpractical to give much assistance, though all day long she was hurrying round the house with her grey hair straggling down her wrinkled neck and her chains faintly clashing. She was always starting things in a flurry of enthusiasm, and then forgetting all about them. Winifred came behind with a dour expression, clearing up the confusion.
‘Mother again!’ she would say with saturnine, gloomy exasperation, when she found the kettle had been left on the fire till the water had all boiled away and probably a a hole burnt in the bottom as well. ‘Mother again!’ when the drawing-room grate was discovered half emptied and the abandoned ashes blowing all over the floor. And without another word, she would set to, with a kind of dismal, sullen fanaticism, to clean up the mess and repair the damage.
Winifred Kavan spent her days in a gloom of deep, wordless resentment. She hated the dull, grubby business of her life. Strange how hideous she found her existence, when she had never known any other. She was twenty-five years old, plain, and dressed badly in shapeless woollen dresses — ugly brown or greyish plaids mostly. Anna was sorry for her and wanted to be friends.
She followed her into the dark bowels of River House with offers of assistance.
‘Let me help you,’ she said, seeing Winifred immersed in floods of greasy water and piles of dirty dishes.
‘Much good you’d be!’ jeered Winifred crossly. ‘I don’t suppose you know how to boil an egg for yourself.’
Which was true.
Anna didn’t mind her crossness. She didn’t resent her sister-in-law’s mocking rudeness. She divined, somehow, that the girl’s sullenness had its roots in a profound, black resentment, a loathing of her whole life. She understood that Winifred was jealous: jealous of her because she was not under the doom of River House, because she was not plain and dowdy and stultified by eternal house-work.
Winifred hated Anna because she could not make toast without scorching it, or lay a fire so that it would burn. She hated and envied her for never having had to do these things. And at the same time she admired her. She wanted to debase Anna, to pull her down to her own level. When Anna offered to help her with the sweeping or the washing-up, a loud, sneering violence would come into her voice as she cried:
‘Run away and play! You’ll only dirty your precious clothes.’
And when Anna, with her innate fastidiousness, accepted this and went calmly away, Winifred’s heart swelled with envy and loathing. She would have liked to drag Anna into the most menial tasks; but she admired enormously Anna’s refusal to be dragged.
Anna rather liked her. There was something savage about Winifred that appealed to Anna — something fierce and honest. Rude and ill-tempered she was, certainly. Like a sore-headed animal. But honestly so.
They were a good deal together, in the end. Anna had assumed some of the lighter household tasks — making beds and so on — which she performed fairly efficiently. She preferred Winifred’s society to that of Matthew, who annoyed her exceedingly by his refusal to take any part in the turmoil of work. Matthew simply sat back, pasha like, to be waited upon. The meals might have appeared on the table by magic for all the notice he took of the elaborate labour which their preparation involved, which annoyed Anna very much.
‘Why don’t you make him do his share?’ she said to Winifred.
‘Oh — he’s a man.’ Winifred made a strange, disgusted grimace, as though to anathematize the whole male creation.
‘But you could make him do something,’ Anna persisted.
‘It’s no good. Men are so hopeless,’ said Winifred, fatalistic.
Anna was more annoyed than ever. She was most irritated by this conspiracy of the feminine Kavans to encourage the pasha-attitude in Matthew. Why shouldn’t he do his share of the work? And why was Winifred so resigned to her dreary, detested round?
‘If you hate living here so much, why don’t you go away?’ she asked her, frowning, irritably perplexed.
A dark, fixed look, lowering and grim, came on the sullen face of the other girl.
‘Where should I go to?’ she said, heavily.
‘Oh — somewhere — anywhere! What does it matter? The principal thing is to get away.’
‘Without any money?’
Winifred’s voice was heavy and cynical. She looked up, and Anna caught a gleam of ridicule in her eyes.
‘You could get some kind of work,’ she retorted, in impatiently acid tones.
But Winifred only stood there, heavy and glum, and stared back at Anna with the jeering light in her eyes.
‘You could get a job, couldn’t you?’ Anna’s lip was curling impatiently.
‘I’ve never been trained to do anything,’ came from Winifred.
The impatience covered Anna’s face like a shadow, her eyes set cold in contempt. Then quickly she turned away.