He did not answer, but stared at Whitaker. The young fellow had risen in confusion. Embarrassment overtook him; he was stricken dumb with awkwardness, like a child. And Matthew stared him rudely, insultingly.
Anna talked at random. She was furious with Matthew, who stood with that neat, insolent face, staring at the young man. Presently Matthew sat down. His actions jarred on her, everything he did. How hateful was the way he stared, insultingly, so arrogant! She hated him. His behaviour disgusted her.
Matthew sat there, his face wooden and stupid, fixed in the persistent rudeness. He drank his tea, and stared over the top of the cup, rudely. His sun-helmet had left a red line across his forehead, there was a dampness of sweat round his nose and mouth. He would not speak to Whitaker, even when the young man addressed him directly. He simply sat there, ensconced in his ugly, stupid, malicious rudeness, and stared at him, to stare him out.
Anna felt sorry for Whitaker with his bewildered, embarrassed, innocent face, which had never lost its babyish roundness. He stammered and grew pink, then very white, and finally went away.
Matthew went on with his tea. Anna could not bring herself to speak to him. Her disgust was too deep. It was his stupid complacency that she could not bear, so ugly and insensitive. There was a long silence. Then she took up a book and began to read. This irritated him, and he looked at her with his foolish, blue, bright eyes, blank and meaningless as a pair of marbles in his face.
‘What was that young cub doing here?’ came his bullying voice.
She winced in disgust and did not answer.
‘Why were you having tea alone with him?’ came the voice again, in the same hectoring tone.
And still there was silence, except for the turning of a page.
He pushed back his chair with a loud noise, and stood up. He stood over her with clenched fists and the ugly glitter in his eyes, as of an irritable madness. She thought he would strike her. She did not waver. A sort of fiend of defiance came into her. She was purely opposed to him, utterly defiant. His standing over her, threatening her, the stupidity of him, the way his hands quivered, disgusted her beyond measure. She looked at him coldly, destructively, with disgust and loathing. And the frenzy rose in him, his eyes glittered blue and dangerous, he was murderous in his blank rage. And she despised him. He seemed a base, contemptible object, threatening her, bullying her. She only wanted to get away from him.
‘What is it to do with you?’ she said. ‘I shall have tea with whom I choose.’
The angry blood came up in him like a red sign. He seized her shoulders and thrust her back in the chair, as though he would force her through the back of the chair. His face was blank and blind.
‘Oh, no, you won’t!’ he shouted in his frenzy, right into her face. ‘I won’t have it. Not in my house. I forbid it!’
She looked straight at him, with the calm, contemptuous face and the indifferent eyes that cowed him, made him go limp and deflated. He released her and moved away. She saw his neat, stiff figure moving. He went outside. She sat on in the room alone.
She picked up the book, which had fallen face downwards on the floor. Her shoulders hurt where his hands had gripped them. She sat still and smoothed out the crumpled pages. She was not frightened of Matthew. But he repelled her. She was repelled by his hard, hairless body, and the head poking forward rather from the shoulders, in a sly, mean, stupid way. He was like a repulsive burden upon her. If only the time would come when she could shake him off.
Young Whitaker did not come to the house again. Matthew had said something to him; had probably been abusive. There had been some sort of a scene. Anna did not care to find out what had passed. There was a great disgust in her heart, a cold, imperturbable indifference in her manner. She continued negative and vague on the surface. She seemed to be waiting. In the fullness of time, the opposition that was within her would culminate in her escape. She walked sometimes on the road which led to the station. She had money of her own. Any day she could go to the station, and at the station she could take a train to Rangoon, and from Rangoon a boat would take her back to Europe. The way was open. But the time had not yet come.
The slow, hot days went by. Matthew was away a great deal of the time. In the club he was quarrelsome and touchy. His original slightly obsequious leaning towards friendliness had vanished. Both he and Anna were thoroughly unpopular in Naunggyi.
For days on end Anna did not speak to a soul except her servants. And it grew hotter and hotter. Every day a little hotter than the last, with the hot sun riding up, blinding bright, into the burning sky, and the cauldron-like earth simmering below. The rains were coming. There was a strange electric stirring and undulating in the fiery atmosphere. The distant hills stood out sharply, with the trees distinguishable, a tiny, greenish patterning, like shagreen, very clear and regular, on the far-off slopes. Sudden great gusts of wind would come wheeling hotly out of the blazing hush, pillars of grey dust would travel, ghost-like, in silent, stealthy haste across the plain. And clouds began to appear, piling up nightly in heavy portent, like some grandiose doom. In the morning they would all have melted into the vast, scorching, beating light. But evening saw them rolling up once more, a solid, dark pack above the horizon, inexorable and grim. They had to come.
To Anna, so much alone in the strange place, it seemed that immense omens lurked in the sultry air. She waited for the coming of the rains with superstitious anticipation, as if she expected a heavenly sign to be vouchsafed. When the rains came she would escape. She would get away from this place which was destroying her. Her longing for escape burned to a sort of fire within her. Every evening she watched the enormous clouds piling themselves against the sky, and waited for the first drop of rain to fall.
And then suddenly, it was the end of everything. She realized that she was with child. A great sickness of horror and despair went through her. She was incredulous. She had thought so often about the possibility of conception, of bearing a child, but always as a sort of sentimental abstraction, never really in connection with herself. And now the disaster had overtaken her. A certain sense of finality made her hopeless and despairing. This was the finish, the finish of everything. She would never escape now.
Matthew was away for a few days. Anna was dazed with shame and despair. She felt strangely degraded, as though some shameful mark had been set upon her, some sordid stain that could never be removed. She was madly ashamed. She could not endure her body. When she caught sight of her reflexion as she dressed, she shuddered and turned her eyes away as from something horrible and unclean. And again, at night, when she was having her bath, her nerves jerked with insane repulsion, she could not bear the sight of her body. Whenever she thought of the child forming within her, a sort of madness of repulsion flooded her mind and flesh, an intolerable sickness. She wanted to kill herself. This final blow, she felt, had really broken her. She felt as if everything, Matthew and the place and the coming child, were a nightmare, a nightmare against her. Something at the core of her remained cold, indifferent, changeless. But she was so overwrought with horror, that even the sight of her bare arms filled her with quivering disgust. She felt that her body was desecrated and soiled. It would never be clean again.
The letters from England arrived once a week. Anna sat down indifferently to read them. Her heart was dead and despairing.
The first she looked at was from Lauretta — all chatter about Blue Hills whither she had just travelled from the Riviera. The second was a letter, an untidily written scribble from Catherine. ‘When are you going to invite me to visit you? I have had enough of Oxford. The time has come for me to make a change — the more complete the better. So hurry up and say that you would like me to come. How much longer do you intend to let your intelligence atrophy —’