Anna (61 page)

“Hello, Webb,” Gervase said. “Won't you introduce me? Can't keep your lady friend to yourself all the evening.”

He drew himself up to his full height and squared his shoulders in readiness. He was a little taken aback, therefore, to find that Anna was still looking away from him. And when she turned slowly towards him the steadiness of her gaze embarrassed him.

“As soon as I saw you,” Gervase went on as soon as the introduction was over, “I said to myself that girl's a damn' fine dancer.”

He was standing in front of her with one hand on the handle of his walking stick, the other raised to his face twirling the airy ends of his moustache.

“Then you are fond of dancing?” Anna asked.

“Oh, yes,” Gervase answered. “Rather, I mean yes.”

“Why?” he asked himself, “am I behaving like a fool? I'm tongue-tied. I go over to talk to this girl—Delia's governess—and suddenly can't think of anything to say. It's most extraordinary.”

To cover up his confusion, he addressed the next remark to Captain Webb.

“You were stepping it out a bit, weren't you?” he said. “Saw you going round the room like a two-year-old.”

But he broke off because he saw that Anna's eyes were fixed on him; they were the steadiest, most unwavering eyes that he had ever seen in a girl—and they disturbed him. When she looked
at him, he felt oddly subdued somehow; subdued and a little chastened.

“What about coming over to the buffet,” he asked. “Seems hours since I had anything.”

Captain Webb had given a little bow and started to walk away from them. He seemed a little ruffled over what Gervase had just said. As soon as Gervase noticed it, he tried to call him back.

But Captain Webb declined to stop.

“Got to pay my respects,” he said. “Have to ask you to excuse me.”

And he made off, very upright as a soldier should be, and with his head held if anything a little higher in the air than usual.

“Poor sweet,” Anna was thinking. “He was just beginning to enjoy himself. If this creature hadn't come up to us he would probably have been ready to dance again and might have been really happy. As it is he's probably regretting that he even danced once. He will be telling himself that it is foolish at his time of life to try and take up the ends where he let go of them.”

“Champagne,” Gervase was saying loudly. “I don't want claret cup. I want champagne.”

When he had got it, he came back to Anna, and immediately his sense of awkwardness, a strange besetting consciousness of being a very young man in the presence of a pretty woman came over him again.

“I say,” he began, “I hope you won't mind sitting this one out with me? I ought to have warned you.”

“But of course,” Anna answered. “Your ankle.”

It must have been very hot in the ballroom Gervase, decided; the perspiration was fairly rolling off him. He was as hot as Captain Webb had been without even the excuse of dancing. He began mopping his very smooth, round face.

“I only just heard you'd come here,” he began again.

“I've been here nearly three months now,” Anna told him.

“How do you like it?” he asked. “Have they made you comfortable?”

It seemed suddenly a dreadful thing that this girl who was sitting beside him should be shut away in the shabby little sitting-room on the nursery side of the house. It was her place to be in the big hall, in the long drawing-room, where people could see her.

“And do you mean to say that you teach lessons and that sort of thing?” he asked.

“I have just taught Delia the names of all the French kings since Charlemagne,” Anna answered. “But I am such a bad teacher that
tomorrow when I ask her she will not be able to remember the name of even one of them.”

Gervase grinned, displaying as he did so the whole double row of his white teeth.

“I like him better when he smiles like that,” Anna thought. “Then you can see how young he really is.”

But the grin had vanished already and, in its place, was the smile that he had cultivated so carefully, the smile that was, he believed, quite irresistible to all women, especially young ones.

“You weren't always a … governess”—there seemed to him something rather caddish about even uttering the word—“were you?” he asked.

Anna shook her head.

“No,” she said slowly. “I have been a lot of things.”

He bent forward.

“Such as?” he asked.

Anna glanced at him and again those steady blue eyes seemed to destroy something inside him.

“Damn it,” he told himself, “I'm feeling nervous again. Nervous about absolutely nothing.”

And it was quite clear that she did not intend to tell him.

“Isn't that the Lancers?” she asked instead.

“That's the Lancers all right,” he said. He placed his foot on the ground as if to test it, and it gave a hot twinge of pain as he did so. “But you are going to tell me about yourself,” he said.

Anna paused for a moment.

“No, we were talking about the Lancers,” she answered. “It is an English dance. We haven't got anything quite like it where I come from.”

Gervase did not reply immediately.

“I suppose I can't expect her to blurt out everything straight away,” he consoled himself. “She's probably had an unhappy love affair or something, and she doesn't want to be reminded of it.”

And Anna seemed to him in consequence to be surrounded by a halo of delicious mystery. All the other girls, even the entrancing Diana who was dancing with someone else at this moment, now seemed too simple, too innocent, to be interesting. It was as though suddenly he had outgrown the lot of them.

“But confound it,” he said to himself, “I can't sit here all the evening saying nothing: I've got to do something.”

He put his foot to the ground once more and rested his weight on it. It still felt as though his whole ankle was on fire, and he winced. But leaning forward he offered Anna his arm.

“Let's dance this one,” he said.

“But your ankle,” Anna protested.

“Damn my ankle,” Gervase answered.

And he had her in his arms.

It was two o'clock now; the last of the carriages had creaked off down the drive and Tilliards was silent again. It seemed more silent than Anna could ever remember it. When the hour had struck she could hear the clocks all over the house chiming.

She was lying with her hands clasped under her head staring up at the ceiling: she had Iain like that ever since she had got into bed.

“Why do I always do foolish things?” she asked herself. “Why did I have to let it happen? At first I was sensible and tried to stop him; and then … then I suppose I encouraged him. I let him go on dancing. And now Lady Yarde is angry with me. It is not as if I even liked dancing with him.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and saw him very distinctly: his red shining face, the head of curls, the light ambitious moustache, the magnificent teeth, the pendulous Yarde nose; and over all the cultivated social smile that kept supplanting the healthy grin that was so entirely natural there.

“He will marry one of those pretty girls with brown hair and thick ankles and have a lot of babies by her and make her very unhappy because he is so unfaithful,” she went on.

But even as she was thinking about him, she saw another face instead of his, the tanned serious face of Captain Webb.

“I wish he'd come back after he left us,” she told herself. “He's such a nice reliable sort of man.”

And with that thought she fell asleep.

In the end Lady Yarde forgave her—forgave her for having made Gervase dance the Lancers at his own party. But the act of forgiveness did not come easily. It succeeded a period of tears, headaches, recriminations. But when the moment of pardon finally came, Lady Yarde was magnanimous.

“I can see now that it wasn't exactly your fault, my dear,” she said weakly. “Gervase is like that. He's headstrong and impulsive
just like his father. There's no stopping him. But I still think you should have tried.”

And to show that Anna was really forgiven Lady Yarde took hold of her arm and patted it.

“But don't let it happen again,” she said. “That kind of thing only upsets Lord Yarde. And it always recoils on me. Everything does …”

Outside the door, Delia was waiting. She was wearing a strained anxious expression that was oddly like her mother's.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“Is what all right?” Anna replied.

Delia put her arms round her and gave her a hug.

“I'm so glad,” she said. “I thought you were for it. Father's been furious ever since it happened.”

And taking Anna's hand, Delia led her to the schoolroom.

“I didn't get any of the books out,” she said. “You see, I wasn't sure if you
were
coming.”

But it seemed to Anna, when she came to look back on it, that there could never really have been any question of her being sent away. She had been at Tilliards for nearly three months now, and it was a long time for a Yarde governess. Life went on so smoothly that she could scarcely imagine it different.

There were the same irregular verbs that Delia forgot again as quickly as she learnt them, the same Sunday lunches with Lord Yarde, perhaps a trifle more distant and unfriendly. The same moods and tantrums on the part of Lady Yarde, the same long, solitary walks inside the park.

It was as she returned from one of these walks that she found a letter awaiting her. The stamp on the letter was French: she saw that as soon as she picked it up. And she saw also that the envelope was addressed in large awkward capitals. Beneath the letters there was the faint, imperfectly rubbed out outline of other letters drawn in pencil.

She snatched up the letter and held it to her; there were tears in her eyes as she stood there. And because she knew that it was from Annette, because it was the first letter that Annette had ever written to her, she could not bear at first even to tear open the envelope. Instead, she picked up a pair of nail scissors and, inserting the point, she slit the envelope carefully, delicately, so that she could keep the sacred thing for ever. When she began to read, the laboriousness of the little document with the unevenly spread letters made her weep again.

“Dear Mama,”
it ran. “
Thank you for the doll. She is called
Espérance. I hope you are well. So am I. ‘Every day I pray for you. I have lost a front tooth. I am sending it to you with my love. Your loving daughter in Jesus, Annette.”

That was all there was: simply six crooked, irregular lines. Anna squeezed the envelope open, and peered inside. There in one corner was the tooth, like a small fragment of white coral.

She folded up the letter carefully and put it away so that it should not get crumpled. But the small coral tooth she could not bear to part with. She carried it about with her in a pocket in her handbag and, whenever she had the opportunity, she looked at it. The sight at once overjoyed and saddened her. But what it did more than either was to rekindle the desire to have Annette with her again. It made everything else in life seem empty and unimportant.

At once a new idea, a foolish extravagant one, came into her mind. She went up to her room and unlocked the door of her cabinet. It contained all the money she possessed, the small wad of French notes and what was left of the wages that Lady Yarde paid her—Anna sent one-half of all she earned to the convent.

She counted up the money carefully, trying in her mind to convert it into francs as she counted. She had, she found, one hundred and fifty francs in the whole world. But she had not really needed to count at all; she had known all the time how much it was. And it seemed a small enough fortune on which to bring up a young child.

A small enough fortune—but the mischief in her mind had been started, and she could not rid herself of the idea. It grew every minute more fascinating and compelling.

“It would only be for a few days,” she began saying. “In a week I could be back again. Lady Yarde could not miss me for that length of time. It would only be like a holiday. She would understand that all I wanted to do is to
see
Annette. Once I had seen her I should be able to come back again. I should be able to come back here, and
save
.”

But when Anna spoke of it Lady Yarde was horrified. She refused flatly to countenance such a thing and took refuge in one of her nervous headaches, her migraines. She hated this unknown child, this little foreigner who kept stealing Anna's affection from her just as it was growing. And there was Delia to consider. She seemed so much happier in herself since Anna had come to them: she might, for all Lady Yarde knew, even be learning something. Last of all—she was convinced that she really had kept it to the last—there was the question of her own convenience. She couldn't have
a governess who made plans of her own; a governess with a private life was something that was unheard of. So she dismissed the notion, refused entirely to discuss it.

“Please don't mention it again,” she said. “It's quite out of the question. It only shows that your mind isn't on your work.”

She waved Anna aside and picked up a book that lay at her elbow to show that already she had put the ridiculous proposal clean out of her mind.

“Then I will defy her,” Anna told herself. “I
will
go.”

But it needed planning, such a journey as this. She didn't even know how much it would cost to travel to Paris; to Paris and then on again, even farther, to the convent. She would have to find out everything.

The opportunity came sooner than she had expected: it came the next day in fact when she was taking one of those endless, lonely walks inside the Park. She had turned into the long drive when she heard the sound of wheels on the gravel. And, in the distance she saw Captain Webb, seated high in his dog-cart. He was driving carefully on a short rein, keeping the animal's head held high. When he reached Anna, he pulled up. His face was reddened a little by the wind and he was rubbing the knuckles of his hands together to warm them.