Anna (65 page)

“Shouldn't have said that,” he added. “No right to run a fellow down when he isn't here to defend himself.”

Anna looked at him, and saw that he was actually blushing.

“How extraordinary Englishmen are,” she reflected. “At first
he pays me a compliment, and then he withdraws it. And all the time he is uncomfortable simply because he is trying to be nice to me.”

She wanted to be angry with him, very angry, for imagining that she would be carrying on an affair behind Lady Yarde's back. But instead of being angry she forgave him: he was so serious and solemn that she hadn't the heart to be cross with him.

“But it is all so silly,” she said. “He means nothing to me. Not a thing.”

And to prove it she took hold of Gervase's letter and tore it into pieces.

“There,” she said. “And I have not even read it. Should I have done that if I had been in love with him?”

Captain Webb blew his nose again and thrust his handkerchief back into the breast pocket of his coat.

“Suppose not,” he said, and added rather huskily. “Have to accept my apologies. My fault for intruding.”

It was clear that he was feeling the whole position very keenly. His eyes seemed to have grown misty, and he turned away from her.

“But you meant it kindly,” she said. “I know that you meant it kindly. You were only being my friend.”

“Very decent of you to say so,” Captain Webb answered, still in the same husky voice.

And, now there was no concealing how he felt, he took hold of her hand and squeezed it.

But still there was no reply from the convent. It was now six days since Lady Yarde had written. And already Anna was telling herself that something had happened—that the letter had not been delivered, that the Reverend Mother had kept it from Sister Veronica, that Annette was ill and they had not told her.

Then, on the eighth day, it came and Lady Yarde sent for her.

“You see,” she said triumphantly. “It's all arranged. There's nothing that
can
go wrong now.”

She was holding the letter in her hand and waving it vaguely in the air in front of her face as she spoke.

“You can read it, if you like,” she said. “It wasn't meant for you. But it can't do any harm seeing it.”

As Anna took the letter she found that her hands were trembling. She tried to conceal the fact. But Lady Yarde had noticed it.

“You're all on edge,” she said. “I hate nervy people. I've told you that nothing can go wrong now.”

But Anna was not listening to her. She was smoothing out the thin sheet of flimsy paper that still rustled between her fingers. Sister Veronica's big upright handwriting stared calmly up at her.

“Dear Hetty,”
she read. “
Your letter has given me much joy. It was the kindest of kind thoughts to suggest placing our little Annette somewhere nearer to her mother: I know how Anna suffered on leaving her. The Reverend Mother has given her consent, providing certain safeguards are observed: she is anxious to do nothing that might unsettle the child. There is a convent of the Order at Cheltenham that she might go to. I spent my novitiate there and I know how well the children are looked after
…” Anna turned over the page. “
I was touched to find you suggesting that I should come myself,”
Sister Veronica went on. “
But there would be too many distractions, too many memories—not all happy ones—if I were to come back. They would press down upon me and I do not know if I could throw them off. Besides, I am not a young woman, remember: I am fifty-two. And I should be a very dull companion for Annette on such a long journey. One of the younger nuns who would still enjoy travelling would be better for her. But we must wait to see what the Reverend Mother arranges. She can be relied on to think of everything …”

“But she doesn't say
when
it will be,” Anna said suddenly.

Lady Yarde looked up: There was just a trace of irritation in her expression.

“We mustn't be impatient,” she said. “It may not be for months. But that doesn't matter. The important thing is that she's coming.”

She saw that Anna's face had fallen and she relented for a moment.

“Not that it should be very long,” she said. “Nuns are always travelling. The Continental trains are full of them. I keep on telling you there's nothing that
can
go wrong.”

“Nothing that can go wrong.” The words were repeating themselves in Anna's mind. For some reason they frightened her. She had to keep reminding herself that it was someone else, someone who had nothing to lose, who had uttered them. But the uneasiness, the premonition, remained; and the words were repeated more mockingly than ever. The old fears began again and she imagined disasters which might overtake the child once she actually had started—train accidents, chills developing into pneumonia, shipwreck even. And she blamed herself for trying to uproot Annette from that other life in which somehow she appeared to be so happy.

Instead of longing to hear again from Sister Veronica, she now dreaded it: she even prayed that the Reverend Mother might change her mind and so spare Annette the perils of the journey. Particularly at night, the infinite folly of her plan was unfolded to her.

“Perhaps,” she began thinking, “I have done wrong in asking for her. Perhaps my place is with her there. Perhaps it is I who should go back.”

In the big gravel square with the cropped trees and the old cannon captured from Napoleon, there was one man who was walking backwards and forwards like a sentry. His head was thrust forward and his hands were clasped behind his back. It was Gervase. And he had already crossed and re-crossed the square a dozen times.

“I've got to see her,” he kept saying to himself. “I shall go mad if I don't.”

But this time he knew that he couldn't go to Tilliards again. One visit in six months was all right: it was understandable. But two within a fortnight! The very idea was unthinkable. His father, he realised, could scarcely be expected to overlook the occurrence.

“She'll have to meet me somewhere,” he decided. “If only I could see her for a moment I could make her understand. She doesn't know how much I love her. She can't have any inkling of it or she'd have answered my letter.”

At the thought of seeing her a strange weakness came over him. He was aware of a cold sick patch in the pit of his stomach, and his knees trembled.

“I've never felt like this before,” he admitted.

The sound of a bugle vigorously blown in the corner of the square broke in upon him. It was an abrupt and unpleasant reminder of a discordant world. He turned and began to walk over towards the double rank of men that was forming. It was only when he had got half-way across the bare expanse of gravel that he discovered that he was without his gloves and cane; was, in Her Majesty's eyes, undressed, in fact.

That night the brass reading lamp in his room remained burning after the rest of the barracks was in darkness. By the time he had finished, the oil in the fluted glass container was reduced to a thin layer, and there was ink all down his index and second finger. But the letter was finished. There was only one page of it but it had taken most of the evening to write. He had pondered over a dozen different ways of saying everything that was in it, and the waste-paper
basket beside him was full of attempts that he had discarded. Even now, when he came to read it over, he was still dissatisfied with the result: it seemed somehow to express so much less than he was feeling. But he thrust it into an envelope and sealed it down. Then he closed his eyes and put his inky hand across his face.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Make her understand. She's got to see me. I can't live without.”

They had heard from the convent by now. Efficient as ever, the Reverend Mother—she was a woman who would have made her fortune in the world of business—had written off at once to the House of Our Lady of Mercy at Cheltenham. And here was the reply. Anna held the sombre ecclesiastical notepaper in her hand.

The letter itself was kind, very kind. It was written by someone who understood the feelings of a mother, and cared for them. “
We will try to make the little girl very happy”
it ran. “
The nuns who will be looking after her mostly speak French and she need not feel strange even for a day. Some of the girls speak French too, and she can write to her mother as often as she pleases. We hope that she will come to see her. There is a guest house in the Convent where parents can stay …”

Anna wanted to cry.

“I know she will be happy there,” she told herself. “She doesn't know what is in store for her. She does not realise how much goodness there is in the world.”

Her heart seemed suddenly to be filled with an infinite contentment and the whole prospect of the future was golden. Then her eye caught again the sentence in which the writer first spoke of Annette. “
There is a place in the lowest form,”
it said, “
that can be reserved for Annette Josephine …”

As Anna looked at the words, it was as though a tiny peephole in the past had been opened. M. Moritz had chosen the name “Josephine” himself. And through the surrounding darkness she saw him again for an instant. It gave her a strange isolated feeling —almost as though she had died and come back again—to think that somewhere at this very moment he was still living. She remembered his compliments, his mysterious appointments, his unfaithfulness, his important telegrams, his rages. And then, as suddenly, the image grew faint, and faded. Soon nothing of it remained, and she was surprised to find how utterly she had forgotten him. It was as though of all that life at the villa only Annette herself was still real.

Enclosed with the letter was a prospectus, a small brochure of glossy paper, showing the lawn, one of the classrooms, a dormitory in the sanatorium, the chapel. On the last page the fees were set out. Anna's mind reeled when she saw them. It would cost almost as much to keep Annette at Cheltenham for a term as Anna earned at Tilliards in a whole year. And the extras! “
Dancing, a guinea”; “Drawing, a guinea”; “Violin, two guineas.”

A lump came into Anna's throat.

“I did so want Annette to have dancing lessons,” she told herself.

And then she remembered. Lady Yarde had said that she would attend to all the school fees. It was a promise made in the first heat of enthusiasm.

“They can't amount to much,” she had remarked airily. “Not for a child of that age. Besides, I'm probably a patroness anyway. They never charge a patroness at full rates.”

The housekeeper's room at Tilliards was cold and, in Mrs. Merton's occupancy, perpetually stuffy. She rarely opened the narrow, Gothic-pointed windows, and the atmosphere was heavy with the scent of verbena which she sprinkled on her handkerchief every morning. An air of genteel shabbiness hung over the room, and even the pictures seemed a little faded. But at this moment the outlines of everything were obscured. The room was full of a pale misty vapour.

The vapour was issuing from the long spout of a bronchitis kettle that stood on the hearth. And in front of the kettle Mrs. Merton was kneeling. She was very much intent upon something, and her usually pale face was now flushed and heated. In her hands she was holding a letter, and she was slowly and expertly running the gummed flap across the escaping jet of steam. After a few moments the envelope began to peel open and Mrs. Merton, with fingers that trembled ever so slightly, removed the letter that had been inside. Then, very expertly, she placed the envelope between two sheets of blotting-paper to dry.

It was not until she had done so that she sat down to read what she had gone to such lengths to obtain. She was still flushed. But it was not merely the colour in her cheeks that had altered her. Her face, indeed, seemed to have undergone a definite physical change. Not a change of expression simply but a change of character as well. The obedient meekness, the negativeness, had disappeared; and something aggressive and positive had now appeared there. Her thin
upper lip was drawn right back, revealing the long yellow teeth. And, as she read, a smile of intense gratification gradually crept over her whole countenance.

“Just as I thought,” she kept repeating to herself. “She's got some kind of hold over Mr. Gervase. She's probably threatening to compromise him, and she's driven him half out of his mind already.”

The desire to expose Anna was so strong that she had to pause and struggle to get possession of herself again. She wanted to go immediately to Lady Yarde and hold this damning document before her. But how to explain her possession of it? She could scarcely reveal that in her trusted confidential capacity she had extracted this letter simply because she had seen Anna's name and Gervase's handwriting both upon it.

She saw therefore, that there was nothing for it but to seal the letter up again. And very delicately, she took out a small bottle of mucilage and a feather and began re-gumming the flap. When it was finished, she folded the letter neatly into its original creases, and inserted it so that none of the mucilage should get smeared on to the notepaper.

When the whole operation was completed, she put it back into the blotter to dry off again.

It reached Anna, smooth and fresh-looking, by the afternoon post.

But for Mrs. Merton the delivery of the letter was no more than the next necessary link in the long chain—not too long, if she could help it—of events that she saw stretching into the intriguing future. It gave her a strange sense of power to think of Anna, now entirely at her mercy, going about her schemes observed, anticipated and frustrated.

“So he's asking her to meet him at the White Hart in Tunbridge Wells,” Mrs. Merton said over to herself several times. “He's chosen it because he thinks there'll be no one there to see him. She'll go all right, if I know her.”