Let Me Alone

  There was the beginning of an uncomfortable pause while everyone waited for Anna to make a move. Lauretta gave her the tiniest push. The girl went forward, gazing about with clouded, cold-grey eyes, like the sky: at one with the cold, unfriendly, uncongenial sky. For a moment she seemed quite lost. Then she got into the car and sat down. Matthew got in after her, the door banged, and they drove off in a thin keening of farewells.

  They were to drive to London in a hired Daimler. Matthew did not possess a car of his own.

  CHAPTER 8

  MATTHEW and Anna were spending their honeymoon in London. It was not at all the weather for the country. And besides, Anna still had some shopping to do for her tropical outfit.

  Matthew had made all the arrangements in his rather fussy, rather officious way for them to stay at a queer little hotel in Jermyn Street that he knew. Outside, it looked undistinguished, and even somewhat shady, with its dingy paint, and its closely covered windows that were like so many eyes closing in a sly and possibly disreputable wink. But once inside, treading the thick, hot, patterned carpets, surrounded by the ugly, monumental furniture, immensely solid mahogany islands set in immense oceans of florid woolliness, you knew instinctively that you were in the very stronghold of respectability.

  The place was a pure survival from the past, leading straight back to the pride of the Victorian era with its vast solidity, and its stuffiness, and its cumbersome gilt mirrors, and its strangely hot-seeming, heavy, plushy, everlasting materials. Reminiscent of old volumes of Punch. And the thickly-carpeted, elephantine staircase, winding up like the moss-grown coils of some comatose, terrific serpent, up to the unimaginable, fusty recesses of roof and attics.

  A porter showed Anna and Matthew to their room, set down their hand-luggage, and departed. Silence descended. A peculiar stuffy, hot, discreet silence, intensified rather than lessened by the distant growl of traffic.

  Anna looked round the room, examining the furniture, the immense wardrobe, rising sheer like the hull of a battleship, and the suggestive double-bed, not quite so large. The room was far too small for the furniture. Between the bed and the wardrobe there was scarcely any floor space. The door could only be opened with difficulty. Anna was a little dismayed. And she was like a person waking uneasily from a deep sleep. In the car she had been drowsy and vague. Now she awoke slowly to this hideous apartment, and Matthew smiling and smirking at her, a bit constrained, but thoroughly pleased with himself as usual. She was a little dismayed.

  ‘What a small room!’ she exclaimed, glancing up and down.

  The smirk was intensified on Matthew’s face.

  ‘Plenty of room for us. We’ll be nice and cosy here,’ he said, smirking at her, and taking her hand.

  Anna was repelled, and very much surprised. This coy attitude, this almost lewd expression, was the last thing she had expected. All her alarms, which Matthew’s apparent coldness had dispersed, came hastening back to her. Up to now he had simply not existed, physically. What if he were to become physically importunate? The thought of his smooth, lean body made her shudder.

  ‘No. We must get another room,’ said Anna sharply. She moved as if to go to the door, but Matthew held her fast. There she was, tethered to him by her reluctant hand. She felt angry and humiliated. ‘Let me go!’ came her voice, petulant.

  He took no notice.

  ‘We shall do very well here, in this room. I want you close to me.’

  Anna looked up at him. He stood obstinate, with his neat row of teeth, his eyes smiling but opaque.

  Then she looked at the bed.

  ‘I shall get another room,’ she said coldly. But a slow red covered her face. It angered her like a betrayal, coming when her heart was cold with resentment. She was afraid she would cry.

  ‘Oh no, you won’t,’ said Matthew in his soft, stupid, gentle voice, so uncomprehending; but gentle as if she were a child. ‘You’ll stay here with me.’

  She stiffened at his obtuseness. And as she stiffened, he put one arm round her, possessively, and kissed her. She felt the monkeyish, sinewy strength of his long, thin arm holding her with a certain conscious mastery, a certain deliberate disregard of her, as though she belonged to him. And he kissed her on the mouth, with relish, ignoring her resistance; also as if he owned her. He made her feel his predominance; the brainless, brute predominance of the husband. The triumph of pure brawn. He infuriated her. He lighted a flame of sheerest anger in her heart. She suffered shamefully at that moment. But in her heart, the black flame kindled, indestructible.

  When he realeased her and moved away, his face was closed and smiling, but innocent, as though nothing had happened. Utterly unaware he seemed; it might really have been someone else who had embraced her. Distracting, the way the man had of stepping outside himself, of cutting clear away from his own behaviour. The naïve, rather winning look that came back to him between his enormities; some humility, some wistfulness in it. She could have forgiven him, if only he had not lighted the anger in her heart that burned up all clemency.

  There was silence for some moments. He thought she had given in to him. He bent down and began to unfasten the luggage.

  ‘Won’t you unpack your things?’ he asked, glancing up at her.

  She shook her head coldly.

  ‘Not yet. I’m tired. I shall rest a little.’ And she sat down by the wall.

  Presently he went out of the room for a minute. This was her opportunity. Off she hurried, down the lethargic staircase, down to the stuffy little manager’s office, and demanded another room.

  The manager, a pallid, saturnine elderly man, was in immediate opposition to Anna. No, there was nothing else available. Every room in the place was booked. There seemed to be a look of triumph in his eyes as he thus frustrated her. As though in some way he had joined forces with Matthew, against her. The inevitable male conspiracy against the female.

  But Anna was quite determined. She would have another room. She would take no denial. The heat of anger kept her inflexible. She would not go away.

  The manager suddenly capitulated: he had an empty suite on the second floor. He told her vindictively that it was very expensive. She asked the price and agreed to pay it. If it had been fifty pounds a night she would not have hesitated. She went upstairs with two servants to collect the luggage: she had everything taken to the new suite: she spread things over the rooms: and here she meant to stick. When Matthew appeared, she had already hastily unpacked her dressing-case. The room was littered with garments.

  She felt reckless and excited. Her emotions were almost pleasurable. Matthew looked on, very annoyed, from the doorway.

  ‘I have changed the rooms,’ she cried, challenging.

  ‘So I see,’ said Matthew.

  Matthew prided himself on his arrangements. He was an inveterate organizer, always planning ahead, most conscientious, albeit somewhat inefficient. He hated to have his plans disarranged.

  ‘Don’t you like this better?’ asked Anna.

  He stared disapprovingly without answering. She wondered if he was going to make a scene.

  ‘It must be very expensive,’ he said.

  Anna told him the price.

  ‘Ridiculous! We can’t possibly afford it,’ he said, bad-tempered and rather shrewish, as he often was about money matters.

  ‘I’ll pay the bill myself,’ said Anna, brightly contemptuous.

  Matthew stared with bright, blue, disapproving eyes at the flushed, excited, determined face of the girl. He had a censorious look, which Anna did not recognize, rather mean and distrustful. Then it vanished, and the neat smile took its place. Once more she felt the exudation of his peculiar attention – so extraordinary, somehow, but with real warm-heartedness underneath.

  ‘We mustn’t quarrel on our wedding-day,’ he said, coming near and smiling into her face.

  She knew he thought he was behaving generously.

  Their first dinner together passed off fairly well. Anna was preoccupied with the other diners
– they were so totally different from any collection of people she had ever seen. They were all very respectable – yes, overwhelmingly respectable; and aristocratic-looking most of them. But not attractively aristocratic. Most of the women were oldish and badly dressed. And then most of them had those haughty, heavy-jowled faces which have no humanity at all. In that museum-like show-case of ancient gentility and obsolete deportment, it was the heavy, cold, aged, repressive faces which dominated, while the scattered youthful faces looked dismal and negative, overshadowed. It was strangely inappropriate for Anna, so young and vivid and direct, to find herself sitting in the dry, airless, stagnant atmosphere of the ugly past, where no honesty could possibly draw breath.

  ‘What extraordinary people,’ she said to Matthew. ‘And how impressive! All the women look like dowager duchesses.’

  ‘Most of them are,’ he said, with a distant, surprising satisfaction in his tone.

  ‘Is that why you come here?’ she asked, teasing him.

  He bridled in the most curious way, and cocked his bright blue eyes at her, complacent and prim.

  ‘Well, one likes to be among decent people; when one can,’ he said.

  And the astonishing thing was that he was quite sincere. Anna became silent with astonishment. Food for consideration here, indeed.

  After dinner they went to the theatre. Matthew had taken seats for a musical comedy; quite a popular show, but not the show of the moment. And the seats were quite good seats, but not the best. Fourth or fifth row of the stalls they were; one could see the stage pretty well. Anna, long accustomed to Lauretta’s lavishness in matters of this kind, was a little surprised. But in a dim, indeterminate way. The surprise was not strong enough to rise to the surface of her mind.

  She hardly noticed the music, or the antics on the stage. She was tired and effaced. Things seemed dream-like to her. It was like a dream to be sitting in the hot, crowded theatre beside Matthew. It was queer to have him draw her attention to this or that. She tried to be polite and to take an interest. But her brain was drowsy.

  All this time Matthew was reassuringly restrained. There was no sign of a physical advance, no return of the horrible, lewd smirk to his face. True, his sharp teeth flashed disquietingly now and then in her direction; but always under the chastening curb of the customary neat smile. She began to feel relieved.

  But afterwards, back in the hotel, it was a different matter. As soon as the door was closed upon them, he kissed Anna on the cheek, putting his arms round her clumsily.

  ‘At last I’ve got you to myself,’ he said. ‘All to myself.’

  With a strange, determined pressure, like the pull of a strong river current upon a swimmer, he tried to draw her down, on to his knee.

  She twisted herself out of his grip, feeling weak and exhausted, as though she were really struggling against a river, and hurriedly began to talk about the theatre. The young man stirred uneasily, and stared in an unseeing way as he answered.

  Their suite consisted of three rooms and a bathroom. A sitting-room with an uncomfortable, tightly-stuffed sofa and two plushy armchairs; then the bedroom opening out of it, and beyond that another room, very cramped and closet-like: but it had a bed in it. The bathroom was down a bit of a passage at the end.

  They talked for a few minutes constrainedly. Someone had put some imitation flowers, carnations, in a ricketty silver vase on the table. The greenish table-cloth had a fringe of soft plush balls. There was an atmosphere of awkwardness and constraint. Matthew grew stiffer, his smile more meaningless, as the minutes passed, his voice became rather uneven.

  ‘Let’s go to bed now,’ he said. ‘It’s late. And I want to have you near me. Really to have you at last.’ His blue eyes stared with a kind of blank triumph at Anna. He stood up. ‘Come along, my dear. Come to bed.’

  He opened the bedroom door. Behind him, she could see his pyjamas laid out on the bed beside her own things. It produced a fury of opposition in her, the sight of his folded pyjamas. A swift, inflexible decision formed in her mind. Matthew was watching her, waiting. She wanted to throw something at his round, complacent anticipatory head. She detested the sight of it. He stood there in the open doorway, watching her, his lips parting in the slightly lewd, smirking smile, as he waited for her to come to bed. And she had utterly decided against him. She would not go to bed with him; no, not for anything in this world. He looked as neat and brown and presentable as ever, he had still the rather attractive artlessness hanging about him. But his head had a ball-like inanity, which she so disliked, and the suggestive simper came slyly, indecently, at the ends of his mouth. He looked quite handsome; and yet there was that queer buttoned-up closeness, that insentience, that made him seem so non-human to her. He repelled her, thoroughly. And she loathed his complacency, his smirking, proprietary lewdness.

  The seconds went past. Matthew began to move forward into the room. Anna suddenly sprang up and made a wild scurrying dash into the passage. He followed, trying to detain her; his head came plunging after her out into the passage.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, beginning to be roused again.

  But Anna had locked herself into the bathroom. She giggled rather breathlessly, and gazed at her face in the glass, where a curious expression was reflected. A most curious change had come over her. Her colourless, frail, rather ethereal face now wore a bold, hard, brilliant look, derisive and vicious. And her grey-blue eyes had become harder and colder, smaller apparently. In her quiet gravity and her composure, Anna’s eyes would grow large with a deep, jewel-coloured stillness, like deep water. But now, in her excited aversion, they were small and shallow and stony. Her serenity, her delicate, grave aloofness – so unusual – had vanished. Her face was pinched and malicious, like a goblin-face.

  Matthew came up and rattled the handle of the door. His blue eyes, with their untransparent glassiness, their non-luminousness, stared out resentfully at the closed door. A blind, angry spitefulness, rather stupid, came into them.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. I’m going to have a bath,’ said Anna, from the other side of the door.

  There was a pause, during which she continued to meet in the mirror the strange pair of goblin-eyes, steady with strange malice.

  ‘Don’t be long, then,’ he said at last, unseen by her. But his voice was complacent again, even indulgent. He was so sure of winning that he could afford to humour her.

  She kept silence. His cocksureness made her furious. Staring into the mirror, she stood rigid and silent.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ he repeated. And presently she heard his brisk footfalls – curiously heavy for a small-made man – retreating along the passage.

  She smiled to herself, brightly malicious, in the narrow, old-fashioned bathroom. The clumsy metal taps reflected her face, which had taken on the queer goblin look. She undressed slowly, and had her bath, and prepared for the night, all with the bright, alien, vicious look on her face. And then, for a long time, she waited: quite motionless, with a very odd, sardonic expression. She wondered if Matthew would come back and speak to her again. But he did not. Evidently, in his cocksureness, he was content to wait, and humour her caprices.

  Anna sat on the hard white chair, looked at the closed door, looked at her reflection in the glass, and smiled at it knowingly, with goblinish satisfaction. One would have said she was enjoying herself. Then she rose and opened the door quietly, looking down the passage; a short, dim, empty passage, with doors on either side, and Matthew waiting for her behind the door at the end. She shivered in repulsion, but still she went on smiling, as if enjoying it all. Then quietly she went out into the passage. She went into the bedroom and locked the door.

  The other door, into the sitting-room, was still open. She could see two feet in their neat, squarish, patent-leather shoes planted on the floor beyond. The leather was starting to crack a little, in the creases. There was Matthew.

  He had heard her movements, and looked
up, smiling his anticipative satisfaction, rather ogreish in spite of his flat unreality. As though he licked his chops at her. The horrid part was that though he stared hungrily at Anna, he did not seem to see her at all, as an individual. She, personally, did not exist as far as he was concerned; he had reduced her to a sort of extension of himself. He missed her out completely. And now his blue eyes met hers with a gleam of complacent anticipation – self-congratulatory, it appeared – as if he prided himself on his rights over her. And he was going to exercise them, too. Oh yes, he meant to exact his husband’s pound of flesh. There was something a bit pasha-like in his attitude towards her. The age-old, man-to-woman tyrannous condescension. He began to approach her with his prancing gait. But she slammed the door in his face, shutting him out, and turned the key on him. Just as the door closed, she saw the death of his neat smile, and the ugly, spiteful look, mean and cunning and in some way almost imbecile, taking it’s place. She shuddered, and her heart beat quickly. But the goblin-brightness stayed on her face.

  ‘Let me in,’ said Matthew, trying the door.

  ‘No,’ said Anna.

  ‘Open the door,’ he said angrily. A nasty tone was coming into his voice.

  She did not answer, but watched the door. He had got his shoulder against it and was pushing. She could hear the faint roar of his angry breath.

  Suddenly he remembered the other door, and dashed round there. In a moment he was rattling the handle on that side.

  Anna looked round with hard, bright, unnatural eyes. She did not seem to be herself at all, but some heartless creature, inflexible and malicious and rather diabolical. So cold; so sprightly. There was a devilish little cold sparkle on her face as she gathered up his belongings, darting about the room with rapid, flicking motions; collecting his things and bundling them out into the sitting-room; then turning the key again. Quick as thought, the room was clear of all trace of him.

  ‘Your things are outside the door,’ she called. ‘You must sleep in the little room.’