Rosa watched this flowering with interest and pleasure at first, and later with sadness. There was no doubt that their arrival had transformed the factory for her. Rosa had been working in the factory for about two years. Before that she had been a journalist. Before that she had taught history in a girls" school. She disappointed her mother by failing to be a fanatical idealist, and she disappointed herself by failing to be a good teacher. In journalism she had succeeded a little beyond her expectations and even her wishes, but had never recovered from the gloom and cynicism with which she had entered the trade. She had come to the factory in a mood of self-conscious asceticism. Work had become for her something nauseating and contaminated, stained by surrept.i.tious ambitions, frustrated wishes, and the compet.i.tion and opinions of other people. She wanted now at last to make of it something simple, hygienic, stream-lined, unpretentious and dull. She had succeeded to the point of almost boring herself to death. Rosa did not imagine that the factory represented anything other than an interlude in her life; but then she had also ceased to imagine that her life would ever consist of anything but a series of interludes.
There had been a time when Rosa had been used to have one extraordinary thing happen to her after another. But since she had gone to the factory nothing had happened to her at all. It was as if whatever G.o.d she had invoked when she decided, in what her friends pointed out to be such a deplorably destructive and negative mood, upon this course of action had indeed taken her at her word. Her life became simple, with the simplicity hardly of beauty or goodness but of a monochromatic tedium. Where beauty and goodness were concerned, Rosa had of course had no particular expectations from her new life; she was far from sharing her late mother"s urge to get in touch with the People. Deep in her heart, however, although she had not admitted it to anyone, she had hoped that she would get to know some of her workmates; she had even hoped that, somehow or other, she might be able to help them. But none of this had come about. She was on amiable terms with the men and women with whom she worked, but she remained at a distance from them, eccentric, solitary, only just failing to be an object of suspicion. At this Rosa had been not at all surprised and only a little disappointed. Life became impersonal and mechanical; and this even pleased her too, satisfying some deep and perhaps despairing desire for peace.
Rosa never wanted other human beings to come too near. Her intimacy with the person closest to her, Hunter, inspired in her at times a certain horror. She was obscenely near to Hunter. For him she had no exterior. The sh.e.l.l of conventions and pretentions which enclose and define a person did not pa.s.s between Hunter and Rosa but encased the pair of them together. One"s closeness to oneself, she thought, is made tolerable by the fact that one can alter oneself, the structure is alive. But for this other proximity there was no remedy; and this inspired in Rosa such a fear of any proximity as to console her for her increasing solitude. She would have welcomed the intangibility which was being forced upon her if it had not been that she was becoming throughly bored. So the time had pa.s.sed and nothing had happened: nothing, that is, except the advent of the Lusiewicz brothers.
The brothers had treated Rosa at first with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe. They were like poor savages confronted with a beautiful white girl. For them she was from the start "English Lady"; and they were very proud, as they told her later, that they had seen at once that she was "Lady, not like those other ones, but lady." She had had great difficulty in persuading them to call her by her Christian name. Their dependence upon her was complete and their respect for her abject. Rosa even became worried at the degree of her power over them. They asked her permission for the simplest things, they made no choice without her opinion, they were her slaves. Rosa feared this power, but she enjoyed it too. There were days when, contemplating the grace and vitality of her proteges, she felt as if she had received a pair of young leopards as a present. It was impossible not to adore them, it was impossible not to be pleased to own them.
The brothers lived in a cheap room in Pimlico. It was an L-shaped room, full of shabby furniture which had originally been stored there by a junk merchant who had died many years ago, and no one since then had felt inspired to clear the room. The brothers, in whom there was apparent, as soon as they had overcome their initial animal terror enough to display ordinary human characteristics, an exceptional degree of parsimony, were pleased with their junk-filled room, which they were able to rent for eight shillings a week, and whose bric-a-brac, once a senseless jumble, they soon set in order, giving to each decrepit object a proper use and significance.
The brothers had brought with them their very old and bedridden mother. This old lady they stowed in the recess of the L, where she lay upon a mattress on the floor. The brothers occupied another larger mattress in the main part of the room. Social life normally took place upon the floor, since although there were a number of chairs, none of them was quite satisfactory for sitting on, and although there was a bed, even a large one, it consisted of the empty frame only. This large bed-frame was the central feature of the room. The iron side-pieces had long ago rusted into the head and foot boards, and it would now have been a work of considerable difficulty to take it apart. This, however, would not have deterred the brothers if they had not almost at once decided that the bed did very well as it was. Its presence was a joke of which they seemed never to get tired. As the centre part of the frame was entirely gone, it was necessary to step over the side pieces one after the other in order to cross the room. On the other hand, these iron bars were useful as seats, or for leaning against, or for hanging up washing - and so the bed was left intact. An unsavoury lavatory on the first landing provided water for the brothers and for all the other, extremely secretive inhabitants of the house.
It was not Rosa who had discovered this place. How the brothers had discovered it she never found out. They were proud of having found it and would only say again and again, "We do it alone!" which in those days meant not with Rosa. The Pimlico room had given Rosa a shock when, in the early days of her acquaintance with the brothers, she had first come to visit it. The decrepitude of the objects, hardly one of which was unbroken, together with the spotless cleanliness imposed by the brothers, who had even managed to rid their room of the smell which pervaded the rest of the house, made it a strange scene. The clean-scrubbed colours and the air of neat deliberate management brought out with an odd emphasis the fact that nothing was quite the right shape.
Most of all, Rosa had not expected the old mother. The brothers had said nothing about her either to Rosa or to anyone else at the factory - and Rosa felt more inclined to attribute this omission to deliberate secrecy than to the lack in their vocabulary of so fundamental a word. The old woman spoke no English, and how much she was aware at all of where she was and what was going on around her Rosa was unable to decide. Sometimes, when Rosa was talking to the brothers, she would lie for hours with her eyes closed. But occasionally Rosa had found her watching her, with an intent and puzzled expression; perhaps she imagined that Rosa was someone else, a niece, or a friend from long ago whose name she could not recall. On the other hand, perhaps, she knew very well indeed what was going on. Rosa wondered, and when she knew the brothers a little better she asked them, but they were short on the subject. "She think it is still in Poland," said Jan. "She never know that it is not."
"Never," said Stefan. They stood looking down at her. Their mother seemed to fill them with a mixture of tenderness, irritation, and savagery. When Rosa, who was rather shocked at the way in which the old woman was stored there in the corner of the room, had offered to help them to make her more comfortable, they had refused all her suggestions almost with anger. They would not even let Rosa approach near to the place where she lay. "She is our mother," said Stefan. "It is enough."
When Rosa had realized that the brothers had a mother, her first reaction had been one of uneasiness, almost of jealousy. She thought of her at once as a being to be reckoned with, someone to be coaxed, cajoled, humoured, satisfied, and handled. Soon, however, although the old woman never ceased to inspire in her a kind of awe which nearly amounted to terror, she fell into paying her no more attention, for practical purposes, than if she had been another quaint piece of furniture. When, as sometimes happened, they were alone together in the room, Rosa would keep her distance, but would settle down to study the face of the old idol without embarra.s.sment.
It was indeed like being in the presence of a native G.o.d, in which one does not believe but which can terrify one all the same. The mother was yellow in colour and her skin resembled leather. On her face and neck it was crossed with innumerable deep wrinkles until it was almost impossible to descry her features, so many other dark lines distracted the eye. Her checks were furrowed with deep cracks, like a vessel that had been broken and stuck roughly together again. The lower part of her face had fallen in, so that her mouth and chin hung like a flabby bag from the bony protuberances above. Only her plentiful grey hair still seemed to be alive, and her eyes, which were large and dark and moist, and lived in their jagged caves like a pair of jellyfish, their wet and l.u.s.trous surface constrasting oddly with the extreme aridity of their surroundings. She always lay propped up on three pillows, and slept so at night too, as far as Rosa could see. She spoke seldom, but when she did address one or other of her children in Polish her voice sounded quite strong and not at all like the babble of someone who was senile. Once or twice when they were alone together Rosa had addressed her in English, but she had made no response of any kind beyond continuing to stare with her large wet eyes. So Rosa would sit contemplating her and she would contemplate Rosa, with as little relationship between them as if they had belonged to two different historical epochs.
Rosa was surprised to find that she was not disposed to pity the old woman, and that she was soon able to take her cue from the brothers, who mostly ignored their mother altogether. They very seldom addressed a remark to her when Rosa was there. At times, however, the presence of the mother seemed to induce in them a strange frenzy of excitement. Then they would stand staring at her with a kind of astonishment. Rosa learnt to know this mood, which would begin with both the brothers tense and quivering, and would rise rapidly to an orgiastic climax, like some native festival.
"She is earth, earth," Stefan would say in solemn tones to Rosa. "She is our own earth."
"She is our land," said Jan. "Sometimes we dance on top of her, we do the dance of our land. Eh, old woman!" he shouted suddenly, prodding her with his foot. The mother would smile up at them toothlessly and then continue to stare with her mouth open.
"She decay inside," said Stefan. "All is decay. I cannot explain. You smell it soon."
"One day we burn her up," said Jan. "If we insure her we burn her up long time ago. She so dry now, like straw, she burn in a moment. One big flame and all gone."
"We burn you, yes, you old woman, we put fires in your hair!" Stefan would shout, and the old mother would smile again and her eyes would begin to glow feverishly as she looked up at her tall sons.
"You old rubbish! You old sack!" cried Jan. "We soon kill you, we put you under floorboards, you not stink there worse than here! We kill you! We kill you!" And he would make as if to jump on to her stomach. Then the pair of them would begin to dance about the room, shouting things out in Polish, and the old mother would arch herself up on the pillows as if at any moment she might get up and join in the dance.
Then quite suddenly the excitement would be over, and the two brothers would sit down one on each side of the bed frame and mop their brows. This performance alarmed Rosa very much on the first occasion, but she soon got used to it.
"How old is your mother?" she asked them once, after they had danced themselves to a standstill.
"A hundred," said Jan.
"He mean, very old," said Stefan. "Very, very old. She soon forget Polish language too. She forget all. When is so old, past is nothing, future nothing. Only is present - so big." He approached his two hands towards each other until there was only a fraction of an inch between them.
"It is so," said Jan. They both sighed deeply.
After their capering and shouting, a profound sadness would seem to fall upon them and they would begin to sing, in lugubrious voices, their repertoire of Polish songs, concluding always with a rendering of Gaudeamus igitur, which they sang like a dirge, to a slow rhythm, swaying solemnly to and fro, shoulder to shoulder.
"That is student song," Jan would always explain. "In Poland we are students of technic, but we have no time to make our doctor."
"Now we drink," Stefan would say. A bottle of British sherry would be produced, and a toast drunk out of tea-cups.
"Our mother!" said Jan gravely.
"See, we are patriotic for our new country too," said Stefan. "We drink the horrible wines of our new country!" Then there would be uproarious laughter, in which Rosa would join.
Rosa had been discouraged at first by the excessive deference with which the brothers treated her. She had wished to be friends with them; but they had made for her a role which was half lady of the manor and half social worker. After she had at last persuaded them to call her "Rosa", a word which they would utter awkwardly, with blushes, hesitations, and smiles, she set about wooing them in every way possible. Their deference, their helplessness, their timidity called up in Rosa a perfect frenzy of protective tenderness. She felt as if she were warming back to life a couple of small birds who had been battered and frozen almost to extinction. Every day brought her an advance, a triumph, a surprise. During this time she was made very happy indeed by the Lusiewicz brothers.
It gave her a particular joy to teach them English. At first their communication had been by means of pantomime and the astonishingly small number of words which the brothers had brought with them. But gradually, and with increasing speed, the area of communication grew wider, the intercourse between them richer and more subtle - and Rosa would continually have occasion to congratulate herself upon the instinct which had led her to adopt these two strange and helpless children. She felt like the princess whose strong faith releases the prince from an enchanted sleep, or from the transfigured form of a beast. As her pair of princes awoke into the English tongue and as they were able more and more to reveal themselves to her, she found in them a hundred-fold the intelligence, the humour and the joy at which she had at first only guessed. Though even then there were moments when, like the princess who remembers with a strange nostalgia the furry snout and fearful eyes which are now gone forever, she wished to have back some particularly moving moment in the metamorphosis. Indeed, if she could she would have slowed the process down, so delightful did she find it.
The lessons would take place in the room in Pimlico, with the three of them sitting cross-legged on the floor inside the frame of the bedstead. In the centre were the grammar books and dictionaries. At first the brothers talked a great deal to each other in Polish, and could barely be persuaded to stammer out an exercise with Rosa"s help. Then they discovered how to make simple remarks in English. Rosa banned the talk in Polish, and they would take a special pleasure in showing off to each other or taunting each other for mistakes.
"You are like peasant!" Stefan would say to Jan. "Only so talk peasants in England!"
"You not even like peasant!" Jan would answer. "Rosa not understand you at all. I talk like peasant, but you talk like pig!"
Sometimes they would make Rosa laugh so much that the tears would stream down her face; and then suddenly she would find that these tears were not to be checked, and they would flow and flow until she was sobbing to relieve a pain that lay too deep for any ordinary solace. The brothers had opened in her some profound seam of vulnerability and grief. In their presence she was always breathless, as one in a new and beautiful country, full of an inexplicable rapture and never very far from tears. At such times the brothers treated her with a tender respect and consideration, solemnly offering clean handkerchiefs and asking no questions.
Then one day something happened which Rosa had not exactly foreseen but thought of and refused to contemplate. She was walking back with Stefan from the factory. It was a foggy evening in November. Jan, who had been on an earlier shift, had gone ahead and would be waiting for them with a hot meal. The factory was in Lambeth, and they needed only to walk across the river to find themselves in Pimlico. Rosa was for hurrying. It was damp and cold. It was also very dark, and she thrust her arm through Stefan"s. They were nearing the river. Then suddenly, with a sort of moan, Stefan stopped in his tracks. Rosa stopped too. For a moment she thought he was ill.
"What is it?" she asked anxiously, as she turned to face him. Then she saw what it was, and a prophetic terror ran through her. For a moment they stood paralysed, staring at each other. Then with a violent movement Stefan thrust her back against the wall. He kissed her fiercely several times. Then he moaned again like an animal and lay there leaning heavily against her. As Rosa felt his weight upon her, all the will was drained out of her body. She held on to him silently.
At last Stefan drew back a little and looked at her. He drew one finger very gently down the side of her face. "Rosa," he said, uttering the name which she had taught him, "you want this, yes?" Rosa could only nod to him dumbly. There was nothing else she could do.
The rest of the walk to Pimlico was like a nightmare. Thinking of it later, Rosa seemed to remember that she could hardly walk and that Stefan had had to support her and drag her along. Nothing more had been said. When they arrived and mounted the stairs, Stefan behaved as usual, and soon they were eating the supper which Jan had prepared. Then there was the English lesson, and the evening pa.s.sed without incident. Rosa thought that once or twice she surprised a strange look upon Jan"s face, but that may have been only imagination.
The next day was Sat.u.r.day, and Rosa had arranged to see other friends in the afternoon and evening. In the morning she glimpsed the brothers at the factory. They both seemed to be in exceptionally good spirits, whistling and singing and making everyone laugh. She pa.s.sed the rest of the day in a coma of misery. She seemed to see the brothers shooting away from her upon a moving stair. Some wordless bond between them, which had for a short time lifted them all out of this world, had been broken. She saw them suddenly as two very young men, nearly twenty years younger than herself. But she thought nothing clearly about the matter and could not define either what she feared or what she intended to do.
On Sundays she always went to Pimlico about five o"clock and spent a long evening with the brothers. This was usually the best time of the week. She went along on this occasion punctually, but with a sinking heart. Stefan was there, but there was no sign of Jan. Stefan was standing in the middle of the bedstead, his hands on his hips and a gleam of exultation in his eye. "Ah, Rosa!" he said, in a tone which she had never heard before.
"Where"s Jan?" asked Rosa shortly.
"Jan has gone with friends," said Stefan. "He asks for excuse."
This was something unprecedented and extraordinary, as they both knew; but Rosa made no comment. As usual, they had a drink and had supper. The old mother sat there blinking at them. The brothers would never feed her in Rosa"s presence. They finished supper, and as they smoked a cigarette they both fell silent.
They were sitting inside the bed frame, opposite to each other, leaning back against the iron bars. Rosa stubbed out her cigarette. She found that Stefan was looking at her intently, and she returned his look. As she gazed at him now she felt a strange mixture of emotions. A grief which came from the profound deep which the coming of the brothers had opened within her was mixed with a hard elation which was the echo of the look which she had seen in Stefan"s eyes as she entered; and with it all, as an almost physical sensation, went that numb paralysis which is the deliberate dulling of thought by itself. She knew that she had called up a love against which she was now defenceless.
Stefan was no longer looking elated, but was studying her with a stern curious look. "Come and sit here, Rosa," he said.
She moved, and fell upon one knee beside him, looking into his face. In a moment he grasped her by the shoulder and pulled her down towards him. Rosa lay stiffly in his arms. As she lay she was looking straight into the eyes of the old woman, who watched them without any change of expression.
"We make love now, Rosa. It is time," said Stefan, in a matter-of-fact tone.
"It"s impossible," said Rosa, in an equally matter-of-fact tone, "because of Jan." She was not able to think, and she could not say anything more explicit than that.
"Jan is nothing here," said Stefan. "Now is me, not Jan. Come." He rose to his feet, pulling Rosa with him.
"Your mother!" said Rosa.
"She not see, not hear," said Stefan.
Involuntarily Rosa stepped back so as to be out of sight of the old woman round the angle of the room, and as she moved Stefan caught her off her balance and threw her full length on to the mattress. He fell on top of her, and they lay there panting. After a few minutes he was making love to her savagely.
On the following day Rosa began to wonder what on earth she was to do. The first shock of her despair was over. She thought of every possibility, including that of giving in her notice and leaving London. It was impossible to divide Jan and Stefan; for her they were one being. Yet the idea of losing the brothers seared her with such pain, the notion of life without them was now so purely agonizing that she soon veered back towards other even less practicable but less painful plans of action. If it was impossible to part the brothers, it seemed equally impossible to part from them. In fact, Rosa could decide nothing because of a profound and disquieting vagueness in her conception of the whole situation. She knew neither what had happened nor where she stood. There was nothing which she could decide to do but wait; and she found herself secretly hoping that in some way the brothers would take over the situation and make all the necessary decisions for her.
That evening she was expected at Pimlico again, according to their usual arrangement. Normally on that day she made the walk across the river at the end of the shift with both brothers, but when the time came to leave the factory she could find neither of them. Eventually Rosa set out alone, and as she walked the tears fell down in a slow stream, steadily and endlessly as winter rain. These were bitter and distressful tears, not the warm tears that brought solace to the nameless grief. Perhaps there would never be such tears ever again.
She climbed the stairs and entered the room. Jan was there, sitting on the edge of the bed frame, pretending to read a book. There was no sign of Stefan. Jan stood up as she came in, and said, "Ah, Rosa!"
"Where is Stefan?" asked Rosa.
"He has gone with friends," said Jan. "He asks for excuse." Jan was looking radiant.
"I see!" said Rosa.
They had supper in silence. After supper they smoked a cigarette, sitting inside the bed frame opposite to each other, leaning back against the iron bars. Rosa looked at Jan, and it seemed to her that she saw him through such a thick cloud of melancholy that he was scarcely visible at all. He looked back at her, not with sternness but with a strong fierce expression.
"Now, Rosa!" he said and got up.
"Now what?" said Rosa, with all the sudden irritation of deep misery.
"Now we make love," said Jan.
"O G.o.d!" said Rosa. Then she added, "That is not possible, Jan."
Jan looked down at her with a look of surly incomprehension. "How, not possible?" he said. "For Stefan, but not for me? So is not! Get up."
Rosa got up. They were standing very close to each other. Jan was immobile, his face stony. Rosa was trembling between anger and the grief of despair.
"You know about Stefan?" she said.
"Of course," said Jan. "And now is me. Come."
Rosa"s knees gave way and she sank down on to the mattress.
After that day Rosa was completely at a loss. The initiative had pa.s.sed, as she had obscurely wished, into the hands of the brothers. It was soon clear to her that everything that had occurred had been arranged between them beforehand. She made this discovery with a mixture of relief, horror, and grotesque amus.e.m.e.nt. She saw them as frequently as before; and was grateful to them for the gentle tact with which they made plain to her the rules of the new regime. The English lessons continued, and the late suppers which they ate all three together; only now sometimes after supper one or other of the brothers would get up, stretch himself, and say that he needed a breath of fresh air. He would then absent himself for about two hours, and reappear in time for the pair of them to see Rosa to the station.
Rosa was surprised at the speed with which she accustomed herself to the new situation. As soon as it became clear to her that the loss of the brothers could be avoided - and this was clear as soon as she realized their collusion - the sharp pain left her and was succeeded by a cloudy fatalism in which disgust and despair lay uneasily asleep. The brothers had decided, and there was little now that she could do about it. The only thing which troubled her in an immediate way was the old mother, whose presence in the room during the love-making horrified and frightened Rosa in a way that she could not get over, and whose very existence hung upon her like a threatening cloud beneath whose menace she felt herself to be guilty of a fearful crime. And all the while, behind that fatalism and this distress, there grew in Rosa a more profound uneasiness. The power had left her now. The mastery had pa.s.sed to the brothers. They were as gentle and as respectful as ever - but their eyes were the eyes of conquerors. In the deep heart of her which they themselves had laid open Rosa resented this; and as the days pa.s.sed she began to fear them.
Five.
ANNETTE was lying on her bed with her legs in the air. She was admiring the extraordinary slimness of her ankles. Both her wrists and ankles were narrow, almost, as Nicholas would declare, to the point of absurdity; but Annette was pleased with them. When she saw the delicate bones there moving under the skin, she became conscious of her whole body as a sort of exquisite machine. She twisted one foot slowly to and fro, watching the stretching of the white skin over the bone. Then she lowered her legs slowly, placing her hands on her hips and tensing her stomach muscles. She lay limp and drew in a deep breath, her lips relaxing gently as if she were breathing in a smile at the same time. She lay there with her eyes open, and as she did so she saw herself lying there like a beautiful corpse. Her body was long and supple, her waist was narrow, her head was small and neat like a cat"s. She had large luminous brown eyes and a very thin and slightly retrousse nose. "Annette"s nose is like a piece of paper," Nicholas used to say. "It"s so thin you can almost see through it."
Annette was waiting for Rosa to come home. Annette, who was never very sure what Rosa"s reaction to anything would be, wondered what she would say to her latest exploit. But while she waited, she did not worry. Nicholas had said to her long ago, "Live in the present, Sis. And remember, you"re the person who decides how long the present is." Annette, who always tried to follow her brother"s advice, was glad to find that in this case she seemed to have a natural apt.i.tude for doing as he suggested. She lay now, without a thought in her head, in a happy coma, enjoying the silence and the slim feeling of her body.
Annette"s life had always been full of agitation and clatter: engines and dance bands and badinags in four languages. If she crossed a continent it was always at the maximum speed which the age could muster, and if she walked down a road it was always in the company of several people who were usually singing. She had rarely stayed in one place for long. "Don"t worry, we"ll soon be off!" was what her father used to say to comfort her when she was small for any distressing thing, whether it was the hostility of the chambermaid or the unexplained knocking which she heard at night. But this was just what did worry her. It was because of these things that there was a mystery which had never been revealed. She remembered how, very long ago, she had seen a rose in bud in a garden in Brittany, and had said to her nanny that she didn"t want to go to bed yet, because she wanted to stay and see the flower open. Her nanny had told her not to be silly, and her father had laughed and said that by the time the flower had opened she would be three hundred miles away. "People like us can"t have a normal childhood," Nicholas had told her when she was ten and he was twelve. "We"ll cop it when we"re forty-five!"
Annette felt always that she was travelling at a speed which was not her own. Going to or from her parents on one of her innumerable journeys, her train would stop sometimes between stations, revealing suddenly the silence of the mountains. Then Annette would look at the gra.s.s beside the railway and see its green detail as it swayed in the breeze. In the silence the gra.s.s would seem very close to her; and she would stun herself with the thought that the gra.s.s was really there, a few feet away, and that it was possible for her to step out, and to lie down in it, and let the train go on without her. Or else, travelling towards evening, as the lights were coming on in the houses, she would see the cyclist at the level-crossing, his face preoccupied and remote, and think that when the train had pa.s.sed and the gates opened he would go on his way and by the time he reached his house she would be pa.s.sing another frontier. But she never got off the train to lie down in the gra.s.s, nor did she ever leave it, high up in the mountains, at the small station that was not mentioned in the time-table, where the train unexpectedly halted and where the little hotel, whose name she could read so plainly, waited with its doors open. She could not break the spell and cross the barrier into what seemed to her at such moments to be her own world. She stayed on the train until it reached the terminus, and the chauffeur came to take her luggage to the car and Nicholas came bounding into the carriage, filling her with both sadness and relief at the ending of the journey. But the world of the chambermaid and the cyclist and the little strange hotel continued to exist, haunting and puzzling her with a dream of something slow and quiet from which she was forever shut away.
The idea of growing up had always been for Annette the idea of being able to live at her own pace. It had been no better when Nicholas was old enough to act as her chaperon. This had occurred at an early age, since Annette"s parents, christened by Nicholas "the Olympians", held that children ought to be independent, which meant that they ought to grow up as quickly as possible and fit intelligently into the adult world, which after all was the world in which they lived. Nicholas, who had hated his public school almost as much as Annette had hated Ringenhall, had soon decided that Paris, where he was now completing his studies at the Sorbonne, was his spiritual home. Annette had had to spend many evenings there in the company of Nicholas and his friends, listening to endless conversations which went on into the morning hours until the air was so thick with abstractions that she fell, half stifled, into a comfortless sleep. The very general nature of the subjects and the very finished quality of the remarks seemed to make it impossible for Annette to enter these conversations, though she was never sure whether it was herself or her brother"s friends, or the French language that was to blame. "Moi, j"aime le concret!" she had cried out, waking up suddenly at the end of one of these sessions, "Le concret! C"est ce qu"il y a de plus abstrait!" her brother had replied smartly. Everyone laughed and Annette burst into tears.
To the young women at Ringenhall Annette had said, "I have no homeland and no mother tongue. I speak four languages fluently, but none correctly." This was untrue. Her French and English were perfect. But Annette liked to think of herself as a waif. Even her appearance suggested it, she noted with satisfaction. She would sit sometimes looking into the gla.s.s and trying to catch in the depths of her large restless eyes the flicker of a tragic discontent. Annette had never been in love, although she was not without experience. She had been deflowered at seventeen by a friend of her brother on the suggestion of the latter. Nicholas would have arranged it when she was sixteen, only he needed her just then for a black ma.s.s. "You must be rational about these things, Sis," he told her. "Don"t build up an atmosphere of mystery and expectation, it"ll only make you neurotic." Since that time Annette had had a number of adventures, attended by neither delight nor grief. But if Nicholas had hoped by this training to dispel for her that mystery which seemed to him so far from hygienic, he had certainly not succeeded in his aim. The mystery was displaced, but it remained suspended in Annette"s vision of the future, an opaque cloud, luminous with lightning.
Annette got up swiftly. She had decided to change her clothes. She kicked off her skirt and petticoats, drew on a tight pair of black trousers, and admired herself in the gla.s.s. She was pleased with the figure she cut in male attire, looking like a very young dandy just starting out on a career of dice and women and champagne. She had silk shirts of every colour with silk handkerchiefs to match. There were times when Annette felt that nothing really interested her except clothes: clothes, and her jewels. Annette had taken it into her head at an early age to collect unset precious stones: and this expensive hobby had been, in the opinion of some people, shockingly, indulged by wealthy relatives and diplomatic acquaintances in various parts of the world. She now had a remarkable collection, which to the despair of her father and the insurance company she insisted on keeping not only with her, instead of as her more sober advisers urged in the bank, but even exposed to view upon a blue velvet cloth which she had spread out at present on top of her chest of drawers. Annette"s mother, Marcia c.o.c.keyne, appealed to in the controversy of Annette"s jewels, had laughed and said that the only justification for spending so much money on precious stones rather than investing it in railway shares was that precious stones gave to some people a very special kind of pleasure, and that she would have been disappointed in her daughter had she been willing to have such possessions and to keep them in the bank. That closed the matter.
Annette did not keep her whole collection exposed, but only a selection from it which she altered from time to time. The stones which were on view she rearranged every day, sometimes putting them in a symmetrical pattern, sometimes laying them out in constellations, and sometimes just scattering them at random over the cloth. Annette"s most valuable stone was a ruby, which had been given to her when she was twelve by an Indian prince who was in love with her mother. But this was not her favourite. The stone which she liked best was a white sapphire which had been given to her when she was fourteen by an aeroplane manufacturer who was in love with her brother. She held this stone now in the palm of her hand and looked into it as into a crystal. Its radiance was not white or blue but golden, a golden l.u.s.tre refined almost into a transparent light. The present moment was narrowed down into a single point of fire. She looked into the heart of it.
"Annette!" said Rosa. Annette jumped and nearly dropped the sapphire. She replaced it hastily. Rosa disapproved of her jewels. Rosa looked tired, and her hands hung down, as she stood framed in the doorway, like the big hands of a statue. At such times her flesh hung upon her heavily in a way which inspired in Annette a mixture of pity and aversion. Rosa had arrived back from the factory to be met by Hunter with the story of Annette"s decision to leave Ringenhall and her encounter with Calvin Blick. Rosa, who was expected later that evening at Pimlico, was full enough of her own troubles. "So she"s left school," said Rosa. "Now the balloon will go up!"
"Just what I thought!" said Hunter, relieved that her anger was not falling on him.
Rosa had been very fond of Marcia c.o.c.keyne when they had been at school together in Switzerland, and later when they had shared a flat in London, and she did her best to be fond of Annette, not without some success. This was the easier, since Annette had never yet occupied very much of Rosa"s attention. Rosa, who was half charmed, half irritated by her kittenish ways, could not but compare her unfavourably with her memories of herself at that age. But such criticisms as she found herself obscurely tending to make of Annette"s deportment had never yet been formulated, and she had not troubled to ask herself whether they were just and reasonable or not perhaps the expression of a sort of envy of a younger and in some ways luckier woman such as Rosa knew herself to be well capable of feeling. She often enjoyed Annette"s company, yet the child made her nervous. She knew that Annette feared her sarcasm, and this made her but the more inclined to p.r.i.c.k and bite her.
She sat down now on Annette"s divan, not to be friendly but because she was tired out.
"I hear you"ve decided to leave school," she said to Annette.
"Yes," said Annette, standing rigid. "Rosa, do you mind?"
Rosa stretched out her hand towards her, noticed how dirty it was, and withdrew it just as Annette was about to clasp it. "No, of course not!" said Rosa. "And if I did, it wouldn"t matter."
She lifted her legs on to the bed, keeping her feet dangling clear and clasping her hands carefully together so as not to soil the counterpane. She lay there awkwardly, half turned towards Annette. "I never thought much of Ringenhall anyway. What are you going to do with your time now?"
"I was learning nothing there," said Annette. "I have decided that from now on I shall educate myself."
"I asked what you were going to do with your time," said Rosa.
"There are a lot of things I want to find out," said Annette vaguely. "I shall make a plan."
Lying on the bed, Rosa suddenly forgot all about Annette. A cloud of tiredness and depression came down and covered her like a bell.
"May I unpin your hair?" said Annette"s voice from a distance. She was crouched on the bed now beside Rosa"s shoulder.
"Yes, if you like," said Rosa. This was a customary ritual, and Rosa had no strength to move. She lifted her head, and in a moment her hair fell in a heavy dark cascade. Annette drew it away into her lap and caressed it; it was not quite like touching Rosa.
"How beautiful it is!" said Annette. "I tried to grow my hair once, but it got down to my shoulder blades and then stopped."
Annette"s hair was brown and extremely short and curly. The curls were the creation of her hairdresser. Her brother"s hair, which lacked this attention, was thick and very straight, and fell in such a neat circle from the crown of his head that some people thought that he wore a wig. If Annette had worn her hair in this way, her resemblance to him would have been striking.
"You mean you got tired of it and cut it off," said Rosa, thinking hard about something else.
"Lie and rest now," said Annette. "Put your feet up properly."