“Then you don’t need me any more?” Anna asked. “You’ve grown so big that you can manage without me.”
Annette looked up and caught the Reverend Mother’s eye. She saw that the older woman was smiling. This important person who ruled everything was trying to make it simple and easy for her, so she nodded.
As Anna saw the gesture a sudden feeling of pity overwhelmed her. She went on her knees beside the child and put her arms around her.
“My dear little Annette,” she said. “My poor little Annette.”
Drawing her close she put one hand against the closely cropped head and pressed it against her bosom. She was crying openly now. Annette began crying too, crying and at the same time struggling to free herself. Finally she pushed Anna away from her.
The Reverend Mother got hurriedly to her feet.
“Please remember what I told you,” she said. “We don’t want to do anything to upset the child.”
III
Sister Veronica was kneeling in front of the big trunk that had been dragged out into the centre of the boxroom. She was unlocking it, and, as the lid came open, the odour of the lavender in which the clothes had been packed began to fill the air.
Sister Veronica was quick and businesslike. She took out the top dresses one by one—they were silly summery things—and laid them carefully over the back of a chair. Then she came down to the heavier clothes—a dark cloak trimmed with fur, an embroidered cape, a dress of deep crimson velvet.
“That’s more what you want for travelling,” she said. “It’s too fine for it really, but it can’t be helped.”
She handed it to Anna, stroking the smooth sheen of the material with the back of her hand as she did so. Life in the convent had not destroyed her love of soft costly things.
“And these,” she said. “These will be all right.”
She was holding out a pair of long elegant gloves that had a pattern in seed pearls stitched on to them: they had never been worn and they hung there in Sister Veronica’s hand, fresh and new-looking, the token of some forgotten extravagance. As Anna took them from her, as her fingers felt again the cool mossiness of the suede, she found that immediately she remembered everything about them—the little shop that they had come from, the girl who had served her, and even what the weather had been like outside. And, from being a very long way off, that day and every detail of it, suddenly sprang forward so that there were no longer four unhappy aching years between. It was only yesterday that she had bought the gloves and they were in her hands for her to try them on.
But Sister Veronica was standing up now. Her arms were full of garments that she had drawn from the bottom of the trunk: small lacey things, things made of silk, things of pretty colours. She smiled at her.
“They’re yours really,” she said. “It was only for a spell that you gave them up.”
Anna took them up and raised them to her face. They were soft —not like the harsh shifts that were worn inside the Order—and she rubbed her cheek against them lovingly. As she did so, she noticed that Sister Veronica was watching her.
“You’ve no time to do that now,” she said brusquely. “You will have all the rest of the year to do that in. The Reverend Mother will never forgive you if you miss the train.”
And giving Anna a little push she followed her upstairs, carryingthe rest of the clothes over her arm. Then modestly she withdrew while Anna changed.
Inside her narrow room Anna was standing motionless. The pile of clothes still lay on the bed, looking out of place there, and she had made no attempt to start dressing.
“I mustn’t go,” she began saying. “I can’t go and leave Annette.”
The clock in the small wooden tower of the chapel struck three times. And she started nervously. It was too late now for misgivings; she had spent whole days and nights fighting with herself over the thing and she had decided.
“Good-bye, little Annette,” she began saying. “I’m going away, but don’t be frightened, I’m coming back for you. I’m going to take you away from here, I’m going to make you my little daughter again.”
And though she was crying afresh now, she started to strip herself of her uniform, sliding into those fresh clothes that were like putting on the past again. She opened the door and stood there.
Sister Veronica was waiting in the passage outside, her grey form outlined in the pointed window. She turned sharply.
“About time too,” she began and stopped herself.
She was looking at Anna admiringly. It was the frank admiration of a middle-aged woman for a younger one.
“It’s just as I told you,” she said at last. “Those are the kind of clothes you were meant to wear.”
Then she glanced inside the room that Anna had just left.
“But that’s no state in which to leave a room,” she said. “You’ve been here long enough to know that.”
Pushing her way past her, she smoothed out the rough linen coverlet and gathered up the uniform that Anna had dropped. It was still lying there upon the floor.
“What a way to treat it, indeed,” she went on. “There’s someone else has to wear it when you are gone.”
Her voice sounded different somehow—it was heavy and muffled. Anna looked towards her and saw that Sister Veronica was crying. She went over to her.
“Dear Sister Veronica …” she began.
As Anna stood there she felt an arm go round her. It held her pressed lightly for a moment. And then she was released again.
Sister Veronica was brusque and matter-of-fact once more. She was wiping away her tears and concealing them.
“There’s no time for this now,” she said. “The wagon’s outside. We’re keeping it waiting.”
At the foot of the stairs stood a small group of nuns. They were waiting for Anna. One by one they had made their separate excuses to be there when she left. In every large convent there are always departures and arrivals, but Anna’s going was different. There was romance and mystery about it. It was unthinkable that only twelve hours before this lady in the rich travelling cloak had been down on her knees cleaning away the dirt their shoes had made. In the sombre hall she now had the air of someone important; a visitor, to be treated with respect; a patroness even. Her clothes made the stone walls seem even bleaker and more stony. And the coarse habits of the nuns took on the very texture as well as the colour of the walls themselves.
The nuns, even those who had disapproved of her, crowded round to shake her by the hand. It was only after she had gone that one or two of them raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances.
On the doorstep Anna stopped and turned to Sister Veronica. There were tears in her eyes as she spoke.
“Will you do something for me?” she asked.
Sister Veronica nodded.
“If anything should happen to me,” Anna exclaimed. “If I shouldn’t come back, will you give this to Annette?”
She held out a letter in her hand. It was addressed to Mlle Karlin at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
“If I come back here again,” she went on. “You can return it to me. I would rather that I gave it to her myself.”
She handed it to Sister Veronica and stood watching as she put the letter away in the big pocket of her habit. It was an important letter: a letter that had cost Anna the most of the night to write. It was her apology to Annette for the fact that she had ever been born at all.
“You still think I should go off like this without saying goodbye to her?” she asked.
Sister Veronica lowered her eyes.
“That was what the Reverend Mother said,” she replied.
And as she spoke she began moving off to the wagon. It was the same grey cart with the clumsy tilted hood that had brought Anna to the convent. The old nun seated on the plank that served for the driving seat was the same too. She sat there holding the reins of the same tired horse. The wagon was part of a permanent order of things. It made no difference to the old nun up there whether she w
as fetching Anna or taking her away again; her life had been made up of endless successions of Annas, coming and going, and in a little while, this one Anna amongst so many, would havebeen forgotten, while the life of the convent went on smoothly, as unvaryingly as before.
She climbed into the body of the wagon and Sister Veronica lifted up her valise. The old nun in front took down the long whip beside her and flicked it over the creased haunches of the horse. Before Anna could stop her they were moving off.
“Good-bye, dear Veronica,” Anna called.
“Good-bye, Anna,” Sister Veronica answered. “I’ll…”
But the rest of her words were lost in the crunching of the gravel.
The grey wooden gates of the convent stood open, and overhead the little statue of the Virgin with her pink cheeks and blue robe looked down at them. Anna sat on the hard jolting seat steadying herself with one hand and waving.
Sister Veronica was waving too but there were tears in Anna’s eyes and she could not see plainly. Everything she looked at was swimming and misty.
Sister Veronica seemed quite small now, she was simply a stubby figure in grey standing in the centre of the courtyard waving something white. Then one of the nuns closed the gates and Anna could see her no longer.
With the closing of the gates she took a deep breath and looked about her. The safe world of the convent lay behind. In front lay the other world. Her world. The world of trains and people travelling.
“Oh, God,” she began praying. “Tell me that I wasn’t wrong to leave Annette.”
Book VIII. Paris Re-Visited
Chapter XXXIX
The Train was now no more than crawling and Anna looked out of the window, rubbing a small peep-hole with her finger. It was evening, and already the light was going out of the sky. The air was grey and lifeless and a thin rain was falling. Sliding along beside the train were peeling stucco buildings and tall tenements, and the pavements were gleaming. As she looked, it seemed for a moment that she was back in her own past again, that Charles would be there waiting for her. But it was only for an instant that the make-believe endured. Then she remembered again how much alone she was.
There was a long faintly hysterical scream from the engine, and the fierce clutch of the brakes. The coach shuddered for a moment and the passengers were thrown about in their seats. “We’re there,” someone said. And at once there began the agitated scramble for luggage as though after twelve hours in the train a further five minutes were unthinkable.
Anna drew down her veil, and fastened it under her chin. She opened her handbag and looked inside: the little bundle of notes was there, and the address. She read it again mechanically, even though she knew it by heart already as she had once known the address of the Latourettes’ apartment. There it was—Tilliards, Chislehurst, Kent—carefully copied out on a slip of paper in the fine precise writing of the Reverend Mother.
The man opposite, a small robust man with a brief-case full of papers—a manufacturer probably—raised his hat and asked Anna as she was travelling alone if he could lift her case down for her. He raised his short arms to the rack and seized the valise precariously, nearly shattering the bubbling gas mantle in its glass dome in the centre of the carriage. But the gesture of politeness pleased Anna, and she thanked him. It seemed strange to be back in a world where gentlemen raised their hats to ladies and went out of their way to be polite and pleasant.
But as she stepped out on to the platform, it was a different feeling that she was experiencing: it was loneliness. This was not her Paris any more: it was a Paris of strangers. She did not belong here now. After the quiet, the confinement of the convent, there seemed too many people here, to much bustle. She was frightened.
The row of hotel porters, the names of their proprietors written across their tall hats, began to advance upon her. She let the first of them, the porter from the Hotel de la Gare, take up her valise and place it on the barrow with the rest of his spoils. It was only one night that she had to spend in Paris—the boat train left at nine o’clock in the morning—and she did not mind where she spent those short, unimportant hours. The Reverend Mother had given her an introduction to another convent of the Order, but she ignored it: the grey habits of the Sisters had been with her for too long.
The bedroom in the hotel looked down the boulevard de Montparnasse along which the traffic in ceaseless streams was passing. The pavements were crowded and the shop fronts blazed with light. While she watched, the street lamps one by one were kindled. The room behind her was dull and uninviting: it had the strange impersonal emptiness of all hotel bedrooms where people stay only for a single night.
The chambermaid before retiring had lit the gas in the two ornamental brackets which branched from the mantel-shelf. There was a long mirror between them, and Anna went over and stood in front of it. For a moment she studied her face, noting the fine network of lines that now lay beneath her eyes, the short-uncared-for hair, the tired downward droop of the mouth. But she had already spent much of her time on the journey peering into the little tablet of mirror in her handbag, and by now she was reconciled to what the looking glass showed her. It was rather the effect of herself in her hat and with the veil drawn closely down that was her especial business; she turned her head this way and that, regarding herself from every angle. Then she went over to her case and drew out a thicker veil. With this, she was more satisfied.
“Even if he were to see me now,” she told herself, “he would not recognise me. I have nothing to fear, nothing.”
But the fear remained there just the same. It seemed that she had only to leave the hotel for a single instant for M. Duvivier’s hand to descend upon her shoulder. She was still trembling when she went down into the street.
At first she was cautious, not daring to stand too long before any of the glowing windows. But at the second corner she came upon an arcade, brightly lit. It reached back from the pavement, this long cave of retail pleasures, a double avenue of gas-jets spluttering from the roof like fiery stalactites. The second shop was full of toys and she stood looking into it. Finally, it was a big doll that she bought, an Anglo-Saxon princess with flaxen hair and blue eyes. She wrote the label for it herself and begged the shopkeeper to pack it carefully.
But the purchase saddened her. For the moment, she had been happy over buying a present for Annette. Now she could think only that she had deserted her, that she had run away and been unfaithful. The idea of returning to the convent and throwing herself upon the Reverend Mother’s mercy, imploring her to take her back, came into her mind. Then she remembered that it was because some day she was going to take Annette away from the convent for ever that she was here at all.
And Paris was gradually becoming familiar once more. As she drifted aimlessly with the human tide that flowed about her, the night seemed suddenly to be full of hands that were drawing her back again into a life that had vanished, seeking desperately to recapture her. The whole street became a pageant of shadows. A young man, rather thin and very elegant, passed her singing softly under his breath; and for a moment she thought that he was Charles. Then, in the darkness, she noticed an older man, a man with long nervous fingers and a greatcoat slung across his shoulders, the sleeves dangling. A half-smoked cigarette was between his lips, and his face was drawn and lean: it was the Captain. In the doorway of every restaurant, a M. Duvivier was standing.
She walked on trying, to thrust away these shadows. But the hands that were pulling at her were too powerful, too insistent: she was not strong enough to resist them. They were demanding something that she could not refuse.
“I must go back into that life again—if only for a moment,” she told herself. “Then I can bear to leave it for ever.”
The cab that took her to the rue d’Aubon was now passing through streets that she remembered. They had not altered, these streets: the hand of siege and famine and bombardment had rested lightly on them, leaving them merely a little more faded and depressed than she had k
nown them. Only here and there a shell had landed, leaving either a ruin like a gap in a set of teeth, or a bright new building that the smoke had not yet weathered, to mark the spot.
Then, as the block of apartments in which the Latourettes had lived came into sight, Anna stopped the cab and told the driver to wait. She approached on foot. Outside, at the edge of the kerb, the same grey-haired old witch who had guarded the place while Anna had lived there, was talking with her sister witch from the neighbouring apartment block.
The gate stood ajar and Anna went inside. She crossed the small paved courtyard with the cage of linnets and canaries against the south wall, and stood again in the dark, uncarpeted hall. There was a frame there with the names of the residents inscribed upon it Among them the name of Latourette still stared down at her.
And, as she stood there, she remembered the first time that she had gone up those stairs when the whole brightness of the future had seemed to be waiting for her at the top. Then, having re-lived that first moment, she now re-lived the last one—she was coming down the stairs and, in the flat that she had left, M. Latourette was pacing desperately up and down waiting for his wife’s return to consciousness.
“Mademoiselle wishes …?”
It was the old concierge whom nothing escaped, even when she was gossiping, who had returned.
But Anna turned away and told her that she had mistaken the block of apartments. She went back to the cab again, dreading that she might have been recognised. When the driver asked where he should take her, she started: she told him vaguely Montmartre, and sat back covering her face with her hands.
Somehow this visit that she had just made seemed less important now: there was no magic in it. And she realised that she had been striving to recover something that wasn’t hidden there. Her love for Charles, her deep infatuation, had been nothing really. At that moment even the image of Charles himself grew dimmer. And, as the image faded, another set of features took its place. Firm features, hard ones. She could see the clean line of the jaw, the hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes of Captain Picard. The eyes were smiling at her.
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