“Very good,” Annette told her.
“Did you have singing?”
“There was one little girl sang so high we all laughed.”
“Were you that little girl?”
Annette shook her head.
“I’m their best singer,” she answered.
They walked on a little way in silence.
“We mustn’t forget Papa’s tobacco,” Anna said. “He’ll be expecting it.”
He was smoking as much as ever, the Captain. The old briar, his favourite one, was always between his teeth. He smoked an ounce of tobacco every day, and it was only once a week that Anna bought it for him. She had started doing so for no especial reason. It was simply that she had wanted to give him a present. And he had been so pleased that she had gone on doing so ever since. The only time she had forgotten it, Captain Webb had been left with an empty pipe. He now kept an ounce or two tucked away in reserve without saying anything about it.
They had reached the house by now and Anna pushed open the gate. The house itself was of cream stucco. There was a verandah and a balcony. And the front door had a shell fanlight. So had every other house in the terrace. Their house was different only in Anna’s eyes and Captain Webb’s—and possibly in Annette’s. But to them it was unique. At first Captain Webb had wondered if they could afford it. It was £65 a year. And Captain Webb had only £350 all told. There was £200 a year of his own, and £150 from his pension. But it was enough. They didn’t have to go without. There was still jam for tea.
Inside, the house was bright and flowery. Anna had chosen the wallpapers herself. They were gay. Captain Webb would have preferred something not quite so fancy. But he had said nothing. The thought of his own wife’s choosing his wallpapers for his house had made it impossible to restrain her. And, now that the papers were up, he rather liked the effect. It made him feel at once oddly young and strangely old and out of place to be in such surroundings: it was a constant spur to him.
“And what is the first thing you do, Annette, when you’ve got your coat off?” Anna asked.
“Get Papa’s slippers,” Annette answered.
Anna nodded.
“That’s right,” she said. “Papa loves having his slippers brought for him. He lived by himself for so long before Mama married him that we’ve got to spoil him all we can now.”
“We both spoil him, don’t we?” Annette said.
“And we spoil you too,” Anna answered.
“Don’t you get any spoiling?”
Anna laughed.
“I’ve never been spoiled so much in my life,” she said.
Captain Webb was sitting there by the fire as they went in, and he jumped up as he heard them.
“My slippers,” he said. “Now isn’t that nice? Don’t know how I managed before you came to live with me.”
He kissed her and then reached out and took Anna by the hand. There was a tall mirror in the opposite wall and, as they looked into it, they smiled at each other in the glass. The Captain glanced at himself for a moment. He took more trouble with his ties nowadays and wore his moustache clipped shorter: he was quite pleased with what he saw. Then he looked at Anna again.
But Anna too was looking at herself now: and what she saw amused her. “I’m thirty-two,” she was thinking. “And I’ve grown like any other Cheltenham matron. I wear a coat and skirt made by an English tailor. I take my little girl to school every day. I live in a house in a terrace. And I love my husband. It is as though all my happiness had been crowded into now. I am so happy that I sometimes think that it cannot be me at all.”
But the Captain’s arm was round her waist: it was a firm steady arm, reminding her.
“Toast,” he was saying. “Been keeping hot for you. No good if it’s tough.”
II
The house in the terrace seemed suddenly to have become very quiet now that the last of the guests had gone. In the dining-room, the maid and the two hired waitresses were still clearing up the litter of crockery—the ruby-coloured custard glasses, the dishes that had held the pâtes, the little plates for the strawberries and cream. The windows of the room were wide-open and the scent of lilac was coming through from outside, but the room itself still had a close, exhausted atmosphere. There was the faintly melancholy air that hangs over the scene of any party recently dispersed. One of the ladies had left her handbag.
Upstairs in front of the fireplace Captain Webb was standing, his hands under his coat-tails and his eyes dreamily following the spiral of smoke that lazily ascended from his pipe. Opposite to him, Anna was seated. She had a piece of embroidery in her hand and she was holding a threaded needle. But there were long pauses in between the stitches and she kept staring down at the rug as though there were something in the pattern that fascinated her. Captain Webb was watching her closely. He thought that once or twice he had seen her brush away a tear.
“Good do?” he asked. “Everything go off as you wanted it?”
Anna nodded.
“It was lovely,” she said. “Annette was so happy. You could see that she was.”
There was a pause and Captain Webb eased his shoulders where the dress-coat caught him. The suit had hung in the wardrobe for years and his figure had changed somewhat since the dim, forgotten date of that first fitting.
“Nice young fellow,” he said. “Reckon they made a goodlooking pair. Ought to suit each other very well.”
He had made that remark in one form or another rather frequently during the past few weeks: it was the sort of remark that helped to fill in awkward silences.
“I wish he wasn’t taking her abroad,” Anna said slowly. “Ceylon seems a terribly long way off.”
She was staring down at the rug again and it was obvious that she really was crying now. A streak of white was visible in her hair as she bent forward.
Captain Webb left his position in front of the fireplace and went over to her. There was room beside her on the couch and he sat down, one arm around her shoulders.
“What’s started you off again!” he asked gently. “Thought you’d got used to the idea.”
Anna did not reply immediately. She was smoothing out the handkerchief that she had been holding.
“She was always such a pretty little girl,” she said at last.
Captain Webb laughed.
“Can’t expect her to remain a little girl for ever,” he reminded her. “She’ll soon be twenty, remember.”
“Soon be twenty!” Anna screwed up her face and tried to smile. “That means we’ve been married for twelve years,” she said.
Captain Webb removed his pipe and seemed to be pondering over something very profound.
“Do you remember that afternoon in the dog-cart when I promised to bring you and Annette together again?” he asked.
Anna came close to him and took his hand in hers.
“You’ve been a darling,” she said.
She broke off and seemed to be considering the pattern on the rug again.
“It’s so strange,” she continued in the same quiet voice, “For the first twelve years after I ran away, I don’t think I was happy once. And now for the last twelve years I’ve been happy all the time.”
Captain Webb took hold of her hand and squeezed it. He was feeling sentimental himself and just a little affected by the occasion. He would have liked to be able to say something graceful, something that showed how he really felt towards her. But he couldn’t think of anything. So, instead, he got up and went over to the table by the window where the last bottle of champagne left by the weddingguests was still standing. Anna watched him as he poured out two glasses and noticed how trim and upright he was: he really hadn’t changed very much. When he came back he gave a little bow and stood in front of her.
“To the next twelve years,” he said.
“The next twelve years,” Anna replied.
For a moment neither of them spoke. They were both thinking about the future.
“Twelve years,” Anna rep
eated. “I shall be fifty-two then.”
“And I shall be …” Captain Webb began.
But he checked himself and left the sentence unfinished. He wasn’t a young man any longer and twelve years was too far ahead to be looked into. He put his glass down and resumed his place beside her. Their hands met instinctively. And they sat there together, staring at the Japanese fan in the empty summer grate in that quiet house from which to-day’s bride had just departed.
III
The house was always quiet now. Until a few months ago she had gone round it every day, opening windows, drawing back curtains, dusting. But the stairs at last had become too much for her: she wasn’t sure enough of herself any longer. It was only the maid who went into the drawing-room nowadays. And because Anna was so much in one room she had asked that some of the drawing-room furniture should be moved up there. She chose her favourite pieces. There was the couch on which she and Captain Webb used to sit together in the evenings. She now spent quite a lot of her day lying on it.
From time to time, people—elderly, single ladies like herself—came to see her. There was that nice widow of a Naval Commander, and the spinster daughter of a Dean. They had little tea-parties set out alongside the couch. Not that she missed them when they stayed away. She wasn’t lonely. There was always such a lot to do. For a start there was the weekly letter overseas. Annette was still out there in that bungalow (there was an album full of photographs of it on the table) above the plantation. She came back home only once every three or four years, sometimes with her husband and sometimes with one of those enormous children of hers. The eldest one had two children of his own already. It was confusing to take a tiny, golden-haired child on your knee and then remember that it wasn’t your own child or even your grandchild that you were holding but your great-grand-child. There seemed a whole missing generation to be accounted for.
And even when she wasn’t actually writing there was still so much to think about. Admittedly the thoughts became a trifle blurred at times. They mingled. But the thread was there just the same. Hardly a day passed when she did not set out from Rhinehausen again. The excitement she had felt as her father’s front-door shut behind her was still there. And the Latourettes’ apartment. She remembered every chord that the ecstatic Mlle Yvette d’Enbois had played upon the pianoforte; she even remembered Mlle d’Enbois’ remarkably long nose. Charles himself was clear no longer. It was only the scent that he had used that lingered. But whenever that perfume came back to her he was as plain again as if it had all been yesterday. And there was the balloon: she couldn’t count the number of times that she had seen it, black and silver against the night sky, as it came swirling and sagging towards her. Or Captain Picard in that high mansarde, with the revolver placed before him on the table. Or M. Moritz’s villa with the sun shining on the honey-coloured walls. Or M. Moritz himself, see-sawing on his little toes. Or the hairdresser’s in Montmartre with the dangling tail of horse-hair outside and windowful of postiches and side-curls. Or M. Duvivier emerging from the cellar, his face almost as red and puffy as his hands. But there were too many of them and she grew confused. And some of the images weren’t clear and distinct like that. She recalled other figures, other scenes, from a life that had no counterpart. Sometimes, for instance, Captain Picard used to walk beside her down the long path that led through the centre of the convent garden. And another time he and Captain Webb were alone together: she distinctly remembered hearing them argue agreeably together as men do about the merits of their tobaccos. Her father, too, often used to come into these phantom comedies. He was with her in Paris during the siege, and once more she saw herself stopping him from giving her all the choicest bits of food that were his really.
But it was Annette that she saw mostly. Annette at all ages. She was such an important visitor that the others always got crowded out when she arrived.
Captain Webb himself she saw only rarely. But that didn’t surprise her. She never even thought of him as dead, even though she had worn mourning for so long. His study was still there as he had left it. It was on the same floor as her bedroom—he had moved into the room after Annette went away. And she still went into it every day. There was a familiar friendliness about it. His pipes in the rack beside the fireplace were as polished as if they were taken down nightly. And his gun-cases and his fly-rods were in the corner.
Over the mantelpiece was a photograph of Captain Webb himself. It had been taken when he was a cadet. It showed him among some twenty others of his year. But she had picked him out the first time she had seen the picture. She often stood in front of it looking at it, and remembering. And when Captain Webb did come to her it was as often as not this young man from the picture that appeared, this young man with the long moustache and the alarmingly striped muffler.
But to-day she was too tired to stand there. Her body and her mind had both grown tired together. Her memory kept leaving her as it sometimes did nowadays, and she had to wait, one hand on the arm of a chair to support herself, wondering what she had been doing. Her heart, too, was more tired than usual. For no apparent reason it had begun racing and her breath was hard to come by. The doctor had told her to take things easily, to avoid tiring herself, and she had tried to obey him. But everything nowadays was fatiguing. It seemed that stairs had grown steeper and houses taller.
Because she was so weary, she went and lay down for a moment. Her eyes closed. She lay there scarcely breathing; and soon she was not alone. Annette in the striped uniform of the convent came to her and, in her company, she lost all count of how long she had lain there. She simply drifted slowly on the ebb and flow of that past life, sometimes being carried back towards the shore, sometimes being swept farther and still farther from it.
It was the entry of the maid carrying a tea-tray that roused her. The silver tea-pot shone brightly in her eyes and the smell of the hot-buttered toast reached her. There was blackcurrant jam in a glass dish. But she was too weak to sit up for any of it. She could only look for a moment and then close her eyes again. The maid, she noticed, had come over and was standing by her.
“Are you all right, Madam?” she asked. “Do you want your drops?”
Anna shook her head. She tried to speak, but her lips had become strangely clumsy, so that her words were muffled and indistinct.
“I’d like you to get my rosary, dear,” she said at last when she could speak. “The gilt and enamel one that used to hang in Miss Annette’s room. And then I’d like Father Connor. Tell him that I think it’s time.”
“But is it all right to leave you here alone?” the maid asked when she returned.
Anna smiled.
“Do as I tell you, dear,” she said.
Her fingers began playing with the rosary. Alone? She couldn’t think what the girl was talking about. Annette was still with her. And Captain Webb too. She could see both of them. And she lay back, floating again, with the cloud of faces all around her. The shore seemed to be receding faster than ever now. But she felt sure that Father Connor would arrive in time to wave to her. Through a chink she could still see Sister Veronica waving in the courtyard of the convent and Delia in the long drive at Tilliards …
“I hope they post my letter to Annette,” she kept thinking. “I’ve written the first two pages of it already.”
The End
To my Sister,
Barbara Olivia
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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