Anna (47 page)

When he had gone, Anna went over to recover it, but the plaster had broken and the bambino was in pieces.

It was now no more than a matter of hours, the doctor said. The first pains had come and gone away again, but the nurse was emphatic in declaring that they would return at any moment. She spoke as though in some mysterious way the pains were hers and not Anna's. Anna herself was in a state in which she no longer cared anything for pains. She was tired and was content to lie there in the sickroom, propped up by too many pillows, breathing in the heavy air that the nurse kept sprayed with orris-water and eau-de-Cologne. The book that she had been reading lay face downwards beside her and from time to time she dozed.

In a chair beside the bed M. Moritz was sitting. He had changed into a velvet smoking jacket and a pair of scarlet slippers; and he was strangely and rather luxuriously at his ease. Without moving he was able to stretch out his hand and stroke Anna's hair.

Now, with her eyes closed, she looked younger than ever. Younger, but not more beautiful. During the past months her face had grown heavier and the line of her cheeks that he had always admired so much had almost gone. But in his present mood it only helped to make him love her more. There was something in such a sacrifice that appealed to him very deeply.

“To think,” he began saying to himself, “that she should have lost her looks to bear
my
child. It's the least that I can do to see that she's properly looked after so that she can recover them again.”

He cast his eyes round the room and approved of everything that he saw—the bottles of lotion, the powder bowls, the atomisers.

“No one could have done more for her,” he reflected, and bending forward he kissed her forehead.

It may have been the kiss that woke her. When he looked again he noticed that her eyes were wide open and gazing up at the empty ceiling. He asked if there were anything that she wanted; if he should call in the nurse from the adjoining bedroom. But Anna continued almost as if he had not spoken.

“You remember the day when Father Ignatius called?” she asked at last.

M. Moritz leant forward anxiously.

“You want him?” he inquired.

Anna shook her head.

“There was something you said to him that has just come back to me,” she continued. “Something that I think you
meant
me to hear.”

M. Moritz turned his head away and coughed. “What was it?” he asked.

“I forget.”

“You told him that you thought I had been married already.”

M. Moritz smiled and gave a little shrug of his shoulders.

“But it was so obvious,” he said. “I could tell you most things about that marriage He was someone you weren't in love with. You probably hated him—or at least you grew to hate him. If you hadn't hated him you would never have been so cold with me when I first brought you here to the villa. I often think that I saved you only just in time.”

He rose and stood by the bed fondling her hand in his. But, when he looked down, he saw that across her forehead little beads of perspiration had broken out. Her breathing had become laboured.

He ran to the door of the adjoining room and called urgently for the nurse.

A girl! The fact stunned him. It seemed the first of his major plans ever to have gone wrong beyond recovery.

“A daughter! What do I want with a daughter?” he kept asking himself.

And in his despair he walked aimlessly from room to room, trying to find consolation. But, a daughter—there was no consolation possible.

Anna was not yet comfortable—it was too early for that. M. Moritz, however, had been allowed into the bedroom and had seen her very pale amid the pillows. The nurse said that she was not to be disturbed or excited in any way and M. Moritz obeyed her: in his misery he was as silent as a thief. He was sorry for her, acutely sorry; he realised that she must recognise how great a disappointment to him she had been. And because he was sorry he fastened round her neck the chain of pearls that he had been saving up to celebrate their son. And, having placed them there, he kissed the damp forehead and withdrew.

For the next half hour he had stood beside the complicated wicker cot staring down at the tiny area of skull that showed above the blankets. There were tears of disappointment in his eyes as he looked at it.

When the nurse gave Anna the child to feed she was conscious of a strange confusion of emotions. There was happiness and response in the presence of the warm body beside her own, and a rich sensuous pleasure in the pull of the strong lips at her breast. But there was also another and still deeper feeling.

“It is
my
child, not
his,”
she kept saying. “It belongs to
me.”

And she pulled the tiny puckered face away from her, trying to see in it a likeness, an image, something that would reassure her. But the child, deprived of its food, only began to cry.

This time, a new emotion, of pity, came over her.

“It is in my power to make this new life happy or miserable,” she told herself. “She is all mine.”

And she began impetuously dedicating her whole future to her child.

Her possessiveness, her jealousy, increased so that she resented the nurse's hands every time they touched the child. She wanted to be allowed to bath it herself, to attend to it, to lay it down, to wash it. Even its grossest acts seemed charming. But the nurse was adamant. She insisted that Anna was not strong enough, that it was unladylike, unheard of. The most that she would allow Anna was to hold the child in her arms for a few minutes after its napkins had just been changed, and then surrender it again.

The nurse announced, too, that as soon as the baby had drawn off the first milk to avoid fever, she would give it altogether to the wet nurse. She spoke as though a mother's wanting to feed her own baby were something that was unknown in her circles of maternity. She even mentioned in confidence that M. Moritz had made it clear to the doctor that he wanted everything that was possible done to ensure that Anna should not permanently lose her figure.

So, at the end of the third day, the wet nurse was summoned and Anna's baby was taken away from her. A room next to the new nursery had been set aside for the woman, and it was to this room that the child was taken for its meals—the nurse would not hear of actually having the woman in the bedroom. Anna lay there in her room, her breasts bound up in bandages, and cried—cried, not because the bandaging hurt her, but because she was not allowed to look after her own child. The nurse, however, persisted that she knew best in such matters. She reeled off the names of Marquises and Comtesses whom she had nursed, and showed her devotion to her patient, by prescribing a special lotion to prevent the hair from falling, changing the flowers in her room more frequently than ever, shaking up the pillows, indulging in light conversation and spraying the air until it smelt like the dressing-room of an actress.
She did everything in fact except allow Anna to get up, or have her child.

On the tenth day Anna was permitted to put her foot to the ground and, three weeks after the child had been born, she was led by the nurse as far as the seat in the garden. As she sat there, the bassinette was wheeled up beside her and a parasol erected over it. The nurse warned her against moving it because of the dangerous effects of too much sunlight on a young baby's face; and she cautioned her, too, about raising the veils of the bassinette for fear of flies.

But as soon as the woman had gone Anna went over to the wicker carriage, pushed down the hood and took the child out on her lap. It remained there, happy and contented, its deep eyes staring up at her. Then, tired of the world, it closed its eyes and slept. Anna hugged it to her.

“They shan't take you from me,” she said. “They shan't.”

And bending very low she kissed the small hands, the flaxen down that covered its head, the soft rounded cheeks.

When the nurse found her, she was horrified. She hinted darkly at disaster, and protested that she would not have left the child for a single moment if she had imagined that such a thing could happen. That night, when the child was allowed to feed too greedily and brought a little of its food back again, the nurse gave Anna a look that prepared her for the worst.

The fear that the child might die, that something that she might unwittingly do, might kill it, was indeed constantly with her. Its roots went deep. It was the fact that the child had not yet been baptised that frightened her. Unbaptised babies, she knew, went to limbo and could never go to Heaven, and she told herself how wicked she had been not to have called in a priest the moment the child had been born.

That afternoon she spoke of it to M. Moritz. He was, since his last visit to Geneva, more difficult than ever to get hold of. His business affairs were every day becoming more intricate and more numerous; they bred.

He no longer regarded the bank as the ultimate pinnacle of his career, and now thought of it only as a step on a long, hazardous path. He shut himself away with Carlos in early morning in his little study, and emerged preoccupied and impatient only at meal times. He was so busy in fact that he had scarcely any time to admire his little daughter.

And he was no more than lukewarm about christenings.

“Isn't it enough,” he asked, “that you should have your little
Annette, without wanting to have cold water thrown over it? What is there that a priest can give that she hasn't got already?”

He was sitting in a low white-painted chair as he spoke, his glass of brandy in his hand, his cigarette in the long tapering holder.

“Besides,” he said. “Priests ask so many questions: they're naturally inquisitive.”

He paused for a moment and flicked off the ash as delicately as if this were the prime object of smoking.

“I've saved you all the absurd embarrassments of our position,” he added. “I attended to the registration myself. When she is old enough she can change her name to mine by deed-poll if she wants to. I'll ask the lawyers to look after it.”

“Then you don't want there to be any christening?” Anna asked slowly.

M. Moritz's smile did not change.

“Why not let us keep our present happiness to ourselves?” he asked. “I've always been reluctant to let other people share it; that's why I've discouraged visitors who wanted to come here. If we have a christening there would have to be god-fathers. And there are so few people that I would trust to be god-parent to a daughter of mine.”

Round the corner of the terrace the figure of Carlos came in sight: he carried with him his perpetual air of business and apology.

M. Moritz was the first to notice him.

“He doesn't give me a moment's rest,” he complained. “Even my private life, the affairs of my family, are broken into now.”

He rose and kissed Anna lightly on the forehead.

“Forgive me, my dear,” he said. “I've rather a lot on hand to-day.”

And instead of waiting for the young man to join them, he hurried off and met him half-way.

Three days later, M. Moritz announced that he had to go off to Geneva again. The decision was instantaneous and unpremeditated. And at the last moment, he decided that he must take Carlos with him.

“I shall be back perhaps the day after to-morrow,” he declared, “perhaps in a week, perhaps in ten days' time. Take care of the child while I'm away.”

And with the kiss of a doting but over-rushed husband, he was gone.

This time, Anna had an immediate purpose in his departure.

“The child is mine now,” she said. “He can't interfere with me.”

And immediately she began planning for a christening. It was not difficult. There were a dozen churches to any one of which she could go. It was only afterwards that she realised that she had never really thought of any one but Father Ignatius to baptise the child: he knew so much already. By going to him, she told herself, she would show that she was still a good Catholic at heart. And perhaps to see him again, to talk with him, would remove the strange unreasonable dread that hung over her. Ever since his last visit she had felt that she were being watched, had feared that at any moment she might look up and see his black figure standing there.

But when next morning the carriage drew up at the Presbytery and she was shown into the icy bleakness of that bare walled room, her self-confidence had gone again: she admitted that she was nervous. She was still going over in her mind what she should say to him when the door opened and he confronted her.

He looked thinner. The skin was stretched so tightly across his face that there seemed to be no flesh beneath it. His hands, too, showed every branching of the veins. But his eyes remained dark and penetrating as she remembered them.

He greeted her quietly in the flat patient voice of someone who is anxious to reveal nothing. And when he heard why she had come his face betrayed no alteration in his feelings. His hands continued to play with the chain of the rosary that was hanging at his waist.

“I will baptise the child,” he said simply.

Anna paused.

“I know of no one to be god-parent,” she said at last.

Father Ignatius stood there, his deep eyes burning into her.

“I will find her a god-parent,” he answered.

He made no other comment, ignoring, as it were, the whole history that lay behind this visit. From his manner, he might have known nothing of her. The actual time of the christening was fixed in the same cold, deliberate, distant manner.

When he showed her out, he bowed to her.

The nurse wore a new veil of white lawn for the christening: it jutted out beyond her shoulders and fell in a triangle of starchy purity below her waist. It was the kind of veil that she wore when one of the princes of the Church, and not simply an ordinary priest, was officiating.

As for the wet-nurse she wheedled the time of the ceremony out of Anna's maid—and went separately to the church. She felt that if any one had a right to be there, she had. The verger gave her one
of the side pews—he still had no notion how many people he might expect and the sight of Anna's carriage had encouraged him. In point of fact, the wet-nurse comprised the whole congregation.