Under the Net (6 page)

The actors meanwhile were continuing to execute their movements in the extraordinary silence which seemed to keep the whole house spellbound. I saw that they were wearing soft close-fitting slippers and that the stage was carpeted. They moved about the stage with gliding or slouching movements, turning their masked heads from side to side, and I observed something of that queer expressiveness of neck and shoulder in which Indian dancers excel. Their left hands performed a variety of simple conventional gestures. I had never seen mime quite like this before. The effect was hypnotic. What was going on was not clear to me, but it seemed that a huge burly central figure, wearing a mask which expressed a sort of humble yearning stupidity, was being mocked by the other players. I examined the two women carefully, wondering if either of them was Anna; but I was certain that neither was. I should have known her at once. Then my attention was caught by the burly simpleton. For some time I stared at the mask, with its grotesque immobility and the flash of eyes behind it. A sort of force seemed to radiate from those eyes which entered into me with a gentle shock. I stared and started. There was something about that hulking form that seemed vaguely familiar.

At that moment, with one of the movements, the stage creaked, and the backcloth shivered slightly. This sound brought me to myself, and brought with it the sudden alarming realization that the actors could see me. On tiptoe I moved back on to the landing and closed the door. The silence was over me like a great bell, but the whole place throbbed with a soundless vibration which it took me a moment to recognize as the beating of my own heart. I turned now to look at the other doors. One at the far end of the landing had a little notice on it. I read, in large letters,
Props Room,
and underneath in smaller letters,
Miss Quentin.
I closed my eyes for a moment and stilled my breathing. Then I knocked.

The sound echoed strangely. Then a husky voice said: ‘Come in.'

I stepped into the room. It was a long narrow room with large windows opening in to the river, and it was filled to overflowing with a sort of multicoloured chaos which I couldn't at the first moment take in. In the midst of this Anna sat writing at a desk with her back to me. I shut the door behind me as she turned slowly. For a long moment we looked at each other in silence. Like a filling glass I felt my soul rise into my eyes; and in the intense equilibrium of the meeting we both experienced almost a moment of contemplation. Anna got up and said ‘Jake!' Then I saw her.

She was plumper and had not defended herself against time. There was about her a sort of wrecked look which was infinitely touching. Her face, which I remembered as round and smooth as an apricot, was become just a little tense and drawn, and her neck now revealed her age. The great brown eyes, which once opened so blandly upon the world, seemed narrowed, and where Anna had used to draw a dark line upward at their corners the years had sketched in a little sheaf of wrinkles. Tresses of hair which had escaped from the complex coronet curled about her neck, and I could see streaks of grey. I looked upon the face that I had known so well and now that for the first time I saw its beauty as mortal I felt that I had never loved it so dearly. Anna took in my glance, and then with an instinctive gesture she took refuge behind her hands.

‘What brings you here, Jake?' said Anna.

The spell was broken. ‘I wanted to see you,' I said; and now I was anxious just to avoid looking at her and to collect my wits. I looked around the room. An astonishing medley of objects lay about in piles which in places reached up to the ceiling. The contents of the room had a sort of strange cohesion and homogeneity, and they seemed to adhere to the walls like the contents of a half-empty jam jar. Yet here was every kind of thing. It was like a vast toy shop that had been hit by a bomb. In my first glance I noticed a French horn, a rocking-horse, a set of red-striped tin trumpets, some Chinese silk robes, a couple of rifles, Paisley shawls, teddy bears, glass balls, tangles of necklaces and other jewellery, a convex mirror, a stuffed snake, countless toy animals, and a number of tin trunks out of which multi-coloured costumes trailed. Exquisite and expensive playthings lay enlaced with the gimcrack contents of Christmas crackers. I sat down on the nearest seat, which happened to be the back of the rocking-horse, and surveyed the scene.

‘What is this extraordinary place?' I said. ‘What are you doing these days, Anna?'

‘Oh, this and that,' said Anna. She had always used to say this when she didn't want to tell me something. I could see she was nervous, and as she talked she kept picking things up, now a piece of ribbon, or now a ball or a long band of Brussels lace.

‘How did you find this place?' she asked. I told her.

‘Why did you come?'

I didn't want to embark on a routine series of questions and answers. What did it matter why I had come? I didn't know myself.

‘I've been turned out of a place where I live.' This wasn't very explicit, but I couldn't think of anything to tell but the truth.

‘Oh!' said Anna.

Then she asked, ‘What have you been doing all these years?'

I wished I had something impressive to say, but again I could think of nothing but the truth. ‘I've done some translating and some broadcasting,' I said. ‘I've managed.'

But I could see Anna wasn't really listening to my replies. She picked up a pair of red gloves, and pulled one of them on, smooth-out the fingers and averting her eyes from me.

‘Seen any of our old friends, lately?' she asked.

I felt I really couldn't answer this. ‘Who cares about our old friends?' I said.

What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.

‘You look just the same, Jake,' said Anna. It was true. I still looked much as I did when I was twenty-four.

She added, ‘I wish I did!'

‘You look lovely,' I said.

Anna laughed, and picked up a wreath of artificial flowers. ‘What a mess this place is!' she said. ‘I keep meaning to tidy it.'

‘It's lovely too,' I said.

‘Well, if you call
this
lovely!' said Anna.

All this time she avoided my eye. In a moment we should be talking soberly like two old acquaintances. I wasn't going to allow this. I looked at her, and amid the enchanting chaos of silks and animals and improbable objects that seemed to rise almost to her waist she looked like a very wise mermaid rising out of a motley coloured sea; but in a moment she would have escaped me. The strangeness of the whole day was suddenly present to me with a kind of impetus; and immediately I had an idea. In the old days the living-room of Anna's Bayswater flat had been so surrounded by other windows that there was only one comer of the room, low down on the floor, which was not overlooked. So if I wanted to kiss Anna this was the only place where I could do it. At that time too I had, in a not entirely disinterested fashion, been teaching Anna some Judo, and one of our customs had been that when I came in I would seize her and throw her down into this comer to be kissed. The memory of this rose in me now like an inspiration and I advanced upon her. I took her wrist, and for an instant saw her eyes wide with alarm, very close to mine, and then in a moment I had thrown her, very carefully, on to a pile of velvet costumes in the comer of the room. My knee sank into the velvet beside her, and straight away a mass of scarves, laces, tin trumpets, woolly dogs, fancy hats and other objects came cascading down on top of us until we were half buried. I kissed Anna.

Her eyes were still wide and her lips parted and for a moment she lay stiffly in my arms like a great doll. Then she began to laugh, and I laughed too, and we both laughed enormously with pleasure and relief. I felt her sigh and relax, and her body became rounded and pliant, and we looked into each other's faces and smiled a long smile of confidence and recognition.

‘Darling Anna!' I said. ‘However have I existed without you!' I pulled some embroidered silk up behind her head to make a pillow. She threw her back into it and regarded me and then drew me closer.

‘I want to tell you all sorts of things, Jake,' said Anna, ‘but I don't know whether I can now. I'm terribly glad to see you. You can see that, can't you?' She looked into my eyes and I felt the old warm spicy breeze blowing. Of course I couldn't doubt it.

‘You crook!' I said.

Anna laughed at me as she had always done. ‘So some girl has thrown you out!' said Anna. She always counter-attacked.

‘You know you could have had me forever if you'd wanted me,' I said. I wasn't going to let her get away with it, and what I said was more or less true after all.

‘I loved you,' I added.

‘Oh, love, love!' said Anna. ‘How tired I am of that word. What has love ever meant to me but creaking stairs in other people's houses? What use has all this love ever been that men forced on me? Love is persecution. All I want is to be left alone to do some loving on my own account.'

I contemplated her coolly, framing her head in my arms. ‘You wouldn't be so careless of it if you'd ever lacked the love of others,' I said.

She met my look now, and there was something detached and theoretical in her eye which I had never noticed there before.

‘No really, Jake,' she said. ‘This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It's not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.'

This seemed to me very foolish talk. ‘But love
is
concerned with possession,' I said. ‘If you knew anything about unsatisfied love, you'd know this.'

‘No,' said Anna strangely. ‘Unsatisfied love is concerned with understanding. Only if it is all, all understanding, can it remain love while being unsatisfied.'

I was not listening to this serious speech because my attention had been caught by the word ‘silence'.

‘What is this place, Anna?' I asked.

‘That's one of the things that would be hard to explain, Jakie,' said Anna, and I could feel her hands seeking each other in the small of my back. She locked me to her, then she said, ‘It's a little experiment.'

This phrase grated on me. It didn't sound like Anna at all. There was some other voice here. I thought I would pick my way round this.

‘What about your singing?' I asked.

‘Oh, I've given up singing,' said Anna. ‘I shan't sing any more.' Her glance fied away over my shoulder and she withdrew her hands.

‘Why in heaven's name not, Anna?'

‘Well,' said Anna, and I could still sense the curious artificiality in her tone, ‘I don't care for that way of earning a living. The sort of singing I do is so' - she searched for the word - ‘ostentatious. There's no truth in it. One's just exploiting one's charm to seduce people.'

I took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘You don't believe what you're saying!' I cried.

‘I do, Jake!' Anna looked up at me almost imploringly.

‘How about the theatre?' I asked. ‘How does that come in?'

‘This is pure art,' said Anna. ‘It's very simple and it's very pure.'

‘Anna, who's been getting at you?' I asked her.

‘Jake,' said Anna, ‘you were always like that. As soon as I said anything that surprised you, you said that someone had been getting at me!'

During the last part of our conversation she had laid her hand upon my shoulder so that her wrist watch was just in sight, and I could see her gaze passing lightly over it from time to time. I felt furious.

‘Stop looking at your watch!' I said. ‘You haven't seen me for years. You can spare me a little time now!'

I guessed that Anna had it in mind that very soon our
tête-à-tête
would be interrupted. Our interview had a schedule of which Anna was continuously aware. All Anna's life worked to schedule ; like a nun, she would have been lost without her watch, I took the wrist with the watch upon it, and twisted it until I heard her gasp. She faced me now with an intensity and a bright silent defiance which I remembered and loved from long ago. We regarded each other so for a moment. We knew each other very well. I kept her pinioned, but released the tension enough for us to kiss. Her body was tense again, but now it was as if my grip had communicated to it some positive force, and it was like a rigid missile to which I clung as we hurtled through space. I kissed her stiffened neck and shoulder.

‘Jake, you're hurting me,' said Anna.

I let her go and lay heavily upon her breasts, completely limp. She stroked my hair. We lay so in silence for a long time. The universe came to rest like a great bird.

‘You're going to say that I must go,' I said.

‘You must,' said Anna, ‘or rather, I must. Now get up, please.'

I got up, and I felt as if I were rising from sleep. I looked down on Anna. She lay amid the coloured debris like a fairy-tale princess tumbled from her throne. The silks were at hip and breast. A long tress of hair had escaped. She lay still for a moment, receiving my gaze, her foot arching with consciousness of it.

‘Where's your crown?' I asked.

Anna searched under the pile and produced a gilded coronet. We laughed. I helped her up and we dusted bits of tinsel, gold dust, and loose spangles off her dress.

While Anna did her hair I ranged about the room, examining everything. I suddenly felt quite at ease now. I knew that I should see Anna again.

‘You must explain about this place,' I said. ‘Who acts here?'