Anne Severn and the Fieldings Part 15

Where Anne and Jerrold sat, green pastures, bitten smooth by the sheep, flowed down below them in long ridges like waves. On the right the bright canary coloured charlock brimmed the field. Its flat, vanilla and almond scent came to them.

"What's Yorkshire like?"

"Not a patch on this place. I can't think what there is about it that makes you feel so jolly happy."

"But you'd always be happy, Jerrold, anywhere."

"Not like that. I mean a queer, uncanny feeling that you sort of can't make out."

"I know. I know... There's nothing on earth that gets you like the smell of charlock."

Anne tilted up her nose and sniffed delicately.

"Fancy seeing this country suddenly for the first time," he said.

"There's such a lot of it. You wouldn't see it properly. It takes ages just to tell one hill from another."

He looked at her. She could feel him meditating, considering.

"I say, I wonder what it would feel like seeing each other for the first time."

"Not half so nice as seeing each other now. Why, we shouldn't remember any of the jolly things we've done: together."

He had seen Maisie Durham for the first time. She wondered whether that had made him think of it.

"No, but the effect might be rather stunning--I mean of seeing _you_."

"It wouldn't. And you'd be nothing but a big man with a face I rather liked. I suppose I should like your face. We shouldn't _know_ each other, Jerrold."

"No more we should. It would be like not knowing Dad or Mummy or Colin.

A thing you can't conceive."

"It would be like not knowing anything at all ... Of course, the best thing would be both."

"Both?"

"Knowing each other and not knowing."

"You can't have it both ways," he said.

"Oh, can't you! You don't half know me as it is, and I don't half know you. We might both do anything any day. Things that would make each other jump."

"What sort of things?"

"That's the exciting part of it--we wouldn't know."

"I believe you _could_, Anne--make me jump."

"Wait till I get out to India."

"You're really going?"

"Really going. Daddy may send for me any day."

"I may be sent there. Then we'll go out together."

"Will Maisie Durham be going too?"

"O Lord no. Not with us. At least I hope not ... Poor little Maisie, I was a beast to say that."

"Is she little?"

"No, rather big. But you think of her as little. Only I don't think of her."

They stood up; they stood close; looking at each other, laughing. As he laughed his eyes took her in, from head to feet, wondering, admiring.

Anne's face and body had the same forward springing look. In their very stillness they somehow suggested movement. Her young b.r.e.a.s.t.s sprang forwards, sharp pointed. Her eyes had no sliding corner glances. He was for ever aware of Anne's face turning on its white neck to look at him straight and full, her black-brown eyes shining and darkening and shining under the long black brushes of her eyebrows. Even her nose expressed movement, a sort of rhythm. It rose in a slender arch, raked straight forward, dipped delicately and rose again in a delicately questing tilt. This tilt had the delightful air of catching up and shortening the curl of her upper lip. The exquisite lower one sprang forward, sharp and salient from the little dent above her innocent, rounded chin. Its edge curled slightly forward in a line firm as ivory and fine as the edge of a flower. As long as he lived he would remember the way of it.

And she, she was aware of his body, slender and tense under his white flannels. It seemed to throb with the power it held in, prisoned in the smooth, tight muscles. His eyes showed the colour of dark hyacinths, set in his clear, sun-browned skin. He smiled down at her, and his mouth and little fawn brown moustache followed the tilted shadow of his nostrils.

Suddenly her whole body quivered as if his had touched it. And when she looked at him she had the queer feeling that she saw him for the first time. Never before like that. Never before.

But to him she was the same Anne. He knew her face as he knew his mother's face or Colin's. He knew, he remembered all her ways.

And this was not what he wanted. He wanted some strange wonder and excitement; he wanted to find it in Anne and in n.o.body but Anne, and he couldn't find it. He wanted to be in love with Anne and he wasn't. She was too near him, too much a part of him, too well-known, too well-remembered. She made him restless and impatient, looking, looking for the strangeness, the mystery he wanted and couldn't find.

If only he could have seen her suddenly for the first time.

iii

It was extraordinary how happy it made her to be with Aunt Adeline, walking slowly, slowly, with her round the garden, stretched out beside her on the terrace, following her abrupt moves from the sun into the shade and back again; or sitting for hours with her in the big darkened bedroom when Adeline had one of the bad headaches that attacked her now, brushing her hair, and putting handkerchiefs soaked in eau-de-cologne on her hot forehead.

Extraordinary, because this inactivity did violence to Anne's nature; besides, Auntie Adeline behaved as if you were uninteresting and unimportant, not attending to a word you said. Yet her strength lay in her inconsistency. One minute her arrogance ignored you and the next she came humbly and begged for your caresses; she was dependent, like a child, on your affection. Anne thought that pathetic. And there was always her fascination. That was absolute; above logic and morality, irrefutable as the sweetness of a flower. Everybody felt it, even the servants whom she tormented with her incalculable wants. Jerrold and Colin, even Eliot, now that he was grown-up, felt it. As for Uncle Robert he was like a young man in the beginning of first love.

Adeline judged people by their att.i.tude to her. Anne, whether she listened to her or not, was her own darling. Her husband and John Severn were adorable, Major Markham of Wyck Wold and Mr. Hawtrey of Medlicote, who admired her, were perfect dears, Sir John Corbett of Underwoods, who didn't, was that silly old thing. Resist her and she felt no mean resentment; you simply dropped out of her scene. Thus her world was peopled with her adorers.

Anne couldn't have told you whether she felt the charm on its own account, or whether the pleasure of being with her was simply part of the blessed state of being at Wyck-on-the-Hill. Enough that Auntie Adeline was there where Uncle Robert and Eliot and Colin and Jerrold were; she belonged to them; she belonged to the house and garden; she stood with the flowers.

Anne was walking with her now, gathering roses for the house. The garden was like a room shut in by the clipped yew walls, and open to the sky.

The sunshine poured into it; the flagged walks were pale with heat.

Anne's cat, Nicky, was there, the black Persian that Jerrold had given her last birthday. He sat in the middle of the path, on his haunches, his forelegs straight and stiff, planted together. His face had a look of sweet and solemn meditation.

"Oh Nicky, oh you darling!" she said.

When she stroked him he got up, arching his back and carrying his tail in a flourishing curve, like one side of a lyre; he rubbed against her ankles. A white b.u.t.terfly flickered among the blue larkspurs; when Nicky saw it he danced on his hind legs, clapping his forepaws as he tried to catch it. But the b.u.t.terfly was too quick for him. Anne picked him up and he flattened himself against her breast, b.u.t.ting under her chin with his smooth round head in his loving way.