Oliver shook the rain out of his hair and seemed to gather himself together. He said, ‘I forgot myself, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, don’t be, I’ve told you it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind. Only, I’m cold, I’ve got to go in.’

  ‘You ought to mind, I think.’

  ‘No,’ said Anna. ‘Neither of us minds really. There was nothing to do all summer. Let’s not pretend. And anyway, I’m no good at minding things. I don’t care if you make love to me, I – I like it, but I can’t bear it if you try to make me think about it.’

  Oliver wrinkled his brow, at a loss. He said, ‘I don’t like this not minding things –’

  Anna said impatiently, ‘You want your cake and eat it. Think yourself, for a change, where would you be if I did mind?’

  ‘I’d manage. It’d work out.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I expect, more talk. But I don’t mind. So everything’s all right.’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘Please, Oliver, let me go in. Let me go in. I’m cold. I shall miss you, tomorrow.’

  Oliver hesitated still, then took her hand and walked her into the house. At the foot of her stairs she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Goodbye, Oliver.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver heavily. ‘It’s all right.’ He looked suddenly very tired.

  Margaret sat up and said, ‘Oliver, darling, where have you been? It must be four o’clock, it’s gone horribly cold and there you are, soaked to the skin. What have you been doing?’

  ‘I’ve been out,’ Oliver said, dropping his wet clothes one after the other on the floor. ‘In the weather.’ He climbed, cold and naked, into the bed. ‘Let’s pull up another blanket, for God’s sake.’

  ‘But, darling, why?’

  ‘Just don’t talk, please,’ he said. He turned to her and studied her. ‘You’ve never wanted to damage anyone, have you? Not consciously –’

  ‘Damage?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m a Puritan at heart, did you know that?’ Margaret looked puzzled. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Come close and warm me.’ Margaret took him into her arms and put out the light. Almost immediately, she heard him snore.

  Anna congratulated herself on her own sophistication in being quite unperturbed over having been passionately embraced by a married man and wrung her wet nightdress out of the window. Men are funny about sex, she told herself, as she climbed into bed. It doesn’t matter to them as it does to women (everything one read told one this), it’s just something they have to do, it doesn’t matter to them. But they spend much more time having to do it and for some reason doing it means they have to prove they can make women mind and they are terrified one will mind and be a nuisance to them, and they are hurt and disappointed in one if one takes it as casually as they do. It’s a funny pride they have, nothing one can recognize, quite mysterious, really. One has to learn about it, by experience. I’m learning all sorts, she told herself, I ought to be grateful to Oliver, really. She smiled to herself. ‘Poor, old Oliver.’ The sound of the rain on the roof accompanied her, comfortably, to sleep.

  When they left in the morning, the drive was a slow river of yellow mud and loose gravel. Henry drove them to the station, with water slopping round the axles, and Caroline stood with the children, both of them, on the steps to wave.

  ‘Come again,’ she called, cordially, to the back of the car. ‘Come again. We so enjoyed having you.’

  They waved, misted, through the back window. Anna had dark rings round her eyes and the beginning of a cold. Caroline sent her to bed and told her that she must look after herself if she was to pass her exams.

  Henry came back from the station and said, ‘We got them off, just in time.’

  ‘Oh, Henry,’ Caroline said reproachfully. Then she smiled.

  ‘I can get on, now,’ Henry said, making for his study. ‘People can be an awful nuisance, don’t you think?’

  The house closed around them, again, and the rain continued for five days. When it stopped, it was suddenly autumn.

  PART TWO

  7

  Next year, Anna duly went up to Cambridge. Getting herself into Cambridge had not been easy for her, which, in spite of being able, to a degree, to say I told you so, annoyed her surprisingly. Her interviews went off not too badly. The worst moment was when someone asked her, in passing, a routine question: ‘I suppose you were Head Girl?’ and she answered, far too loudly, ‘No, I wasn’t, I was expelled.’ ‘We find a little experience of things outside school is often valuable,’ her interlocutor murmured, and went on to other things. When they wrote to her and told her that they had unfortunately no room for her, but that she had been placed on the waiting list, she assumed that her exclusion was due to this indubitable sign of instability on her part. Later, after she had been offered the place refused by a series of young women who wanted to go to Oxford, or had emigrated to Australia, or had suddenly decided that they preferred immediate marriage to the academic life, she came to wonder. The prefects who had been interviewed with her were so much less in evidence, once she was up – or perhaps they had all changed – and Anna came to the conclusion that the dons thought as little of them as she did herself, and believed passionately in a quality they referred to as originality, and which turned out to be often enough, as far as she could observe, indistinguishable in practice from emotional instability and intellectual exhibitionism. They seemed – shy and solitary as most of them were – fascinated by extremes of student flamboyance, and Anna came to imagine that they had associated her breaking of school laws in some way with this, and that it had done her no harm, possibly some good. That was not all, of course. ‘Parts of your papers were abysmal, you know,’ one of them told her later, ‘and your French and Latin were shocking, but you had sparks, you had sparks, and you had a mind of your own which is the main thing, after all. And of course, it was likely you had the right background, though we do try not to take these things into account. Is your father working on anything at present?’

  Margaret Canning wrote to congratulate Anna, on behalf of Oliver and herself, and enclosed a list of the names and addresses of friends whom they thought it might help Anna to know. Anna wrote back, too late and too curtly, thanked them for their congratulations, said she felt she would be in Cambridge on false pretences, and added, for Oliver’s benefit, that she supposed they wouldn’t have taken her if she hadn’t been her father’s child. She never called on the friends, partly out of laziness, partly because she was not sure whether the friends were Oliver’s or Margaret’s, and although Margaret’s friends, if they took any notice of her, might be amusing, Oliver’s would certainly be fierce, intimidating and a dreadful strain, which she had no intention of subjecting herself to. She did not see the Cannings again before going up. The summer visit was not repeated, and although Margaret still lunched and shopped with Caroline occasionally, and Oliver wrote to Henry from time to time, they did not cross Anna’s path.

  What she made of Cambridge was not apparent to anyone; neither to her parents, nor to those who taught her, nor to herself. She wrote essays, when these were expected, seeming to find it, as the dons certainly did, faintly surprising that anything as solid and committed as an essay, as opinions, in ink, on paper, should proceed from her and be detachable from her, to be criticized. These essays were precise, correct, unadventurous, and on the whole incontrovertible. She sat, thin and pale, with her head on one side, and Caroline’s look of polite tea-party interest on her face, and listened to her supervisor’s remarks about them but she was never to be provoked into saying anything further than she had already committed herself to; one of her tutors, who disliked her, came to the conclusion that she should never have been admitted. The other, more optimistic, continued to hope for some kind of mental tin-opener to present itself. Once she thought she had it, when she provoked in Anna an outburst of indignation over something contemptuous said about Madame Bovary. ‘It’s not dull, it’s terrible,’ Anna cried, but she was reading English, not French, and the incident was not repeated.

  She was not friendless, as she had been at school; she had coffee with people, and went to parties; she attended the first nights of plays, and was seen in lectures and in libraries. But she was not remarkable and had no special skill, and this now began to matter, the elusive nature of her event in the future became tormenting, in a society of the clever, the extravagant, the ambitious. It would be nice to be really clever, she thought, the way it would have been nice to be really horsey, but as with the splints and spavins, the correct retort, the correct allusion, rarely came to her. And she saw that people thought her ‘not worth the effort’, and made less herself.

  Caroline was not troubled about cleverness. Caroline saw the Universities as Zuleika Dobson had seen them; cities of young men, pleasant, eligible, likely to be successful young men. In Cambridge in particular there were ten men for every woman and Caroline reasoned that if Anna behaved even half sensibly – she had certainly grown prettier – she might well be suitably married at the end of her three years. If Anna, like almost any woman undergraduate, shared this view, it was only very vaguely, and not with any of Caroline’s practical hopes. She supposed dimly that she ought to be in love, and in her own way cast about for someone to be in love with. Love, achieved, might even be the event she was awaiting. But not marriage; her view of love was still through the small end of the telescope; to be beautiful, it must be hopeless; if it looked, as Michael had, as though it might have been anything else, she took care to complicate it until it was safely impossible and remote again.

  This took time. Eventually, after a series of experiments, and savoured failures, she arrived at Peter Hughes-Winterton.

  Peter Hughes-Winterton stood in his doorway, waved the smoke away from his face and listened to the needle grate and slither on the last moan of the clarinet. He had meant this party to be quite different, had worked over it for weeks and now, three-quarters of its way over, it was like all other parties, dim, hot, airless and smoky, with people chattering in high squeals in his living room, or lying in untidy heaps in his darkened bedroom, and one or two couples advancing and retreating, twisting each other with closed eyes and sweat on their lips, by the record player in the window. Preparing the room before Hall, he had thought it all seemed new and glamorous, warm and a little bit out of this world, as a party should be. He had lit candles, tiers and branches of candles, silver candlesticks borrowed and begged from neighbours, from home, from the college, he had had them on all possible ledges and levels, all the walls, he had thought poetically, studded and scattered with little flames. He had bought crimson cloth and draped the room with curtaining, he had decorated with Victorian piles of wax fruit and piles of real fruit in the same style, he had commissioned several enormous, voluptuous drawings by a Pole with a genius for imitation Beardsley. There was a very special punch, in silver bowls with ornate ladles, made from a recipe which had been genuinely handed down in his own family from 1745. He had become quite excited, polishing the glasses, stirring the punch, arranging the gilt cords on his hangings for the last time before the guests arrived. He was practical enough to ensure that his candles and his tent of curtaining were in no danger of setting each other alight. He was rather proud of himself.

  And then they had come, some in cavalry twill, some in jeans, with the usual indistinguishable girls in bunchy cocktail skirts and tarty little tops; they had brought their own records and had removed his minuet from his record player within minutes, to try out something new that had only just come out. They had rolled up his beautiful rugs – he supposed that was a relief, in a way – to make space for jiving, and they had gone into the bedroom, which he had put aside for coats, and were taking off more than coats. They had blown out some of his candles to make the necessary dark corners and had put some of them into bottles, in other corners, to light cigarettes from. They compared the drawings, in insistent, high-pitched, authoritative voices, with other décors executed by the same artist at other parties on other nights, so that they lost their mystery and became a conversation point like any other. They drank down the punch like anyone else’s cheap wine cup, and said to him cheerfully as they passed him, ‘Potent stuff, this of yours, Peter, very. We’re getting rather high.’ There was at least enough to drink, so that by any normal standards the party was a success. Peter was grateful for this, even in the midst of feeling let down.

  He had made the party, as he had first conceived it, for Anna, whom he loved. He had hoped she might blossom in candlelight and good manners. He looked across the room for her and found her where he had left her, standing against the bedroom door, looking prim and lonely and quite obviously not liking the party now. She was wearing a dress – the high-necked, cream coloured linen one that Margaret Canning had bought for her – and her hair was now long enough to lie like a flat plate, curled round on the top of her head. She would have liked my party, Peter thought sadly, not being the man to call her so obvious dislike of the present party rudeness; he thought of it as honesty, which covers a multitude of social cruelties. He had gone to fetch her some brandy – ‘I can’t take any more cup,’ she had said – and as he set out towards her his foot crunched on a broken glass.

  Anna watched him approach and thought her face into a smile which did not manage to reach her mouth or eyes. She was, in fact, pleased to see him. He seemed, to Anna, one of the very few people she knew who seemed effortlessly able to like other people, or what he was doing. He liked being an undergraduate. He rowed, and talked, spoke rhetorically and not very well, but with obvious honesty, in the Union, and went out with the Trinity Foot Beagles. These things became him. They were what he had been born and bred for. His father, in fact, when he had been told he had a son, had imagined him a tall, blond, elegant undergraduate at his own college, had waited for the actualization of this, and had not thought beyond it; so that Peter, for him, was now ideal Peter. It was assumed that he would follow his father into the Foreign Office, but this was an assumption about a young man whose eternal present was the University, and neither Peter nor Sir Walter Hughes-Winterton had yet paused to think that there was only a year left of this present before it was all over, and he must apply himself to an examination that it was more unlikely he would pass than his father’s generation could conceive.

  Anna had met him first at the end of someone else’s party, where she had nearly fallen drunkenly down a staircase and had been saved by Peter’s strong and unceremonious grip on her wrist. It was a silly incident, but she had been very frightened and very grateful, and carried with her a vision of Peter as very literally a pillar of strength, a salvation from the depths, blond, solid and confident above her and her slipping feet, which was never quite annihilated by the usual exaggerated female contempt for those who love, and expose themselves before they are loved.

  Peter remained a protector, an opener of doors, a bringer of flowers, a provider of coats against the rain and cushions in punts, and Anna laughed at his punctiliousness, admired him for it and came to rely on it, all at once. She disliked his attempts to identify himself with what might be called the modern undergraduate, went once with him to a jazz band ball where he wore tight jeans and a scarlet shirt, sulked, and told him that that kind of thing just didn’t suit him. She liked to hear him talk about hunting and rowing and even politics, and to leave the arts alone. This, Peter had decided, was because she resented the inevitable reference to her father which most literary conversation sooner or later produced, and he made a point of never mentioning Henry Severell. Peter was by no means a fool. He loved Anna because she was vulnerable and not vulgar, and attractive, and had he thought ‘something in her’, and because she needed, he thought, like most people, an enormous amount of kindness and attention, before she would unfold. He was waiting until he was indispensable. Anna, who was also not a fool, knew what he thought, and prodded her feelings occasionally to see whether he might not have become indispensable whilst she wasn’t looking. So far, he had not, but she didn’t want to have to do without him.

  ‘Here’s your brandy. Now, I must get my breath back.’ Anna took the glass and looked into it. ‘It’s getting difficult to breathe at all,’ she agreed.

  ‘I didn’t mean it to be this kind of party.’

  ‘They’re enjoying themselves,’ Anna said kindly.

  ‘I’m looking forward to your meeting my mother. She’ll like you. Lots of character. Ideas of her own.’

  ‘I don’t expect she will like me.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Mothers never do. I’m the kind of person people’s mothers just don’t like. Can’t we go now? I’ve had too much drink and if I stand here any longer I shall just go to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t think I ought. I mean, it’s my party, I ought to see them out – they might break something, or worse. I’m sorry, Anna –’

  Anna drooped. Peter said, ‘Let’s go outside, anyway, and get some fresh air. Would you like that?’ Anna nodded and Peter made a way for her, down the stairs and out into the court. The night was cold and Anna gasped and surfaced as though she had been flung into cold water. Peter was breathing heavily.

  ‘Is that better?’

  ‘Much,’ said Anna, shivering. She swayed up against him, whether by accident or design neither of them were quite sure, and Peter pulled her firmly into his arms and kissed her.

  ‘Oh, warm,’ said Anna, classifying.

  ‘Anna –’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Only I love you.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Anna quickly, feeling coldness and distance creeping over her as they always did with the importance in his voice.

  ‘No, don’t interrupt. I don’t want you to say anything now, it’s too soon. Only, when I’m in a position to, I’ll ask you to marry me. Don’t answer. I’ll make you sure you want to, by then, don’t worry.’