Anne Severn and the Fieldings Part 2

"I _love_ him."

"I'll give him to you if you'd like to have him."

"For my own? To keep?"

"Rather."

"Don't you want him?"

"Yes. But I'd like you to have him."

"Oh, Jerrold."

She knew he was giving her Benjy because her mother was dead.

"I've got the grey doe, and the fawn, and the lop-ear," he said.

"Oh--I _shall_ love him."

"You mustn't hold him too tight. And you must be careful not to touch his stomach. If you squeeze him there he'll die."

"Yes. If you squeeze his stomach he'll die," Colin cried excitedly.

"I'll be ever so careful."

They put him down, and he ran violently round and round, drumming with his hind legs on the floor of the shed, startling the does that couched, like cats, among the lettuce leaves and carrots.

"When the little rabbits come half of them will be yours, because he'll be their father."

"Oh--"

For the first time since Friday week Anne was happy. She loved the rabbit, she loved little Colin. And more than anybody or anything she loved Jerrold.

Yet afterwards, in her bed in the night nursery, when she thought of her dead mother, she lay awake crying; quietly, so that n.o.body could hear.

v

It was Robert Fielding's birthday. Anne was to dine late that evening, sitting beside him. He said that was his birthday treat.

Anne had made him a penwiper of green cloth with a large blue bead in the middle for a k.n.o.b. He was going to keep it for ever. He had no candles on his birthday cake at tea, because there would have been too many.

The big hall of the Manor was furnished like a room.

The wide oak staircase came down into it from a gallery that went all around. They were waiting there for Mrs. Fielding who was always a little late. That made you keep on thinking about her. They were thinking about her now.

Up there a door opened and shut. Something moved along the gallery like a large light, and Mrs. Fielding came down the stairs, slowly, prolonging her effect. She was dressed in her old pearl-white gown. A rope of pearls went round her neck and hung between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Roll above roll of hair jutted out at the back of her head; across it, the foremost curl rose like a comb, s.h.i.+ning. Her eyes, intensely blue in her milk-white face, sparkled between two dark wings of hair. Her mouth smiled its enchanting and enchanted smile. She was aware that her husband and John watched her from stair to stair; she was aware of their men's eyes, darkening. Then suddenly she was aware of John's daughter.

Anne was coming towards her across the hall, drawn by the magic, by the eyes, by the sweet flower smell that drifted (not lavender, not lavender). She stood at the foot of the staircase looking up. The heavenly thing swept down to her and she broke into a cry.

"Oh, you're beautiful. You're beautiful."

Mrs. Fielding stopped her progress.

"So are you, you little darling."

She stooped quickly and kissed her, holding her tight to her breast, crushed down into the bed of the flower scent. Anne gave herself up, caught by the sweetness and the beauty.

"You rogue," said Adeline. "At last I've got you."

She couldn't bear to be repulsed, to have anything about her, even a cat or a dog, that had not surrendered.

vi

Every evening, soon after Colin's Nanna had tucked Anne up in her bed and left her, the door of the night nursery would open, letting a light in. When Anne saw the light coming she shut her eyes and burrowed under the blankets, she knew it was Auntie Adeline trying to be a mother to her. (You called them Auntie Adeline and Uncle Robert to please them, though they weren't relations.)

Every night she would hear Aunt Adeline's feet on the floor and her candle clattering on the chest of drawers, she would feel her hands drawing back the blankets and her face bending down over her. The mouth would brush her forehead. And she would lie stiff and still, keeping her eyes tight shut.

To-night she heard voices at the door and somebody else's feet going tip-toe behind Aunt Adeline's. Somebody else whispered "She's asleep."

That was Jerrold. Jerrold. She felt him standing beside his mother, looking at her, and her eyelids fluttered; but she lay still.

"She isn't asleep at all," said Aunt Adeline. "She's shamming, the little monkey."

Jerrold thought he knew why. He turned into the old nursery that was the schoolroom now, and found Eliot there, examining a fly's leg under his microscope. It was Eliot that he wanted..

"I say, you know, Mum's making a jolly mistake about that kid. Trying to go on as if she was Anne's mother. You can see it makes her sick. It would me, if my mother was dead."

Eliot looked as if he wasn't listening, absorbed in his fly's leg.

"Somebody's got to tell her."

"Are you going to," said Eliot, "or shall I?"

"Neither. I shall get Dad to. He'll do it best."

vii

Robert Fielding didn't do it all at once. He put it off till Adeline gave him his chance. He found her alone in the library and she had begun it.

"Robert, I don't know what to do about that child."

"Which child?"

"Anne. She's been here five weeks, and I've done everything I know, and she hasn't shown me a sc.r.a.p of affection. It's pretty hard if I'm to house and feed the little thing and look after her like a mother and get nothing. Nothing but half a cold little face to kiss night and morning.

It isn't good enough."