Free Let Me Alone by Anna Kavan Page A

romantic friendship. There was nothing emotional about their relationship. But a frankness, a freshness, an almost man-to-man breeziness, very free and easy. They teased one another and sharpened their wits upon each other. But there was a good deal of romance in their friendship. The mockery, the intellectual strife between them, did notdiminish it. The romance surrounded them like a force generated between them, so that the world around them seemed brighter, and gayer and fuller. So that whatever they did together was interesting and amusing. Sometimes they played childishly fantastic little games with the surface of life. And sometimes they talked seriously and with a sense of importance.
    ‘I’m sorry we’ve missed the war,’ Sidney said to Anna soon after the armistice had been signed.
    Anna was surprised. The war had not meant anything to her except an excuse for tedious restrictions. Ever since she had left Mascarat, Europe had been at war. She knew no other world.
    ‘Why?’ she asked, her clear eyes watching her friend. ‘It’s been a horribly unpleasant business.’
    ‘But how exciting!’ said Sidney. ‘Don’t you realize what a wonderful atmosphere there’s been in England all these four years? The change and excitement and all the old things coming to an end. I should have loved to have been in the thick of it all. And instead of that we’ve missed it – missed it by about two years.’
    That was like Sidney; that energetic interest in events, that desire for experience. Anna was different. She wanted to appreciate things, to understand them, but all in the abstract, so to speak, without actually experiencing them. And for that reason she was more interested in Sidney as an intelligence than as a personality. Sometimes that militant quality in Sidney, that aggressiveness, alienated her. It jarred upon her.
    But Sidney, for all her assertiveness, looked upon Anna with a kind of fascination. In spite of the teasing and the mockery and the man-to-man attitude, Sidney had subtly but definitely put herself in the humbler role. There wasthat curious hint of deprecation in her manner even while she mocked and swaggered. And a disguised, faithful devotion in her bright, clever-animal eyes.
    ‘You really are extremely intelligent,’ she said to Anna. ‘Far more intelligent than I am.’
    She was all devotion as she said it, and under the black, tilted eyebrows the amber-coloured eyes looked out soft with a peculiar romantic affection. But the next moment she was laughing again, laughing her sharp ironic laugh and swaggering off with the same derisive, detached expression as before; mocking herself and Anna and the whole world.
    Proud and diffident Sidney, with her protective aggressiveness, and her cynicism, and her admiration for the other girl which must always be hidden away. She had a burning attachment to Anna. And yet she was not quite sure that at the same time, in some portion of her brain, she didn’t despise her a little. Or perhaps pity her; which was much the same thing.
    Anna was going to Oxford in the autumn; to Somerville. She and Rachel had decided it between them, and Lauretta had been persuaded to agree. At the end of the Easter term Anna had already passed the necessary examinations and was eager to go. But she had to wait till the autumn. So a restlessness came upon her, a feeling of suspense. The summer months lay before her like an empty interval, pleasant enough, but without much significance. She was restless.
    Spring was already well on the way. A clear sky, with blue shadows on the low hills that had taken the place of mountains in her life. A few bright leaves poking up, and mauve and yellow heads of crocus in the grass.
    Anna was in her bedroom, trying on a hat that had just come by post. Lauretta was generous with presents of thiskind. Casually, Anna stood in front of the mirror looking at the hat which was made of fine straw with an uneven brim and a little fringe of softly