Chapter Twenty-seven

IT WAS of course Mildred's idea that Miranda should stay on at Seton Blaise: and once suggested the notion seemed to please everybody. It pleased Miranda because it represented a holiday, it pleased Felix because it represented a chance to get to know the child and because Ann must be constantly at the house, it pleased Ann (he hoped) for the same reasons, it pleased Humphrey because it left Penn in need of consolation, and it pleased Mildred because she had thought of it. Only Penn was cross.

The doctor, summoned at once, had declared the damaged ankle to be severely sprained and had prescribed rest and quiet; more danger was to be apprehended from shock than from anything else, he privately explained to them. Miranda herself, cheerful at first, was established upon the big settee in the library, and from there lorded it over the household, consuming during the day fantastic quantities of coffee, biscuits, chocolate, cakes and ice-cream, as well as her usual meals.

Felix was in a strange state of mind. He was by now very much in love. He observed with mingled feelings of delight and dismay the terrifyingly rapid alteration of his (as it now seemed in retrospect) gentle and sensible love for Ann into a passion which shook him with stormy gusts and left him trembling. By declaring his love he had completely changed the world. He was a different man, she a different Ann, and the place they inhabited was not the same. Yet in the midst of the new landscape they constantly apprehended, in ways which seemed to puzzle them both, their old knowledge of each other; and upon this, when their steps faltered, they laid a steadying hand.

On the whole, for Felix, joy predominated over fear. Falling in love is a rejuvenating process, and he surrendered himself to it as to a delightful course of treatment. He had, too, the reassuring sense of an interval during which forces were working on his side. He had cast a stone and now watched the ripples. He had, at moments, gaped at his audacity. Yet his haste, which seemed like a sort of violence, also seemed to him to merit, to compel, its reward. He had a sense of acting upon Anne at a distance; and his powerful love, making him feel a giant, filled him with confidence in his cause.

Chronologically speaking, Felix was completely disoriented. He had told Ann, which now seemed a positive and also an absurd lie, that he expected nothing. He had said that he did not want» to rush her, and had implied that he would wait for years if necessary. He did indeed at times try to picture himself as patient, and as settling down for a long siege. But his forces were constantly demoralized by the idea of an immediate capture, and he caught himself more than once with the expectation that the whole thing could be settled in months or even weeks. He tried not to think too much about what Ann was thinking. Tacitly, for the present, they avoided intense conversations and were indeed not often alone together. But Felix could not help watching her for signs of love, and at moments when their eyes met he felt he could not be mistaken about the message. He felt, could almost see, powers within her working for him. He waited; and as a result of his dislocated time scheme could do nothing, could plan nothing. He prolonged his leave and procrastinated about his job. He did not write to Marie-Laure; and decided after a while that his silence, functioning instead of a letter, was the right answer.

After a day or two of Mildred's bright idea the arrangement began to seem a little less inspired and to afflict Felix, in the midst of his hopes, with a certain immediate nervous melancholy. The weather changed, became colder. Rain battered the garden and a gloomy yellowish light lurked at the windows. Lamps were turned on within. A fire was lit in the library and Miranda shivered and called for rugs. Ann came over regularly, driving the Vauxhall through the spitting downpour. She would not let Felix fetch her. She came, and she sat with Miranda in the library, sometimes with Felix there, sometimes not. She seemed exceptionally absorbed in her child and Felix had an unnerving sense, even when he was subsequently alone with Ann, of being somehow chaperoned by that mysterious little nymph. Ann was depressed and jumpy; yet she gave him, by wordless looks, by pressures of the hand, and by an increasing helplessness and reliance upon him in various practical matters, enough encouragement.

Mildred seemed thoroughly depressed and moody too. Having suggested the retention of Miranda, she would have nothing to do with looking after the child, of whom she privately professed dislike, and left the task entirely to the embarrassed Felix. It was as if Mildred had suddenly given up hope and consented to become older. She looked older, frailer, less interested in life. There was only, through Ann, the most perfunctory news of Hugh, who could now spare no time at all from his London activities, and limited his evident concern with his granddaughter's accident to the dispatch from?Hatehards? of a complete set of the novels of Jane Austen in a modem leather-bound edition. Mildred seemed to have no spirit left even to be curious about Felix's progress, and they now talked rarely. She had been prepared to launch him with a brave face, but not to follow his subsequent vicissitudes. Her excitement about his match seemed to have faded, and she left him, after so much encouragement, to paddle his own canoe. She withdrew, and he missed her.

Humphrey was also depressed, Felix had always, from the very beginning of his sister's marriage, found it a trifle difficult to believe in Humphrey. He found his brother-in-law mysterious, in some ways substanceless, in some ways too good to be true. There was something in him he admired and to which he found it hard to give a name: perhaps it was Humphrey's courage, or an artistic aloofness from conventional life. His brother-in-law had particularly taken his breath away at the time of the catastrophe, which Humphrey had weathered with a calmness and irony which made him seem a man truly superior to fortune. Yet Humphrey was also, for Felix, a nothing. It was partly that Felix could not really believe in homosexual love. Mildred had many a time, defending her husband out of the curious deep attachment which bound them together, tried to make him see the seriousness of the matter; and that Humphrey often suffered Felix was prepared to believe and could even see. But be could not envisage Humphrey's bizarre relationships as having any possible connexion with the human heart; and there was, in his picture of Mildred's husband, a chilling void at the centre.

That Humphrey was suffering now was indeed evident enough; and Felix took Mildred's word for it that it was because of young Penn; though his imagination, when it occasionally had time to spare for Humphrey's troubles, could do little with the almost ludicrous idea. Humphrey visited Grayhallock several times during Miranda's sojourn at Seton Blaise, and returned each time with a long face. He and Mildred drew together in a private sombre communion which excluded Felix. They were often to be discovered, almost like lovers, holding hands and having conversations which terminated abruptly on Felix's arrival. He could not conjecture the nature of their complicity and when he wondered what they were talking about he found himself shuddering. Eventually Humphrey took himself off to London and Mildred retired morosely to her room.

Miranda, after a day or two of rather feverish elation, joined herself to the general gloom. She seemed incapable of reading anything except the newspaper, and after remarking upon the extreme pliancy of their covers, took no further interest in Hugh's Jane Austens. She lay for hours huddled upon the settee with a rug over her, staring out at the rain, and consoling herself with snacks. Someone, usually Felix, had to come and make conversation with her. She seemed to him ill in some indefinable way, and, in consultation with Ann, he asked the doctor to call again. Ann thought she might be sickening for German measles, but the doctor could find no symptoms, spoke again of shock, and departed cheerfully after accepting a glass of sherry.