'Why did you love me, I wonder? I was never, particularly faun-like!

'Heaven knows. Perhaps I only really woke up to myself later. Perhaps Felix woke me. Yet I did love you; yes, you were the great thing. Wasn't I unlucky?

'Emma, said Hugh, 'let me look after you properly. I wouldn't bother you. You could have your Jocelyn. But please let me somehow take you over. I know I don't deserve it, but I do love you. Only I must have some sort of status and security. I can't go on like in these last weeks. Just say in principle yes and we'll find a way to be together. He leaned forward, touching her skirt.

'Ah, my dear, she said, 'wouldn't we be ridiculous, two old people shouting endearments at each other?

'Emma, let us be together, let us have some reality together at last.

'It is too late for reality, she said. 'It is better that you should dream about me. Why spoil your dream? Keep it intact till the end. I'm terribly ill-natured really and not to be lived with or even near. I gave poor Lindsay a bad time, words and blows. Yes, I used to beat her. Now she's beating Randall! Could I have some more tea, if it's not too cold?

'I don't understand. Do you — want me to remain as I am — in love? He still clawed her dress.

'Yes, if you can. I'd adore it! If we must ape something in the past let it not be the marriage you were too cowardly and I not clever enough to get. Let it be some innocent dream love, a courtly love, something never realized, all dreams. And Penn shall be our symbolic child. And you can telephone me and send me flowers. It will be quite like being seventeen again. Won't that be youth enough, restoration enough, redemption enough?

'You cheat me, he said in a voice of anguish, 'you deny me.

'Hugh, stop believing in magic. You are just like poor Randall after all, who thinks he can conjure up pleasure domes and caves of ice just by boarding a plane and sending off a few letters.

'But — how will you manage?

'I shall manage. I shall be happy. I shall be beating Jocelyn.

'But at least, he said, 'you will talk to me more. We shall have real speech, you will tell me about yourself?

Emma' laughed. 'I doubt if such tales would be suitable for young Jocelyn's ears.

'You mean, he took it in, 'that you won't see, me alone?

'Well, young Jocelyn will be here, won't she? said Emma. 'I shall keep her a prisoner as did Lindsay. Only more so! She gently extricated the fabric of her dress and drew it down about her knees.

Hugh leaned forward and took her chin in one hand and turned her face towards him. With his other hand he grasped her shoulder. The gesture had an effect of violence.

She let him hold her so for a minute, and then shrugged him off.

'You see how much I need a chaperone!

'So I'm to take Randall's place?

'How prettily you put it. You're to take Randall's place.

He let out a long sigh and stood up. 'I wonder if I shall be able to stand it.

', If you can stand it, come. And if not, not.

'But you look so sad —’

'Ah, I'm not sad for now, my sweet, I'm sad for then.

Chapter Thirty-five

THE wind took one of the dust-bin lids and rolled it clattering across the yard. Ann pursued. The little paved area behind the kitchen, bright with dandelions, was damp from the recent shower. Some washing which Ann had hung out and forgotten jerked and dripped. She retrieved the lid and returned to the waste-paper bin out of which she was filling her bucket as usual to restart the soaked bonfire. She packed the paper firmly into the bottom of the bucket and held it there while she scrabbled with the other hand to pick up some fIat stones to weigh the paper down. Already several white fragments were dancing about the yard, joining some dead leaves which the trees, despairing already in their summer fullness, had surrendered to the confident wind. The sky was a thick grey suffused with points of gold from the hidden sun. There would be a rainbow somewhere. Ann crossed the road and started down the hill.

Miranda was away staying with a school friend. She seemed to have escaped the measles. Penn had behaved as Miranda predicted. He had waited till the last moment before the date of his plane, and had then written to ask Ann to send his things. He was very grateful and apologetic, but simply could not manage to get down to Grayhallock to say good-bye. Ann had packed his belongings with a heavy heart. She included the veteran car book, which was still in his room. He had himself, apparently, taken the box of soldiers back to Steve's room. She could not find the German dagger anywhere, though she spent a long time searching for it. Miranda said she had mislaid it.

The Swanns had departed on holiday with their caravan. She had waved them off, a boisterous business-like family party, organized and conducted laughingly away by the purposeful vigour of the Swann boys, who behaved like junior officers on a combined operation. She had been asked to join them but had refused, and not only because Clare's invitation had been less than irresistibly pressing. She feared to see, at present, too much of Douglas in case her own blank need for affection, for the most elementary' consolation, should make him positively fall in love. She had hoped that Hugh might come to keep her company, but though he often rather guiltily telephoned he still did not seem able to leave town. So she remained solitary at Grayhallock except for the now frequent company of Nancy Bowshott, with whom she picked and preserved the soft fruit and helped Bowshott with the endless spraying. Drawing close to, Nancy, she guessed one day, hardly now with surprise, that Nancy was grieving for Randall.

Ann tired herself out each day by with physical work. She lived in exhaustion, unhappiness and muddle as in a now accustomed medium, flopping in it like some creature in the mud. She was still stunned by her own action, stunned partly by the fact of having acted at all. It seemed to her that she had not done such a thing in years. She had become quite unaccustomed to action an-d utterly unaccustomed to reflection upon action; and when she attempted the latter she found herself dreadfully unable to determine what she had done and why. She ought, she felt, to know this. Yet looking with desperate glances back over the expanse of her conduct she could not discern where the actions lay at all or what, amid the general drift, they positively were. She had acted, she had altered the world; but how, why, even when?

Looking back on her last interview with Felix, Ann felt that it had simply been a muddle. Yet deep in the muddle there was, there must have been, some decisive form. What had most struck her, before seeing him, as essential had been her image of Randall returning, Randall searching for her, Randall crying for her, and not finding her. She had been, at this, overwhelmed by a tide of pity and compassion for Randall, a tide she could only in the end say of love for Randall. This feeling. which was in its way blinding and suffocating, seemed to make it impossible for her to say yes to Felix: made it impossible for her to say yes then, and if not then, then not at all, as Felix must not be made to spoil his life by perhaps fruitless waiting.

That much, before he came, had seemed, if not 'clear', at least irresistible. Yet Ann had summoned him. Shoe had not, as she might have done, told him her decision by letter. What could this mean but that there had really been, as yet, no decision? She had perhaps however vaguely relied upon him for a certain hardness, a certain grimness, something that would lend, to the other side, a sense of fatality. She had perhaps half hoped for an exorcism, for the removal, somehow, of that overwhelming image of Randall: to have her view unravelled and shown to be wrong. The interview had seemed to her, she now sometimes thought, while it was going on, like a trial run, like something incomplete, something symbolic, a symbolic sacrifice. She was suffering for Randall; but when she had suffered enough, when both she and Felix had suffered enough, the suffering would end. She would go the whole circle of suffering and at its close she would be able to take Felix in her arms. That was what had driven her on through Marie-Laure, even to her ultimate words of denial.