'Then you must go, Hugh, said Mildred. 'That's my advice. She rose awkwardly and began to grope for her things.
'Oh, you're not leaving? he said, coming to her and fumbling with her coat, crumpling it inconclusively in his hands and laying it back on the Ann of the chair.
Standing now, Mildred was very close to him. She could have reached up and put her hands on his shoulders in a way she had often imagined. 'Yes, I must be off.
'Please don't go, said Hugh, 'please have dinner with me.
'I can't. I've got to be somewhere else.
'Oh dear, he said. 'I've so much enjoyed talking to you, I've enjoyed every moment. I hope I haven't shocked or annoyed you, Mildred? I assure you I didn't intend all this to come out.
'That's all right, my dear, she said. She pulled her coat on. 'It was 'Very interesting.
'Well, at least let me get you a taxi'
'All right. Hugh, you will go and see Emma, won't you? You must have courage, you know.
'Bless you, Mildred, he said. 'You've given it to me. Yes. I'll go. Bless you.
Mildred smiled at him. 'You have quite a passionate nature, Hugh dear. I wouldn’t have suspected it.
'Have I? He seemed pleased, and pressed her hand with gratitude and cordiality.
Chapter Eleven
HUGH stood looking down the long corridor that led to Emma's door. He told himself, twenty-five years ago I was here. Only 'I' and 'here' refused to do their work. He put out one hand and touched the wall. The intermittent babble inside his head had this morning risen to a crescendo and he doubted his ability to hear anything that might be said. He also felt slightly giddy. He waited. He had, of course, arrived too early.
Hugh had been, he thought, when he saw Mildred, in two minds.
His condition of trouble about Emma had increased steadily and alarmingly. It really had the air of being a disease. It was not like thinking and coming to conclusions, thinking further and coming to more conclusions. What indeed it was that was increasing so was something which his mind could not at all confront. It was sometimes like a great cloud emanating from him and surrounding him, a new form of his being, something almost physical. It was not regret for the past, it was not even exactly yearning for Emma: these were far too like thoughts. Whereas what was the case was opaque, it had no reflective qualities. What it was indeed was just — somehow — Emma, and nothing else; and this nonsensical way was the only way he could put it.
All the same, he kept his head, and beside, or within, this great balloon that tugged him off the ground a sort of monologue went on, though in a rather high-pitched tone, as if the Voice of Reason had become slightly hysterical. He knew perfectly well that conditions such as the one he was in — he did not give it a name — were temporary. He could weary out the inflated thing that so pulled him About, he could weary it out just by keeping his feet firmly planted and directing his attention elsewhere. He could be sane in a week, if he really wanted to be, he told himself; and he reflected that his condition undoubtedly had more than he had at first realized to do with his simply being tired and overwrought. He had so much looked forward, had quite childishly looked forward, to having a holiday when poor Fanny was dead. It sounded a very callous way to put it, but there it was, and it was perfectly natural. He had, since his retirement from the Civil Service, had no opportunities for self-indulgence, since Fanny's illness had followed so soon after. He had promised himself many things, reading, painting, travel, the untrammelled conversation of friends: these things, like toys put away in a cupboard, awaited him still. His freedom awaited him still.
It would indeed be an act of gratuitous folly to, as he had put it to Mildred, make trouble for himself at this stage. He knew nothing of Emma's present arrangements or state of mind and shrank from any attempt to 'make inquiries' about her. To try to reestablish any sort of 'relationship' however vague with Emma would be likely to cause pain and confusion and nothing else. And of course he would make himself ridiculous: though this thought in fact troubled him comparatively little, and he had been sincere in saying to Mildred that at his age one outgrows certain considerations of dignity. He was well aware that: his selective memory retained for him, from that strange episode of the far past, only what was joyful and what was tragic. What it suppressed was that Emma was a tough and difficult customer and not by any means well adapted to get on with someone like himself. When, moreover, he reflected on the curious beauty which, after all, that memory retained, worked as it had been into a self-contained crystal sphere of intense experience, he felt at moments that it would be a pity to risk spoiling it: to risk spoiling it by a painful, embarrassing or irritating sequel, or worse still, by a boring one. For the most depressing thought was the thought that if he and Emma were to meet now the meeting might have no significance at all.
The trip to India was obviously a god-send. Two days out from Southampton and he would be in another universe: at times he thought, two hours out from Southampton. A long time away, packed with unforeseeable experiences which would compel thought and fancy, filling his mind with bright new images, would quite cleanse him of these weird cobwebs: he thus attempted to see his so improbably reviving feelings as the fabric of some dreadful reanimation, partaking of the unnatural, unnerving, almost evil. It was too soon after Fanny's death to be mad in this way. It was in any case, at any time, improper for an elderly man to be mad in this way. He would go, he thought, with Mildred, with solid, sensible, unemotional Mildred, to the ends of the earth: and there, at the ends of the earth, he would re-join his freedom. He set his mind upon this rendezvous, and relied upon Mildred to keep him to it. Only when Mildred had said, 'You want to go and see her', all that structure had dissolved. It had been but a dream structure in any case, raised up to mask the determination, the rapacious need, which he had had all along to see.
Emma again.
He looked at his watch. He was still more than ten minutes too early. He had made the arrangement by telephone. He had not spoken to Emma directly, but to her secretary who had said yes, Miss Sands would see Mr Peronett, and would he kindly come at five o'clock, and that he was not to knock at the door but to come straight into the drawing-room.
As Hugh raised his head to look again at the distant green door he saw to his extreme dismay that it was opening. No votary surprised by the real presence of the goddess had a more potent urge to fall senseless to the ground or preferably to sink through it. Hugh took a step back, wondering if he had time to get away round the comer of the corridor without being seen. Then a sense of the stupid undignified nature of such a flight made him reverse his movement, and he began to walk very slowly towards the door, hoping that it was not evident that he had only been set in motion by seeing it open.
Two figures issued from' the door and began to glide along the rather dark corridor towards him. As they grew larger he saw that one of them was a very handsome young woman and that the other was his son. The shock of seeing Randall in that context at that moment was considerable and Hugh's immediate feeling was one of sheer confusion, of having made some dreadful mistake. Of course he had not forgotten that Randall knew Emma. But in the picture of his own dealings with Emma, Randall had had no place, not deliberately excluded so much as automatically irrelevant and out of mind. Hugh was hurt by Randall's proximity to his own moment of truth. It was an intrusion.
Randall was now saying something to the girl, and they slightly quickened their pace as they. approached him. It was plain that there was going to be no introduction, and for a moment it looked as if the advancing pair were simply going to sweep him out of the way. How they did get past each other was not, in Hugh's memory of it afterwards, very clear. He must have stood aside. Randall and the girl, as if sucked violently through a tube, held their course. He had a rapid picture of his son's face turned towards him, perfectly bland, saying Good evening. He had an equally rapid but detailed picture of the girl's golden hair, and her also somewhat golden eyes regarding him with an expression of amused curiosity. Then they were gone and he was alone in the corridor some ten paces from Emma's door.