He now scarcely saw them except together; for they relentlessly chaperoned each other. He attended upon them, or more precisely he visited them, since Emma rarely stirred Abroad, in a manner which would not have disgraced the most solemn of Jane Austen's beaux. When in their company alcohol never passed his lips. He was sober, quiet, serviceable, docile, and, alas, chaste. It was at times incomprehensible to him how he had come, to this extent, to kiss the rod. He desired Lindsay no less than before. He knelt trembling to her physical presence. The magnetism, the tension between them had not slackened, and he apprehended with continually renewed pleasure her half-concealed excitement at his arrival. Yet this totally inexplicit, never-discussed, 'temporary solution' had lasted now for nearly a year and all three parties seemed to have settled into it with zest. Randall was well aware of the deliberation with which they weakened him, with which they turned his love-relation into a play-relation. Yet he felt strangely little resentment. The strains and paradoxes were thrills and pleasures, and he came even to delight in the convention whereby his love for Lindsay was supposed to be still a secret; and the nearest he could come to his satisfaction was the guilty enjoyment of Lindsay's dry-lipped kisses while Emma's stick tapped slowly across the next room. It was, in fact, a pleasure so extreme that he could sometimes feel that a total possession could give him no more.
Emma, although he now saw so much of her, remained obscure and still a little frightening. Emma was the centre-piece of the relationship, and it was here that the darkness was. Emma joined with Randall in flattering Lindsay, and with Lindsay in teasing Randall; but she was herself never either flattered or teased. She would sit there, rather plump in her flowery old-fashioned dresses, her short frizzy dark-grey hair standing out on either side of her sharp-nosed intelligent face, which seemed like that of a clever dog, and she would watch them with a morose benevolence, leaning forward on her silver-topped cane. F. rom the exact nature of the relation between Lindsay and Emma Randall's imagination shied away. But whenever they touched each other he felt the shock of the contact within himself. That too was pleasurable.
Sipping his tea, Randall contemplated Lindsay now, as she bent over her embroidery frame. She was wearing a green linen dress with a low square neck. The plaits of hair, with the docility of gold beaten into a close chain, coiled tightly about her head, emphasizing its roundness. The pain of physical desire, which was sometimes so sharp, was deliciously diffused now in an aching of his whole body. She raised her head and gave him a quiet solemn very conscious look. Emma was lost in a haze of cigarette smoke. The many clocks ticked in the quiet room. Randall was in heaven.
The situation often struck him in a strange way as an appeal to his intelligence, and this pleased could such a structure remain rigid; and at times he felt the sheer cleverness of Emma, Lindsay and himself, coiled like three great muscular snakes at the very centre of the edifice. Yet also love was its centre; and perhaps here cleverness was love. With the passion of the artist which he now increasingly felt himself to be he adored Lindsay's awareness, her exquisite sense of form, which was a sort of dignity of wit, a sense as it were of the movement and timing of life which made her like a great comedian. She was shapely and complete; and like a kaleidoscope, like a complex rose, her polychrome being fell into an authoritative pattern which proclaimed her free. With exhilaration Randall felt himself become light, light, able to rise at last into the airy world of the imagination, the world above the mess of morality, the world inhabited by those two angelic beings.
Yet there were weights. Randall could at times, in the midst of his curious enjoyment of his indulged frustration, feel a special gratitude to Emma for having so thoroughly 'swallowed' them. What, after all, could he have done, what would he have done? He could not have taken Lindsay away because, quite simply, he had not enough money. Some knowledge of her, which could not now be muted, told him that it would be idle to expect her to help him through some new beginning. The merits of his plays were still unrecognized; and he simply could not see himself starting again to build up, somewhere else in England, another rose nursery. He could not see Lindsay getting up at six and turning the earth herself as Ann had done.
In any case, there was still Ann and perhaps there would always be Ann. Pity for unloved Ann haunted Randall like a demon, preventing him from rising, preventing him from being free. Yet he had advanced a little, had he not, he had gained some ground. During the years of quarrelling, the years of irritation in that indifferent house, when they had torn each other and then wretchedly sought each other out because in their solitude there was no other consolation, it had seemed to Randall that nothing could ever alter, it would always be so. Even his love for Lindsay had made at first no impression on the futility of his life with Ann. But after his mother's death something new had seemed possible, and something new had indeed seemed to emerge from the solitary vigil which he had imposed upon himself. The period of meditation in his room, the abstention from Ann, the long hours of whisky and roses, the walks in the misty dawn among the dew-laden rose bushes to a chorus of newly wakened birds, out of all this had come some fresh strength, some breaking of the spell. After the monastic dignity of this period of retreat, the final scene could not be dwelt upon with satisfaction. How unfair he had been to Ann, how cunningly he had awaited a pretext, how careful and deliberate his anger had been, all this was known to Randall; though he could not altogether suppress a sense of almost technical pleasure in the success of the operation. Only he was sorry his father had been there. He was sorry to have seen his father ineffectual, frightened, resigned. He was sorry to have exhibited to him that most sordid moment of his own mechanism of change. More obscurely he respected and at moments envied the presence in Hugh of workable principles. His father's life had had dignity, had not degenerated into chaos. But for himself, principles in that sense were out of the question. It remained to be seen whether out of his present chaos some higher form would yet emerge.
Of course he had been monstrously unfair to Ann; yet the unfairness was only something superficial and immediate, and in a more remote, more complex sense there had been justice. He could never have treated Ann rationally, he could never have explained to her what his grievances were. She would not have understood. She would have stood there, strong in her kind of honesty, that honest simplicity which destroyed the footholds of his imagination and which made her for him so deadeningly structureless, so utterly lacking in significance; and she would not have understood. As he pictured her thus he saw her indeed as the incarnate spirit of the Negative. The fact was that she was his destroyer, and some ultimate instinct of self preservation initiated and justified his proceedings against her. Yet he pitied her; and he knew that he had not even now left Grayhallock for good. He was bound to the place, still by Ann, by the pilgrimage of the rose year which he could not yet do without, and by Miranda; by Miranda most of all, the heart of that mystery, the green central button of that rose: Miranda, whom he had seen asleep in the last moments before he left the house, the pointed strands of her blazing hair fallen across her cheek, and a doll open-eyed beside her on the pillow.