'What is it? said Emma.
'It's Mildred Finch, said Ann. 'She's just arrived with her brother.
'Felix Meecham! said Emma. 'Why, I was in love with him too, once upon a time.
'You in love with Felix! said Ann, turning in amazement. 'You too? She realized too late her misunderstanding and the suggestion which her words carried.
Emma laughed. 'Well, for about four days, you know. One can be in love for four days. It was long ago, when I stayed with them once, and he was a boy scarcely older than Penny. I was very sad about something at the time — well, about Hugh. And Felix consoled me. Quite unconsciously, you know. He just was, and that consoled me. He was an exquisite boy.
She got up and joined Ann at the window. The group was still by the car. Mildred was talking to Hugh and Humphrey was talking to Penn. Miranda had got hold of one of Felix's hands and was tugging him. He was laughing.
'You loved Felix, said Ann. She looked out at him laughing there With Miranda. Then he cast an anxious look at the house. Tears came up in Ann's eyes and began to pour down her cheeks. She turned away from the window with an exclamation and buried her face in her handkerchief. 'Ah, said Emma. And then, 'Tiens! She followed Ann and put an arm round her shoulder. 'There, there, my child. You go and do the lunch. You have been patient with an inquisitive old reptile. I shall go out and greet my oId friend Mildred Finch. Yes, I think I shall join them now. She will be pleased to see me!
Chapter Seventeen
'BUT what was she doing there? asked Mildred for the tenth time. 'Sort of sentimental journey, I suppose, said Felix. 'Cheese, Mildred?
They were sitting over lunch at Felix's flat in Ebury Street. Felix had prepared the meal. He prided himself on certain simple accomplishments. There had been pate de foie gras, a spanish omelette with an excellent salad, and now a good selection of cheeses with celery and various biscuits in a big tin. A bottle of Lynch-Gibbon Nuits de Young 1955 had been almost finished.
'Sentimental journey pooh! said Mildred. 'Is the Camembert ripe? No, well I think I'll have some of the Cornish cream cheese. Mildred helped herself to cheese and spent some time selecting a biscuit. As Felix was gloomily silent she went on, 'She seems to have got poor old Hugh back into her clutches.
'I wouldn't exaggerate that, Mildred, said Felix. 'You're such a schemer yourself, you're a bit too ready to attribute schemes to other people.
'Well, somebody's got to do some scheming, said Mildred. 'Or let's call it planning, shall we? As you won't raise a finger to help yourself, dear boy, I have to try to help you. And then I'm accused of scheming!
'I'm not accusing you of anything! said Felix irritably, cutting himself a piece of Stilton. He had in fact been very displeased with Mildred when he had learnt that she had, without consulting him, visited Ann and invited her to Seton Blaise. He had, about her refusal to come, mixed feelings. He certainly had a horror of seeming in any way to press or pursue. He was satisfied that Ann perfectly understood his sentiments; and for the present he preferred to wait and see.
He was, concerning Emma Sands, not quite as untroubled as he pretended to his sister to be. Emma had always seemed to him an exotic and slightly dangerous figure. He well remembered her curious brief attachment to him, of which he had been, without showing it, perfectly aware at the time; and he recalled with a mixture of aversion and fascination how she had kissed him when she departed. He had scarcely seen her since then, but she was the sort of person one remains aware of. He had felt dismay at finding her, so unexpectedly, at Grayhallock; and he agreed with Mildred in thinking, however irrationally, that she was up to no good. What no good she was up to he could not conceive; but he saw her obscurely as a threat to Ann.
He was additionally distressed by a dreadful thing which had happened, and of which he had said nothing to Mildred. Mildred had persuaded him against his better judgement to accompany her and Humphrey on the visit to Grayhallock, and he «cursed himself for not having had the sense to stay away. Emma had cornered him soon after his arrival there, before he had even caught a glimpse of Ann, and had made him accompany her down the hill as far as the roses. Then, as they stood there, looking at the scraggy multi-coloured lines of hybrid teas, she had suddenly intimated to him that Ann had confided in her concerning a sentimental understanding between Ann and himself. Felix had been so taken aback that he had made no denial, and his behaviour must have served as a confirmation of what Emma could only have surmised; for he realized almost immediately afterwards that Ann could not possibly have confided in Emma. Felix saw that he had been fooled, and he felt with pain that something sacred had been profaned, something delicate had been prematurely named, and something precious and fragile made known in a dangerous quarter: for whatever Emma might think about Ann's feelings, his own must, in his confusion, have been made fairly evident. Emma had certainly had a field day. But to Mildred, from whom he would never have heard the end of it, he said nothing of this.
Felix was well aware of his foolishness in having made of his quiet love for Ann, during these last years, a sort of home; and he did not rate as high as Mildred did, indeed he did not rate at all, his chances of ever now having Ann. Ann, when he first met her, was already Randall's wife, and he» had in the earlier time regarded her with an admiring affection which was in no way out of the ordinary. She had seemed to him, somehow, the ideal English woman, and he had been used to say vaguely to himself that he would like to marry someone like her. The years passed, and it became unobtrusively evident that Ann was not happily married; and with an increasing interest in the situation Felix began to realize that what he wanted was not someone like Ann, but Ann. It was of course, he realized, a most improper ambition as well as a foolish one. The fact that a woman's husband is thoroughly unsatisfactory — and Felix regarded Randall as a four-letter man of the first order — does not justify others in paying their attentions to her. Ann was married, and Felix, from the depths of his conventional honourable soul, took the full measure of the great institution which confronted him. He could not, however, at any point quite make up his mind to sheer off. He was fairly certain that Ann in some undefined way cared for him, even perhaps, however vaguely, needed him. He watched with pity and with fascination, and at last with hope, the progressive?degringolade? of Randall’s relations with his wife. He asked no questions about the future. He waited. And he made of his strange friendship with Ann a place of security, a sort of permanent house, an English house for a wandering man, a place where his valued things could be stored in safety. He had come to depend on this.
Felix was not as innocent of sexual experience as his clever sister, with a rare naivety which rather touched Felix, seemed to imagine. He had known, in various parts of the world, plenty of women. These relationships, with something of the brutality of the soldier and the complacency of the sahib, he made comparatively little of, though he was sometimes troubled by general pangs of conscience concerning fornication. Felix was a church-goer and a communicant, maintaining the unreflective unemotional traditional Christianity in which he had been brought up, and which was vaguely connected in his mind with the Brigade and the Queen. He felt he ought not to go to bed with women he was not married to; yet when he was seriously tempted he usually succumbed, especially in hot climates. But in some separate place in his mind he had kept his intention to marry, in the end, an English girl; an intention which gradually merged into his rather hopeless attachment to Ann.