He would never never understand her. He looked surreptitiously at his watch.
Chapter Twenty-eight
ANN walked slowly up the hill along the grass path between the gallicas. Behind her the thick white tower of smoke from the bonfire rose straight up into the air. It was a still day, not raining, but overcast and heavy, under a yellow sky. Ann had been lighting the bonfire, taking from the stables one of the buckets of tom paper kept for this purpose. Nothing was wasted at Grayhallock. And Nancy Bowshott was well trained in the segregation of the contents of waste-paper baskets. Now as Ann mounted she looked on either side of her under the red prickly arching stems to see if she could catch sight of Hatfield. Bowshott had reported seeing him earlier that morning, in the field just below the nursery, devouring a young rabbit.
There was, of course, no word from Randall. A friend of Clare Swann's had reported seeing him in Rome lunching in an expensive open-air restaurant with Lindsay, and Clare had passed this on, with scandalized exclamations, to Ann. The absurd intelligence had hurt her terribly of course, if Randall was in Rome with Lindsay, obviously he would be lunching with her at expensive open-air restaurants. But the vague words had stirred her imagination, and she saw the trailing canopy of vines, the cloudless radiant sky, and beneath in a dappled shade the lovers leaning together.
Ann's mind was out of her control. She had never had this sensation before and it afflicted her with a sort of sea-sickness. She was racing somewhere so fast that she could no longer focus her eyes. Her images of those she loved, her image of herself, seemed lurid, inflated and blurred. Everything was getting monstrously larger and hazier at the same time. She wished that she could rest; but the machine only whirled the faster, dazzling her and inducing a continual nausea.
Ann was by now dreadfully in love with Felix. From the moment when, after his own declaration, she had realized with a shocked surprise that she was ready to fall in love, the descent of her mind into love had taken place with the power of an avalanche. There was nothing between her and a total love of Felix, no barrier, no resting place. Once she had seen the possibility, the whole thing had been there, and with such an authority and completeness that she could now convince herself that she had loved Felix for years. Certainly the thing had been long preparing; and for all the madness of the present moment, she knew that it existed not as something crazy or trivial, but as a deep belonging of her whole personality. She fully laid claim to, she fully inhabited, her love of Felix.
That she was in this extremity she had so far concealed from him, by an avoidance of long or intimate talks, and by a partly simulated concentration upon Miranda. She had even managed, in Miranda's absence, to keep her daughter with her as a topic of conversation, and in this role as a sort of chaperone. She feared some terrible breakdown with Felix, some hurling of herself into his arms or at his feet; and her efforts to preserve an erect posture made her positively stiff. For she knew very well that great as was the sum of her love and of his love at this moment, any such scene would increase it a hundredfold. And she still did not, in the most fundamental terms, know what she was up to.
For the fact was that, keeping pace demonically with her love for Felix, there had developed in her a dark new passion for Randall. It was as if one were the infernal mirror image of the other; and at times when she woke from a troubled sleep, not sure which of the two she had been dreaming of, she almost felt the loves to be interdependent. Being in love with Randall in this way was something entirely painful and with a brutality of its own, as if such' a love could not but hurt its object. It was quite unlike her old romantic love for the young Randall, or her steady married love for her husband. She was not sure indeed how she recognized it as love at all. It was a kind of mutual haunting. It made her frightened; and because she suspected at times that it was simply her resentment and her jealousy run mad, she tried not to indulge it. She began to need help.
Felix had attempted to give her, and she had attempted to give herself, the sense of there being plenty of time. But she knew that this was just a reassuring fiction. There was, really, very little time. It was not just that at her age, at Felix's age, it was senseless to talk of waiting for years. There was something in the situation itself which demanded a quick solution. She did not doubt either Felix's love or her own, nor had she in general any sense that she ought to send him off to a younger woman. Her own appetite for Felix, with a rejuvenating sharpness and authority, made her feel herself a proper enough object. Soberly, she did not think it likely that Randall would return.
She had been for years unwilling to see that Randall hated her, she had been unwilling to use that word even to herself. But lately she had been compelled to see it, to see the strength and a little to understand the nature of that hatred. Randall saw her as the destroyer, as the devil.
These considerations, however, were very far from adding up to an answer. There were, she felt at times, insuperable barriers between herself and Felix. There was Miranda. The child worshipped her father. Would she tolerate a step-father? Ann had had experience of Miranda's will. Even if this difficulty were overcome there was another, vaster, harder: the Christian view of marriage. Ann had always been a member of the Church of England, zealous, serious, on the whole undoubting, but a little vague about dogma. She had never reflected before upon this particular question. She did not know how to find out what she thought about it and she was afraid' of finding out. She thought that she had it in her to defy authority; but defying her own conscience would be another matter. As yet her conscience, lost somewhere in the uproar of her feelings, had made no pronouncement.
Ann was troubled too by the existence of Marie-Laure Auboyer.
She wished that she had not asked Felix for her name; pale and silent now behind the name, like a funeral effigy, stood the' figure, both pathetic and menacing, of the French girl, whom Ann found herself thinking of both as a rival and as a victim. She had learnt of her existence some time ago from Mildred and had gathered, and felt some quiet pain at the news, that Felix was greatly in love. Mildred had mentioned this in some context of deploring foreigners; and had obviously at once regretted her indiscretion. She had been at Grayhallock twice in the last week, on each occasion in a' state of listlessness out of which she only roused herself in an effort to efface the impression she had then made. In the course of those attempts she let it slip out, perhaps imagining that Ann knew already, that Marie-Laure had gone to Delhi. It was another reason for haste. Felix must if necessary be dispatched to India before it became too late.
Ann began to be tormented by a terrible sense of urgency. She tried to think clearly, especially about the matter of Christian marriage. But whenever she tried to order her thoughts there rose huge and scarlet before her the Randall-demon, her new and terrible relation to her husband: and she knew that before she could move towards a decision that ghost must be somehow laid. She wondered at moments if she should not talk to Felix about the whole thing; but she realized that to do this would be to prejudge an issue about which she would wish to have decided coolly and rationally. As the situation was at the moment balanced, any move she made would be likely to have decisive weight. If she took another step now in the direction of Felix she was lost. Ann decided to talk to Douglas Swann.