Peronett grandson now. The name would live on only as the name of a rose.
'All the same, children are so sensitive — He's a funny little boy. I shall miss him when he's gone back.
Yes, thought Hugh, you are lonely, you are lonely, poor Ann. He looked at Ann's greenish-yellowish eyes, widened now and misted with sad thoughts. He apprehended her with what he knew was but a perfunctory pity and but a vague good will, poor Ann incarcerated here with spiteful mysterious Randall, and only her enemies Nancy Bowshott and Clare Swann for company. How soon, he began to wonder, could he decently go back to London?
The sense of unhappiness at Grayhallock had been, since his return there, almost intolerable to him. The house was a melancholy one at the best of times, and had always seemed to him, if not exactly hostile to Ann and Randall, certainly indifferent to them. It had never, he felt, taken them altogether seriously. It had known quite other things, and there were times, especially at night, when one could feel it thinking about them. Grayhallock was only partly an old house, it had few pretensions to beauty, and such pretensions as it had to grandeur were now gentle and absurd. The long central portion of the house with its tall windows and yellow stucco and wide semicircle of steps dated from the early eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it had been acquired by a linen manufacturer of vast wealth from County Tyrone, who had given it its present name and a pair of lateral battlemented towers. He had also added an ornate glass porch over the steps, a vast mushroom-shaped conservatory, and a red brick kitchen annexe: excrescences which, in spite of Hugh' s protests, Ann and Randall had never seen fit to remove. While within, the house always seemed to Hugh to be both dark and damp, centred, as round a vast atrium, about the cold stone-flagged still-room, full of rain-soaked overcoats and rows of muddy Wellingtons.
'Well, that's that, said Ann. She put the last garment on to the neat pile and patted it. 'Now I must find Miranda and tell her to change for church. Thanks so much for helping me, Hugh.
Ann's Christian piety, though doctrinally a little vague, was unwavering, and, Hugh conjectured, unreflective. Randall, who did not share it, tolerated it; but had been much less ready, as he put it, to see his daughter 'godded'. Miranda, however, to the surprise of some, though in so many ways her father's little girl, had so far continued firmly in the faith of her mother. Hugh himself, undramatically and again unreflectively, had no faith. Religion lay far behind him with things he had forgotten.
He got up with relief and followed Ann in the direction of the drawing-room. As he emerged into the corridor he apprehended, like a cold breeze, the presence of Randall in the house. He wondered, as he felt it, with such a presage of unpleasantness to come, blow upon him, with what icy authority it must now be touching the shrinking soul of Randall's wife.
The drawing-room was a long room with three big windows hollowed and upholstered with shabby chintz window-seats. Beside the front porch, it also had the view of the beech-fringed lawn. The lines of roses were out of sight now below the hill, and between the towering beeches there was only visible the blue and white swiftly moving sky which before a brisk north-west wind was descending across the pallid chequered Marsh in the direction of Dungeness and the twenty miles distant sea. The room, which apart from Randall's bedroom was the only 'serious' room in the house, was pleasant enough, its panelling a faded green, its furniture of a battered elegance, old miscellaneous 'finds' in lesser antique shops. The thick fawn carpet was scattered with a dim glow of threadbare rugs, which although 'if perfect' would be treasures, were now almost impossibly, manifestly, imperfect. A huge rosewood bookcase held the family library: rarely disturbed now since the younger Peronetts were not great readers.
Miranda was curled in one of the window-seats with three of her dolls propped up opposite to her. She was raising her finger as if to admonish one of them, and paid no attention to the new arrivals. Hugh was permanently disconcerted by his granddaughter. He could never, for instance, decide how far to humour her air of childishness. Miranda had always seemed younger than her age, and yet managed to combine her Peter Pannish demeanour with a knowingness which made Hugh sometimes conjecture that it was all a sort of masquerade. Yet it would be absurd to think this. The child, after all, in this respect curiously resembled her father. Randall was certainly a Peter Pan; and it was hardly-fair to raise an eyebrow at Miranda's undiminished passion for dolls when her father still kept by his bedside the woolly toys of his childhood. They were both of changeling blood.
In appearance, of course, Miranda was the living image of Ann, and indeed 'living' was the right word, since the same features glowed in the child with a difference which made the resemblance inaccessible to a casual observer. Miranda was as pale as her mother, but her face had the transparency of marble where Ann's had the dullness of wax. Miranda's hair fell consciously about her, and about her brow and eyes, in straight bright strands like a mop of red and golden tassels, while Ann's neglected hair, which grew in just the same way, was something limp and string-like to be thrust back unheeded. Yet Ann was handsome still, with her strong face and her direct green glance, if one could only see her: which, as Hugh reflected, perhaps hardly anyone could any more. It was, he reflected too, Ann's own fault if he had become invisible.
'Where's Penny? said Ann.
'Haven't the faintest, said Miranda, rearranging the three dolls. Miranda was a weekly boarder at a school not far from Grayhallock and spent her week-ends at home. During these times she did, as far as Hugh could see, nothing. She had even, as a result of a serious fall two years ago, lost interest in the Swanns' pony.
'Is he in his room? Penn occupied one of the top tower rooms, above Ann's room. Miranda occupied the corresponding room in the other tower, above Randall's room.
'As I don't know where he is I don't know whether he's in his room, said Miranda, still tкte-а-tкte with the dolls. This was one of those moments which made Hugh wonder.
'Ah, well, said Ann.
Her philosophical treatment of her daughter also caused Hugh surprise mingled with irritation. He still experienced a recurrent desire, which he had not always, he thought with satisfaction, inhibited when she was smaller, to slap Miranda hard.
'I was just wondering if he'd mind drying up while we're at church.
'I'll dry up, Hugh heard himself resignedly saying. He detested the housework which Ann kept shamelessly hinting he might help her with. Penn already did more than his fair share of it; Miranda, in Hugh's opinion, less.
'Oh, that's terribly sweet of you! said Ann. 'I'm afraid there's an awful lot. Then perhaps Penny could lay the table, if he turns up. Penn was excused church, of course, his father being one of those who could scarcely credit that any rational person still believed in God. Not that there was anything wrong with Jimmie really.
Ann was telling Miranda it was time to go and change for church, while Miranda, her slim tartan-trousered legs curled under her, continued to commune with the dolls.
Hugh wandered away down the long room and touched guiltily in his pocket the fat letter from Sarah which had arrived two days ago and which he had still not nerved himself to read properly. It had been posted before the news of Fanny's death. He glanced at it, gathered that all was well in general and that Sarah was going to have another baby; but he had not settled down to plough through the details. Sarah wrote such enormous interminable letters; heaven knew how she found the time, with four children and another on the way. What is more, she relentlessly expected an intelligent commentary in return, and complained if she didn't receive it, so there was no use skipping. Hugh loved his daughter dearly, but he had never got used to her marriage. Sarah had met Jimmie Graham during the war, when he was a fighter pilot in the Australian Air Force, and she was in the W. A. A. F. Jimmie now worked in the I. C. I. works in Adelaide. Hugh had only a faint conception of what he did. She was terribly happy of course. But all the same.
Hugh pushed the letter deeper into his pocket and withdrew his hand. He looked idly at Ann's desk. It was covered with piles of printed cards saying that the Peronett Rose Nurseries much regretted that, owing to shortage of staff, they could not receive visitors this summer. It was a mystery to him how, in these recent years, Ann had managed at all. Randall's small genius had made the nursery, of course. It was his patient work which had produced the series of new roses, most of them now well known, by which the name of Peronett would be remembered. The younger Randall had been, in his way, a remarkable horticulturalist. He had met Ann when he was studying agriculture at Reading University, where Ann was reading for a degree in English. He had communicated to her his science; but the flame of his originality he could not communicate. Randall was in the end more artist than scientist, and had nothing of the commercial. Hugh recalled his saying once of Ann, 'she doesn't really love the roses. She regards them as a chemical experiment. Perhaps the great days of the nursery were over. Yet it was on Ann's science and Ann's business sense that it depended now.
Hugh looked at himself cautiously in the big gilt rather battered cupid-encrusted mirror that soared over the
