ostentatious affability and mateyyness with Nancy: until he became aware that she thought he was flirting. After his planned withdrawal, coldness set in between them. This hurt him very much.
The strained and precarious relationship between Ann and Randall, which he had been quite unprepared for, was also a constant source of pain and surprise. After his own noisy argumentative affectionate family it seemed to him scarcely credible that two married people could continue on such terms, being so cold and mysterious to each other and so silent: he was shocked. Randall had now been in a state f sulky retirement in his room for about ten days, ever since they had returned from London, and no one seemed to think it particularly odd. Ann did not run to coax him out. She just accepted his sequestration. At home somebody would be laughed out of such childish conduct. It was all so irrational, he thought, using one of his father's most favoured terms of abuse. Yet whenever he thought of Randall there brooding up above in his room, he shivered. He was afraid of his uncle.
As he squatted in Steve's room in the wet green light in front of the big box of soldiers he thought with renewed longing of his own home, the lovely new-built bungalow at Marino, with its multicoloured roof under the shadow of the great dry rustling blue gum tree: so clean and airy and modem, with its floors of precious jarrah wood and its lemony peachy garden. They had only lived there a year, since his father's promotion, and he had not got used to the wonder of it yet. Before that they had lived in Mile End, nearer to Port Adelaide, and made do with a week-end shack at Willunga. But now it was like a holiday all the time, with the sea filling half of space, and the white sand below, and the uncleared gum above, and the rics of galahs and kookaburras to wake you up in the morning. That was a real place.
As he put a few more of the soldiers back into the box he caught a glimpse, through the interstices of the jumbled figures, of something else lying at the bottom. He unpacked again carefully until he could thrust his hand down. What he drew out was a very beautiful modern dagger, a soldier's dagger, the kind that really meant business. The leather sheath, from which two metal chains depended, was dark and supple, and the instrument came out of it with sizzling sweetness. The blade was as bright as a mirror and terrifyingly sharp. Now this was worth having, this was real loot. He stood up and brooded delightedly over the dagger, trying the edge and the point with his finger. He examined the hilt. It was black, beautifully enameled, and within a circle near the top was a small white swastika. It must have been a German officer's dagger. He let it drop from his hand and it stuck trembling and quivering in the floor boards between his feet. He restored it to its sheath and thrust it into his pocket. It was a most sinister thing, and he loved it.
He repacked the soldiers and put the other things back into the cupboard. He picked up the veteran car book. He could feel the dagger heavy inside his pocket, touching his thigh, imparting power. He felt himself lifted to a higher plane of detachment as if some little movement in the mysterious and irreversible process of growing up had become momentarily perceptible. He looked down at the wooden box of soldiers. He was a free man, his own judge, and he would do exactly what he pleased. He decided to take the soldiers to his room.
He emerged into the corridor with the box under his Ann and closed the door behind him. The long corridor, known for some reason as 'the gallery', was rather dark, since the big northern window which was supposed to light it had been walled in when 'that Orange vandal', as Grandpa called him, had built, across the once handsome stairhead, a mean draughty little room for some 'servant'. The light now came from the two extremities of the house where in a whirl of ornate white-painted metal banisters, the two circular staircases rose to the towers, and a cold light streamed down from Above. Penn could not now, as he emerged, help glancing about him a little guiltily. He saw, with a certain chill, that Miranda was sitting on the stairs which led up to her own tower.
His little cousin was an unsolved problem to Penn. He could not have imagined her beforehand, and indeed he did not try; but he had brought nevertheless in his luggage a special piece of affection labelled with her name. He was made at the first overtures to feel a simpleton, and this gift had never been delivered. Yet what in her thus defeated him he did not know, as he watched her, remote as a cat, playing with her dolls, and realized with shame that he did not even know her age and did not now dare to ask. She was certainly not a bit like Jeanie. The grown- ups seemed to expect them to play together, but her company made him uneasy, and the nearest they got to mateyness was on occasions when she teased him into excitement and then flubbed him for being rough. She was, and this he took for granted, a superior and special little girl. She was a green sprite, something unposed out of the green watery light of England. But he was not at all sure that he liked her.
She was sitting sideways on the stairs, her feet tucked under her, leaning her head against the banisters, as if she had been waiting for him to come out, while two of her dolls with legs dangling sat on the stair below. The little cold group of strange beings regarded him. Sitting there quite still, beyond the dusk of the corridor, picked out in the light from the staircase windows, they seemed like something in a play, at some moment when the main character is immobile at the back of the stage; only now their stillness in the chilly light in the dreary cage of the staircase suggested some jumbled and senseless drama in a dream.
Penn felt disconcerted, and thought at first that this was because of the soldiers. The next moment he thought that it was because Miranda had seen him coming out of her dead brother's room. The moment after he no longer knew why at all. He could not salute her as he had his hands full and speech seemed impossible. So he nodded his head to her and turned hastily in the direction of his own tower. He wished she had not seen him. He wished she had not been there.
Chapter Six
THE big brightly lit stone-flagged kitchen was silent except for the click of dominoes and the perpetual purring of the Aga cooker. The shutters were closed and barred. The long rows of blue dishes on the dresser gleamed like so many approving Dutch cherubs. Hugh calculated that tomorrow he could decently tell Ann that he was leaving on Tuesday.
It was the evening of Saturday after supper. At the long deal table, its legs half clawed away by generations of cats, its surface blanched by years of scrubbing to the colour of light sand, Douglas Swann and Penn were playing dominoes. Miranda had gone to bed. Ann was sewing. Hugh was smoking his pipe and watching the others. Every now and then Ann looked up and smiled, at anyone who caught her eye, a pale encouraging smile.
Hugh reflected that it was a peaceful scene, a scene even of positive innocence: an innocence to which Penn youthfully, Swann professionally, and Ann with some more subtle resonance of the spirit, attributed each their note. Ann was certainly being bravely cheerful in a way which both exasperated Hugh and half compelled his admiration. He himself contributed nothing, he was the spectator. But then he was always the spectator, he reflected with a sad satisfaction which was a sign of returning vitality. He puffed his pipe and contemplated the happy little family group. Randall, it was true, was still brooding upstairs like an unexploded bomb. But even the thought of Randall seemed now less alarming. By a kind of inertia things were slowly subsiding back to normal; and from that point, he obscurely felt, his own new life would begin. The danger point was passed by now. Randall had been practically incommunicado for ten days, and if one were disposed to find things odd one might find this rather odd. But why be so disposed?
Ann, who was after all the person most affected, seemed to take it calmly enough; so calmly that Hugh, who had not discussed the matter with her, suspected that perhaps after all she had some subterranean mode of communication with her husband. Perhaps, contrary to appearances, she was seeing 'something of him. Perhaps she visited him when everyone else was in bed. In any case it was clear that there was nothing he could do about it. He had visited Randall once or twice since their conversation about 'the formal world', but had found his son remote and dreamy and more than usually evasive. Randall was drinking steadily. On the other hand he seemed peaceful, even cheerful, and had an air as of one positively meditating. The Absurd siege could not last forever. The situation was too ridiculous for even Randall to sustain. He must soon return to some version of his normal condition wherein, unable to be in Ann's presence without irritation, he nevertheless followed her everywhere and could scarcely while he was in the house at all, let her out of his sight. From this irritated and obsessive state his present isolation seemed like a disciplined abstention from which some notable purging of the humours might be hoped to follow. It could even be that Hugh's departure would hasten the Armistice.
So he reasoned. But, with a pleasantly complacent sense that he was justified in cherishing himself, he was clear that whatever the outcome of that argument he would stay no longer at Grayhallock. The big indifferent house, upon which the unhappiness of him and his had made so little impression, and where the phantoms of his sadness were without a resting place, seemed a device of punishment which was not designed for him. He had not
