The two women sat with their backs to the sun, which gave them each a halo, Emma's a jagged haze about her frizzy dark grey mop, and Lindsay's a thin smooth semicircle of brighter gold about the already bright gold of her neatly coiled hair. They were both doing petit-point embroidery on circular frames. Randall faced the light. He felt revealed, cornered, happy.
'Terrible as my lot is here, said Randall, 'I assure you it was even more terrible there.
'I don't think his lot is so terrible, do you? said Lindsay. 'Certainly not, said Emma, 'Considering how bad he is, we let him off very easily on the whole.
'We hardly ever beat him, said Lindsay. She held the embroidery frame away from her, admiring the effect.
'Ah, but you don't understand my sufferings! said Randall. 'I won't always behave well, I warn you. One day I'll break out. You'll see!
'He'll break out, said Lindsay. 'What fun. More tea, Emma dear? Emma removed her glasses and set her embroidery aside. She caressed her closed eyes for a moment with long fingers. 'A fag, sweetie.
Lindsay rose to light it for her. Their hands touched, golden in the sunshine as some complexity by Faberge.
'But meanwhile, my dearest gaolers, said Randall, 'I'm delighted to be here. He looked affectionately round the room, to which the puffing Gauloise was now adding a momentary intensification of the sunny haze and the old familiar tobacco smell. Emma, part of whose witchery it was to seem older than she could possibly be, had contrived to give the room an Edwardian look, and appeared in the midst of it, her voluminous nylon dress seeming like transparent muslin, her silver-topped walking-stick half lost in the folds, Edwardian herself. Even her tea-table was a tea-table in some now vanished sense. Only her tape-recorder, dog-like at her feet, recalled the present age.
He added, 'It was hell at Grayhallock. Everyone was watching me to see what I'd do, to see which way I'd jump, to see how long I'd stay. I was slowly suffocating. I can't think how I stood it so long before.
After a pause Emma said, 'I don't suppose people were all that much interested in your doings, except for Ann. In my experience people's real interest in each other is very small. Even the most delicious gossip dies quickly. Don't you think so, Lindsay?
'Yes, said Lindsay. 'Hardly anyone really notices either how good one is or how bad one is. Which I suppose is consoling, given that one is more often bad than good.
It was always like that. They never let him really complain. With an air of fastidious good taste they would turn his complaints away into general conversation. This sense of being petted, permitted, indulged and ultimately bullied exasperated Randall, yet gave him, too, a sort of agreeable shiver. He enjoyed the outbursts and the little feeling of guilt afterwards. Still, they led him on, they provoked him, in a way which satisfied their curiosity while leaving them guiltless. He idolized the serene quality of their egoism.
It was now over a year since Randall had fallen in love with Lindsay Rimmer. He had been, for nearly fifteen months, quite desperately in love. But the course of his love had been a strange one. He had come to see Emma, with whom he had previously had a slight party-going acquaintance, in order to ask her help and advice about getting his plays put on. He had also come to satisfy a persistent curiosity concerning his father's former mistress, about whose person in his imagination a certain lurid light had always played. He had, in that episode in the life of his slow orderly parent, an obsessive interest wherein resentment on his mother's behalf had no part; and his feelings had always veered between a sort of admiration and a sort of disappointment. The thought of it all certainly excited him and he wanted to see Emma. He came to observe her. He saw Lindsay and was instantly enslaved.
Lindsay Rimmer was not in the ordinary sense a particularly accomplished or a particularly distinguished girl. She was, to the very discerning nose, possibly even not a very nice girl. Her age, never divulged, was certainly a trifle over thirty. She came from Leicester, where she had been first a clerk, then a dental receptionist, and then a reporter on a local newspaper. Her general culture had startling lacunae, although because she was also a clever girl, they rarely showed. She had come to London four years ago in search of adventure and in answer to an advertisement of Emma's for a secretary and companion. She was, whatever her other short-comings, undeniably beautiful, with a pale complexion, very rounded head, long golden braids of hair, large brow and great expressive light brown eyes. She resembled Diane de Poitiers, and had round small breasts which would have delighted Clouet, and with which Randall's acquaintance had been but brief and tentative; since Emma intervened.
Randall's love for Lindsay had come violently and suddenly, the entire transformation of the world in a second, a wild cry after long silence, the plunge of a still stream into a deep ravine. This falling in love was, he felt, the best thing he had ever done. It had that absolute authority which seems to put an act beyond the range of right and wrong. It had a splendour. Before it Randall had passed years of restlessness, weary of Ann, weary of the nursery, weary of himself, and yet not able to conceive of any other life. He had had two or three scrappy love affairs, but they had seemed to him, even at the time, senseless and ugly. He only half believed in his plays, only half believed that they represented a way of escape. There had been in his unhappiness no touch of fury or madness, only a dreary whining discontent. Steve had died; and after that there had been black lassitude and drink. And then he had met Lindsay.
Randall saw her, he was certain, with a clear eye. He was no longer a romantic boy; and this very fact made the sovereign violence of his love the more astonishing, the more worthy of complete and ruthless adhesion. He had never, he felt, really seen Ann when he loved her; and had indeed married her under certain complete misapprehensions about her character. But Lindsay, without illusion, he saw. He took her in, for what she was, her whole person: and her aroma of tough slightly ruthless even slightly vulgar vitality drove him mad. It even delighted him that she was the tiniest bit, but patently, 'on the make'. Some people, those ones with the discerning noses, might have called her calculating or sly; but with him she was honest, in a gorgeous and unpretentious way which made her little cleverness all the more attractive. With him she was honest, she was open, and what was best of all about her, except perhaps for her resemblance to Diane de Poitiers, she was divinely indifferent to ordinary morality, she was, he felt, free. She was his angel of unrighteousness, so he often told her, and through her he enjoyed a most exhilarating holiday from morals. She was, he delighted to tell her, a demon, but an angel for him, heartless, but warm for him, a natural tyrant, but for him a liberator, evil, but for him good. She was indeed, his good, that towards which his whole being magnetically swung. The madness, the fine fury, had come at last.
And Lindsay loved him: the miracle of that still retained its freshness. Taken by surprise, she had hesitated only a moment after his first cry. Then she had opened her arms. There had followed days of drunken beauty when they had wandered about half fainting hand in hand, and he had shown her things she had never seen and given her things she had never had, and watched the tall structure of her demonic self-assurance shiver and bow to the ground before him. That had been sweet indeed. He had only, and how often later he cursed himself for it, because of some lingering weakness caught in his years of frailty, because of some fear of her which persisted, because in a way he felt so certain and did not want to hurry, not possessed her; and then there had been Emma.
Emma had descended upon them with something which was not exactly anger, though it had seemed like anger in the first days; later it had seemed more like love. Whatever it was it had been like a storm. What exactly happened Randall did not know. But when the first whirl subsided he found himself confronted not with Lindsay, but with Lindsay and Emma. It was not that Lindsay's will had been subdued, for Lindsay was altogether unsubdued. It was as if she had moved smartly into another dimension, or on to a higher plane, and now looked down at him merrily with undiminished love through a barrier of glass. She was become suddenly as inaccessible as a Vestal Virgin. He was certainly still loved. Only now he was loved by both; and at times he wondered whether he were not coming, by some chemistry of the situation, or by some more positive influence of their wills, to be in love with both.
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
