'I don't think you should be in any hurry to do so, said Swann. 'But in any case that won't alter your own position. We know, don't we, what we think about the permanence of marriage.
'So I should devote the rest of my life to purifying my image of the absent Randall?
'This isn't like you, Ann.
'I don't know what I'm like any more. I feel how I've lived all the time in unconsciousness.
'Being good is a state of unconsciousness.
'Then perhaps I shall stop being good. It looks as if it's going to be too difficult from now on anyway. She sat down again and pushed her hair back.
'You're tired out. Can't you manage a holiday?
'Someone offered to drive me to Greece.
'Well, why don't you go? Do go. Clare and I can keep an eye on things here.
She felt again that unfamiliar sensation and she saw herself on the road south in the very dark blue Mercedes. 'Ah, I've been dead all these years.
'You are precisely mistaken, said Swann, 'You have been alive all these years. You are momentarily dead now.
Ann was silent. What did she want from Douglas? She wanted him to support her own view of the matter. And since he was not doing so she might as well end the conversation. So she had a view of her own which was different from Douglas's?
'You're doing me a lot of good, she said.
Swann smiled and patted her knee. 'Is the exorcism working? Was it? She lifted her head and it was as if the great scarlet cloud were gone, the whirling images were gone, and there was only a great space and a great light. 'Yes, it's working.
'I'm so glad, he said. 'I know we think alike really. Prayer, if I may say' so, is so important here. I have known constant prayer to remove the most rooted resentment.
'Ah, but I don't feel resentment, said Ann. 'I don't, I don't. It was true.
'If you can love him now and keep him in your heart that will be a joy that is better than happiness.
'Better than happiness. She rose to her feet. She wanted to be alone now.
'The marriage bond is an indissoluble mystical union of souls.
Who knows what good your love may not do him, even if you never meet again.
'How true, said Ann. 'You know, I think I'll take that Greek holiday after all.
'Well done! said Swann. He was being led towards the door. 'On no account miss Delphi. Clare and I were in Greece ten years ago. I think we've still got all our guide-books. We'll lend them to you.
'You are very kind. Thank Clare for the bottled apricots, will you?
The door shut behind him at last. Ann returned to the drawing room. She lay down on the floor and buried her face in the hearth rug. She felt exhausted, purged. Yet it was a strange purging. Perhaps Douglas had been right to say that goodness was a state of unconsciousness. But what she had to do with now was consciousness, and she was profoundly and terribly aware of a change in the structure of her world, as if the crystals were forming with a difference. It was not that her image of Douglas himself as good had in any way altered. It was that he could no longer, in the mirror of her being now so alarmingly brightened, properly reflect himself. His words, which in him were good words, were at her side of the picture temptation, almost corruption. Whatever she could do for Randall she could not do that. A saint might do it, but she could not. She could not thus hold him; and as she imagined this 'holding' she saw it almost as vindictive, revengeful, something to do with death. No, she must let Randall go, she must let him go properly, she must cut the painter. This idea of cutting him free shed for her a certain light, wherein she glimpsed for a moment, like a figure seen in a flash of lightning, what she herself must look like to Randall, what she must, in these last years, have looked like, have been. She saw the deadness of it; and Randall's words came back with a force which she could almost echo: 'You weigh upon me. You imprison me. She must set Randall free.
But was that not also setting herself free? She had never thought about freedom, it had never been a value to her. Now suddenly, as she felt it to be so vividly desirable, she looked back over her thoughts, trying to doubt them. Where did the corruption lie? Yet, as she reflected, this question seemed less important, consumed, dimmed by a sort of realism, which she still hesitated to dignify with the name of truth. The world had changed and there was no going back. She must live as best she could in the new world. She rolled over on her back and looked at the high white ceiling of the drawing-room, now dusky and yellowish in the rainy afternoon light, and it seemed to her like a lofty Southern sky, infinitely far and blue and hazy with brilliance. She lay there stunned and dazzled.
The telephone rang and she pulled herself to her feet at last. It was Mildred ringing up from Seton Blaise to say that she and Felix would be bringing Miranda tomorrow morning. Miranda.
Chapter Twenty-nine
MIRANDA was back at Grayhallock and Penn was in torment. He had been, at the idea of her staying on at Seton Blaise, very cast down at first: but in fact her absence had been for him a time of welcome respite wherein he could spend the day dreaming of her without those sharp and painful disturbances of his private image which the actual presence of his darling so often occasioned. He had also enjoyed looking forward to her return. But the return itself had had a terrible quality.
It was as if the house feared Miranda. The darkness, the coldness, the dampness of the still rainy weather seemed to gain, from her return, an extra shadow. The house groaned and huddled. Miranda herself was in an evident state of extreme depression and was very short with anyone who came near her. Ann was jumpy and nervous and more than usually awkward with her daughter, though she was also at times merry in a way which unnerved Penn more than her accustomed soberness. One morning he heard what he had never heard before, Ann singing: and this sound, echoing through the darkened arches of the brooding and prophetic house, made Penn shiver with a sense of ills to come.
He was now tossing on his bed. He had already got up several times, and looked across at the light which was still burning in Miranda's bedroom in the opposite tower. It was not in fact very late. After Miranda retired Penn had gone to bed in a mood of mingled boredom and desperation, and had been trying to cheer himself up by reading Such is Life. But even Tom Collins could not speak to his condition. For the time the myth of his past seemed dead, the great image of the new free man in the appallingly ancient land. They were far off now, the drooping myalls and the lordly kurrajongs and the crimson quondongs and the spotted leopard trees.
The huge coloured country might have been a dream; and Penn apprehended with alarm a sort of failure within him for the first time of his sense of nationality. It was no use, in the crisis which faced him, being even, an Australian.
He could not get comfortable. His body ached through and through with desire, producing a sort of perpetual tiredness which was half pleasurable and half painful. He got up again and went to the window. The light was still on in Miranda's room. He put on his dressing-gown and began to wander about his own room. He looked gloomily at the wrecked bed, and at his few books on the white shelf. On the table in a blue vase were roses Ann had brought up that morning. Beside them lay the Swedish knife which Humphrey had given him. He snapped it open and tried the blade. Humphrey was kind to him. He was the only person who had really wanted to be told about Australia. And now he had asked Penn to London again and Penn had again said no. It was a good knife: but of course it was nothing like the German dagger.
Penn opened the drawer and took out the dagger. He drew it silkily out of its sheath and balanced it in his hand. It made him feel dangerous. He was very sorry to think that he would have to part with it. He had put off telling Miranda about it; and in any case, since the occasion in the churchyard when he had nearly given it to her he had had other matters on his mind. He went to the window again and gazed at her light, scratching the palm of his left hand gently with the point of the dagger.
Penn felt sorry at the thought of losing it, but he also felt pleased to be able to delight Miranda and to make, for her, some evident little sacrifice. He did not want to waste the scene of returning the dagger, and he began to wonder, when shall I give it to her? He opened his window a little wider. The night was very dark but warmer and there was a flowery smell, the smell of thousands of roses. The idea came up when out of the darkness, I shall give
