as her vulgarity appeared in this context as an uneasiness which detracted the tiniest bit from her grace. But these were details.
Settled back on his raised-up pillows now above the sleeping girl, Randall lit a cigarette and contemplated the hot blurred rectangle of the window, the doors open to a balcony behind the long Venetian blind, the white curtains, soft and translucent as a dream, falling unstirred by any breath of air. The canary continued its song. There was something unfocused, something a little unnervingly fragmentary, in his present apprehension of Lindsay. A number of things, seemingly unrelated, contributed to there being, in his attempted pattern, significant gaps. Talking casually about her childhood Lindsay had given him a quite different account of certain matters from the one she had given at first. Yet what did it matter to him if she was a liar? He was a liar himself. One evening in a restaurant when he had tried to buy her some roses she had said absently that she did not really like roses, as if she had forgotten who she was talking to. But what did it matter to him if at moments she hardly knew who he was? There were moments, particularly late at night, when he hardly knew who she was. Then again she had said to him, only the previous day, 'It wasn't true what we said about Emma Sands; We did like her, didn't we? We did love her.
Randall had figured his flight in the perfect image of freedom. To be alone with Lindsay in Rome and to be rich seemed to constitute the very peak and essence of unimpeded activity. He had a little reckoned without his mind; and although he told himself that he would change, that he would soon don a new personality, the personality which he had slipped on, as for a tailor's fitting, the day he lunched at Boulestin's and saw the waiters bowing to the ground, he had not yet, he had to admit, quite put off the bad old self. He worried. He could not help reflecting still about Lindsay and Emma, though he told himself it was ridiculous to speculate about that now. Even if his more bizarre images of their relationship, even if his more nightmarish suppositions concerning their collusion about him should have some part of truth, why should he trouble about that now, why should it matter now what Lindsay was then? He shrugged his shoulders but he could not get Emma out of his mind.
This unfortunate obsession had another aspect. It was as if Emma had produced the situation in which he had desired Lindsay. Emma had been, as it were, the impresario of his passion. He had loved Lindsay as the enticing but untouchable princesse lointaine which Emma had (how deliberately and with what end?) made of her; and in now possessing Lindsay Randall experienced, though very rarely and for a second at a time, the touch of a disappointment analogous to that of the girl who desires the priest in his soutane, but wants him no more when he has broken his vows to become, less ceremoniously, available.
It was not that Lindsay, possessed, brought with her anything of the sober commonplace. The region they jointly inhabited was mad and exotic enough. But Randall felt curious stirrings of another freedom, as if this degree of hurling himself about still did not satisfy his awakened energy. It was not, either, that Lindsay was below her destiny. She was, on the whole, magnificent. Her moments of faltering were few compared with her great serenities and certainties. She dressed exquisitely in the array of flowered marvels, soft or crisp, flowing or sleek, which Randall had bought for her by the armful. She wore her jewels like a duchess, and everywhere she went, leaning upon his Ann, admiring heads were turned. Whatever her occasional blanks where the quattrocento was concerned, Lindsay could sufficiently impersonate a great lady. She had, in the void of their new existence, both style and form, and moved in its boundlessness with a boldly spread and finely articulated wing.
Randall wished that he was sure that he could say the same of himself. He had said once to Lindsay that they were, in strength, an equal match. He had in the last weeks quietly become aware, in the nebulous inexplicit way in which one realizes such things, that this was not so. He noted in her a barbaric strength which her present finery made subtly more apparent. Lindsay was the stronger, Lindsay was the boss; and even if she herself had not yet realized it, it could not be long before she did. Randall sometimes wondered whether this discovery were not the real source of his discontents. He attempted in any case to survey it with a cool eye. In spite of his anxieties about the present and the past, he had gained, for a further future about which he remained totally agnostic, a little self-confidence. As for the past, he would never know; but people survived. He would certainly survive.
He could not help being disappointed in his performance. He reemembered how much he had admired Lindsay and Emma, and wished to emulate the serene quality of their egoism. He had thought of them as living high up in a region of perfect freedom, in a sort of paradise of the imagination. He had thought of this as some quite different mode of being to which he was prepared to attain even by committing crimes, to which perhaps he was likely to attain especially by committing crimes. But he had not, or had not yet, been able to live up to the promise of those dreams and those early moments. Something in his sloveuly darkened self prevented his attaining the immaculate condition which he had pictured, and for which he had conceived Lindsay as the perfect consort.
What here impeded him was, he was fairly sure, not the demon of morality. It was more like some restless rapacity, a rapacity such as is the mark of mediocrity in art. The great artist is not rapacious. Randall felt restless, he wanted, now more than ever, to have everything; and he could not but picture his life with Lindsay as a perpetual Bight, from Rome to Paris, from Paris to Madrid, from Madrid to New York, from New York to… And as he imagined them thus covering the globe he also put it to himself: the world is large and there are other women in it besides Lindsay.
Randall stubbed out his cigarette. On the table beside the bed was a glass of water, a little pile of aspirins, a detective story, and a toy dog which Lindsay had bought him two days ago at a street market. They had not named it yet. Toby was still packed away in his suitcase. He caressed the other dog and fancied he heard from the cupboard Toby's disapproving barlq. He smiled a little and ate an aspirin. Would he, in the end, ditch Lindsay?
What was he going to do, in the big airy spacious» roture, anyway?
He knew in his heart, and he knew that Lindsay assumed, that he would never be a playwright. Distanced now by so much more of experience and suffering from his plays he realized clearly tbanhey were no good. They were pretentious, m. uddled and insipid. Perhaps he would try his hand once more; but it would be merely an amateurrish game. There was only one thing in the world that he was really good at, and that he would never do again. He saw in a vision the sunny hillside at Grayhallock with its slight haze of green and its myriad little coloured forms and he sighed. Ann.
Through some mechanics of reality the figure of Ann remained steady. But its power was broken. It was this breaking of the power which enabled him to entertain, halflaughingly, a sort of nostalgia. Ann's tyranny was broken, her dead hand was gone. Why had he fretted so in the old days when freedom was, after all, so easy? Perhaps this, and only this, was what Lindsay was for, to free him from Ann; and if it were so it would be justification enough. Whereas Emma's awareness of him still seemed to hover over him like a cloud, Ann's awareness of him had vanished, it was nothing. By passing through extremity, by committing the final crimes, he had freed himself forrever of any concern about what Ann thought. And sometimes he imagined weirdly that this put them into a new and innocent relationnship, as if they could set up house together like Christie and Old Mahon; and he would be the boss then. Or more vividly at other times he pictured himself based on Ann and the roses and having as many other women as he pleased without troubling. Perhaps after all it was there where the new world lay, in some almost impossible fusion whereby he could eat his cake and have it. He knew that these were otlJ. y wild fancies. But it gave him pleasure all the same to think, almost with a perverted tenderness, that now he did not care a fig about what went on in Ann's mind.
The great thing was that there was no hurry. He turned on his side to look at Lindsay and saw that she was stirring and would soon be awake. He looked upon her with love, with a possessive positive love which made nothing of his moments of disloyalty. He prepared his presence, his smile, for her like a table arrayed. In a moment she would open her eyes and draw him instantly to her with a beaming laziness. She always knew deeply and at once where she was and with whom. He waited tenderly for her to awaken. Had he made a terrible mistake? The wonderful thing now was that no mistake was terrible. There was plenty of time, and time would show him what he really wanted to do. He would survive. He could always, and after his own beautiful fashion, return to Ann. Ann would always be waiting.
Chapter Thirty-four
'WELL, Emma, said Hugh, 'what about it?
'Oh that, she said. 'Was I supposed to be thinking it over?
For some weeks now she had managed by a combination of procrastination, feigned illness, and sheer
