Chapter Thirty-five
THE wind took one of the dust-bin lids and rolled it clattering across the yard. Ann pursued. The little paved area behind the kitchen, bright with dandelions, was damp from the recent shower. Some washing which Ann had hung out and forgotten jerked and dripped. She retrieved the lid and returned to the waste-paper bin out of which she was filling her bucket as usual to restart the soaked bonfire. She packed the paper firmly into the bottom of the bucket and held it there while she scrabbled with the other hand to pick up some fIat stones to weigh the paper down. Already several white fragments were dancing about the yard, joining some dead leaves which the trees, despairing already in their summer fullness, had surrendered to the confident wind. The sky was a thick grey suffused with points of gold from the hidden sun. There would be a rainbow somewhere. Ann crossed the road and started down the hill.
Miranda was away staying with a school friend. She seemed to have escaped the measles. Penn had behaved as Miranda predicted. He had waited till the last moment before the date of his plane, and had then written to ask Ann to send his things. He was very grateful and apologetic, but simply could not manage to get down to Grayhallock to say good-bye. Ann had packed his belongings with a heavy heart. She included the veteran car book, which was still in his room. He had himself, apparently, taken the box of soldiers back to Steve's room. She could not find the German dagger anywhere, though she spent a long time searching for it. Miranda said she had mislaid it.
The Swanns had departed on holiday with their caravan. She had waved them off, a boisterous business-like family party, organized and conducted laughingly away by the purposeful vigour of the Swann boys, who behaved like junior officers on a combined operation. She had been asked to join them but had refused, and not only because Clare's invitation had been less than irresistibly pressing. She feared to see, at present, too much of Douglas in case her own blank need for affection, for the most elementary' consolation, should make him positively fall in love. She had hoped that Hugh might come to keep her company, but though he often rather guiltily telephoned he still did not seem able to leave town. So she remained solitary at Grayhallock except for the now frequent company of Nancy Bowshott, with whom she picked and preserved the soft fruit and helped Bowshott with the endless spraying. Drawing close to, Nancy, she guessed one day, hardly now with surprise, that Nancy was grieving for Randall.
Ann tired herself out each day by with physical work. She lived in exhaustion, unhappiness and muddle as in a now accustomed medium, flopping in it like some creature in the mud. She was still stunned by her own action, stunned partly by the fact of having acted at all. It seemed to her that she had not done such a thing in years. She had become quite unaccustomed to action an-d utterly unaccustomed to reflection upon action; and when she attempted the latter she found herself dreadfully unable to determine what she had done and why. She ought, she felt, to know this. Yet looking with desperate glances back over the expanse of her conduct she could not discern where the actions lay at all or what, amid the general drift, they positively were. She had acted, she had altered the world; but how, why, even when?
Looking back on her last interview with Felix, Ann felt that it had simply been a muddle. Yet deep in the muddle there was, there must have been, some decisive form. What had most struck her, before seeing him, as essential had been her image of Randall returning, Randall searching for her, Randall crying for her, and not finding her. She had been, at this, overwhelmed by a tide of pity and compassion for Randall, a tide she could only in the end say of love for Randall. This feeling. which was in its way blinding and suffocating, seemed to make it impossible for her to say yes to Felix: made it impossible for her to say yes then, and if not then, then not at all, as Felix must not be made to spoil his life by perhaps fruitless waiting.
That much, before he came, had seemed, if not 'clear', at least irresistible. Yet Ann had summoned him. Shoe had not, as she might have done, told him her decision by letter. What could this mean but that there had really been, as yet, no decision? She had perhaps however vaguely relied upon him for a certain hardness, a certain grimness, something that would lend, to the other side, a sense of fatality. She had perhaps half hoped for an exorcism, for the removal, somehow, of that overwhelming image of Randall: to have her view unravelled and shown to be wrong. The interview had seemed to her, she now sometimes thought, while it was going on, like a trial run, like something incomplete, something symbolic, a symbolic sacrifice. She was suffering for Randall; but when she had suffered enough, when both she and Felix had suffered enough, the suffering would end. She would go the whole circle of suffering and at its close she would be able to take Felix in her arms. That was what had driven her on through Marie-Laure, even to her ultimate words of denial.
The utterance of the words of denial had seemed to wake her from a trance, and she had lifted her face to Felix's stricken and stiffened countenance. She had reached the end and had then been ready' to begin the scene again with every difference. Only it was too late. She had not meant the words as Felix had taken them. She had only meant to say everything, to show him everything, the ultimate difficulties, the ultimate problem — and then ask him at one step to solve it all. But the picture, as she had too truthfully revealed it, was too much for him. If he had only seized her when he came in, if he had kissed her, if he had as much as touched her, or if he had at the end simply shouted her down, she felt she must have submitted. If she had only not for that instant tried him with the words of denial everything might have been different. Yet had she not merely and exactly done as she had decided beforehand she would do? And had he not acted as she must have known he would act? It was scarcely a matter of motives. She had had no motives. Her whole life had compelled her. They had each of them their destiny.
It was as if what she had done was plotted on different and incongruous maps, which made it seem to her sometimes that different lines or levels of conduct must have coexisted, and sometimes that what she had really done was some yet other indiscernible thing. She had worked it out, or partly worked it out, that it was her duty to hold to Randall; yet the reasoning of this and the idea of this, though persistently present, lacked clarity. She did not really believe that Randall would come back; nor did she believe that her actions, one way or the other, would affect him any more at all. He would not be oppressed by her faithfulness or released by her lack of it. The cutting of the painter had been an idea that concerned only herself: it was her own freedom only which had been in question. Randall, without further reference to her, was in possession of his. Why then had she not cut the painter? The intoxication of freedom had even come to her, like a helpful attendant spirit, at the due moment. But she had dismissed it.
Here she was bound to reflect upon the notion of the sacrament of marriage which had so authoritatively come up for her in her talk with Douglas. The notion was constantly present to her mind now, but in an utterly inert way. It was like a great lump which she kept turning over but in which she could discern no significant shape. That was something which she had simply not thought out to the end, and she had not done so because she must somehow have realized that it was not essential to her decision. It was not that she had from this derived some decisive command of duty which she now saw, because her poor heart was elsewhere, as an empty form. She could have born this comprehensible 'pain more easily. She suspected she had not been moved by the command of duty at all.
Yet when she tried to see her conduct as determined by emotion, by desire, by a will seeking, however deviously, its own felicity, she could not on those suppositions either make sense of her actions. She had let go of the exceedingly, dear and 'precious Felix whom she loved and needed with all her heart, almost, it seemed to her, because of a naked meaningless incapacity to take what she wanted. Or was it that some other, stronger, emotion had really moved her, some completely mad, even almost corrupt, emotion of sentimental sympathy for Randall? At a certain moment perhaps she had not been able to bear the break with Randall, ignoring the dreadful fact that it had already taken place; and the flood of feeling which had perhaps been fatal to Felix seemed to her indubitably more like some unrealistic haze of sentiment than like the heavenly love desiderated by Douglas Swann. That, unless it was very heavily disguised, she did not feel to be in the situation at all.
Miranda was perhaps the key to the matter; yet had she acted, persuaded by Miranda, for the sake of Miranda? Her daughter had, in some simple terms, reminded her of her duty; yet Ann could only remember having felt, at this reminder, a sort of irritation. But Miranda had certainly shaken her. There had been some terrible accuracy of aim in Miranda's words. And Miranda had helped to set loose that fatal pity for Randall. Perhaps even her cry of ‘I don't want to be a step-daughter! had worked with Ann more deeply than she realized. There was no denying that the child herself was very disturbed at present. Ann had been shocked, and indeed frightened, to hear from Nancy Bowshott that Miranda had broken all her: dolls. Her own failure, after their momentous discussion, to communicate, at all with her daughter left this massacre as something barbarous, fearful and unexplained. Ann yearned to help her child but could not. She grieved to find herself regarding Miranda's presence in the house as
