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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 A
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 Swa
Hugh reflected that it was a peaceful scene, a scene even of positive i
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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 made and deserved this cage and he could and would step out of it. He would exert himself later to help those that remained behind. Meanwhile, he had had enough of A
He wanted too to pass another stage in the distance that separated him from Fa
Laughter and the clatter of the dominoes being piled together on the table marked the end of another game. A
After the violence of death, its unavoidable shock and horror, as his disturbed spirit began to compose into a fresh pattern, as the thoughts which came to him in the early morning began to take on form and structure again, he found that Emma Sands occupied a new and significant place. It was as if she had crept up on him, and he had turned to find her, large as life, sitting there. He was haunted by the image, the snapshot vision, which he had received in the cemetery, of Emma and the girl, black rainswept figures, clinging grotesquely together. He had reached indifference, he had passed into forgetfulness: he thought. But now Emma grew in his mind; and the previous occasions of seeing her, so oddly spaced out through the past years, the bus occasion, the escalator occasion, the National Gallery occasion, fed retrospectively by the cemetery occasion, glowed and burgeoned in his memory.
He knew, of course, his own absurdity, knew even something of the mechanics of this tiny obsession, and how it had jerked into more evident life when Mildred had suggested the trip to India. Why could he not go to India? Because — yet why because? — of Emma. Emma still, magnetically, existed; and he had time too to reflect on how instinctively he classed her with the dark free things, with that other shapely world of the imagination into which he had failed, and he found himself using Randall's metaphor, to 'climb' at that crucial period of decision twenty-five years ago. But of course these ideas were without worth, cobwebs and mere childish hauntings which he needed only the time for drawing a deep breath to blow. away altogether. He already knew, and he anticipated with pleasure the little struggle he would have with himself, that he would eventually decide to go to India with Mildred. That is what he would do. Ah, he would be free, he would show them all how much an old man could alter. In Vishnuland what avatar.