An Unofficial rose

'Ah, I don't mean that! she said, raising her head, and her face was wild with some appeal. 'I don't mean that. I do love you. God knows I love you. But I can't see my way out. I'm still too involved with Randall. He's too real. I don't understand it myself. But I do love you. Oh Felix, I'm wretched, help me, help me! Her voice ended in a high-pitched wail. She sobbed for a moment and then was quite still, her hands hanging at her sides, the tears coming.

Felix looked at her miserably. 'There's no need to be kind to me, he said. 'There's no need to be evasive with me. Naturally l. won't press you or bother you. Don't worry about me. I'll go to India. I won't trouble you any more. I think you're wrong about Randall. But I suppose you have a right to love him and not me. I suppose you have a right to think as you please — about your husband.

The word fell dully between them and A

He said, 'I know. It's all right. You don't have to be kind. He picked up his coat. He pocketed the photograph of Marie-Laure.

For a moment they stared at each other. 'Don't go, said A

Felix shook his head. 'You're right, he said. 'It's better to do it quickly. I have no taste for suffering. Forgive me for having troubled you. He made for the door.

He dragged savagely at the wheel of the very dark blue Mercedes and drove it half across the lawn towards the gates. A strange cry seemed to linger in the air behind him. He pressed his foot down and down on the accelerator until the car screamed under him. He was paying the penalty, he knew it even then, for being an officer and a gentleman.

Chapter Thirty-two

MIRANDA, curled upon the window-sill, watched the lights of the very dark blue Mercedes disappearing down the drive. She watched the bright illumination move, with sudden glimpses of green trees, at an increasing pace down the hill until it vanished. The sound of the engine remained with her, at first growing louder as the car gathered speed, and then quickly diminishing. At last there was complete silence. Miranda listened to the silence. Then she moved with a kind of lassitude back into the bedroom. A world had ended. An enterprise was complete.

She knew what had happened in the drawing-room. She had listened long enough at the door. She stood now as if at a loss, without employment, not knowing what to do. Then she pulled the curtains, locked her door and knelt down to rummage under her bed. She dragged out a large wooden box, a box designed for books with a strong lock on it. She searched the table drawer for the key and opened the box. She tilted it over until its contents streamed on to the rug. She began listlessly to sort them.

There were a few letters and a lot of cuttings and photographs.

There was that photo of Felix in te

Miranda had loved Felix Meecham with all her heart ever since she could remember. She could not trace the moment at which her childish adoration of that tall gentle-spoken demi-god had changed into the possessive jealous agony with which she now lived day and night. It sometimes seemed that her love had always been the same, always equally great in sum, only at a certain time it had been set on fire. And in those flames she writhed. It was not, as a child, that she had not suffered, that she had not missed him, yearned for him, and felt wild joy on his occasions of return. She had suffered bitterly because of his interest in Steven, who also idolized him, and his comparative lack of interest in herself. But at least as a child she had not conceived of possessing him. The terrible pain began when, at some half-noticed turning of the way, she found herself in the same world as Felix. For now that nothing separated them everything separated them.

Miranda was of course aware of a certain something, a trembling of interest and sympathy, between Felix and her mother. This too, she felt, she had always known about; but when her love burst into flames she was driven to a sharper curiosity and a more exact observation. There was in truth little to observe, nor did Miranda conjecture more than she saw. But what she saw was enough, and she watched and suffered.

Miranda was sure that no one knew about her condition. Asked at the age of five whom she wanted to marry, she had answered without hesitation 'Felix'. Everyone had laughed, but no one had remembered. That her love was in secret became the more important as she observed, sharp-eyed and prophetic, the breakdown of her parents' marriage; and as she saw the pattern of events develop in an ever more menacing way her hopeless will to have Felix produced, as a secondary growth, a more viable will at least to prevent her mother from having him. Miranda had been fond of her mother, she supposed, in earlier years; but the mother of her childhood was an anonymous faceless figure. All the colour of that early world had belonged to her father. Her mother first gained individuality and personality as her rival; and to the prosecution of that rivalry Miranda dedicated herself with ferocious efficiency.

She could not, of course, confide in anybody, not even, or especiaIly not, in her father, to whom she had always been so close. Her attachment to him was something warm and organic and formless and infinitely comforting, though at moments too it caused her a sort of shame, almost a sort of disgust. He was the sole recipient of her tenderness, the only one for whom she was still a soft and nestling creature; and with this softness she combined, as she grew older, a fierce loyalty and a desire to protect him whenever, as it increasingly seemed to occur, he was in any way 'in danger'. That her love for Felix was a sort of danger to him she early apprehended. He would be hurt by it if he knew. And from this knowledge also she protected him. She did not conceive her two loves as rivals. They were as different in nature as were their objects. Randall seemed to her infinitely frail compared with Felix, but through frailty infinitely dear.

When it became abundantly clear, and it was clear very early to Miranda, not only because of her almost scientific observation, but also because of hints her father dropped, that her parents were going to be parted for good, she felt that she could scarcely endure what was to come. She felt it as very likely that Felix would court her mother, that her mother would hesitate and procrastinate, but that Felix would get her in the end. Miranda told herself that she would not survive that moment. If Felix married A