The family at large, though accepted as ‘hers’, meant less to her. She admired and envied and pitied Stella. She liked and was interested in and annoyed by Alex. She was fond of Tom about whom Brian had such mixed up feelings, but she bridled her fondness in case Adam should sustain any tiniest jealous hurt. On the whole she regarded Tom as a simple fellow, blessedly harmless. Like Brian, she envied Tom’s cheerfulness, but on Adam’s behalf not her own. When Adam was twenty would he be cheerful? She doubted it. Would Adam ever be twenty? George was another matter. Gabriel had strange thoughts about George. These thoughts had gained a definition for her from an incident which occurred a few years ago. Gabriel had been sitting in Diana’s Garden at the Baths with some acquaintances and the talk had turned to George and several people (Mrs Robin Osmore was one, and Anthea Eastcote, then a school girl) had said some mildly disobliging things about her brother- In-law. They fell silent when George appeared nearby, having undoubtedly overheard. As he went away Gabriel felt constrained to leap up and run after him. She caught him up as he was coming out of the Institute building into the street. She touched his arm and said blushing, ‘I didn’t say anything against you, I don’t think anything bad about you.’ George smiled, bowed slightly and went on. When she next met him in company, his eyes showed consciousness of the significant occasion. Gabriel was already regretting what now seemed her imprudent impulse, which she had not mentioned to Brian. What she had said was not even true. She did think bad things about him. And now she had made a secret link between them, an invisible bond like a rope the other end of which she could occasionally feel George sardonically, maliciously, ever so gently, twitching. There was some little, very small, piece of Gabriel’s heart which harboured the belief, allegedly so common among Ennistonian women, that she and she alone could save George from himself.
Alex put the key into the door of the Slipper House. It was eleven o’clock at night on the evening of Brian and Gabriel’s visit. As the door opened a damp woody smell emerged. Suddenly frightened, Alex fumbled for the light, went in and closed and locked the door behind her.
The Slipper House had been built by Alex’s eccentric father, Geoffrey Stillowen, in the nineteen-twenties, and was known to the few local persons interested in this matter as a ‘gem of art deco’. It dated from roughly the same period as the Ennistone Rooms. It was made of concrete, once white, now a stained blotchy grey, with curving corners and curving steel-framed windows and a shallow sloping green-tiled roof. There was a sort of Assyrian (or possibly Egyptian) superstructure, originally painted green and brown, over the front door. The door had an oval stained-glass panel depicting very upright stylized red tulips. There was more floral stained-glass on the upper landing and a large stained-glass screen in the drawing-room representing an aeroplane among clouds. The drawing-room also contained a very slippery window seat with carved ends and the original cushions with green and grey wavy designs, a fine large mirror with a fountain cut into the glass, and a table with a glass top supported on a metal arabesque. The flat fat oatmeal-coloured three-piece suite in the drawing-room was also original, and so was a set of tall mauve vases whose members were dotted here and there. The house was sparsely furnished, partly with oddments made of bamboo which Alex had put in during her ‘creative’ period. The floors were all of the most exquisite pale parquet, with designs made out of different woods. It was from this that the house had got its name, since Geoffrey Stillowen had insisted that no ordinary shoes, only soft slippers, be worn in the house, and there still stood beside the door a box of various-sized and coloured slippers which he had provided. Our townspeople made their own assessment of the odd name which sounded in their ears vaguely improper, as it might be of some oriental bower or seraglio, a discreet house of ill fame where exotic women pad.
Brian had not been far wrong in thinking that Alex used the Slipper House as a place of meditation. She liked the emptiness, the spaciness of the house, its lack of clutter after the mass of objects and trophies which filled the big house. Once, she had played at painting there, made figures out of clay and papier mâché and painted them like little gaudy Indian gods. She had done watercolours when she was young and had returned, after Alan left her, to what she thought of as her career as a failed painter. The little study room next to the kitchen was still strewn with paints and brushes which she had laid down a long time ago. She looked at them briefly as she went through the house turning on the lights. As she went she shuddered with a superstitious uncanny feeling which was also a kind of pleasure of aloneness.
Alex had long ago lost the Methodist religion of her childhood, but a religious sense subsisted in her, perverted into a kind of animistic obsession. Adam had some such odd sense of the world, only his pantheism was innocent, partook perhaps of that primal positive innocence which has made so many thinkers want to believe in metempsychosis. Alex’s quickening of the world about her was neurotic and corrupted, the final distortion of those artistic impulses with which she had so irresolutely played. It was as if things appeared and disappeared, dematerialized with malicious whimsy. Some things were like little animals; or rather, they were live things, with the clumsiness of objects, which fell about, shuffled, jolted and rolled. Perhaps Alex’s painted fetishes had been homeopathic attempts to placate these tiny malign deities. There were little thing-creatures that hid things, mouse-like movements in corners which ceased when Alex looked, substantial shadows which she flinched to avoid and which vanished as she moved. Alex had always collected things, but now it was as if they were gradually turning against her. In a way she knew that ‘all this was nonsense’, and although it frightened her, it did not frighten her very much because of a kind of complicit frisson which these experiences brought with them.
This leak of her unconscious mind into her surroundings, this theft of her vitality by malicious forces, was now becoming connected for Alex with the problem of Ruby, and this upset her much more. She did not really think that Ruby deliberately hid things and found them again, but it was as if Ruby had become the human ‘front’ of a revolt against Alex of her most familiar world. Alex could not imagine her life without Ruby, if Ruby were simply to go away. Herein Ruby appeared as a defence, not before recognized as such, against gathering forces. On the other hand, if what Ruby wanted was to be welcomed at last, by some revolutionary change, into an equal and quite different relationship with her employer, this Alex felt to be unthinkable, the final breakdown of sense and order. There were no ordinary gestures of affection and recognition between them which could possibly mediate such a change. It could not be done. Alex would resist it to her last breath.