William sat down and found his heart still beating hard. He bowed his head and folded his hands, which were trembling. He wondered to himself, whatever possessed me to utter all those high-flown words, wherever did they come from? Then the memory piercingly returned to him of what the doctor had said, and he shuddered with weakness and fear.
The silence continued, ringing now with the echoes of what William had said, and each person present promised himself some amendment of life. Brian thought, what a skunk I am, and how lucky I am to have such a dear good sweet wife and such a marvellous son, I must go and see Alex soon, and bloody stop hating everything and everyone. Gabriel thought, dear, dear William, how much I love him, yes, I must stop being so feeble and silly, and I must not think those mean spiteful thoughts about Stella, and I must think differently about George, but how? Adam thought, I must stop imagining those funny things about Rufus and I must be kinder to my father and talk to him and not tease him. Anthea Eastcote thought, I must be frank with Hector Gaines and I must give up Joey Tanner. Nicky Roach thought, I must work harder and not go to bed with girls all the time (but he felt rather sad about this). Mrs Roach thought, I must stop spending these crazy amounts on clothes. I must be mad! Nathaniel Romage thought, perhaps I ought to reconvene the committee before I have the house painted? Mrs Romage thought, I had better stop cooking the books. Ought I to confess to Nat that I’ve been cooking the books? No. Miss Landon thought, I must prepare my lessons better and, quite simply, stop loathing the children. Nesta Wiggins thought, I ought to go to Mass now and then to please my father and stop being so ridiculously pleased with myself. I’m just a stinking sinner. Well, I am, aren’t I? Mrs Bradstreet had a very serious sin, not unconnected with her late husband, upon her conscience. Sometimes she felt she was damned, sometimes she felt she should tell everything to the police (how much did they know?). She decided that for the present she would follow William Eastcote’s advice and lay it all before God. However, she had done this before to no avail. Emma thought, I must go and see my mother, I must go and see my singing teacher, and I must … just somehow … try to become .. less awful. Tom thought, I’m innocent, I’m good, I love everybody. I shall go on being innocent and good and loving everybody, oh I feel so happy! What Zed thought is not known, but as his nature was composed almost entirely of love, he may be imagined to have felt an increase of being.
‘A chair does a lot for a picture’ was one of Alex’s sayings. At this moment she was trying out this guidance in the Slipper House, as she moved a bamboo chair with a pink cushion on it and placed it underneath a contemporary print of the eighteenth-century ‘bath house of transcendent beauty’ which had been pulled down to make way for the Institute building. The effect was good. It was Sunday evening. The bells of St Olaf’s, distinctly audible in damp weather with a west wind blowing, were decorating the muzzy soft brown twilight. All the lights were on in the Slipper House, the central heating was on, the shutters were closed. Every window had inside shutters, all of which had been decorated by the young painter, Ned Larkin, Geoffrey Stillowen’s discovery. The most ambitious scene, representing the family in Belmont garden, was in the sitting-room downstairs, but each room had its window into the fantasy world of Mr Larkin. The main bedroom, where Alex now stood, revealed in the space of the shuttered window above the window seat, a blue sky traversed by a silver airship, and down below looking up a dog, a black-and-white terrier whom Alex dimly remembered, but not his name. The upstairs shutters and curtains had not been touched for some time and turned out to be full of dust and moths and spiders. With Ruby, she had cleaned the whole house thoroughly, and could now enjoy it by herself. Working silently with Ruby had been a strain. How easily her mother would have chatted all the time, encouraging the servant, cheering her on.
Alex looked at the bed, a plain strong single bed with handsome plain ball-headed posts at each corner made of a grainy gleaming nut-brown wood, a fine piece, a relic of its time. In the centre of the headboard an incised oval design was carved, representing perhaps a seed or the cosmos. This carving had excited Alex when she was a girl. Here John Robert Rozanov would sleep. In the little room next door, in a plain handsome nut-brown matching wardrobe, he would keep his clothes. In the sitting-room downstairs, or perhaps in the second bedroom which Alex had prepared as a study, with a light oak desk and a lamp with a leaded-glass shade, he would write his great book. In the evenings when he was tired he would talk to Alex, first of old times, then of other things. Further than this Alex did not allow her thoughts to wander, at least with any clarity. Indeed much was unclear. The kitchen was scrubbed and accoutred, but who would cook his meals? Ruby and Alex had worked hard. A few pieces of furniture had been brought in from Belmont, but the house still had the airy, empty, rather pale, faintly provisional look which somehow suited it. It had never really been occupied. It had been a place for summer parties and populous fêtes of Stillowens long gone and scattered. Had her father, after her mother’s death, ever slept in this room, with the silver airship and the little dog and another woman? Alex could not believe it. The house, which the Ennistonians believed to be such a strange ambiguous place, was somehow innocent and unstained and unused, like her golden-haired brother who had died in the war, blown to pieces by a shell near Monte Cassino. She had seen his neat clean white little gravestone among hundreds of others in a beautiful Italian cemetery.
Alex padded down the slippery shallow wooden stairs and stood in the sitting-room, near to the picture of her childish self holding the little bouquet of flowers upon the shutter. There was a smell of wood smoke from a fire which she had experimentally lit in the big open grate in the kitchen. She had brought in an oval folding table from Belmont in case John Robert should elect to work downstairs. The beautiful parquet floor, upon which Alex’s slippers now skated softly, was dotted with rugs, geometrical Persian rugs from Belmont, and curious woollen rugs and rugs made out of rags which the architect had inspired Alex’s mother to buy especially Tor the Slipper House. Upon the walls, painted egg-shell blue, some wood engravings of curvaceous willow trees were hanging. There was an intense silence, outside of which a motor car was passing on the road at the bottom of the garden along which Father Bernard and John Robert had walked on their way to the Common. With a discreet sidelong glance she observed her reflection in the cut-glass fountain mirror. She felt ageless, poised and young, ready to begin the world anew.