Mrs Tanner enchants Paul and he flees through the portable door

Mrs Tanner enchants Paul and he flees through the portable door is a contest between imposed feeling and deliberate escape. Aboard a train, Paul wakes with a bump on his head to find that the woman he had seen as an older, maternal figure now appears to him as the most beautiful girl in the world. Her apparent transformation marks the spell’s power over his perception; the scene presents no evidence that her actual appearance has changed. When the enchantment makes him declare his love, Paul recognizes that his words and feelings are no longer under his control. His escape depends on remembering that he can still act, even while the spell tries to make surrender seem like happiness.

The encounter on the train

Paul comes to in a compartment where the other passengers are asleep or absorbed in reading. Mrs Tanner’s mum is beside him. He recognizes her face as belonging to the woman who had been sitting opposite, but his memory of her ordinary, older appearance clashes with the overwhelming beauty he now perceives. His startled response registers both the shock of seeing her and the spell’s hold over him.

She acknowledges that she struck him, saying she did not hit him very hard, and presents herself as capable of kindness. The head bump gives the encounter an immediate physical aftermath, but the decisive danger is the change in Paul’s response to her. When he tries to speak, the declaration that emerges is that he loves her, although he knows those are not the words he intended to say. Her satisfaction confirms that this is the outcome she wanted.

A manufactured attachment

The enchantment does not merely make Paul admire Mrs Tanner’s mum: it overwhelms his ability to resist the attachment. He knows he ought to be angry, yet finds anger as inaccessible as something wholly beyond his reach. Instead, he experiences the prospect of loving her as an irresistible future, complete with the promise of permanent happiness. The narration’s image of sinking into custard gives that surrender a comic shape, while also emphasizing its helplessness: the supposed happiness is advancing over him whether he consents or not.

The spell threatens to displace Paul’s existing emotional life. He struggles to remember the name of the girl he loves, and identifies her only through the description of the thin girl. He recalls that she is with Shaz, a performance potter who lives in a bus, but even this knowledge does not free him from the enchantment. The contrast is consequential: Paul can still recognize that his attachment to Mrs Tanner’s mum is imposed, yet the spell interferes with his memory and makes the imposed feeling seem blissful. The scene therefore distinguishes awareness of coercion from the power to resist it.

Mrs Tanner’s mum tells him that he has put up a fight but that she has won, and presses him to come to her. Her joking, impatient manner sits uneasily beside the force of the enchantment. Paul appears to yield, asking to leave the train before going anywhere with her, but this apparent compliance becomes a tactical opportunity rather than acceptance. He proposes the portable door, which is in his pocket, and lets her imagine choosing a destination. She suggests a beach at Martinique; he agrees to go wherever she likes while steering the encounter toward the door.

Flight through the portable door

Paul brings out the cardboard tube that serves as the portable door. When Mrs Tanner’s mum suspects he might go through first and shut her out, he says he will lead. At the threshold, however, he shouts PAST and lunges forward. The act converts a possession he can carry in his pocket into an escape route, and the shouted direction makes his flight a deliberate attempt to get away rather than a passive disappearance.

The passage beyond the door is dark. Paul can hear Mrs Tanner’s mum behind him, but he tests his response to her by recalling her face and finding that he now feels revulsion rather than enchanted adoration. The abrupt change shows that the spell’s hold has ended, at least enough for him to reject the image and feeling it imposed. He is better, though his destination is not yet clear in the darkness.

Aftermath and significance

The later exchange about the door supplies a small but important practical consequence. Paul notices that it had been wedged open with a handbag and asks whether it was closed behind him; the other person cannot say for certain. The lights then come on, and Paul realizes that he is home, sort of. The qualified recognition leaves the arrival less than straightforward, but confirms that the flight has brought him to a place he understands as home rather than back to the train or to the destination Mrs Tanner’s mum proposed.

The scene’s reversal rests on the difference between feeling and choice. The enchantment gives Paul an apparently complete romantic certainty while obscuring the woman he actually loves; escape begins when he treats the portable door not as a route to the spellcaster’s chosen excursion but as a means of leaving her. His sudden change from involuntary declarations of love to rejection gives the episode its comic snap, without making the coercion trivial. The door provides a concrete way out of a feeling that Paul cannot reason himself out of, and his shout at the threshold marks the moment he acts on the knowledge that the happiness being offered is not his own.