Читать книгу Imagined Selves - Willa Muir - Страница 24

SIX

Mabel was feeling restless. Calderwick was a dull little hole, she reflected, as she stood at the window playing with the cord of the blind. There had been rain all morning, and the roadway was full of irregularly shaped puddles through which there bumped an occasional tradesman’s van. Drops of rain were still starring the puddles from time to time, and the laurustinus behind the railings was dripping. The room behind her was dark in spite of a fire, but it was too early to switch on the lights, and at any rate she was bored to death with the room. She had read the last magazine; she knew by heart all the bits of music on the piano; she was fed up with the gramophone; it was too wet to play golf, and nobody was likely to call. Apparently the only thing that attracted her interest was the acorn-shaped wooden bob at the end of the blind cord.

Mabel was not the kind of woman to escape from her boredom by considering it as an objective phenomenon. Is it a peculiarly human affliction? she might have asked herself. Are cats ever bored? Would a child be bored if its parents left it alone on a desert island? None of these questions occurred to Mabel. It did not strike her that boredom was a remarkable state in a world full of things to smell, to touch, to taste, to listen to, and to think about. She assumed – and she may have been right – that the laurustinus was as bored as she was, and that the patient grass in the park opposite was bored by the rain.

She did not even wonder why she was bored. She knew. John, her husband, was too dull and elderly for her. He went to the office every day; he came home for meals; he went to church on Sundays; he kissed her every morning and every night; he gave her money when she asked for it. He wouldn’t dance; even the records he liked to hear on the gramophone were boring things without a decent tune; he wasn’t interested in her friends, and, in general, he was just a bore. Mabel let go the acorn bob so that it hit the window-pane with a sharp rap.

The only person he was really interested in, she thought, was his precious sister. And he was getting grumpy because he hadn’t heard yet whether she was coming or not. But if Lizzie Shand were in the south of France why on earth should she come to Calderwick in the middle of winter? Mabel had seen posters advertising the south of France, and as she gazed out of the window she noted that Calderwick was colourless – grey skies, grey pavements, grey people. She herself would become grey in the course of time. Sarah Murray, she thought with a flash of spitefulness and horror, was grey already, inside if not out, although she was only a little over thirty. Mabel looked down at the silken sleeve of her rose-coloured gown. Then she walked deliberately up to her bedroom, turned on the lights and drew the curtains.

Nearly an hour later she was standing with all the frocks she possessed scattered around her, hanging over chairs, and lying on the bed. Her hair was a little ruffled; her cheeks were glowing. She had tried the frocks on, every one, but she had now come to the last of them, and she did not know what to do next. She was no longer bored, however; she was pleased by her own prettiness, and with renewed self-confidence she began to approve of herself in other aspects also. For instance, she had conscientiously done her best for Hector.

Any other woman might have led him on after that sudden kiss in the back lane; it was nearly a whole week ago, but she still remembered the thrill that ran down her spine when he kissed her. A heartless woman would have made a fool of him; a prig would have told her husband; but she, Mabel, had magnanimously used her power over him to keep him out of temptation. Nor had she told Aunt Janet of her favourite’s lapse; she had instead urged on Aunt Janet the necessity of making Elizabeth into a better wife for Hector. She and Janet between them, she had suggested, could turn Elizabeth into more of a lady and less of a vulgar lump. Hector should be grateful. Why not pay a call at number twenty-six, just to show Elizabeth that bygones were bygones? She hadn’t seen either of them since that last Saturday. It was nearly half-past four now; Hector would be at home by five; they would all have tea together.

The last shreds of her boredom vanished into the wardrobe with her frocks. John could have tea by himself. She was going on an errand of mercy, as it were, and even wifely duty had to give way to larger issues, had it not? She put on her pearls.

The acorn bob hung listlessly at the window of the empty drawing-room.

Both Mr and Mrs Hector Shand were at home when Mabel was shown in. Elizabeth was coldly polite, but Mabel had expected that.

‘Got up to kill, aren’t you?’ said Hector, almost savagely. She laid her coat over his arm almost as if she were laying herself, he thought, and seizing her hat he brutally clapped it on his own head. The plume of cock’s feathers streamed out behind his ear.

‘All I want are a few kiss-curls,’ he said, his eyes glittering as he looked at Mabel, ‘and then I could play the peacock as well as any of you women.’

Mabel gave a little scream of concern.

‘You’ll ruin my hat, Hector! Take it off.’

‘You deserve to have it ruined.’ Hector twirled the hat on his hand.

Elizabeth was still cold.

‘Put Mabel’s things on the sofa,’ she said. ‘And ring the bell for another cup, please.’

Hector sniffed loudly as he sat down again.

‘Been drenching yourself with some kind of stink, haven’t you? All the street-walkers do that. I thought you were a respectable married woman?’

He had reverted to his old habit of baiting Mabel, but he was doing it with more venom than before, thought Elizabeth. She began to think he was going too far in his merciless criticism of Mabel’s clothes, voice, manner, and conventional standards. Mabel was showing more and more resentment. No wonder.

Mabel too was aware that there was a new undertone in Hector’s railing. It annoyed her, but it fluttered her with an excitement that was quite pleasurable. At any rate, Hector did not bore her as John did…. She was conscious of her own lithe figure under the rosy silk of her dress, and of her long, well-shaped legs.

‘By the Lord!’ said Hector, ‘I’ll have to thread pink ribbons through my pants, or something. If respectable married women can doll themselves up like that, I don’t see why respectable married men shouldn’t put up something of a show.’

Elizabeth smiled, but she was not amused by the duel.

Their voices got sharper and sharper. Mabel finally shed all her dignity and put out her tongue: and the more hoydenish she became the more quiet and detached was Elizabeth’s attitude.

When Mabel rose to go Hector growled:

‘I suppose you expect me to take you home in all this rain?’

‘You forget, Hector, we’re dining with the Scrymgeours to-night: there’s no time to spare,’ put in Elizabeth.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Hector. ‘The Scrymgeours, Mabel, your particular friends, did you notice? We’re having dinner with them.’

‘You were awfully rude to her,’ said Elizabeth, trying to laugh, when Mabel had departed, cock’s feathers and all.

‘She went off in a huff all right,’ Hector’s voice was complacent. ‘She deserved every bit of it after the things she said about you to Aunt Janet.’

Mabel was annoyed at first as she picked her steps in the dark wet streets. It wouldn’t have taken Hector a quarter of an hour to escort her. He was deteriorating. Aunt Janet was right in thinking that Elizabeth would be the ruin of him. Dining with the Scrymgeours were they? Indeed!

She was still smarting from the lash of his tongue. But, incomprehensibly, Hector’s rudeness was less offensive than Elizabeth’s stupid attempts to palliate it. A phrase from one of her magazines came into her mind as she noted the rustling of her own petticoats: ‘the delicious frou-frou of femininity’. Elizabeth had none of that, not a particle of it. She perceived suddenly that Hector had been gibing at her femininity in order to save Elizabeth’s face.

He’s beginning to feel that Elizabeth is a great lump, she said to herself.

She felt younger, more alive, and, on reflection, pleased with the openness of Hector’s tactics. He was hard and aggressive; she liked men to be hard and aggressive. She preferred people to be successful rather than sentimental. He was an unscrupulous brute, of course; but she had the whip-hand of him, no doubt of that. John would turn him out of the mill at a word from her. His boldness in the circumstances was not unpleasing.

‘Well, little woman?’ said John, beaming upon her and showing his strong teeth. ‘Where have you been to in all this rain?’

John’s contentment was soon explained. He had received by the evening mail a letter from his sister, who was coming on the thirteenth.

‘Next Saturday,’ said John, rubbing his hands. ‘Thirteen was always Lizzie’s lucky number, she used to say.’

Mabel curled her lip as she went upstairs. John was growing positively soft.

‘I’m so tired,’ he had said, yawning and stretching his arms. ‘I’ll be glad when the week’s over and it’s Sunday morning again.’

Thank goodness, thought Mabel, it’s only Friday night.

Elizabeth was puzzled by the fact that she had felt like a wet blanket during Mabel’s visit. She had actually discovered herself feeling outraged by the childishness of the other two, and she had never before regarded herself as definitely grown-up. Was this a part of the process of becoming a wife?

Surely I’m not going to turn into a walking Morality, she thought impatiently. I don’t like disapprovers. But if she refused to disapprove, she could not deny that she was disquieted. In Hector’s rudeness to Mabel there was something that she did not like.

‘I don’t know what came over you,’ she said to him. ‘You made me quite uncomfortable. Suppose I had been going on at John like that, how would you have felt?’

‘Grand! I’d have backed you up for all I was worth.’

Elizabeth had to laugh.

‘I dislike Mabel too much to chaff her,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s it. It was really comical how ladylike I felt!’

The Scrymgeours rarely gave dinners, partly because Dr Scrymgeour liked to be left alone at his own fireside and partly because his practice was so extensive that his presence at home could not be guaranteed. But Emily was longing to show off her husband to her new friend, and Elizabeth was now so intimate with Emily Scrymgeour that she felt almost a proprietary interest in the doctor. She was, in fact, identifying a part of herself with Emily, exactly as she had identified a part of herself with Hector. In consequence she thought it absurd of Hector to say he did not like Mrs Scrymgeour; he would like her well enough when he got to know her.

The doctor’s wife was a small neatly made woman with large vivacious eyes of so dark a grey that they looked black. Her abundant black hair was glossy, her skin of a smooth pallor which remained impervious to the climatic effects of Calderwick, her quick hands short-fingered, nervous and capable. Her tongue was as quick as her hands, but she had a warm voice and the confiding manner of a child, although she was a good ten years older than Elizabeth.

She had comforted Elizabeth by assuring her that most of the other women in the town were dreadful sticks who hadn’t two ideas among them.

‘And they’re all so frightfully pi,’ said Mrs Scrymgeour, ‘not like you and me.’

It was a relief to pour into Mrs Scrymgeour’s ready ear a confession of inability to be interested in such topics as the winter underwear of husbands and how to keep darns from being scratchy. Mrs Scrymgeour agreed too that whist drives were awfully boring.

‘I go to some of them, of course – good for my husband’s practice. But they’re glad when I stay away, if you know what I mean. I’m such a good player, and it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but most of them are terribly greedy for the prizes.’

Mrs Scrymgeour’s method of rearing her child was sniffed at, it appeared, by the Calderwick ladies. She was suckling it herself.

‘They think that’s so vulgar,’ she confided to Elizabeth.

It was also considered undignified for a doctor’s lady to push her own perambulator, and no argument could have more effectively secured Elizabeth’s constant attendance.

Her friend’s manner in shops filled Elizabeth with envy. She had a special crony behind every counter on whom she lavished her bright smiles and who was rewarded for extra attentiveness by confidential gossip. Portly grocers carrying reserved baskets of large eggs came out in their aprons to admire the baby while Elizabeth held the perambulator, and even Mary Watson smiled, although she nodded her head vigorously and said: ‘That bairn o’ yours is far owre spoilt.’

The care bestowed on the upbringing of young Teddy surprised and fascinated Elizabeth. The doctor, it appeared, was always firing off new theories about the child’s development, and these his wife retailed to Elizabeth with great vivacity. She was proud of her husband, and had a fine sense of showmanship.

‘But he never screams!’ Elizabeth had remarked one day. She had had a vague idea that babies screamed incessantly.

‘Oh, doesn’t he! He screams for his milk all right. You should hear him.’

‘But he never screams while he’s out,’ persisted Elizabeth.

‘Why should he? His little tummy’s happy, and he trusts the whole world – even Mary Watson.’

‘Da-da,’ said the baby.

Mrs Scrymgeour remembered the doctor’s latest discovery and expounded it. The baby was saying da-da at present because his teeth were beginning to push through, and his attention kept returning to that part of his mouth. Before that he said ba-ba and boo-boo because his attention was concentrated on putting his lips together, on sucking; and still earlier he said goo-goo, and gay-gay, and gi-gi.

Mrs Scrymgeour bent over to her baby with each new sound and the baby chuckled as if at a great joke.

‘And he said that because he was attending to swallowing his milk, guggling it down, which must have been about the first thing he had to learn,’ she concluded in triumph. ‘Isn’t he a nut, my Jim?’

To see a pattern suddenly emerge in life where no pattern was discernible before is one of the keenest of human pleasures, and Elizabeth was thrilled by this orderly explanation of a baby’s random sounds. But Mrs Scrymgeour had not finished. She chuckled like her baby and glanced sideways at Elizabeth, saying: ‘Of course, it wasn’t only swallowing he had to learn in the beginning. When you take in food you have to let it out at the other end, too: and so Teddy used to attend to both ends; he used to grunt at both ends simultaneously.’

Their laughter rang out in the street and even passers-by smiled.

‘And Jim swears that the only thing which keeps us from speaking with our tails as well as with our mouths is insuff – insufficient apparatus.’

They both held on to the perambulator, weak with laughter. The baby joined in.

It was simple and pleasant laughter, but Mrs John Shand had not thought so. She had wrinkled her pretty nose in disgust as she saw her sister-in-law making a spectacle of herself with the Scrymgeour woman, and crossed the street to avoid meeting them.

A vulgar creature, she said to herself. It would not be long till Hector’s eyes were opened, for, in spite of his faults, he was, after all, a gentleman.

Elizabeth, however, had no misgivings as Hector sat down beside her vivacious friend. She turned expectantly to Dr Scrymgeour.

The doctor looked tall beside his wife, but small beside Hector. He had the slightly explosive manner of the shy man who is daily forced to overcome his shyness. His head was broad rather than long, with a wide forehead that was the first thing one noticed about him. Its width was accentuated by the parting in the middle of the fair hair above it, and it made the rest of his face at first sight insignificant. But his blue eyes were keen, Elizabeth discovered, and his lips, although thin, were beautifully cut. In repose they lay folded upon each other like the lips of a child, she thought.

The promise of that wide forehead attracted her, for she was naïve enought to believe in foreheads as an index to intelligence. She did not think it necessary to stumble over preliminary nothings, for Emily, with her delightful directness, had introduced her husband with these words: ‘You can tell Elizabeth the worst, James. I’ve given you away completely already.’ Yet the doctor evaded her with generalizations when she asked him point-blank for some more of his theories about the upbringing of children. His smile was nervous, it even verged on a giggle: he had false teeth, too, and although she tried to be tolerant Elizabeth disliked false teeth.

She felt balked.

Her identification with Emily made her feel humiliated as well as balked. If he tells Emily why shouldn’t he tell me? she thought, and the only possible answer seemed to be that he did not consider her to be sufficiently intelligent. Perhaps he was afraid she would be shocked. For the first time it occurred to Elizabeth that a capacity for being shocked argued a lack of intelligence. This new idea excited her, as new ideas always did, and she turned to the doctor, with an imitation of his wife’s most arch manner, crying: ‘I believe you are afraid of shocking me, but you know it’s only stupid people who are ever shocked! Besides I know all about Teddy speaking at both ends—’

The corners of the doctor’s mouth went up.

‘Emily’s too fond of that story,’ he said.

‘What story?’ called Mrs Scrymgeour across the table.

Elizabeth answered her and Emily laughed heartily. Elizabeth glanced at Hector to share her enjoyment with him. To her surprise he looked almost sulky. He shot one glance at her which she could not interpret and crumbled his bread.

‘Teddy is illuminating a great many phrases and attitudes for me,’ went on the doctor. He began to giggle again.

‘Why do the ministers speak of the “milk of the Word”?’

‘Do tell me.’

‘Watch any baby sucking,’ said the doctor with glee, ‘and you’ll see it.’

‘Oh do tell me!’

‘When Teddy sucks he puts all his energy into it—’

‘Hear, hear!’ from Mrs Scrymgeour.

‘And that makes him clench his fists and bend his arms in and draw up his knees. Now the flexion of the arms brings the fists close together. Turn him up endways in that position and he would be kneeling in prayer. Sucking the milk of the Word. There you have it. Isn’t it illuminating?’

‘What a lovely idea!’ Elizabeth forgot all about Hector. ‘Drawing comfort from Heaven like a child at the breast.’

‘There’s the Milky Way up in the sky too,’ added the doctor. ‘The first god must have been a mother-god. Yes, yes.’

He was fingering his wine-glass.

‘Bottle-feeding,’ he fired out suddenly, with another giggle, ‘will probably mean the end of religion.’

‘James!’ said Mrs Scrymgeour in delight. That’s a new one!’

‘Well, your bottle-fed baby sees the milk going down in the bottle until there’s none left, and he knows that it’s empty. He can’t have the same emotional satisfaction as a child sucking at the breast, which is an apparently inexhaustible source of comfort. Communion with nature, you know, and all that. Your bottle boy isn’t likely to grow up a mystic’

‘I shall put Teddy on a bottle to-morrow,’ declared Emily.

‘I wish I had some proof … statistics of bottle-fed ink ants….’

The doctor shook his head in comical rue.

‘Nobody draws up the kind of statistics I want. But if religion knew its business the Pope would issue a Bull forbidding feeding-bottles. On the other hand, you would have the rationalists financing feeding-bottles.’

He broke off, chuckling, and drank his wine.

Mrs Scrymgeour was radiant. Her husband was going through his paces very well, and Elizabeth looked as if she were enjoying herself. The doctor relinquished his wine- glass and applied himself to a highly decorative sweet which Elizabeth was privately attempting to analyse and deciding to acquire from Emily’s book of recipes. Mrs Scrymgeour turned the full broadside of her charms upon Hector.

But although Elizabeth was stimulated by the doctor’s remarks and preoccupied with the sweet, she was at the same time trying to ignore a certain uneasiness in her spirit. There was something in what had just been said that threatened danger to her inner life.

‘Don’t you believe in religion, then?’ she asked.

The doctor seemed embarrassed again…. Apparently he did not like serious questions.

‘Er–er a childish way of comforting oneself, don’t you think?’

‘But how can one live without it?’

Elizabeth was genuinely shocked at last, and since something she valued was in danger she did not stop to reflect upon stupidity and intelligence.

‘Oh, well, one does, doesn’t one?’

‘I don’t mean conventional religion, going to church, and that kind of thing. I mean precisely that capacity to draw comfort from the universe, that mystical communion you were speaking of. Don’t you believe in that?’

‘Er–no,’ said the doctor.

He looked at Elizabeth, then he looked away.

‘I believe many people feel such a communion,’ he added, ‘but it isn’t what they think it is.’

‘But if I don’t believe what I feel,’ burst out Elizabeth, ‘what am I to believe?’

Dr Scrymgeour carefully spooned up the last of his sweet and said nothing.

‘You take all the poetry out of life,’ murmured Elizabeth.

The doctor brightened and laid down his spoon:

‘I haven’t a grain of poetry in me.’

Elizabeth stared at him, and saw again that his lips were cut like the petals of a flower. Her blank horror was invaded by a secret sense of superiority. He did not understand himself.

‘Perhaps you have more poetry in you than you guess,’ she returned, smiling, and for the rest of the evening she refrained from lapsing into seriousness.

‘Well,’ said Emily, whirling round upon her when she went upstairs for her wraps, ‘well, what do you think of my husband?’

‘I think he’s a darling.’

‘Isn’t he clever?’ said Emily, with satisfied triumph. She then handed Elizabeth a compliment: ‘He’s a shy creature, you know, and he doesn’t usually trot out his pet ideas before company. He must have liked you.’

‘Do you know,’ said Elizabeth, flattered, ‘he has such a lovely mouth that I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.’

‘Better not tell Mr Shand.’

It occurred to Elizabeth that she ought to return the lead and ask for a verdict on Hector, but Emily had already screwed down the gas. Elizabeth obediently went downstairs.

But when Hector was fumbling with the latch-key at their own door she was appalled to hear him say: ‘Thank God, that’s over!’

‘What’s the matter, Hector?’ she called, pursuing him into the drawing-room, where he was striking matches. She thought that he was jealous, perhaps, and perhaps even a little excited with wine.

‘I can’t stand that woman,’ retorted Hector, pitching his coat on a chair and unwinding his muffler. His nose was very high and haughty.

Elizabeth’s eyes widened.

‘She was very nice to you.’

‘Nice to me! Huh! Expects every man she meets to eat out of her hand, doesn’t she? Bloody bitch, that’s what she is. Thinks everybody’s going to fall for her. She makes me sick.’

Hector stuck his pipe between his teeth and reached for the tobacco-jar.

‘But heaps of people like her.’

‘You bet your boots they don’t,’ said Hector through his clenched teeth as he stuffed his pipe.

‘Oh, nonsense, Hector; I know they do.’

‘She only tells you they do. I tell you she would turn any decent fellow sick.’

‘I can’t see what’s the matter with her.’

‘The matter with her,’ said Hector between puffs, ‘is that she’s all my eye. I’d like to smack her skinny little bottom good and hard.’

Elizabeth burst out laughing.

‘Is that all you have against Emily, that she’s too skinny for your taste?’

‘No!’ said Hector, with unexpected ferocity.

Elizabeth, however, went on laughing. Fresh from a new environment she had not yet accommodated herself to the familiar room and all that it connoted. At the moment she was not a wife.

‘Oh, Hector, didn’t you once tell me you couldn’t look at a woman without thinking of going to bed with her? It’s not really Emily’s fault if you think she’s too skinny.’

‘If you must have it,’ said Hector, rising and standing on the hearthrug; ‘I don’t think she’s the kind of woman you should associate with.’

‘Indeed!’ Elizabeth sobered all at once. ‘And why?’

‘Look at the kind of talk she hands out. Tells me her baby’s first sense of beauty comes from feeling her breasts. Feeling her breasts, she tells me! Might as well ask me to feel her bubs and be done with it. And her husband’s no better.’

‘Do you mean to tell me that you were shocked?’

‘I should damn well think I was.’

‘You’ve said many worse things to me.’

‘Not before other people.’

‘And you’ve done many worse things.’

‘Damn it all, haven’t I been sorry for them? What’s that got to do with it?’

Hector too was defending something he valued that he felt to be in danger. He was particularly indignant that it should be threatened by a woman, since women were its natural defenders.

‘You’re a stupid fool!’ cried Elizabeth, her eyes hard.

‘Go on.’ Hector was grim. ‘Go on. Spit it all out.’

Elizabeth remembered her wifehood. She went up to him and locked her hands round his unyielding arm.

‘Don’t you see, Hector, don’t you see, darling, that it’s simply stupid to be shocked at things?’

‘I may be stupid, but I don’t see. I’m only thinking of you,’ he went on less grimly. ‘I don’t want my wife to be an easy mark for other people to sneer at, and that’s what will happen to you if you get into that woman’s habits.’

Elizabeth unloosed her hands.

‘The Scrymgeours are the only intelligent people I’ve met in Calderwick. I intend to go on being friendly with them.’

‘Intelligent be damned! Don’t come with that highbrow stuff to me.’

‘I’m not going to stultify myself, not even for you. You can do what you like about it.’

‘So that’s that,’ said Hector in a stifled voice. He did not know the meaning of the word that Elizabeth had brought out with such a grand air, and his ignorance made him savage.

‘That,’ responded Elizabeth, ‘is that.’

She felt such a cold ferocity in herself that she was frightened. This was like none of their previous quarrels. There were tears in her eyes as she walked upstairs, but they were tears of mortified pride, not of wounded love. How dared he dictate to her what she was to think? Stupid, sulky fool. He was as bad as Aunt Janet. She grew hot again as she remembered how near she had been to asking Emily: ‘And what do you think of my husband?’

Disjointed sentences started up in her mind. She walked about the bedroom saying, ‘Oh, my God.’ Then she flung herself on the bed and stared dry-eyed at the wall. She was terrified at herself. ‘If I don’t believe what I feel what am I to believe?’ she had said to Dr Scrymgeour. And at the present moment what she felt was that she didn’t give a damn for Hector.

Hector poured himself a glass of whisky and gulped it down. As he found himself biting on his pipe-stem so fiercely that he was afraid he would break it he emptied out his pipe and lit a cigarette…. The cigarettes and the glasses of whisky went on in an uninterrupted chain.

So that was that. She despised him for a stupid fool. Now he knew where he stood. Nothing more to expect.

Using words he didn’t understand, by God! And all he asked for was a little decency.

Hard lines on a poor devil who was only trying to do the right thing. Trusting to his precious wife to help him not to make a bloody mess of his life and she turns round and sneers at him.

What the hell was the use of trying?

As the whisky diminished in the decanter Hector more and more savagely shook himself free from the entanglements he felt irritating him. His love for Elizabeth was one; it only put him in the power of a woman who despised him. His love for Aunt Janet was another; it only related him to a code of prohibitions which he could not observe unaided. Elizabeth and Aunt Janet stood on either side of him demanding what he did not have, for he had neither intellectual freedom nor moral constancy. His slighted vanity, his wounded love, and his morbid feeling of insufficiency filled him with pain and dull rage, and he turned that rage upon the two human beings who stood nearest to him.

Damn all women, he said to himself as he emptied the decanter. He had come to no other conclusion: he was very drunk and intensely miserable.

When he finally stumbled upstairs in his stockinged feet a reek of whisky came with him. Elizabeth was undressed and lying in her bed with her face to the wall. She was very rigid, but he was too drunk to suspect that she was awake. She could hear him disentangling himself from his trousers; he was obviously attempting to make no noise. Suddenly she did not know whether to laugh or cry. His physical presence had thawed that terrifying ice about her heart. Almost palpably she felt her love for him joining them together again…. Hector put out the light and crawled groaning into bed. Elizabeth turned round and stretched out a hand in the darkness as if across a gulf that could still be bridged.

Her hand touched him lightly. He shook it off, growling: ‘Leave a fellow alone, can’t you?’

She turned her face to the wall again and wept quietly, while Hector dreamed that he was dead, lying on a bier in a place that looked like a church, and that Elizabeth and Aunt Janet in deep mourning walked up the aisle to look at his body.