Читать книгу Imagined Selves - Willa Muir - Страница 26

EIGHT

When Elizabeth Shand awoke in the morning Hector was still asleep. He was facing her as he lay, but his head was half-buried in the pillow and little of him was visible save his tumbled hair and closed eyes. The terrible sensation Elizabeth had of having dropped down a bottomless chasm began gradually to fade before the reassuring familiarity of Hector asleep in the next bed. She could not see his face, but she knew that his body was the same body it had always been; behind those closed lids the same Hector must exist. If once she had been daunted by the aloofness of her sleeping husband she was now comforted by it. Asleep, he was still her sweetheart, unchanged by the conflicting storms of yesterday, sunk into the most profound part of himself, which, of course, was the essential Hector, the Hector who loved her and whom she loved. Their quarrel of the night before seemed irrelevant as she lay looking at him. She remembered how she had told the minister that she could not believe in the separation of the spirit from the body; and now she thought that it was when most completely sunk in the body, as in sleep, that the spirit was most itself.

Quietly she crept out of her own bed and crawled in beside Hector. Let him awaken to find her close to him, she thought. Surely there was some current of invisible force which flowed in an unbroken circuit around them as they lay motionless together, a healing current, she thought, which would bear away all their differences. She felt his eyelashes stir on her cheek, and pressed him to her in a passion of tenderness.

If Hector was surprised to be awakened in this fashion he did not show it. He rubbed his cheek on hers and kissed her tenderly enough. Even the reek of stale whisky did not annoy Elizabeth; she was both exalted and contrite, and she dismissed all scruples as unworthy. But Hector had a fiendish headache, a rotten headache; that damned whisky couldn’t have been good stuff. Elizabeth got up and fetched him two aspirins in a glass of water.

‘You’re much too good to me, Elizabeth.’

Did this protest mean that Hector felt himself fettered by his obligations to her? She did not stop to wonder.

Her mood, persisting until next day, which was Sunday, inclined her towards going to church, and she was a little surprised and touched by Hector’s ready acquiescence.

Whenever they went to church they sat in the Shand pew, and after the morning service all the Shands strolled home with Aunt Janet, and returned by way of Balfour Terrace, where John and Mabel took their leave and Elizabeth and Hector, waving good-byes, went back to the High Street alone.

John, being the senior Shand, sat at the outside end of the pew; Hector was next to him, then Elizabeth, Aunt Janet and Mabel. Elizabeth found it possible to smile on both the other women, but unconsciously, after the first silent greeting, she edged towards Hector and away from Aunt Janet. She found herself also regretting that she had cut off her intercourse with the minister merely because of Aunt Janet’s scandalmongering, and she waited eagerly to catch his eye and send him a message of reassurance.

The minister walked up to the pulpit with his usual solemnity, with even more than his usual dignity. His glance crossed Elizabeth’s once, but his blue eye flashed such a cold strange gleam that she felt snubbed. Perhaps he resented the way she had dropped him?

She forgot this personal question in her amazed disapproval of the sermon. She could not know that William Murray had sat up until far into the morning reshaping that sermon to fit his spiritual rebirth into the Church. Where was his sympathy, his tolerance? she asked herself. The man was thundering theology from the pulpit; splitting hairs, logic-chopping. Far above the heads of his congretation, anyhow, thought Elizabeth scornfully, looking round at the vacant or sleepy faces. He was now proving to them that the existence of good connoted the existence of evil; this world was a world of both good and evil, unlike the Kingdom of God, which, when it came, would be neither good nor evil, but equally beyond both, transcending both. Meanwhile, because on earth we had intuitions of good, we must admit also intuitions of evil.

‘The metaphor of darkness, like all metaphors, misleads our childish minds,’ said the minister. (Was that meant for her? thought Elizabeth.) ‘We fold our hands passively and wait for the sun to dispel the darkness of evil, when we should be fighting it, driving it away, casting it out, as Christ cast out devils.’

In her mind’s eye Elizabeth suddenly saw Ned’s distorted face, and her heart grew heavy with a feeling of doom.

‘The Church, as the visible body of Christ,’ preached the minister, ‘is an alliance against the powerful forces of evil. Alone, we cannot fight evil; it is too strong for the individual; we all need help in the struggle, and so we are banded together to form a Church. Who is not for us must be against us….’

Elizabeth, more and more confounded, leaned forward in the pew and rested her chin on her hands. The man was actually talking about original sin. What had happened to him? What was he going to do to Ned?

‘The body in itself is evil,’ insisted the minister, ‘until we deliberately consecrate it to God.’

Elizabeth sat back with such violence that she dislodged a Bible from the shelf in front of her and sent it clattering to the floor. She wished she had the courage to rise and contradict the minister on the spot….

Aunt Janet was offering her a peppermint.

‘Don’t you feel well, Elizabeth?’ she whispered.

‘Me a peppermint too,’ whispered Hector, grinning.

Aunt Janet rustled the little paper bag. Elizabeth turned fully round and looked at the clock to see how much of this apalling sermon was still to come.

She would not listen any more. The odour of peppermint and cinnamon, the incense of a Scottish Presbyterian church, floated around her. Sucking her hard peppermint, she stared at one of the windows, combining the little panes of glass into squares and diamonds of colour. Let him stew in his own juice, she thought angrily. Let him take a whip and beat the devil out of Ned if he chooses; it’s none of my business.

The congregation stirred; the sermon was finished; everyone stood up to sing the final hymn. Elizabeth kept her mouth shut. She would never, never go to church again, let the Shands say what they liked. She wasn’t going to have all that theological tapestry hung between her and the universe.

Slowly and sedately they moved out in the throng.

‘Did you feel ill, Elizabeth?’

Aunt Janet was at her ear, solicitous.

‘No, I was only angry.’

‘Angry, my dear?’

‘Angry with all the nonsense Mr Murray was talking.’

‘I thought it was a very good sermon, I’m sure. Didn’t you think so, John?’

‘A very good sermon,’ said John.

‘Well,’ Elizabeth laughed a little, ‘I think it’s awful to have to listen without being able to contradict. I wanted to answer back.’

She turned round, looking for Hector as usual, but was surprised to see him walking off with Mabel. It was extraordinary. He had never done that before.

She could not help watching the two figures in front. Mabel walked very well; she had an elastic step; her very back looked gay. She and Hector were laughing. It was queer, she commented to herself, that the sight of Mabel and Hector exchanging badinage should rouse in her the same feeling of disapproval that had invaded her the other day. She felt grown-up again, relegated to the background with the sober adults, as it were, while the children frolicked along in front. It puzzled her.

John seemed to be amused at something. Whatever it was, he checked himself from putting it into words. But the twinkle in his eye suddenly delighted Elizabeth as she caught it.

‘Your beard twinkles when you smile, John,’ she said, feeling audacious. ‘The point of your nose twinkles, too. Look at it, Aunt Janet, doesn’t it now?’

She had never before suspected that she could venture to chaff John, or that he would like it. Apparently he did like it, and her grown-up feeling vanished when she discovered that John was an excellent victim of teasing. She forgot that for a second or two she had resented being left to his society. Behind a cross-fire of personal remarks she escaped for the moment from her anger with the minister, her forebodings about Ned, and her uneasiness with regard to Mabel and Hector. In spite of his beard, and his size, John was not so very grown-up after all.

‘I was afraid of you at first because of your beard,’ she confessed, ‘but now I see that you are only hiding behind it.’

When Aunt Janet was safely within her own front gate Elizabeth found herself still beside John.

‘You know my sister is coming on Saturday?’ he said suddenly.

‘Oh yes,’ cried Elizabeth. ‘I’m looking forward so much to meeting her.’

‘I think you’ll like each other. I couldn’t help laughing when I saw you fidget so much in church; she used to do exactly the same.’

‘Did she want to answer back too?’

‘She always did,’ said John gleefully.

Elizabeth’s heart leapt. ‘Is she at all like me?’

‘No, not at all. She’s more like Hector, I must admit. But, although you may not care to hear me say so, she’s much better-looking than Hector.’

‘I’ll let you say so as much as you please. When does she arrive on Saturday?’

‘I think she’s to travel overnight from London coming in here about ten o’clock. Hasn’t Mabel invited you and Hector to come to dinner on Saturday night to meet her?’

‘No, not yet —’

‘She’ll probably do it before you go home. We’ll have a jolly evening.’

John actually hummed a little song to himself. That finally broke down the frail wall of Elizabeth’s discretion.

‘Do you know, I think I must have several blind spots,’ she said, ‘I’m only finding out now what you’re really like.’

John smiled half-shyly.

‘I’ve decided that your bark is worse than your bite, John.’

‘How do you know that?’

Elizabeth laughed; her eyes sparkled.

‘I’m learning sense. I used to judge people entirely by what they said; but now I know that it’s the person behind the words that matters. When you like people it doesn’t matter very much what they say.’

‘I thought you liked Murray?’

‘That’s a shrewd hit,’ said Elizabeth, with a rueful grin.

John grinned back. ‘And yet you were nearly jumping out of the pew at him this morning.’

‘I couldn’t help it. But I’m sure it’s because he himself has changed that what he said annoyed me. Something has changed him. I’m afraid of what he might do….’

‘How’s that? I thought myself that he seemed to be coming to his senses. He’s been mooning about for years in a kind of dream, quite off the earth; and this morning I thought he had wakened up.’

‘I liked his dream better…. I don’t want to be brought down with a thump on to solid earth. Besides it wasn’t solid earth, John. It was only logic. It was husks for the prodigal sons and daughters, that’s what it was; and who has a right to say that we are all prodigals and must be fed on husks?’

John did not answer at first. Then, with an appeareance of lightness, he said: ‘Oh, well, after the husks comes the fatted calf, you know. We’ll have that next Sunday.’

Elizabeth realized with a stricken feeling that he had applied the parable to himself and his sister.

‘I’m for the fatted calf all the time,’ she said as heartily as possible, and dropped the discussion, feeling clumsy and foolish.

When they all halted at number seven Balfour Terrace she could not resist slipping her arm inside Hector’s, as if it were necessary to let Mabel see that Hector had been merely on loan. In this graceful position they both accepted Mabel’s invitation for Saturday night to meet Lizzie.

As they turned home Hector disengaged his arm. Men and women in Calderwick certainly never walked arm-in- arm by daylight, but Elizabeth quite unreasonably felt chilled by his action.

‘You ran away and left me,’ she said.

‘Oh, Mabel wanted to tell me about the car she’s going to get. She screwed it out of John this morning.’

‘A car! How lovely.’

‘I’m going to teach her to drive it. We’re going up to Aberdeen some time this week to buy it.’

‘You know, John really is a dear,’ said Elizabeth suddenly, apparently ignoring Hector’s statement. ‘I’ve only just found it out.’

‘John? He’s a swine.’

‘No, he’s not! How can you say such a thing?’

‘I suppose you’re going to call me a liar, are you?’

‘What’s the matter, Hector?’

‘Oh, nothing. I suppose you think I’ve bloody well deserved all I’ve got from John?’

‘I don’t care whether you did or not. He’s certainly different now.’

‘Hell of a difference!’

‘People do change, Hector. It’s queer that they do. I suppose we all do….’

‘Well, I’m not going to argue about it.’

The tone of Hector’s voice as he said ‘argue’ conveyed that he had had enough of argument with Elizabeth, and reminded her, with a shock, of their previous argument. All her uneasiness came back, and her thoughts congealed like a crust over her feelings, so that she did not venture to say another word. They walked on in a silence that grew more oppressive the longer it lasted, and it lasted until they got home.

The invisible barrier between them seemed to cut across the table as they sat at dinner. Elizabeth was scrupulously polite in offering more helpings, and Hector accepted them with equal politeness.

‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ she asked. On Sunday afternoons they had always gone out together, but to-day she was determined to thrust no assumptions upon Hector.

‘I think I’ll run up and see Hutcheon.’ Hector’s tone was quite careless. ‘He’s got a small car – a beauty – and I’d like to have a shot at driving her somewhere this afternoon, to get my hand in.’

In other circumstances Elizabeth would have cried, ‘I’m coming too!’ but she only looked at her plate and filled her spoon with exaggerated care. In another moment her emotions would break their crust and come bubbling up…. Hector felt the imminence of the outburst, and he laid down his napkin.

‘I’d better be getting along,’ he said, ‘or Hutcheon will be gone. Excuse me, please.’

Elizabeth had learned a few things that Sunday morning, and in the afternoon and evening she learned something more. Her first lesson was that in the absence of Hector her painful agitation subsided with incredible quickness. Half- an-hour after his departure she was able to sit down to a book by a philosopher called Bergson, whom she had discovered just before leaving the University and who excited her. The second lesson for the day was that the same agitation returned with the same incredible suddenness the minute Hector set foot again within the house. She seemed to have become two separate persons, one of whom was calm and confident in Hector, while the other was childishly, almost hysterically, affected by his presence.

All the understanding excuses she had found for him during the afternoon, all her quiet resolve to find a harmony which should include both her love for Hector and her good opinion of John, all her faith in the underlying permanence of that love, disappeared when he came in, as the clear reflection in a still pool disappears when the mud at the bottom is stirred up by a stick.

The whole of Elizabeth’s world was in flux, although not exactly as Bergson had declared it to be, and instead of regarding the phenomenon with scientific interest she felt as if she were drowning in it.