Читать книгу Imagined Selves - Willa Muir - Страница 27

NINE

Elizabeth, governed as she was by images, thought of herself and Hector as the terminals of an invisible and powerful current which ought to flow unimpeded from one to the other. Hitherto she had not imagined that a distortion of the current could distort the terminals also, but in the next week she grew more and more baffled by the effects of the distortion upon herself. Whenever Hector spoke to her a lump rose in her throat; his approach seemed to graze an intolerable wound; and the more grimly she told herself that this was absurd and petty the more she was bewildered by her own spurts of resentment. On the other hand, whenever he ignored her or turned away in impatient anger her resentment was lost in a self-pity that sometimes passed off in a fit of submissive tenderness towards her husband and sometimes drove her sobbing to her bedroom. She could never tell what she was going to do, and in none of her actions was she recognizable to herself except during Hector’s absence. As soon as he left the house she would stop crying and say: This is not me! What have I been doing?

These more stable moments emerged like rocks once the waves of emotion were spent. They might have served Elizabeth as a basis for self-examination but, being young and indeterminate, she preferred to gaze with increasing bewilderment at the cross-currents of the sea. Elizabeth had a habit of turning her back on the land.

Hector was less bewildered because he was deliberately drifting, and in doing so he was perhaps subserving a deeper purpose. The ports we try to make by tacking may be less salutary for us than those to which we drift. There may be no such thing as chance in human conduct. Hector, at any rate, although unhappy, was less surprised by the estrangement than Elizabeth. It seemed to him now that he had foreseen it all along. It served him right, he thought, for marrying a woman supposed to be brainy; she was bound to despise him sooner or later. He could not forget her contempt; he kept worrying it like a dog at a bone. For a few hours on the day after their quarrel he had apparently forgotten it, but it had been only temporarily buried beneath a load of depression, and now he was turning it over so often that there was no chance of its disappearing. His persistence in dragging it to light was indeed so obstinate that there must have been some other motive at work which he did not surmise. In vain Elizabeth tried to assure him that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant it, that it was too absurd – he refused to be placated. It began to look as if he were clinging to an excuse. That was perhaps what bewildered Elizabeth most.

She was incapable of realizing that she had failed him in something essential, and he was too inarticulate to make it clear. Even when he said, ‘You don’t give a damn for decency, so why the hell should I?’ she was merely angry.

So Hector drifted deliberately, even defiantly, as if he had argued the situation to some such conclusion as this: Elizabeth should have steered him on his course; she should have guided him into the haven of respectability; and if she refused, if she unshipped the rudder and flung it at his head, whose fault was it that he drifted?

Moreover the current that was bearing him away had been pulling at him ever since his marriage. In becoming estranged from his wife Hector was only doing what the whole of Calderwick expected of him. Wives, in Calderwick, were dull, domestic commodities, and husbands, it was understood, were unfaithful whenever they had the opportunity. Hector also had the reputation of being the wildest daredevil in the town, and in the Club, where every man liked to be thought a bit of a gay dog, his prestige was enormous. His prestige was now likely to increase still more, for he spent every night in the Club getting drunk. When he was not at the Club or in the office he was flirting with Mabel. Because of Elizabeth’s inexplicable failure as a wife he could not hope to rival John as a respected citizen, and to captivate John’s wife seemed an alternative way of getting even. Mabel was asking for it anyway, he told himself.

It is difficult to see what current could have carried Elizabeth away had she too been minded to drift. In Calderwick wives are not so well provided for as husbands. Wives in Calderwick, for instance, do not forgather in drunkenness, so Elizabeth was denied that relief. Nor could she count on support from Aunt Janet; she could not, indeed, count on any of the women she knew except Emily Scrymgeour. The only thing she could have done was to be unfaithful to her husband, but for a Calderwick woman to do that is not to drift: the whole social current sets the other way. Mabel was not drifting towards Hector, for instance; she had no intention of leaving the social current; she was only swimming a little against it to try her strength, to give herself something to do. There was no easy drift to which Elizabeth might commit herself except the traditional stream of respectable wifehood. Both as a member of society and as an individual she was more buffeted than Hector.

For the first day or two she took long, solitary walks, seeking an assurance from the sea, the grass, and the leafless trees in the little valleys that she was still the same Elizabeth. The house seemed to be agitated by stormy emotions, but out of doors, she thought, in the slower, larger rhythm of the non-human world, she would again find herself, and, in consequence, find Hector too. She laid her hand on the smooth trunk of a large beech and looked up through its rounded boughs at the grey sky. It was a wise old tree, she thought, sixty years old perhaps, maybe a hundred; she had watched its leaves change from green to russet, and now she could almost feel the warm life withdrawn into its trunk, which in spring would flow out again into a thousand buds. An old, old tree, but it would put out silky new leaves, with downy edges, leaves so young and tender that one would hesitate to touch them…. Sudden tears filled her eyes as she thought of the spring buds; it was an intolerable thought that such young things should bourgeon only to be burned in the fires of autumn and stripped from the boughs by savage winds. We are like the leaves, she thought, and when we flutter from the tree we think it is freedom, but it is death.

She stood there, with the palm of her hand pressed on the smooth grey bark, and stared at a world that was filled with death. Everything died. Everything could die. It was intolerable. How could she have been so unthinkingly happy in such a world?

She fled back to the town, where mortality crowded together and roofed itself in from the terrible emptiness of the sky. Men and women were incredibly pathetic, she thought, or incredibly courageous. But, in comparison with death, of what importance were their silly little notions of right and wrong? What did it matter if Hector thought the Scrymgeours indecent? How could she bother to be angry with him when he might die?

The thought of Hector dead haunted her all the rest of the afternoon. The physical presence of living people usually keeps us from inflating their images with sentimentality, but when the objects of our desire are removed from us in space or time their images can shrink or swell disproportionately; and as Elizabeth in her imagination was removing Hector to a point much farther away than the office, where he was presumably detained, his image became gigantic, filled with all the qualities her frustrated tenderness longed for. By five o’clock she was sitting at the tea-table waiting for him in a state of almost painful anticipation. At half-past five she made tea and drank it by herself; his absence had become a voluntary absence, and his image began to shrink; the sentiment which had sustained it flooded back upon her until she had to get rid of it in an outburst of tears, after which she lay on her bed in cold despair. Hector had dwindled into nothing; he was worse than dead to her, for there was no consoling image left. She felt as if it were she herself who was dead.

When Hector came in, some time after midnight, she turned her face to the wall. He was very drunk.

Next day she shrank from going out. But she could not settle; she wandered from the window to the bookcase, and from the bookcase to the window again, forgetting her book. The certainty of death made everything irrelevant and trivial. Born to die, she said to herself. She might equally well have said, Dying to be born, for what she was gazing at was the winter death of the garden, but her eye was prompted by the apparent deadness of her own heart, where no quickening movement promised new life. The end of Hector’s love for her seemed like the end of the world.

Elizabeth was a victim of her upbringing as well as of her temperament. From her earliest years she had been subjected to the subtle pressure of the suggestion that a husband is the sole justification of a woman’s existence, that a woman who cannot attract and keep a husband is a failure. That some such theory should emerge in a society which regarded the sexual act as sinful was inevitable; one cannot train women in chastity and then expect them to people the world unless the sinfulness of sex is counterbalanced by the desirability of marriage. In Elizabeth’s case temperament had modified tradition so far as to set romantic love as well as marriage on the other end of the lever depressed by sex: marriage alone without love would not maintain the equilibrium. One might admit that the odds were heavily weighted against her.

Her restlessness was perhaps a symptom of vitality. At any rate, after walking round and round the drawing-room she went on an impulse into the kitchen, where the strong-armed and red-headed Mary Ann was singing as she washed up dishes. Elizabeth, as Mabel said, had simply no idea how to treat a maid; she was incapable of keeping her own place, and therefore unfit to keep other people in their places.

‘Well, Mary Ann, are things looking up?’

‘First rate, mem…. I had a rare time last nicht.’

Mary Ann beamed, and plunged into the soapy water again.

‘Here, give me a dish-clout and I’ll dry the dishes. I can’t settle to anything this morning.’

‘You’re looking tired,’ said Mary Ann, with affectionate concern. ‘Dinna you touch that dish-clout. I should have had thae dishes done lang syne. I’ll no’ be a minute. And then I’ll make you a cuppie o’ tea, will I?’

‘You think a cuppie o’ tea is a cure for everything, Mary Ann.’

‘So it is,’ said Mary Ann stoutly. ‘Gi’e me a cuppie o’ tea and I dinna care what happens next.’

Elizabeth sat down on the kitchen table.

‘How’s the lad getting on?’

‘Eh, fine, I tell ye. He’s coming on. He gi’ed me a pickle sweeties last nicht. I gi’ed him one on the lug he wasna looking for.’

‘Aren’t you afraid to hit a policeman, Mary Ann?’

‘Me? No’ me. A polisman’s only a man-body, especially if he’s your lad. A bit dirl on the lug’s good for them.’

‘What did he say?’

‘“You’re a daft besom,” he says, “Mary Ann,” he says, “but I like you for it,” he says, rubbing awa’ at his lug. “Do you ever think about me?” he says, the great soft gomeril. “Whiles,” says I, “but no’ aye!” That gi’ed him something to think about. “Whiles,” says I, “but no’ aye!”’

Mary Ann chuckled as she cleared the dishes away. Elizabeth sat lamely on the table, realizing that good- humoured banter can be as efficient a barrier to intimacy as the most discouraging aloofness. She did not know how to begin confiding in Mary Ann.

‘Now for the cuppie o’ tea.’

Mary Ann bustled to the stove.

‘All right, Mary Ann.’ Elizabeth slipped off the table. ‘Bring it into the drawing-room.’

Her half-conscious wish to talk to somebody became a definite desire to consult Emily Scrymgeour. She felt that she was blindly going round and round in circles and that talking to a third person might clear her vision. Since that unlucky evening of the dinner-party she had not seen Emily, but that active lady had already guessed something of what was happening. Scandal in Calderwick percolates at first by a kind of osmosis from one mind to another long before it becomes current, and various people had remarked Hector’s frequent appearances in Mabel’s new car and his increasing devotion to the whisky at the Club. In fact, Emily was waiting for her friend’s confidences.

‘I’m sorry for her, mind you,’ she said to the doctor, ‘but she’s such a queer mixture that she’d shy off if she thought I was trying to poke my nose in too far, even although she thinks the world of me. She’s really very reserved – like you.’

That judgment would have amazed Elizabeth.

‘She takes the wrong things too seriously,’ said the doctor. ‘Bound to get hurt.’

‘Jim! And you’ve only seen her once! You are a clever wee man, you know. It isn’t everybody can get a husband like you.’

This complacent reflection was never absent from the background of Emily Scrymgeour’s thoughts, and made her tolerant of other wives’ difficulties.

Elizabeth did not suspect that she was falling like a seed into a carefully prepared bed when she walked into Emily’s drawing-room, apologizing diffidently for her defection of the past week. She did not realize it even when Emily sent Teddy out with Peggy the maid, averring that she had so much sewing piled up in the basket that she could not afford to go out, and that anyway it was better to sew with somebody to keep one company.

‘Don’t you hate sewing and darning?’ said Elizabeth.

‘No, I love it. Haven’t you ever seen my white embroidery? I like working with my hands and I make all Teddy’s clothes myself. Look at the design on this romper….’

‘I wish I was some good at sewing,’ burst out Elizabeth. ‘I can’t even knit.’

‘Your hands look capable enough,’ returned Emily, working busily with her own quick short fingers. ‘I hate to see women with helpless-looking hands, but yours aren’t like that.’

Elizabeth, thus admitted to the same pinnacle of womanliness as her friend, squirmed there in silence for a minute and then abased herself.

‘My hands are all thumbs, Emily, in every way. You don’t know what a fool I am.’

Her voice roughened as she said this, for she was executing one of those complicated manœuvres of which the human spirit is strangely capable. Her vanity and her love were hurt, her pride was bewildered, and she had a longing to weep on Emily’s shoulder; but at the same time she could not abuse her husband to anybody, and the only alternative was to abuse herself. The savage roughness in her voice was caused by anger, and as she started up to walk about the room her anger increased. She was contemptuously furious with herself.

‘A fool!’ she kept on saying. ‘A damned fool!’

‘It’s unlikely that you’re the only fool in the world,’ said Emily, laying her work aside. ‘People do quarrel with their husbands, you know.’

She laughed at Elizabeth’s startled face and patted the sofa, on which she had expressly seated herself.

‘Don’t prowl like that, but come and sit down and tell me all about it. I’ve been married for eight years, Elizabeth.’

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s not difficult to guess, is it? What else could it be?’

‘Oh – anything. I’m an ignorant fool, I tell you. I never suspected that I was a half-wit, and it’s unpleasant to discover it.’

‘Do you think I’m a half-wit too?’ said Emily, smiling.

‘I think you’re the only intelligent woman in Calderwick.’

‘Do sit down and be sensible.’ Emily was still smiling. ‘What you really mean is that you didn’t learn at the University how to manage a husband.’

‘I haven’t learned how to manage myself; that’s what’s bothering me.’

Elizabeth ceased prowling, and looked directly at her friend.

‘I feel that myself has let me down. I don’t know at any minute what damned silly thing I’ll do next. Yes, I have quarrelled with Hector, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that I haven’t sense enough to know how to set things right. Emily, I can’t speak to him without bursting into silly tears.’ This was the most revealing speech that Elizabeth had ever made, even to herself, and for a moment she had the feeling that something within her was struggling into consciousness, some recognition of an incompatibility too fundamental for compromise.

Emily brushed it away.

‘You take the wrong things too seriously.’

‘Do I?’

‘Of course you do. You are turning a simple quarrel into something much too tragic. My dear Elizabeth, I’ve known you for long enough to see that.’

‘Do I?’ repeated Elizabeth. Almost absent-mindedly she sat down beside Emily, and leaned forward, clasping her hands together.

‘It’s not such a simple quarrel,’ she said suddenly. ‘I don’t think he loves me any more.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Emily quietly resumed her sewing. To herself she said: Aha! Now we’re getting at it.

‘Because if he loved me as – as I love him,’ Elizabeth’s voice faltered, but she went on, ‘he couldn’t keep things up against me the way he does. Emily, if you love a person you love a person, no matter what’s said or done. Quarrels are only on the surface —’

‘That may be true of women, but men are different. Now, listen to me.’ She checked Elizabeth’s protest, laying a hand on her arm. ‘There’s a lot of nonsense being talked about the equality of the sexes, chiefly by mannish women. I’m not a mannish woman; I don’t believe in them. Men and women are quite different. I’m going to talk to you very frankly. Hector is the first man you ever slept with, isn’t he?’

Elizabeth nodded, blushing.

‘But you’re not the first woman he ever had.’

Elizabeth’s blush deepened.

‘Of course you’re not. It doesn’t mean so much to him as it does to you. It’s you who will have the babies. That makes a big difference, don’t you see? Every wife has the same handicap in her relation to her husbnad. Marriage for a woman, my dear, is an art – the art of managing a husband – and that means not taking his passing phases too seriously. Strategy is what you need, and tactics —’

‘I want to live with Hector without any tactics,’ broke in Elizabeth. ‘I want to live with him and just be myself.’

‘But you can’t,’ said Emily firmly and decisively.

‘Then I’ll run away.’

Emily pulled her down again on to the sofa.

‘That would be the silliest thing you could do. Where would you go?’

‘I can teach,’ said Elizabeth stubbornly.

‘No school would take in a woman who had run away from her husband.’

‘I could take my own name and leave Scotland.’

‘I thought you said you loved him?’

Elizabeth hid her face in her hands. There was a long silence.

Waves of self-reproach were rising higher and higher in Elizabeth, and the unspoken thing which had been struggling into consciousness was finally drowned.

‘I do love him; I do love him,’ she whispered. Without removing her hands she added: ‘I’ve been thinking all the time about his love for me, not about my love for him.’

Emily patted her shoulder and said nothing.

‘He’s miserable too,’ whispered Elizabeth. ‘He gets drunk nearly every night.’

After some minutes she sat up, with a bright eye, and looked at her friend:

‘I’ve been a bad wife, Emily. Thank you, very much, for clearing me up.’

‘What about some tea?’ said Emily briskly.

Elizabeth could not help laughing.

‘All crises in women’s lives seem to be punctuated by cups of tea,’ she said.

Later that evening Emily sat on the rug by her husband’s knee and told him about her successful management of Elizabeth: ‘Don’t you think I was right?’

The doctor in his thin voice said: ‘You should have told her to have a baby.’

‘So I did, after we had tea. I told her a baby was a wonderful thing for making a man human. Aha!’

She pinched the calf of his leg.

‘I suppose,’ said the doctor, ‘you didn’t think of asking her how they got on in bed?’

‘She’d have been dreadfully shocked if I had. Besides – I shouldn’t think there would be any difficulty there – her husband’s a Shand.’

‘Their reaction times may be different,’ said the doctor.

‘Jim,’ said his wife, ‘what a wee devil you are!’