Читать книгу Imagined Selves - Willa Muir - Страница 28

TEN

Elizabeth had yielded herself to the stream of traditional wifehood, and the boat of her soul no longer rocked. She had but one course to follow – to devote herself to her husband, to love him selflessly, exacting nothing and giving much. She had been a bad wife, and now, God helping her, she would be a good wife.

A cynical observer might have remarked that she was now inflating with sentimentality her own image instead of Hector’s and setting it up in the role of Noble Wife. Yet these wind-blown puppets of our imagination play more than visionary parts in the drama of the soul, and have the advantage of being able to collapse suddenly when the need for them is over. Elizabeth, hidden within the self-made figure of the Noble Wife, was shielded for the time from social disapproval as effectively as a pneumatic tyre is shielded from the bumps of a hard road. Moreover, she now presented the comforting appearance that Hector expected of her.

She must have known this instinctively, for she first bathed and powdered her face, and then put on her prettiest frock. In Calderwick at that time it was considered slightly improper to powder one’s face by day, but Elizabeth excused her daring by reflecting that darkness had already set in, although it was not yet five o’clock. She inspected herself in the glass and added a string of coloured beads, signs of dawning femininity which might have pleased her sister-in- law.

She then put on a hat and coat and left the house with a quick, firm step. She could not wait for Hector; she was going to the office to bring him home. This time she would not burst into tears when she saw him. No wonder he got fed up, she told herself; any man would be fed up with a wife whose nose was always blobby.

The image of the Noble Wife was growing rapidly in size. Unconsciously, without words, Elizabeth was adding to the number of its attributes.

The perfect wife was not only selfless and loving – she was sympathetic, understanding, tactful and, above all, charming…. She must always be pretty – no, not pretty, Elizabeth did not aspire to prettiness – she must always look ‘nice’. The frou-frou of femininity was beginning to rustle round Elizabeth. Here, too, was the cloak of charity which should cover her husband’s many sins, while her devoted love sustained and comforted him…. Elizabeth was not far from the final dogma that woman exists for the sake of man. She was going beyond her teacher, Emily Scrymgeour, who believed only that woman should pretend to exist for the sake of man.

There is, however, a keen ecstasy in renunciation. We must not pity Elizabeth as she makes her way upstairs to the inner office of John Shand & Sons; she is transfigured by happiness. All the doubts that have vexed her for the past few months appear now as selfish hesitations: she feels that in spite of herself she has been miraculously led from one stepping-stone to another until she has emerged from the fog of uncertainty to find herself safely across the Rubicon in the full sunshine of wifehood.

Some of that sunshine was needed in the inner room where Hector was still sitting at his desk. He was alone: John had been out all day at the farmers’ mart, for it was a Friday, the weekly market-day of Calderwick. The outer office was empty, except for Mason, the head clerk, who was nervously hovering about his desk, and peeping every now and then through the glass partition to see if Mr Hector wasn’t thinking yet of going home. Mason had never known the junior partner to sit so long in the office.

For hours Hector had been humped over his desk in listless depression, drawing lines and diagrams on a bit of paper. He had put in what he called ‘a thick week’, and the defiant recklessness that had carried him along was now ebbing away, leaving behind it disgust and staleness. There were heavy black pouches under his eyes, and his mouth was drawn tight as if he were afraid it would fall out of control were he to open it. One could almost see the inchoate sagging outline of the form that might be his at the age of fifty, the ghost of the father, Charlie Shand, horribly incarnate in the flesh of the son.

Whether this illusion of Charlie Shand’s presence was the cause or the effect of Hector’s thoughts it is impossible to say. His father was haunting him. He was going the same way as the old man, he thought, jabbing furiously at the paper: drink and women, drink and women; and he would end in the same way. Might as well be dead. He saw himself again lying on a bier in a place that looked like a church.

That might be the best thing for all concerned. He was sick of everybody and sick of himself. Might as well be dead as feel dead.

He hadn’t a dog’s chance in Calderwick. The place was too full of his father…. He shuddered and shut his mouth more tightly than ever, while he drew aimless little pictures down the side of the paper. Then he set to work drawing a ship, a child’s ship, with masts and sails growing out of a rudely sketched hull. He became absorbed in it, and after he had finished the sails he put in a solitary figure in the bows, and then printed a name on the stern, ELSA. Elsa? There was another queer word struggling in the back of his mind, Koben, Kjobben something, and a doubling, a thickening of shadowy images, as if he were retracing some experience he had had before….

His mouth fell open. He had seen the ship Elsa in the harbour, with foreign fellows jabbering along her deck, and from that day to this he had not thought of her until his pen had printed the name. The rope curling on the quay beside him…. Better to drown in the open sea than in a stagnant dock….

He sat motionless for a while, with a new feeling springing up within him, a feeling faintly like hope. He was superstitious; he believed in omens; and the ominous dream of his own death had oppressed him heavily. This ship, he felt sure, was a sign. A sign of what?

His mind suddenly cleared, and he knew as well as if he had thought it out that he would take ship for some far-off country, Australia or Brazil or the South Seas. He would sign on as a sailor, a cattle-man, anything: the voyage would take months, months of hard work far from pubs and women; at the other end there would be at least one’s pay, and a week or two of glorious rioting in a new country. Somewhere in the South Seas. He had had enough of the North.

Hutcheon’s people were shipping agents: young Hutcheon would help him to do it and would keep his mouth shut. He would sign on to work his passage. He still had over two hundred and fifty pounds of his own: that would help to start him in something at the other end: or he could ship again for another voyage somewhere else if there was nothing doing where he landed. Clear out! By God! he would.

He sat staring into vacancy, lost in his dream, voyaging into that unknown which put Calderwick in its right perspective, reducing even John to a fat, foolish puppet whom it was absurd to take seriously. He had been too young, too raw, when he was shot out to Canada; he had not seen how unimportant the family was, how little Calderwick mattered; but this time he would stand on his own feet. He snapped his fingers. The ghost of his father wavered and vanished from his brain.

Hard work, hard physical labour, and then a spree; that was a life he could enjoy. In Calderwick there was opportunity for neither the one thing nor the other: all a fellow could do was to soak himself rotten in the rotten Club, and then addle himself still more on an office stool, or go to church on Sunday like a good little boy and be jawed at by all his family…. An uneasiness began to disturb him: he jabbed at the paper again. Well, let them think he was a quitter – a natural, heaven-born quitter: if that was his line he would follow it out. To hell with them all!

A noise outside made him start. He sat up and moistened his dry lips; he became conscious that he wanted a stiff whisky. He looked at his watch; it was past five o’clock. Old Mason must think he’d turned damned industrious. Hardly had the thought shaped itself when he was again startled. Wasn’t that Elizabeth’s voice?

In the few seconds during which he sat staring at the door before it opened he was, as he would have termed it, in a blue funk. He had avoided thinking about Elizabeth while dismissing her from his life, as he had avoided thinking about Aunt Janet, or even Mabel. By lumping them all together as ‘women’ and putting them in the same phrase as ‘drink’ he had escaped the necessity of considering them as individuals. Even now he was unwilling to think of Elizabeth as Elizabeth. His sense of guilt and his resentment at feeling guilty, which combined to produce the blue funk, threw up another impersonal phrase. ‘Just like a woman. Just like a woman,’ something muttered savagely at the back of his mind as he sat with jaw set and eyes fixed on the door.

It is much easier to dismiss people from one’s business than from one’s life. The absolute importance of money is impressed on us both directly and indirectly with such force that it seems a final argument to say that So-and-so costs us too much; even So-and-so sees the force of it, although he may resent dismissal. Money, after all, is money. But we do not feel with the same conviction, with the same prospect of general approval, that we are, after all, ourselves, and that if So-and-so costs us too much he must be thrust out of our lives. Civilization, in binding us to one another with a solid wall, turns into ramshackle structures the private dwellings of our spirits; we lean lopsidedly upon each other and hesitate to complain of encroachment, or to refuse support even when the roof tree is cracking under the strain. We rely more and more upon the wall of civilization to stave off collapse, and less and less upon ourselves. In fact, we live so much upon the wall and so little in ourselves that we do not often know what condition our house is in, or whether it needs repairs.

Hector’s decision to rid his house of encumbrances and to repair it was so recent, and apparently so spontaneous, that he could not justify himself, and it was natural that the arrival of Elizabeth should put him in a blue funk. She was ushered in by Mason, who was relieved to find that there was a comprehensible reason for Mr Hector’s waiting so long in the office. Mason’s eye was rather appealing, and Hector, glad of a diversion, answered the unspoken appeal.

‘We won’t be a minute, Mason,’ he cried, hastily rising. ‘Get me my coat, will you?’

To Elizabeth he said nothing: he could not think what to say, but stood leaning his hands on the desk. Without noting whether Mason had shut the door again Elizabeth ran towards him. ‘My dear love,’ she said, ‘my dear, dear love.’

Hector, armoured in the conviction that she despised him, had been hard to her. He had returned an equal coldness and silence to hers, and had been infuriated by her tears, which he interpreted as reproaches. But she came towards him now with such tenderness in her eyes and in her voice that he was taken off his guard, and before he could stop her she had her arms round his neck.

‘My dear love,’ she said again, with a vibration in her voice which he had never heard before. He remembered that her bosom was comforting, his head sank, his arm went round her, and for a long minute they embraced each other. When he tried to lift his head Elizabeth stroked it and whispered: ‘I’ve come to tell you I’ve been a bad, bad wife, and now I’m going to be a good one. My darling, my darling.’

His eyes blurred and he put out a hand to steady himself against the desk. He was damned tired, he remembered. Elizabeth felt the almost imperceptible droop of his body and for the first time since coming in she looked at his face. His eyelids were wet. She kissed them, but he kept his eyes shut.

‘I’m damned tired, Elizabeth,’ he said.

She took his coat from Mason, who was coughing in the doorway, found his hat, and led him downstairs. They walked home arm-in-arm, closely pressed together.

Elizabeth did not suspect that the tears in Hector’s eyes might have been tears of disappointment. She felt tender and protective towards him, as if he were a baby she must foster and encourage, and the strength of her feeling at the moment excluded any doubt of its necessity. The perfect wife is bound to assume that her husband requires her devotion, that without her he would be ‘lost’. This traditional and easy attitude fits loosely over the real problem, the problem of one individual’s relationship to another, and conceals its shape exactly as the cloak of charity conceals failings.

But Hector surrendered himself without resistance to his wife’s devotion. He had been unconsciously reaching for that cloak of charity ever since his marriage. Time after time he had confessed his sins in Elizabeth’s lap as if she were his mother, but he had never got the desired assurance that whatever he did she would still be a mother to him. That assurance was now hovering around him at last as he sat in the arm-chair before a glowing red fire and let Elizabeth put on his warm slippers for him.

And yet he felt miserable. The spark of hope in his breast seemed to have been blown out. He tried to excuse himself.

‘I’ve been thinking all day what a rotter I am…. Going the same way as the old man did, Elizabeth. You won’t let me come to that, will you?’

Elizabeth sat on the padded arm of the chair and took his head on her bosom. Her face shone with exaltation.

‘No, I won’t let you. I love you more than anything in the world – more than myself even. I’ve just discovered that.’

‘Keep me off the drink, Elizabeth….’

She kissed him on the forehead.

‘I promise.’

He suddenly lifted his head.

‘And make me a good boy for ever and ever. Amen.’

His tone was bitter, almost savage. Elizabeth peered into his face.

‘What is it?’ she said half under her breath.

He buried his face in his hands. Elizabeth knelt beside him and tugged at his wrists.

‘What is it, my love? Hector, I want to help you.’

She clasped his wrists and caressed them. Strong arms, she thought, sliding her fingers and the palms of her hands down his arms; strong arms, with their short black hairs, and their sinewy hardness under her soft palms.

‘I’ll make you happy,’ she said. ‘As happy as we were at first…. Us two against the world, Hector. We’ll show them….’ She went on caressing his arms, but a strange anxiety was spreading in her heart. Hector’s face was still hidden: he made no response to her assurance. She felt as if she were desperately fanning an extinct fire.

‘I’ll do anything you like, Hector. I tell you I’ve been a beast to you, but it’s going to be different…. I’ll give up Emily Scrymgeour. I’ll behave like a perfect lady, except when we’re just together, us two. Us two, Hector…. I’ll back you up all round….’

‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ said Hector. Then seizing her hands he laid his forehead on them and groaned: ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that.’

Elizabeth’s lips trembled, but she made no sound. She could feel Hector’s eyelashes quivering on her fingers, and she pressed her hands closer to his face to stop that fluttering. She bowed her head upon his and, still on her knees, began kissing the back of his neck.

The scent of peat and tobacco smoke from his tweed jacket, the thickness of his black cropped hair, the strength of his neck and shoulders inflamed her senses. After weeks of estrangement they were so near to each other that all this misery seemed to her suddenly an absurd irrelevance. She tried to force her hands from Hector’s grip. Laughing, she struggled with him.

But Hector held on to her wrists as if they were straws and he a drowning man. The softness and warmth of her caresses and of her body drew him towards her almost irresistibly, and yet he resisted with all his force. He had the feeling that if he yielded now he would be bound for life to the fate he had escaped in imagination that afternoon.

Elizabeth, still laughing, sank back on her knees. She did not take Hector’s resistance seriously.

‘Let me go,’ she said.

He tightened his grip.

‘Listen….’

Elizabeth looked up in alarm. His eyes were black and sombre.

‘Let me go,’ she said in a sharper voice. ‘You’re hurting me. Let go!’

Hector set her free at once, and she sat on the rug chafing her wrists.

‘Will you let me go?’ he said, and as if this unequivocal statement had broken a dam his words came rushing out in a whirling flood, tossing at Elizabeth’s feet the sediment of his despair.

‘Damned, mean, narrow little world, Calderwick,’ he finished. ‘I’m done for if I stay in it any longer. I’ve got to clear out. Will you help me? Will you back me up, Elizabeth?’

Elizabeth sat staring at him.

‘Go away?’ she said. ‘Without me?’

She seemed to herself to be shrinking and dwindling to a vanishing point on the hearthrug, her voice was small and forlorn.

The sweat stood on Hector’s forehead.

‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘if I go, I don’t know where I might land: I can’t risk taking you —’

‘But I can risk going!’ cried Elizabeth. ‘I’d go with you to the end of the world.’

‘But I mean to work my passage…. I can’t afford to take you.’

He bent forward and took her hands again. ‘Don’t let me down, Elizabeth. Back me up. I’ll find something for both of us…. If I don’t get out —’

He shuddered.

‘You must go,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Of course you must go. Haven’t I always wanted us to go to Canada or somewhere? But why can’t I come too? I’ll work at anything, Hector. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll scrub floors —’

‘A fellow can’t let his wife do that.’

Elizabeth sat still for a moment. Then she began to laugh hysterically.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Hector. ‘Stop it, Elizabeth: stop it, for God’s sake!’

Elizabeth’s laughter wavered into a shrill sound and died away.

‘I am your wife,’ she said. ‘Am I not? I am your wife, Hector. I’ll be a good wife. What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to wait for me,’ Hector bent and unbent her fingers. ‘I don’t know where I’m going yet. But when I find a place fit for a woman —’

Elizabeth felt the idiotic laughter bubbling up inside her once more. She clenched her teeth on it. Shut up, she said to herself. I’m not me. I’m a wife, a woman, who has to have places that are fit for her.

‘But what am I to do while I’m waiting?’ she said aloud.

‘I thought – I thought that perhaps you could live with Aunt Janet….’

Hector had a momentary fear that Elizabeth would perceive that he was improvising. He was very grateful to her when she looked up quietly and said: ‘I’ll wait for you, Hector, as long as you like. I love you, and I shall always love you. But I won’t be a burden on anybody! I’ll find a teaching job, somewhere. After all, I’m a highly qualified young woman: it would be absurd of me to sponge on Aunt Janet.’

Hector was ashamed.

‘I don’t like doing it,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve two hundred pounds. I’ll leave you a hundred….’

‘Nonsense! You’ll need as much as you can scrape together. Where did you think of? …’

‘Anywhere…. South Africa, Australia, Brazil. Pick up any chances going.’

Hector was surprised to find how reasonable and practical his adventure began to appear when it was looked at steadily. His sense of guilt evaporated.

‘After all,’ said Elizabeth, ‘all this furniture was given us by Aunt Janet, and we can’t fling it back in her face without an explanation. We must have it out with her, and with John too.’

‘John won’t raise any objections if you don’t.’

Hector stared at his wife after saying this. A murky corner of his brain seemed to clear up. She was backing him; she was standing by him; and because she was backing him he wouldn’t have to sneak away like a coward. She was taking all the moral responsibility off his shoulders.

‘By God, Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘you understand me better than anybody!’

It was a sincere tribute to the impersonation of the Noble Wife. A lump rose in Elizabeth’s throat, but she returned his look unwaveringly.

There was one curious consequence of this interchange. Both Hector and Elizabeth felt embarrassed when they kissed each other.