Imagined Corners - Willa Muir Canongate Classics

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it?’

      ‘Why – of course,’ said Mabel. ‘They’re not like each other, are they?’

      John chuckled.

      ‘About as like each other as fire and water. I’d give anything to see Lizzie dealing with Hector.’

      ‘What would she do?’

      ‘If she’s still what she used to be she’d have him deflated within ten minutes. There wouldn’t be much left of him.’

      ‘I wish she’d come and do it,’ murmured Mabel.

      All through the evening the phantom of the other Elizabeth Shand, his sister, had haunted John, and now that he was safely under the bedclothes he allowed himself the indulgence of thinking about her. He had tried for so many years to forget her that even now, when anger had died away, he felt his persistent affection for her as a weakness to be indulged only when his head was under the blankets, when the respectable citizen of the daytime had merged into the boy of five-and-twenty years ago. He was startled by the painful leap his heart gave when Mabel murmured: ‘I wish she’d come and do it.’ He had not known how greatly he desired to see Lizzie again. Twenty years it was since he saw her last. She must be thirty-nine now, three years younger than himself. But that was absurd; he could not picture Lizzie as a mature woman. A wild thing she had been, always in hot water. What a day that was when their father had married again! She was three miles down the coast when he found her, hatless and coatless; she made him miss the wedding too, and she must have been at least twelve then; yes, Hector was born a year later, thirteen years’ difference between them…. What an extraordinary thing affection is, John reflected. Aunt Janet was always down on Lizzie; she couldn’t stand Lizzie; and yet, there she was, sticking up for Hector who wasn’t fit to black Lizzie’s boots. Lizzie was a wild creature, but not a selfish one. On the other hand, his own affection for Lizzie was just as unreasonable as Aunt Janet’s for Hector. Lizzie had behaved scandalously; she had outraged everything he stood for; he had been ill with rage when she ran off with that foreign fellow. Yet that was in keeping with Lizzie’s character; she was always dashing into adventures. It had been she who had discovered the disused pottery miles from home where they set up house for so many weeks one summer. He could remember the tumbledown shed, with a low bench covered with dust and fragments of baked clay, fluted moulds broken and crumbling, whorls and handles lying in careless heaps. With closed eyes John re-traversed the road that led there through a hot summer’s afternoon, with Lizzie, like an elf, darting from one hedgerow to the other, until she discovered the overgrown side-path, and set off down it at a run. She would never keep on the main road, not Lizzie. Nobody knew what it meant to him when she ran off with that German. He nearly threw up everything to go after her. But even if he had tracked her down, how could he have brought her back to be a perpetual reminder of disgrace? A drunken father was bad enough without a dishonoured sister; no family could have lived them both down. Yet though he could justify his anger and his estrangement from her the long companionship of their childhood was still alive and seeking fulfilment. Twenty years. She was nineteen then. But when he dreamed of her, as he did now and then, she was always a slip of girl…. He drifted into sleep with the vague idea that he was stumbling through a dark forest of lofty trees, pursuing a brilliant butterfly that would dart off at a tangent and would not keep to the path.

      Mabel Shand had never seen her sister-in-law, and, like everybody else, was unaware of John’s passionate regret for her. Like everybody else, too, she knew the facts of the scandal; Elizabeth Shand had run away with a married man, a foreigner, the head of the modern languages department in the Calderwick Academy. Mabel also had the benefit of Aunt Janet’s comments, including the information that John could not bear to have his sister’s name mentioned; but she had been surprised shortly after their marriage to hear John say lightly: ‘You remind me of my sister Lizzie; she was a gay young thing something like you.’ He had added hastily, ‘But you have more sense,’ and Mabel realized that the comparison was intended as a compliment. Of course she had more sense; she knew too well the value of social prestige. Her position as John Shand’s wife was more worth while than any fly-by-night nonsense of true love. Mabel had no intention of falling in love. She preferred to see others in love with her. She had fancied Hector, but that was when she was a mere child, and now, lying in bed beside John, she was convinced that she hated Hector. The thought flashed through her mind with savage suddenness: ‘I wish I had him here; I’d smack him!’

      Her body quivered with the intensity of her feeling. Smack him, good and hard, she would.

      II

      About the same time Sarah Murray was sitting in her bedroom with a rug over her knees and a shawl round her shoulders darning stockings, as she listened to the irregular tramp of Ned’s feet overhead. He would stand for a long time on one part of the floor and then stride up and down speaking to himself with increasing vehemence in high tones of exasperation, only to fall silent again, standing motionless on some other spot. He had come in from his golf match taciturn and sullen, but at tea he had brightened up when William asked him how many he had gone round in; his one nasty remark had been made quite jokingly, that the links were all right if it weren’t for the people on them who infested the grass; they should be combed out like fleas. After that he had opened the piano, which he hadn’t done for months, and played beautifully for a long time until she asked him for something out of the Messiah and then he brought his hands down with a crash and stamped out of the room, saying: ‘O God!’

      He had refused to come in to supper until she and William were finished; since then he had been walking up and down in his own room at the top of the house. Sarah looked at her watch; it was now midnight. Three hours he had been going at it, and might go on for three hours more. What could it be that was troubling him? What could it be that kept him turning and turning round it like an insect on a pin? He had crumpled up the local weekly and thrown it across the room; she had smoothed it out later and looked it over to find what cause for offence he had discovered in it. But there was nothing. Nothing in particular. The usual records of sudden deaths and police cases; local appointments, farmers’ dinners, auction sales, and the movements of prominent citizens. She had noticed, for instance, the arrival of Mr and Mrs Hector Shand at their house in the High Street. But how could any of it conceivably enrage a sane person? Insanity? Sarah’s hand shook as she darned. The footsteps upstairs seemed also, with furious persistence, to be darning an invisible hole across the room.

      ‘I can’t stand it,’ said Sarah aloud. ‘I must do someting or I’ll go crazy.’

      She stuck her needle into the stocking and got up. She tiptoed upstairs, although she feared that Teenie was not asleep, and listened at Ned’s door.

      ‘Security!’ she heard him cry, half sobbing. ‘Surely that’s not much to ask for? Security’s all I want.’ His voice died away into mutterings; then it rose again. ‘Good God! They have to do it at somebody’s expense, but why me, me? Couldn’t they work it off on somebody else? It’s incredible, logically and mathematically incredible—’ He came to a dead stop on the floor, continuing the argument with his voice rising hysterically at the end of every statement. ‘With hundreds of millions in the world to practise on they make a dead set at me. All I ask is peace and security and they all climb by kicking me down. Are all the low, sneaking, cunning imbeciles to enjoy a home and a job at my expense? Just because I’m not so low and cunning as they are? Good God!’

      He was silent again as well as motionless. Sarah’s heart was pounding wildly against her ribs. This was sheer raving. It was no use merely to listen; she must go in and bring him back to a sense of proportion. She opened the door. Ned started. ‘Get out!’ he screamed. ‘Can’t I have peace even here?’ Sarah spoke mildly, to her own astonishment, for she was shaking. ‘I’ve only come in to see that you haven’t let your fire out, Ned. You always forget to put coal on.’ The fire was actually half dead. Sarah went firmly towards it and made it up in silence. She could feel Ned’s eyes burning into her back.

      ‘That’s all right now,’ she said, rising from her knees and dusting her hands. ‘You won’t catch cold now. Are you working on your mathematics?’

      ‘Why?

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