LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      SEVEN

      Saturday was Mary Watson’s busiest day. Coats hadn’t been going so well this winter as they should have done, but at last they were beginning to sell, and she was kept hard at it running upstairs to the mantle showroom.

      ‘I’m fair run off my feet,’ she complained, slumping on to a stool covered with black American cloth. ‘That Mrs McLean is just like the side o’ a hoose; there’s not a coat in the whole of my stock that’ll meet across her, and I’ve had every single outsize off the hangers. I’m fair worn out.’

      Her

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