Imagined Selves - Willa Muir Canongate Classics

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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.

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