you know, don’t you, that you needn’t feel jealous of anybody?’
He shook his head vehemently.
‘But you do know,’ she insisted. ‘You’re a part of myself. I simply couldn’t fall in love with anybody else.’
‘I’m always afraid of losing you,’ said Hector, his voice muffled in her dress. ‘I’m no highbrow; I can’t talk about books and things; and some day you’ll turn me down…. I deserve it,’ he went on, lifting his head. ‘When I think of all the girls I’ve turned down I feel that you’re going to be my punishment for the lot.’
Elizabeth’s spirits were rapidly rising; she shook him a little and said: ‘Oh, you silly ass!’ Then she kissed him full on the mouth. They lay for some time without speaking.
‘All the same,’ said Elizabeth at last, ‘I’m glad you didn’t stay at the Club drinking yourself dottier.’
‘I didn’t go to the Club,’ said Hector, twisting and untwisting a piece of her hair. ‘I – you won’t forgive me if I tell you, but I must tell you.’
Elizabeth drew away a little. She had forgiven him; she didn’t want confessions; she was beginning vaguely to dislike Hector’s insistence on lengthy confessions.
‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘The only thing that matters is this.’
‘It does matter.’ Hector’s voice was sombre. ‘You don’t know what an out-and-out rotter I can be. I went down the back lane with Mabel, and I was feeling so mad, and she was jawing at me about behaving myself better, and I knew what a little bitch she was, and her arm was always coming up against mine, and – well, I just took hold of her and kissed her as hard as I could.’
‘What?’ said Elizabeth incredulously. ‘Mabel? Did she let you?’
‘She liked it all right, you bet your life! She pretended she didn’t. But I was — Oh, hell, when I’m in that state I know, I tell you, and I just knew she was itching for it.’
‘Well,’ said Elizabeth, ‘is that all?’
Her voice was quite cool.
‘That’s about all,’ said Hector.
He was beginning to feel relieved. Elizabeth wasn’t going to cut up rough after all.
‘I swore I’d paint the town sky-blue scarlet unless she asked me in for a drink, and I gave her a lot of slosh about her influence over me and all that, until she nearly purred. So I went in with her and had a drink, and we danced a bit —’
‘Have you been there all this time?’
Hector stopped in surprise at the sudden sharpness of the question.
‘It’s not so very late,’ he said. ‘John —’
Elizabeth pushed him away and sat up sobbing:
‘That’s all you care, is it? That’s all you care. You go out leaving me heart-broken, and then you go fooling with Mabel for hours and hours, leaving me – leaving me —’
All the rage and self-pity that had apparently vanished was closing over her again.
‘I had to tell you, don’t you see?’ Hector kept on repeating. ‘I have to be sure you won’t turn me down.’
He felt rather helpless; he had not expected her to be quite so jealous. He said so.
‘I’m not jealous!’ shrieked Elizabeth. ‘It would never come into my head to be jealous of anybody, let alone Mabel. I think jealousy is idiotic. I’m simply angry, because you could go out and enjoy yourself after hurting me so much.’
‘The hell you are!’ Hector began to feel angry too. Damned unreasonable, he thought.
Elizabeth slapped the hand he was trying to caress her with.
He got off the bed.
‘I might as well go and get roaring drunk,’ he said, making for the door.
Elizabeth sprang after him. ‘If you do,’ she said, ‘I’ll come and get drunk too.’
Her threat sounded like mere bravado even to herself. A sense of weakness came over her.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I can’t do without you.’
The reconciliation made them very happy. It also blinded them to the real issue between them which had obtruded itself nakedly enough in their quarrel, and as they sat cheek by cheek agreeing together what fools they had been their unanimity was more apparent than real. Elizabeth meant that she had been a fool to be miserable at all, since their love could never die, while Hector meant that he had been a fool to be jealous of a half-man like the minister. Elizabeth was now ready to regard Hector’s sojourn with Mabel merely as an attempt to distract himself from his unhappiness, and Hector was ready to look on Elizabeth’s friendliness to the minister as the polite amiability of a hostess; but they did not recognize that in so construing each other’s actions they had each left out a good deal of the truth.
‘We need a change of some kind,’ said Elizabeth finally, after turning over in her mind the various circumstances preceding the outburst. She was glad to lay the blame of it on Calderwick. ‘Let’s take a day off to-morrow.’
But perhaps it was an obscure sense of some change in herself that prompted her to use these words, for in the small hours she awoke with an anguished feeling that she was lost and no longer knew who she was. She had been dreaming that she was at home, but now the window, faintly perceptible, was in the wrong place, and she knew without seeing it that she would collide with unfamiliar furniture were she to get out of bed. There was sweat on her brow and her heart was thumping; the world stretched out on all sides into dark impersonal nothingness and she herself was a terrifying anonymity. She took refuge in a device of her childhood. I’m me, she thought; me, me; here behind my eyes. Mechanically she moved her arm and crooked her little finger as she had often done before. It’s me making the finger move; I am behind my eyes, but I’m in the finger too…. But the clue she was striving to grasp still eluded her, and if she could not seize it she would be lost for ever. When she was almost rigid with terror the name ‘Elizabeth Ramsay’ rose into her mind, and the nightmare vanished. Her body relaxed, but her mind with incredible swiftness rearranged the disordered puzzle of her identity. She was Elizabeth Ramsay but she was also Elizabeth Shand. Hector was there. She put out her hand and gently touched the mass of his body under the coverings on the neighbouring bed.
Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and the more years she traversed the more inalterably would she become Elizabeth Shand. Those years of the future stretched endlessly before her; with that queer lucidity which is seldom found in daytime thinking she could see them as a perspective of fields, each one separated by a fence from its neighbour. Over you go, said a voice, and over she went, then into the next and the next and the next. But this was no longer time or space, it was eternity; there was no end, no goal; perhaps a higher fence marked the boundary betwen life and death, but in the fields beyond it she was still Elizabeth Shand. She was beginning to be terrified again, and opened her eyes. Mrs Shand, she said to herself. It was appalling, and she had never realized it before.
Hector’s
