for the fatted calf all the time,’ she said as heartily as possible, and dropped the discussion, feeling clumsy and foolish.
When they all halted at number seven Balfour Terrace she could not resist slipping her arm inside Hector’s, as if it were necessary to let Mabel see that Hector had been merely on loan. In this graceful position they both accepted Mabel’s invitation for Saturday night to meet Lizzie.
As they turned home Hector disengaged his arm. Men and women in Calderwick certainly never walked arm-in- arm by daylight, but Elizabeth quite unreasonably felt chilled by his action.
‘You ran away and left me,’ she said.
‘Oh, Mabel wanted to tell me about the car she’s going to get. She screwed it out of John this morning.’
‘A car! How lovely.’
‘I’m going to teach her to drive it. We’re going up to Aberdeen some time this week to buy it.’
‘You know, John really is a dear,’ said Elizabeth suddenly, apparently ignoring Hector’s statement. ‘I’ve only just found it out.’
‘John? He’s a swine.’
‘No, he’s not! How can you say such a thing?’
‘I suppose you’re going to call me a liar, are you?’
‘What’s the matter, Hector?’
‘Oh, nothing. I suppose you think I’ve bloody well deserved all I’ve got from John?’
‘I don’t care whether you did or not. He’s certainly different now.’
‘Hell of a difference!’
‘People do change, Hector. It’s queer that they do. I suppose we all do….’
‘Well, I’m not going to argue about it.’
The tone of Hector’s voice as he said ‘argue’ conveyed that he had had enough of argument with Elizabeth, and reminded her, with a shock, of their previous argument. All her uneasiness came back, and her thoughts congealed like a crust over her feelings, so that she did not venture to say another word. They walked on in a silence that grew more oppressive the longer it lasted, and it lasted until they got home.
The invisible barrier between them seemed to cut across the table as they sat at dinner. Elizabeth was scrupulously polite in offering more helpings, and Hector accepted them with equal politeness.
‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ she asked. On Sunday afternoons they had always gone out together, but to-day she was determined to thrust no assumptions upon Hector.
‘I think I’ll run up and see Hutcheon.’ Hector’s tone was quite careless. ‘He’s got a small car – a beauty – and I’d like to have a shot at driving her somewhere this afternoon, to get my hand in.’
In other circumstances Elizabeth would have cried, ‘I’m coming too!’ but she only looked at her plate and filled her spoon with exaggerated care. In another moment her emotions would break their crust and come bubbling up…. Hector felt the imminence of the outburst, and he laid down his napkin.
‘I’d better be getting along,’ he said, ‘or Hutcheon will be gone. Excuse me, please.’
Elizabeth had learned a few things that Sunday morning, and in the afternoon and evening she learned something more. Her first lesson was that in the absence of Hector her painful agitation subsided with incredible quickness. Half- an-hour after his departure she was able to sit down to a book by a philosopher called Bergson, whom she had discovered just before leaving the University and who excited her. The second lesson for the day was that the same agitation returned with the same incredible suddenness the minute Hector set foot again within the house. She seemed to have become two separate persons, one of whom was calm and confident in Hector, while the other was childishly, almost hysterically, affected by his presence.
All the understanding excuses she had found for him during the afternoon, all her quiet resolve to find a harmony which should include both her love for Hector and her good opinion of John, all her faith in the underlying permanence of that love, disappeared when he came in, as the clear reflection in a still pool disappears when the mud at the bottom is stirred up by a stick.
The whole of Elizabeth’s world was in flux, although not exactly as Bergson had declared it to be, and instead of regarding the phenomenon with scientific interest she felt as if she were drowning in it.
NINE
Elizabeth, governed as she was by images, thought of herself and Hector as the terminals of an invisible and powerful current which ought to flow unimpeded from one to the other. Hitherto she had not imagined that a distortion of the current could distort the terminals also, but in the next week she grew more and more baffled by the effects of the distortion upon herself. Whenever Hector spoke to her a lump rose in her throat; his approach seemed to graze an intolerable wound; and the more grimly she told herself that this was absurd and petty the more she was bewildered by her own spurts of resentment. On the other hand, whenever he ignored her or turned away in impatient anger her resentment was lost in a self-pity that sometimes passed off in a fit of submissive tenderness towards her husband and sometimes drove her sobbing to her bedroom. She could never tell what she was going to do, and in none of her actions was she recognizable to herself except during Hector’s absence. As soon as he left the house she would stop crying and say: This is not me! What have I been doing?
These more stable moments emerged like rocks once the waves of emotion were spent. They might have served Elizabeth as a basis for self-examination but, being young and indeterminate, she preferred to gaze with increasing bewilderment at the cross-currents of the sea. Elizabeth had a habit of turning her back on the land.
Hector was less bewildered because he was deliberately drifting, and in doing so he was perhaps subserving a deeper purpose. The ports we try to make by tacking may be less salutary for us than those to which we drift. There may be no such thing as chance in human conduct. Hector, at any rate, although unhappy, was less surprised by the estrangement than Elizabeth. It seemed 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
