I won’t let you. I love you more than anything in the world – more than myself even. I’ve just discovered that.’
‘Keep me off the drink, Elizabeth….’
She kissed him on the forehead.
‘I promise.’
He suddenly lifted his head.
‘And make me a good boy for ever and ever. Amen.’
His tone was bitter, almost savage. Elizabeth peered into his face.
‘What is it?’ she said half under her breath.
He buried his face in his hands. Elizabeth knelt beside him and tugged at his wrists.
‘What is it, my love? Hector, I want to help you.’
She clasped his wrists and caressed them. Strong arms, she thought, sliding her fingers and the palms of her hands down his arms; strong arms, with their short black hairs, and their sinewy hardness under her soft palms.
‘I’ll make you happy,’ she said. ‘As happy as we were at first…. Us two against the world, Hector. We’ll show them….’ She went on caressing his arms, but a strange anxiety was spreading in her heart. Hector’s face was still hidden: he made no response to her assurance. She felt as if she were desperately fanning an extinct fire.
‘I’ll do anything you like, Hector. I tell you I’ve been a beast to you, but it’s going to be different…. I’ll give up Emily Scrymgeour. I’ll behave like a perfect lady, except when we’re just together, us two. Us two, Hector…. I’ll back you up all round….’
‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ said Hector. Then seizing her hands he laid his forehead on them and groaned: ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that.’
Elizabeth’s lips trembled, but she made no sound. She could feel Hector’s eyelashes quivering on her fingers, and she pressed her hands closer to his face to stop that fluttering. She bowed her head upon his and, still on her knees, began kissing the back of his neck.
The scent of peat and tobacco smoke from his tweed jacket, the thickness of his black cropped hair, the strength of his neck and shoulders inflamed her senses. After weeks of estrangement they were so near to each other that all this misery seemed to her suddenly an absurd irrelevance. She tried to force her hands from Hector’s grip. Laughing, she struggled with him.
But Hector held on to her wrists as if they were straws and he a drowning man. The softness and warmth of her caresses and of her body drew him towards her almost irresistibly, and yet he resisted with all his force. He had the feeling that if he yielded now he would be bound for life to the fate he had escaped in imagination that afternoon.
Elizabeth, still laughing, sank back on her knees. She did not take Hector’s resistance seriously.
‘Let me go,’ she said.
He tightened his grip.
‘Listen….’
Elizabeth looked up in alarm. His eyes were black and sombre.
‘Let me go,’ she said in a sharper voice. ‘You’re hurting me. Let go!’
Hector set her free at once, and she sat on the rug chafing her wrists.
‘Will you let me go?’ he said, and as if this unequivocal statement had broken a dam his words came rushing out in a whirling flood, tossing at Elizabeth’s feet the sediment of his despair.
‘Damned, mean, narrow little world, Calderwick,’ he finished. ‘I’m done for if I stay in it any longer. I’ve got to clear out. Will you help me? Will you back me up, Elizabeth?’
Elizabeth sat staring at him.
‘Go away?’ she said. ‘Without me?’
She seemed to herself to be shrinking and dwindling to a vanishing point on the hearthrug, her voice was small and forlorn.
The sweat stood on Hector’s forehead.
‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘if I go, I don’t know where I might land: I can’t risk taking you —’
‘But I can risk going!’ cried Elizabeth. ‘I’d go with you to the end of the world.’
‘But I mean to work my passage…. I can’t afford to take you.’
He bent forward and took her hands again. ‘Don’t let me down, Elizabeth. Back me up. I’ll find something for both of us…. If I don’t get out —’
He shuddered.
‘You must go,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Of course you must go. Haven’t I always wanted us to go to Canada or somewhere? But why can’t I come too? I’ll work at anything, Hector. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll scrub floors —’
‘A fellow can’t let his wife do that.’
Elizabeth sat still for a moment. Then she began to laugh hysterically.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Hector. ‘Stop it, Elizabeth: stop it, for God’s sake!’
Elizabeth’s laughter wavered into a shrill sound and died away.
‘I am your wife,’ she said. ‘Am I not? I am your wife, Hector. I’ll be a good wife. What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to wait for me,’ Hector bent and unbent her fingers. ‘I don’t know where I’m going yet. But when I find a place fit for a woman —’
Elizabeth felt the idiotic laughter bubbling up inside her once more. She clenched her teeth on it. Shut up, she said to herself. I’m not me. I’m a wife, a woman, who has to have places that are fit for her.
‘But what am I to do while I’m waiting?’ she said aloud.
‘I thought – I thought that perhaps you could live with Aunt Janet….’
Hector had a momentary fear that Elizabeth would perceive that he was improvising. He was very grateful to her when she looked up quietly and said: ‘I’ll wait for you, Hector, as long as you like. I love you, and I shall always love you. But I won’t be a burden on anybody! I’ll find a teaching job, somewhere. After all, I’m a highly qualified young woman: it would be absurd of me to sponge on Aunt Janet.’
Hector was ashamed.
‘I don’t like doing it,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve two hundred pounds. I’ll leave you a hundred….’
‘Nonsense! You’ll need as much as you can scrape together. Where did you think of? …’
‘Anywhere…. South Africa, Australia, Brazil. Pick up any chances going.’
Hector was surprised to find how reasonable and practical his adventure began to appear when it was looked at steadily. His sense of guilt evaporated.
‘After
