as a convention of kirk elders. She had been amazed by the scene: all those people huddled together for support against four inches of hair on a harmless boy. It was as if, unable to feel for things that mattered, they all colluded in exaggerated reactions to trivia, indulged without risk in a ceremony of feeling.
Dan Scoular was her parents’ equivalent of long hair in their neighbour’s life, the proof that trouble does eventually come to every door. In that family summit meeting it became clear that it wasn’t who he was they had noticed but who he wasn’t. He didn’t have a very cultured accent. He wasn’t at university. He had no prospects of becoming a professional man. Everything they said to her when he was gone was another door closed on the possibility of their seeing him as he was. Their talk was the noise of preconceptions sliding home like bolts: ‘you’re young yet’, ‘more fish in the sea than ever came out of it’, ‘marriage is more than physical’, ‘not what we thought you would finish with’, ‘manners maketh the man’. This last came from her mother because Dan had not cut his piece of cake into segments with his knife but had lifted it whole and bitten into it.
‘Oh,’ her mother had said as if a small, domestic crisis had arisen. She put on one of her favourite expressions of rehearsed surprise. ‘I’m sorry. Didn’t I give you a knife?’
‘Aye, thanks,’ Dan had said. ‘But I never eat them.’
Betty had understood what had often troubled her about her parents’ politeness: it was a form of rudeness. Her mother in that moment had used what she liked to regard as manners to make somebody feel uncomfortable. For her mother and father the manners had become the most important things, because that way they never needed to go beyond them, could make their lives a continuous ritual round of attitudes in which any real feeling occurred like a short-circuit. The natural grace with which Dan had deflected an awkward moment into a joke was something they didn’t appreciate.
Her parents, she had decided, deserved their friends. From that night on, her sense of them had hardened. She realised how her mother’s pride in Betty’s achievements at school had never seriously related to what they meant about Betty herself. It was something her mother could brag about, something to wear like a fancy feather in her hat. She recalled something her mother had said several times when her parents were having what passed for an argument, a monotonous reshuffling of stock responses. ‘I did my duty by you, anyway.’ She meant she had given him a child. Her daughter was an expression of duty. Her father was always appropriately humble before the resurrected spectre of that often referred to and agonising experience, a nightmare of sickness and contractions and bravely borne self-sacrifice beyond his capacity to imagine. Betty herself had been accused of her mother’s pregnancy but had proved less susceptible to being intimidated by her birth than her father was.
Such memories were a farewell look at where she had been. From her reading she made up her own name for the place she was determined to leave: the lumpen-middle-class. If the dynamic of aristocratic life, she had thought, was the past (you inherited your status), that of middle-class life was the present, what you now materially possessed. For lineage, read money, the mechanical womb in which her parents had conceived her and from which they saw her own children coming. They seemed dead to the possibilities that lay beyond it.
That was one reason why, besides being in love with Dan Scoular, she had felt an intellectual identification with what she understood to be working-class life. The knowledge she had acquired of it through him made her want to be a part of it. From the first image she had had of him at a wedding to which she was taken by somebody else, she had wanted to know more about how he came to be the way he was, with a relaxed assurance and a smile that would have thawed a glacier. The company of his relatives she had found herself among welcomed her as if she belonged to a branch of their family they were delighted to make contact with again.
That same openness was something he had brought to their continuing relationship. She had never quite become immune to the attractiveness of his vulnerability. She had never known a man who was so obviously without effective defences. He didn’t hide behind any pretence of worldly wisdom. He seemed to have no sense of you that you were meant to be able to fit. He had met her with a kind of uninhibited innocence. It seemed to give them licence to find out together about themselves, and they did. Their previous involvements didn’t cause any aggressions between them. Marriage happened as a natural consequence, or so it had felt at the time.
But somehow the daily proximity of marriage had eventually compromised their original feeling. She began to see less attractive implications in his easiness of manner. She sensed him struggling to come to terms with how many restrictions there were on her apparent acceptance of him as he was. In their coming to understand the small print of each other’s nature, resentments grew.
The resentments were at first just the ghosts of things not done that haunt our lives in a gentle, house-trained way, the half-heard sough of chances missed, the memory of a relationship you allowed to starve to death through inattention, the place you might have been that stares reproachfully through the window of the place you are. But such resentments, born of the slow experience of how each choice must bury more potential than it fulfils, were always seeking incarnation. Then their tormentingness could be given shape, their slow corrosion be dynamic. In the shared closeness of a marriage, it was very easy to exorcise the growing awareness of the inevitable failures of the self to live near to its dreams into the nature of the other, to let the lost parts of yourself find malignant form in unearned antipathy to the other one’s behaviour.
It had happened to them, not dramatically but in small, daily ways. But then habit commits its enormities quite casually, like a guard in an extermination camp looking forward to his tea. Each day Betty sensed something in herself she didn’t like but couldn’t prevent from happening. She knew that what presented themselves to her as random thoughts were taking careful note, like shabby spies compiling a dossier against him.
One reiterated secret accusation concerned his propensity for violence. She knew it was grossly exaggerated in Thornbank. He had said to her once, Thank God, one fight avoids ten years of scuffles.’ He had confessed to her that he had never been in a fight without experiencing rejection symptoms of fear afterwards, a shivering withdrawal, a determination not to do the same again. She had seen that at first hand. Once he had struck her, one open-handed blow on the side of the head after – she admitted to herself afterwards – she had gone on at him for hours. His disgust at himself had been alarming, an almost tribal shame as of a native who has disturbed the graves of his ancestors. After her elaborate description of how far he fell short of being a man, she had stopped and begun to worry about his stillness. In the end, it had taken her two days to coax him like a small boy out of his self-contempt. He had promised her that it would never happen again, and it never had.
She believed she knew the truth of his reputation for violence. When he was young, it had been a gesture he knew how to make, which earned him an easy acceptance in the rough context he was born in, and it had remained something he could never believe in seriously. He had never hit the boys, even in a token way. Yet in the moments when her frustration with her own life left her with no charity for him, a voice in her that was like an echo of her mother would say he was a violent man.
The housing scheme they lived in, too, she would sometimes use against him. She liked their council house but she would keep handy in her mind her awareness of the haplessness of neighbours, the aimless family quarrels that they had two doors down, the way several people whom they knew organised their lives with all the precision of a road accident.
But all her accusations were subsumed under the one basic charge: he was wasting himself. He let days happen to him, that was all. Somehow, although less effectively and with increasing difficulty, he still provided a decent enough home, saw that she and the children lived more or less all right. But he seemed to make that his only purpose, had a life but no sense of a career.
She had loved that
