He’s beginning to feel that Elizabeth is a great lump, she said to herself.
She felt younger, more alive, and, on reflection, pleased with the openness of Hector’s tactics. He was hard and aggressive; she liked men to be hard and aggressive. She preferred people to be successful rather than sentimental. He was an unscrupulous brute, of course; but she had the whip-hand of him, no doubt of that. John would turn him out of the mill at a word from her. His boldness in the circumstances was not unpleasing.
‘Well, little woman?’ said John, beaming upon her and showing his strong teeth. ‘Where have you been to in all this rain?’
John’s contentment was soon explained. He had received by the evening mail a letter from his sister, who was coming on the thirteenth.
‘Next Saturday,’ said John, rubbing his hands. ‘Thirteen was always Lizzie’s lucky number, she used to say.’
Mabel curled her lip as she went upstairs. John was growing positively soft.
‘I’m so tired,’ he had said, yawning and stretching his arms. ‘I’ll be glad when the week’s over and it’s Sunday morning again.’
Thank goodness, thought Mabel, it’s only Friday night.
Elizabeth was puzzled by the fact that she had felt like a wet blanket during Mabel’s visit. She had actually discovered herself feeling outraged by the childishness of the other two, and she had never before regarded herself as definitely grown-up. Was this a part of the process of becoming a wife?
Surely I’m not going to turn into a walking Morality, she thought impatiently. I don’t like disapprovers. But if she refused to disapprove, she could not deny that she was disquieted. In Hector’s rudeness to Mabel there was something that she did not like.
‘I don’t know what came over you,’ she said to him. ‘You made me quite uncomfortable. Suppose I had been going on at John like that, how would you have felt?’
‘Grand! I’d have backed you up for all I was worth.’
Elizabeth had to laugh.
‘I dislike Mabel too much to chaff her,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s it. It was really comical how ladylike I felt!’
The Scrymgeours rarely gave dinners, partly because Dr Scrymgeour liked to be left alone at his own fireside and partly because his practice was so extensive that his presence at home could not be guaranteed. But Emily was longing to show off her husband to her new friend, and Elizabeth was now so intimate with Emily Scrymgeour that she felt almost a proprietary interest in the doctor. She was, in fact, identifying a part of herself with Emily, exactly as she had identified a part of herself with Hector. In consequence she thought it absurd of Hector to say he did not like Mrs Scrymgeour; he would like her well enough when he got to know her.
The doctor’s wife was a small neatly made woman with large vivacious eyes of so dark a grey that they looked black. Her abundant black hair was glossy, her skin of a smooth pallor which remained impervious to the climatic effects of Calderwick, her quick hands short-fingered, nervous and capable. Her tongue was as quick as her hands, but she had a warm voice and the confiding manner of a child, although she was a good ten years older than Elizabeth.
She had comforted Elizabeth by assuring her that most of the other women in the town were dreadful sticks who hadn’t two ideas among them.
‘And they’re all so frightfully pi,’ said Mrs Scrymgeour, ‘not like you and me.’
It was a relief to pour into Mrs Scrymgeour’s ready ear a confession of inability to be interested in such topics as the winter underwear of husbands and how to keep darns from being scratchy. Mrs Scrymgeour agreed too that whist drives were awfully boring.
‘I go to some of them, of course – good for my husband’s practice. But they’re glad when I stay away, if you know what I mean. I’m such a good player, and it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but most of them are terribly greedy for the prizes.’
Mrs Scrymgeour’s method of rearing her child was sniffed at, it appeared, by the Calderwick ladies. She was suckling it herself.
‘They think that’s so vulgar,’ she confided to Elizabeth.
It was also considered undignified for a doctor’s lady to push her own perambulator, and no argument could have more effectively secured Elizabeth’s constant attendance.
Her friend’s manner in shops filled Elizabeth with envy. She had a special crony behind every counter on whom she lavished her bright smiles and who was rewarded for extra attentiveness by confidential gossip. Portly grocers carrying reserved baskets of large eggs came out in their aprons to admire the baby while Elizabeth held the perambulator, and even Mary Watson smiled, although she nodded her head vigorously and said: ‘That bairn o’ yours is far owre spoilt.’
The care bestowed on the upbringing of young Teddy surprised and fascinated Elizabeth. The doctor, it appeared, was always firing off new theories about the child’s development, and these his wife retailed to Elizabeth with great vivacity. She was proud of her husband, and had a fine sense of showmanship.
‘But he never screams!’ Elizabeth had remarked one day. She had had a vague idea that babies screamed incessantly.
‘Oh, doesn’t he! He screams for his milk all right. You should hear him.’
‘But he never screams while he’s out,’ persisted Elizabeth.
‘Why should he? His little tummy’s happy, and he trusts the whole world – even Mary Watson.’
‘Da-da,’ said the baby.
Mrs Scrymgeour remembered the doctor’s latest discovery and expounded it. The baby was saying da-da at present because his teeth were beginning to push through, and his attention kept returning to that part of his mouth. Before that he said ba-ba and boo-boo because his attention was concentrated on putting his lips together, on sucking; and still earlier he said goo-goo, and gay-gay, and gi-gi.
Mrs Scrymgeour bent over to her baby with each new sound and the baby chuckled as if at a great joke.
‘And he said that because he was attending to swallowing his milk, guggling it down, which must have been about the first thing he had to learn,’ she concluded in triumph. ‘Isn’t he a nut, my Jim?’
To see a pattern suddenly emerge in life where no pattern was discernible before is one of the keenest of human pleasures, and Elizabeth was thrilled by this orderly explanation of a baby’s random sounds. But Mrs Scrymgeour had not finished. She chuckled like her baby and glanced sideways at Elizabeth, saying: ‘Of course, it wasn’t only swallowing he had to learn in the beginning. When you take in food you have to let it out at the other end, too: and so Teddy used to attend to both ends; he used to grunt at both ends simultaneously.’
Their laughter rang out in the street and even passers-by smiled.
‘And Jim swears that the only thing which keeps us from speaking with our tails as well as with our mouths is insuff – insufficient apparatus.’
They both held on to the perambulator, weak with laughter. The baby joined in.
It was simple and pleasant laughter, but Mrs John Shand had not thought so. She had wrinkled her pretty nose in disgust as she saw her sister-in-law making a spectacle of herself with the Scrymgeour woman, and crossed the street to avoid meeting them.
A vulgar creature, she said to herself. It would not be long till Hector’s eyes were opened, for, in spite of his faults, he was, after all, a gentleman.
Elizabeth, however, had no misgivings as Hector sat down beside her vivacious friend. She turned expectantly to Dr Scrymgeour.
The