‘Do you know, I think I must have several blind spots,’ she said, ‘I’m only finding out now what you’re really like.’
John smiled half-shyly.
‘I’ve decided that your bark is worse than your bite, John.’
‘How do you know that?’
Elizabeth laughed; her eyes sparkled.
‘I’m learning sense. I used to judge people entirely by what they said; but now I know that it’s the person behind the words that matters. When you like people it doesn’t matter very much what they say.’
‘I thought you liked Murray?’
‘That’s a shrewd hit,’ said Elizabeth, with a rueful grin.
John grinned back. ‘And yet you were nearly jumping out of the pew at him this morning.’
‘I couldn’t help it. But I’m sure it’s because he himself has changed that what he said annoyed me. Something has changed him. I’m afraid of what he might do….’
‘How’s that? I thought myself that he seemed to be coming to his senses. He’s been mooning about for years in a kind of dream, quite off the earth; and this morning I thought he had wakened up.’
‘I liked his dream better…. I don’t want to be brought down with a thump on to solid earth. Besides it wasn’t solid earth, John. It was only logic. It was husks for the prodigal sons and daughters, that’s what it was; and who has a right to say that we are all prodigals and must be fed on husks?’
John did not answer at first. Then, with an appeareance of lightness, he said: ‘Oh, well, after the husks comes the fatted calf, you know. We’ll have that next Sunday.’
Elizabeth realized with a stricken feeling that he had applied the parable to himself and his sister.
‘I’m 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