that Murdo honestly enjoyed being in the thick of trouble, while Maud merely included Murdo’s restlessness in the eternal restlessness of all males. Euphemia said sentimentally: “I suppose the children are old enough to be told, Maud? Your uncle, children, was unfortunate in his marriage. I think it has preyed on his mind a good deal.”
“Bosh, Euphemia!” cried Fanny.
But Alastair, who had reached the brash age of adolescence, was not satisfied. “I suppose you mean about his wife running away with someone better looking? Why didn’t he divorce her and marry someone else, like the Eltons?”
Euphemia gasped, and Maud exclaimed, “Alastair!”
“Well, why didn’t he? I would have.”
“Nice people don’t talk —” began Maud.
“Let’s hear no more of it, Alastair!” said Pen sternly. “One would think you’d no breeding at all.”
Dan, who thought slowly, was struggling with an idea. “But I think —” he began.
“Children! You may all leave the table,” ordered Pen.
“You see, you juggins?” commented Alastair very unfairly. “You never know when to stop.”
Sulkily the children trooped from the room. Alastair and Joanna went upstairs to get some sheet music.
It seemed to Dan that he had got hold of an important idea, and he wanted to be by himself to wrestle with it. He went into the drawing room where there was a fine fire blazing away; moving a sofa in front of the hearth, he lay down and watched the flames.
In the dining room, with the constraint of the children removed, the grown-ups were talking more freely. With her infallible instinct for saying the wrong thing, Euphemia was discussing divorce. “Divorce is much commoner nowadays because people lack the spiritual resources they used to have.” Secretly it pleased Euphemia a little when marriages were unsuccessful.
Placing the tips of his fingers together with precision, Daniel Thatcher ventured to disagree with his sister-in-law . “I believe the usual cause of divorce is that one partner demands too much of the other. ‘There is always one who loves and one who is loved’ is a French proverb containing much shrewd truth. Yes. No one should place his whole life utterly in the hands of his partner, keeping nothing back for his private life. No. A man should always possess his own soul away from even those closest to him. How else can he be secure? He should guard his reserve against all importunings. Indeed, yes!”
To Tessa, her husband’s dry, precise voice had suddenly become intolerable. She could not reach him at all. No matter what happened he would regard it judicially as an intellectual problem. He would put his finger tips carefully together, look at her mildly from that inner place you could not reach, and say: “Let us consider it calmly, my dear.” … If only she could really shake his self-sufficiency just once and make him suffer!
She burst out: “Oh, Daniel! Daniel! That’s just selfish! I think people ought to spend themselves on others even if it destroys them!”
All around the table, chairs creaked from the slight, startled movements of those sitting on them. Daniel blinked and changed colour. Called back to the domestic relations from the pure intellectual pleasure of expressing an idea with precision, he remembered that Tessa always had the faculty of making him feel uneasy. She made one feel that one’s ideas always had some personal application.
Maud tried to change the subject, but Tessa would not let her. Flushed and panting, she released a reckless torrent of words: “Why shouldn’t Murdo have got a divorce, and why shouldn’t his wife? You have only one life to live, and after a woman’s forty, she might as well be dead! … I’m sorry! I know I’m making a scene.… I didn’t mean to.… I don’t want to! I’m so ashamed!” She bit her lip and shook her head to keep the tears back.
Daniel said: “Tessa!” and coming round, tried clumsily to take her hands. She pushed him away with an inarticulate cry and rushed from the room with her hands over her face. Complete silence ensued for a moment. Maud gathered her wits together and quietly accepted the situation.
“Tessa hasn’t been herself since the baby died,” she said. “Go to her, Daniel. And, Daniel — coax her to talk to you.” Daniel went, looking bewildered.
Charles said tentatively: “A good bust-up once in a while is the very best thing for a family. Clears the air.” And Euphemia whispered to Fanny: “I’ve been thinking for some time that the child has been going through a religious crisis of some sort.” Fanny exclaimed: “Rubbish!” And Pen snorted derisively.
Tessa had flung herself on a chesterfield in the drawing room. Dan’s tousled head peered over the back of the sofa before the fire like a startled deer from a covert, and he saw a woman with her face buried in the cushions — crying. What ought he to do? If he stole away she might see him, and dimly he felt that that would never do. Then Uncle Daniel came into the room. Too late to go now.
Daniel sat on the couch beside her. For a long time she would neither answer him nor move, except to shake his hand from her shoulder.
Daniel said miserably: “When I said that, I didn’t mean us . I wasn’t thinking of us.”
Tessa sat up at last. “Oh, Daniel. This is a miserable life we lead!”
There was fear in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Tessa.”
“Why are we like this together?”
Daniel gave a mirthless laugh. “I am old, Tessa; you are young.”
“No! It isn’t that. But you are so stiff and cold and unnatural with me. It freezes me.”
Daniel began to stride up and down. Several times he began to speak, but each time he stopped, defeated. “If —” he said at last “— if you want — I mean, if I don’t — if I can’t make you happy, you could — sometimes I think the devil is between us, Tessa!”
“I don’t want a divorce, Daniel. But I want to feel alive. Life’s passing, and I feel as if I’d never truly lived it.… Make me feel alive, Daniel!”
He came to her, put his hand awkwardly on her shoulder, then removed it, feeling her muscles tense against him. “Tessa, why must we? You know the sort of torment this leads us to.”
“Put your hands on my shoulders again, Daniel. Please.”
He did as she asked. She was trembling.
“Now say you love me, Daniel.”
He tried to utter the simple sentence, but he could not. What he felt he could not utter — no, not if his life were to depend upon it.… And at times like these, the tension rising, like a sudden demon out of nothing, would unfurl to their minds and nerves a mortal hell divided between them.
“If only —” began Daniel, but he did not finish the phrase. But both of them knew what he meant: if only, while she was with child, Tessa had been quiet and hadn’t gadded about and played games. Daniel said heavily: “The doctor says there must never be another. It might mean —”
“I’m willing! I don’t care!”
She fingered the lapel of his coat and dropped her eyes. “Daniel. Other people —” She stopped.
“I know, my dear. But it wouldn’t be right. It isn’t right. We’ve talked about that before, over and over again. It wouldn’t be right.”
Presently, they went slowly out of the room together, and a sorely perplexed and abashed boy stood up. His mind was in a turmoil. He did not completely understand what he had heard, but he understood enough to be frightened. Was this what it was like to be grown up? he wondered. He felt obscurely that he was looking for the first time into a fearful world.… He began to jingle some loose cartridges in his coat pocket. He did not want to think of it. “Tomorrow I’ll get up at dawn and set up a target against the escarpment. Two bulls and four inners last time; not bad!”