Just before she went to sleep it came to her that he might want her to have a room of her own just as much as she wanted it herself. He might want to be alone at night just as much as she wanted it, because then if he talked or called out there would be no one to hear him. This comforting thought went with her into a deep and dreamless sleep.

It wasn’t till next day when Lizzie Pardue had left them alone and gone off to the Vicarage that it occurred to Millie Blount to wonder why they had come down to Cleat, but she knew better than to ask any questions. If she could have heard Lizzie talking to the Vicar’s wife it might have started her worrying again. Lizzie had worked for Mrs Field for a great many years and felt quite at home with her. They were making beds together, and she had a lot to say about her nephew Sid and his wife.

‘Very worried about her he is, Mrs Field. That’s why they’re down here. “Country air,” he says, “and your cooking, Auntie Liz,” he says, “and if that don’t make her well, nothing will. Right down melancholy, that’s what she is.” And what with his first wife throwing herself under a train, poor thing, it’s only natural he should take it to heart.’

Mrs Field said,

‘Did she throw herself under a train? How dreadful! No, the sheet isn’t straight, Miss Pardue – it wants pulling up on your side.’

Lizzie pulled it up.

‘She threw herself right under the Brighton express. Sid he took it to heart something dreadful. She left him a nice bit of money, but it don’t make up for losing your wife. And he said to me last night, “I’d never get over it if anything like that was to happen again, Aunt Liz,” he says.’

‘Miss Pardue, that’s the Vicar’s pillow you’ve got, not mine. You don’t mean to say there’s any reason to suppose…’

Miss Pardue shook her head in a mournful way.

‘There’s no getting from it she’s melancholy. And I’m sure there isn’t a kinder husband than Sid anywhere. But he’s worried, I can see that, and he says she talks funny.’

‘The eiderdown is behind you, Miss Pardue. How do you mean, “She talks funny”?’

Lizzie Pardue picked up the eiderdown and spread it across the bed.

‘It’s the things she says, and the way she says them if you know what I mean. Sid don’t like talking about it, but when it comes to saying she don’t think she can go on and he’d be better off without her, well, it gives you a bit of a turn, what with poor Lucy throwing herself under a train and all.’

‘She ought to see a doctor,’ said Mrs Field in her most decided voice.

In the cottage with the thatched roof Mrs Blount was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. There were some sprouts to see to too. Sid had picked them and brought them in, and she was very pleased to get everything forward so that there would be as little as possible for Aunt Liz to do when she came home at half past twelve. At the other end of the table Sid had a bottle of ink and a writing-pad. He got out his pen and dipped it.

He hadn’t written more than a line or two before he stopped and began to rub his thumb and the side of his hand. She kept her eyes on the potatoes so that she needn’t watch him. He didn’t like being watched, and she didn’t like looking at his hands. They were strong and coarse, and there was hair on them. They frightened her. He began to write again, and went on to the foot of the page. Then he said, ‘Ow!’ and wrung his hand with the pen in it. A blob of ink splashed down on to the white scrubbed table. Lizzie Pardue wasn’t going to like that. Mrs Blount got up to get a cloth, but he shouted to her not to fuss and she didn’t dare. She went and sat down again, and there he was, nursing his hand and saying he had put the thumb joint out, and how was he to finish his letter.

‘And it’s got to catch the post whether or no. There’s a chap I half said I’d go into a deal with, but I’ve thought better of it. Heard something about him as a matter of fact, and he’s not the sort I want to get mixed up with.’

Mrs Blount was very much surprised. They had been married three years, and she never remembered his telling her anything about his business before. She didn’t say anything, because she didn’t know what to say. He went on grumbling about his hand.

‘It’s no good thinking I can hold a pen, because I can’t. And that letter’s got to catch the post. You’ll just have to make the best job of it you can. I’ll tell you what to say. You’d better come round here and take this chair. And wash your hands! I don’t want my business correspondence all messed up with dirt off those potatoes!’

There wasn’t any dirt on the potatoes, because of course they had been scrubbed before she sat down to peel them, but she didn’t say anything.

She went and washed, and he swore at her for being so long. By the time she was set down and had the pen in her hand she was shaking. He put the block in front of her with a clean page on it. He had finished the first sheet and laid it aside. She said, doing her best to keep her voice steady,

‘Do I put a 2 at the top?’

He swore at her.

‘You don’t put anything down but what I tell you! And don’t start too near the top. There’ll be only a sentence or two to come, and it’ll look better that way.’

She sat waiting for him to tell her what to write. He stood over her, watching everything she did, and began to dictate. It made her so nervous that her hand shook worse than ever. She wrote in stumbling letters:

‘I can’t go on with it. It’s no use. I don’t feel I can.’

He was looking over her. When he saw what she had written he pulled the block away and swore again.

‘How do you think I can send a scrawl like that! I’ll just have to try and get him on the phone!’

He tore the sheet off the block and looked at it. The writing was barely legible, and pulling the block away had made the pen run off at an angle.

He stood behind his wife’s chair and smiled approvingly. He thought that what she had written would do very well.

JACK HARRISON WAS in a most dazed and uncomfortable frame of mind. He was not a man of marked ability in any direction. He had entered a family business, Harrison and Leman, General Importers, at the age of eighteen, detached himself from them to serve through the first World War, and returned when it was over with a wounded shoulder which still occasionally gave him trouble, and an immense thankfulness at finding himself back in the office. He was not clever, but he was painstaking, courteous, and trustworthy. In due course he became a partner and inherited a considerable fortune from two bachelor uncles. He was universally liked, but after a slightly patronizing manner. At least one woman had cared for him deeply, but he had most unfortunately married Ella Crane. He would have been happy with Emmy Lester and he was not at all happy with Ella, but it never occurred to him that there was anything he could do about it. He did what he could to avoid rows and the occasions for them, but it was uphill work and he wasn’t very good at it.

That there should have been a row, and a major one, in front of two police officers, one of them a member of the local force, was a terribly shaming thing. The figure destroyed by Ella’s uncontrolled rage was Meissen ware and had belonged to a several times great-grandmother. He might have received a cut over the eye which could have affected his sight, and worst of all, the scene, its sound, its fury, its violence had blown upon the smouldering resentments of the last two or three years and fanned them into flame. It wasn’t right to hate your wife, to wish vainly that you hadn’t married her, and that there was any way in which you could be rid of the burden of her presence. And if this was wrong, what was to be said about the promptings of which he was now and then aware. It shocked him very much that there were moments in which he was conscious of a desire to strike Ella, to see her shrink away from him and be afraid.