instinctively.

‘Well, what’s the matter with you!’ she snapped pettishly, ‘sitting there moping with the tea to be made. I sometimes don’t know why we christened you John’ – with a sigh. ‘My father was never like you. He was a man who knew his business.’

‘All right, all right,’ he said despairingly. ‘Can’t you get a new record for your gramophone. I’ve heard all that before,’ as if he were conscious of the inadequacy of this familiar retort – he added: ‘hundreds of times.’ But she wasn’t to be stopped.

‘I can’t understand what has come over you lately. You keep mooning about the house, pacing up and down with your hands in your pockets. Do you know what’s going to happen to you, you’ll be taken to the asylum. That’s where you’ll go. Your father’s people had something wrong with their heads, it was in your family but not in ours.’ (She had always looked upon him as her husband’s son, not as her own: and all his faults she attributed to hereditary weaknesses on his father’s side.)

He pottered about, putting water in the kettle, waiting desperately for the sibilant noise to stop. But no, it took a long time to stop. He moved about inside this sea of sound trying to keep detached, trying to force himself from listening. Sometimes, at rarer and rarer intervals, he could halt and watch her out of a clear, cold mind as if she didn’t matter, as if her chatter which eddied round and round, then burst venomously towards him, had no meaning for him, could not touch him. At these times her little bitter barbs passed over him or through him to come out on the other side. Most often however they stung him and stood quivering in his flesh, and he would say something angrily with the reflex of the wound. But she always cornered him. She had so much patience, and then again she enjoyed pricking him with her subtle arrows. He had now become so sensitive that he usually read some devilish meaning into her smallest utterance.

‘Have you stacked all the sheaves now?’ she was asking. He swung round on his eddying island as if he had seen that the seas were relenting, drawing back. At such moments he became deferential.

‘Yes,’ he said joyously. ‘I’ve stacked them all. And I’ve done it all alone too. I did think Roddy Mason would help. But he doesn’t seem to have much use for me now. He’s gone the way the rest of the boys go. They all take a job. Then they get together and laugh at me.’ His weakness was pitiful: his childish blue eyes brimmed with tears. Into the grimace by which he sought to tauten his face, he put a murderous determination: but though the lines of his face were hard, the eyes had no steadiness: the last dominance had long faded and lost itself in the little red lines which crossed and recrossed like a graph.

‘Of course Roddy doesn’t want to help you. He’s got enough to do as it is. Anyway he’s got his day’s work to do and you haven’t.’

‘It isn’t my fault I haven’t.’ He spoke wearily. The old interminable argument was beginning again: he always made fresh attacks but as often retired defeated. He stood up suddenly and paced about the room as if he wanted to overawe her with his untidy hair, his thick jersey, and long wellingtons.

‘You know well enough,’ he shouted, ‘why I haven’t my day’s work. It’s because you’ve been in bed there for ten years now. Do you want me to take a job? I’ll take a job tomorrow . . . if you’ll only say!’ He was making the same eternal argument and the same eternal concession: ‘If you’ll only say.’ And all the time he knew she would never say, and she knew that he would never take any action.

‘Why, you’d be no good in a job. The manager would always be coming to show you what you had done wrong, and you’d get confused with all those strange faces and they’d laugh at you.’ Every time she spoke these words the same brutal pain stabbed him. His babyish eyes would be smitten by a hellish despair, would lose all their hope, and cloud over with the pain of the mute, suffering animal. Time and time again he would say to her when she was feeling better and in a relatively humane mood: ‘I’m going to get a job where the other fellows are!’ and time and time again, with the unfathomable and unknowable cunning of the woman, she would strike his confidence dead with her hateful words. Yes, he was timid. He admitted it to himself, he hated himself for it, but his cowardice still lay there waiting for him, particularly in the dark nights of his mind when the shadow lay as if by a road, watching him, tripping behind him, changing its shape, till the sun came to shine on it and bring its plausible explanations. He spoke again, passing his hand wearily over his brow as if he were asking for her pity.

‘Why should anybody laugh at me? They don’t laugh at the other chaps. Everybody makes mistakes. I could learn as quickly as any of them. Why, I used to do his lessons for Norman Slater.’ He looked up eagerly at her as if he wanted her to corroborate. But she only looked at him impatiently, that bitter smile still upon her face.

‘Lessons aren’t everything. You aren’t a mechanic. You can’t do anything with your hands. Why don’t you hurry up with that tea? Look at you. Fat good you’d be at a job.’

He still sat despairingly leaning near the fire, his head on his hands. He didn’t even hear the last part of her words. True, he wasn’t a mechanic. He never could understand how things worked. This ignorance and inaptitude of his puzzled himself. It was not that he wasn’t

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