Elinor had lifted her face toward the same bright disc. Moon, full moon. … And instantly she had changed her position in space and time. She dropped her eyes and turned toward her husband; she took his hand and leaned tenderly against him.
“Do you remember those evenings?” she asked. “In the garden, at Gattenden. Do you remember, Phil?”
Elinor’s words came to his ears from a great distance and from a world in which, for the moment, he felt no interest. He roused himself with reluctance. “Which evenings?” he asked, speaking across gulfs and in the rather flat and colourless voice of one who answers an importunate telephone.
At the sound of that telephone voice Elinor quickly drew away from him. To press yourself against someone who turns out simply not to be there is not only disappointing; it is also rather humiliating. Which evenings, indeed!
“Why don’t you love me any more?” she asked despairingly. As if she could have been talking about any other evenings than those of that wonderful summer they had spent, just after their marriage, at her mother’s house. “You don’t even take any interest in me now—less than you would in a piece of furniture, much less than in a book.”
“But, Elinor, what are you talking about?” Philip put more astonishment into his voice than he really felt. After the first moment, when he had had time to come to the surface, so to speak, from the depths of his reverie, he had understood what she meant, he had connected this Indian moon with that which had shone, eight years ago, on the Hertfordshire garden. He might have said so, of course. It would have made things easier. But he was annoyed at having been interrupted, he didn’t like to be reproached, and the temptation to score a debater’s point against his wife was strong. “I ask a simple question,” he went on, “merely wanting to know what you mean. And you retort by complaining that I don’t love you. I fail to see the logical connection.”
“But you know quite well what I was talking about,” said Elinor. “And besides, it is true—you don’t love me any more.”
“I do, as it happens,” said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit, vainly as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination. “But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started. We began with evenings and now …”
But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic. “Oh, I know you don’t want to say you don’t love me,” she interrupted. “Not in so many words. You don’t want to hurt my feelings. But it would really hurt them less if you did say so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now. Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement. And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there’s suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain. So long as the words haven’t been definitely spoken, there’s always just a chance that they mayn’t have been tacitly implied. Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied. There’s still room for hope. And where there’s hope there’s disappointment. It isn’t really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it’s crueller.”
“But I don’t evade the question,” he retorted. “Why should I, seeing that I do love you?”
“Yes, but how? How do you love me? Not in the way you used to, at the beginning. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten. You didn’t even remember the time when we were first married.”
“But, my dear child,” Philip protested, “do be accurate. You just said ‘those evenings’ and expected me to guess which.”
“Of course I expected,” said Elinor. “You ought to have known. You would have known, if you took any interest. That’s what I complain of. You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you. Do you think I can forget those evenings?”
She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall where they had sat
