Free Justice Is a Woman by Yelena Kopylova Page A

Hughes-Burton joined the Remington household at the beginning of November.
    Elaine was
    now four months pregnant and apparently had accepted her condition, if not joyfully,
    then at least without
    any outward show of hostility.
    From that particular Tuesday morning when Joe had frightened her and she had admitted to herself that
    she had been frightened, not so much by what he might do to her person, but by his threat that he would
    throw her off; she knew him well enough by now to realise that he had an aggressive side to him and
    against all his personal feelings he would have carried out his threat if she’d had an abortion from that
    morning she had done a lot of thinking, and all centring around herself and her needs. She knew the one
    thing she couldn’t face was life without certain of its comforts, and the thought of being on the open
    market again, with the stigma of separation attached to her this time, was not to be borne; that particular
    market was flooded with a great many women of her class, young widows and
    disappointed brides, the
    residue of dead young officers. Those men who had escaped had nothing to offer in
    marriage except
    love, and as she had witnessed, that love brought little comfort in a third-floor flat in Bloomsbury. So she
    had allowed Joe to bring her round to accepting the disaster that had befallen her.
    And she also deemed it expedient to change her tactics insofar as expressing her opinion of the people in
    whose midst she had found herself, for she was being forced to recognise that her
    husband was the son
    of his father and that they both stemmed from the working class; in fact, they had never left—it, and in a
    way this was a matter of pride with them both. Even Joe’s education, she was finding, was but a thin
    veneer, and there were times when he took no pains to hide it, when he seemed to take pride in stripping
    it off by resorting to the idiom of the area. What it all amounted to, in his case, she had concluded, was a
    deep feeling of inferiority; you had to be born of the middle class, or the upper class, you couldn’t be
    born into it. Even though his mother had been a lady, so she had been given to
    understand, he himself in
    no way showed evidence of it; on the contrary, he seemed to take a delight in hobnobbing with menials.
    That objectionable being who lived in The Cottage, for instance. Oh, how she disliked that man; it put
    her teeth on edge every time she saw him with Joe. If the man had been white, Joe’s
    attitude towards
    him would still not have been natural, ordinary, for he seemed to go out of his way to placate the fellow.
    It wasn’t as if he was afraid of him, no, not that, but as if he held him in high esteem, as one would a very
    close and well loved friend.
    And then there was the man’s wife. That creature, Egan’s daughter.
    She was much too familiar with Joe, and Joe with her. Yesterday she had seen him put a hand on her
    shoulder.
    She had walked down the drive to meet the car. She was finding she had to do such
    ordinary mundane
    things to fill in her time and stem the feeling of utter boredom. She had just turned the bend in the drive
    when she saw the car inside the gate, and there was Joe going into the cottage with the girl, and they
    were laughing together, quite loudly. The girl was in her outdoor clothes and it was
    apparent that she had
    ridden with Joe in the car.
    She had turned on her heel and marched back to the house, determined she would have
    something to
    say to him when he came in. Yet before reaching the front door she had asked herself
    what she would
    say, and how she would say it; after all, he had probably merely given the girl a lift back from the town.
    Yes, but why had he to escort her into the cottage? Well, his answer could be: “Why not?
    I couldn’t
    leave her to find her way in alone, could I?” Such a flippant attitude on his part had shown itself of late; it
    was his idea of humour.
    Before she heard him come