Free Complete Short Stories (VMC) by Elizabeth Taylor

her sudden sensations of irritability towards Robert. ‘My head!’ she said, and stumbled along over the tree roots, pressing both hands to her temples.
    ‘I will find you some of Rex’s famous hangover pills when we get back. It was funny about Rex going tonight.’
    ‘Funny?’
    ‘I thought Madam’s view of him was very dark indeed.’ He took Hester’s elbow and guided her out of the way of some low branches. ‘Nearly there,’ he said.
    The air was thinner and cooler outside the wood. They came to the churchyard and the neat Despenser graves.
    Muriel had creamed her face and was weeping. Robert was silent with frightening displeasure.
    ‘I don’t want to see him again,’ she cried.
    He took the cuff-links out of his shirt and put them back into their velvet-padded box. He said: ‘That is what you cannot help doing. It is a little awkwardness you have created for us all.’
    ‘He might resign.’
    ‘But he won’t, and there is no reason why he should. You will find he is quite unperturbed. It will have meant nothing to him,’ Robert added cruelly. ‘When he remembers, and if it amuses him, he may take advantage of the situation to discomfit us. It is dreadfully late to be crying so,’ he said fretfully. ‘I am very tired, and he will see your red eyes in the morning and purr more than ever.’
    ‘Robert, you are rather working this up. By the way you are speaking I might have committed adultery.’
    ‘I think you might, if you hadn’t suddenly heard “God Save the Queen”. Your patriotism made you stand up – even if it
was
in one another’s arms.’
    ‘Oh, the brittle wit! How dare you? We had suddenly realised that the dance was over.’
    ‘Time had stood still.’
    She began angrily to splash cold water on her eyes. When she was in bed, she said shakily: ‘After all,
you
don’t make love to me.’
    He got neatly into bed and lay down as far from her as he could, his back turned.
    ‘Do you?’ she wept.
    ‘You know I do not, and you know why I do not.’
    ‘If I didn’t like it, perhaps that was your fault. Did you ever think of that?’
    ‘Very often. I surveyed every explanation in turn. Then I became rather bored and thought “so be it”.’
    ‘I know I was wrong tonight … though really sillier than wrong.’
    ‘You made us both look absurd and started a ridiculous scandal by your behaviour. Everyone missed you. I suppose it was an arranged thing between you … I remember your insistence on having him there. How long, if you wouldn’t mind telling me, has this romance been flourishing?’ He spoke stiffly, lying with his back to her. He was anxious to be reassured, to shake off the insecurity which results from a serious deviation in one we have trusted.
    ‘You shall not say such a thing,’ she cried.
    He had gone too far in his suspicions, and her amazed rejection of them was so genuine that he now went too far in his relief; although he only gravely said: ‘I apologise.’ ‘This dreadful conversation!’ he thought. ‘The cold phrases of hatred – “I apologise.” “How dare you!” “You
know
why.”’ ‘If it was just a sudden ill-judged thing,’ he said, ‘I can understand better. Anything else – plotting, lying – would not have been like you.’
    She lay on her back and stared up through the darkness; said ‘Thank you’ in a far-away voice.
    ‘Oh, don’t cry again.’ He turned over and touched her hair.
    ‘We were so happy,’ she cried.
    ‘I don’t think we were very happy.’
    ‘I was.’
    He meant his silence to punish her. To explain – she thought – everything; to simplify everything and press the punishment back upon him, she said: ‘If Hester had never come here! If we could be as we were!’
    ‘She had no part in this. She was utterly innocent.’
    ‘Her innocence has been like a poison to us. It has corrupted us both.’ In her mind she seemed to step back from the thought of their married life, as if she recoiled physically