Free Complete Short Stories (VMC) by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

from an unexpected horror. She said: ‘It is like the time when I found the adders lying under the ferns.’
    ‘What is like that?’ he asked. His head lay on his crooked arm, and he stared into the darkness where there was less to see than behind his closed lids.
    ‘To realise my ignorance about you; to discover our estrangement – this tangle of secrets; and to know that I can behave as I did tonight …’
    ‘Don’t cry, Muriel.’
    ‘Why do you call me “Muriel”? You have never done so until now, until lately.’ ‘Until Hester came,’ both thought.
    ‘She … Hester, I mean … has made no difference to us. I’m not in love with her, if that is any comfort … if you want to hear such embarrassing things really said aloud.’ He spoke coldly and angrily and with a sense of treachery to himself, as if she had forced from him some alien oath. ‘She has changed nothing … only shown us what existed, exists.’
    ‘We should be very grateful for that.’
    Her burst of anger was a relief from tears.
    ‘If I can never love her again,’ he thought, ‘why is it Hester’s fault? It is she, Muriel, who destroyed it, let it slip from her and then, in trying to have it back again, broke it for ever.’ Lying so close to her, he let this monstrous treason against her form in the darkness. Then he felt her lift herself up on one elbow. She was wiping her eyes. Crying was over, then? But, more dread to him even than her weeping, she put out her hand and touched his arm and he wondered if she had sensed the fissure widening, separating her from him, in his heart – the hard knowledge of non-love. She began to throw words into this abyss as if to close it before too late. ‘Robert, forgive me! I will try. I will do everything. I am sorry. I cannot bear it.’
    The words worked no magic, and continued into unseemliness, he thought. This reserve had changed to cold-heartedness, and he wondered how he could ever change it back again. He turned over and put his arms round her.
    ‘Let us try again!’ she begged, and she pressed her burning eyes against his shoulder. He moved his head back a little, for her hair had fallen against his mouth.
    ‘We will both try!’ he whispered. ‘I will try very hard.’ ‘But will it be-any use?’ he wondered.
    Robert, in the days that followed, wondered if it were the mildness of his nature which enabled him to find the suppression of love more easy than the suppression of non-love. No concentration could cure him of his lack of feeling towards Muriel, and, to ward off his indifference to her, he began, without knowing it, to catalogue her virtues. In this way, he always had a ready antidote for the irritations she caused him, and quickly smothered thoughts of her coldness with remembrances of her kindness to animals and that servants loved her. Against her sarcasm he recalled her loyalty, and tried to acknowledge her steadfastness when beset by her lack of humour.
    At first, as if a true understanding were between them, Muriel went through her days in chastened peace of mind, submissive and forgiving. Emotion had tired her and she seemed weakly convalescent, her mind on such little things, as if she only waited for the time to pass. At night, the resentment she fought during the day poisoned her dreams, so that, lying beside Robert with her heart full of love for him, she dreaded to fall asleep and so out of love again – would wake trembling or tearful at his dream-betrayals, carrying imaginary wrongs beyond the dawn, to discolour all the morning.
    Bravely, she set out to enchant him all over again, as she had done so many years ago, but disheartened now, frightened, and lacking the equipment of romanticism, energy, curiosity. ‘For I did not have him once for all,’ she thought sadly, arranging her pink dress against the red carpet and her white hands on the tapestry; glancing timidly at him, who did not look in her direction. Her voice lost its edge when she spoke to him,