Free Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

the same, it had been good, was good, and he leaned back and felt the warmth travelling through him. His change lay heaped up, a pile of silver and coppers. He fidgeted with it, afraid to touch his glass again for a bit. He knew he was drinking too quickly, and on an empty stomach. Then he realised she had given him too much money, that the note had been split up, but not much broken into, and he felt distracted with anger.
    Gilbert walked in.
    Tom saw her eyes flicker in terror. He knew how shaken she was, how her mind turned over quickly the thought that since he had come early, he might so easily have come earlier, how her world rocked and became unsafe.
    ‘Why, hello, Gil!’ she had said, and now she was saying: ‘Have you lost all your money, then, or spent it?’
    He shouted ‘good evening’ at them all, slapped his hands down on the bar, roaring for drinks. ‘Come on, what ’chaving? Don’t be shy, boys.’
    He made his wife run back and forth with glasses. Her face looked drawn and desperate and Tom felt compassion for her, was moved by her at last, but not in a way she would have wished, for his pity would not have fitted into her schemes of romance and fascination. Yet her being pitiable had made her become – for this passing moment – real to him and he wished to be kind and show her sympathy.
    He was curt with Gilbert, scarcely acknowledged his whisky. Above all men, this was the one he most hated; the one who represented the great bogus male world (of which he, Tom, was an outcast); who threw money about (Tom drew his heap of silver nearer with a loving gesture); who insulted his wife to prove his grandeur (whereas Tom insulted her because she reminded him of his treachery to himself). Moreover, he had aligned himself with this hated man by taking his wife and letting her make a despicable link between them.
    ‘What sort of day, Gil?’ she was asking. ‘Did Corona run?’
    ‘Did it run!’ he exclaimed.
    ‘Yes, that’s what she asked!’ Tom murmured into his whisky. ‘I am having too much drink,’ he thought. ‘Go steady. Why did he come home so early? He hates me. Nothing to do with her, but because I despise what he respects, don’t lift a finger to get what he’d grovel for, never laugh at his funny stories about copulation, never slap him on the back or buy him a drink. If I were Marion, he’d call me a cissy and be done with it, but he knows I’m not, that I could thrash the backside off him or any other man and that puzzles him all the more. But he is just right for her, really. He could not have been
made
to suit her better. Heis the answer to all she needs and asks for, all that her vulgarity calls forth.’ He imagined their love-making; remembered his own; shut his eyes. ‘Why does she hanker after me, then?’ he wondered. ‘Why is she so sick to destroy me? Because she knows I am private and she wants to trespass. She knows I am committed and she wants to annul my commitment. She is worse than he is. She wants to say: “I have received from him the same as
she
– the most beautiful of all women.” But who does she want to say it to? She would never dare say it to me, nor to other people – her husband, for instance – and she could never say it to herself, because she knows it is a damned lie. That is why she cries.’
    He wouldn’t soil his money buying Gilbert a drink, so he slipped it into his pocket and then, without saying good night, as if he were just going out to the lavatory, he sauntered casually from the bar. Once outside, he quickened his pace, going up the warm tunnel of the steep lane, the hedges enclosing him.
    There was a lighted window at the lodge. That sluttish woman who was sometimes to be seen slapping a grey, gritty cloth across the kitchen floor at the Manor, stood up in the poky little room, above the dusty leaves of geraniums on the sill, a baby clutching at her untidy hair. She was talking to someone unseen and her mouth moved and her body