Free A Modern Tragedy by Phyllis Bentley

in the large drawing-room.
    He looked round at the thick pale carpets, the numerous elaborate lamps, the vivid cushions and richly upholstered chairs, in grim satisfaction, nodding his head slightly; did they think he was going to give up all that without a fight? If they did, they were wrong! Then it struck him how new the room looked, how unused; indeed society did not come to Grey Garth very often. His wife was ailing, of course, but that wasn’t the whole reason; you wouldn’t catch Henry Clay Crosland entering this drawing-room, for example. Tasker’s eyes hardened, his nostrils slightly dilated; well, he’d show them!
    He turned off the light and went upstairs. As he passed the door of his wife’s room, her voice called thinly: “Leonard!”
    He grimaced, but went in. Marian Tasker was lying on her back in the luxuriously appointed bed, with her arms stretched out at her sides, in the attitude of the habitual invalid. A vivid-shaded lamp, and her rich silken night-gear, only made the pinched face beneath her greying hair lookmore haggard, the thin throat and arms more wrinkled. She was older than her husband, and had never had much physical attraction for him; indeed the proposal that they should marry had come from her side. The daughter of a little suburban shop-keeper in Ashworth, whom Tasker had met during one of his early commercial enterprises, as organiser of a thrift club, she had brought him the two hundred pounds—the result of the sale of her deceased father’s shop—which formed the foundation of his fortune. Therefore, he kept faith with her; that is to say, his body sometimes roved, but his mind did not; and though he often wished, in a terrible rage of exasperation and thwarting, that he was rid of her, the thought of forcing her to divorce him or separate from him never entered his head. He would indeed have been shocked at such an idea. Moreover, with Marian he was completely at his ease, because she knew his antecedents. He could relax his accent, utter his views of men and things with the robust cynicism natural to him, sure of not shocking her. What she thought of him Tasker had never been altogether able to make out, which was, perhaps, the secret of her power over him; he knew, however, that in her way she loved him. They had no children. In earlier days this had been a disappointment, a deep hurt, to Tasker, but now he was glad; children tied you up, limited your activities, and he wanted to be free, he could not bear any restrictions on his power to do as he chose. Marian was a meticulous housewife, of the type which prefers to see a thing unused rather than soiled; the emptiness of her drawing-room did not trouble her. She had called him in now to complain, in her rather nagging high tones (unchanged since the days when he first knew her), that one of the taps in the magnificent white and silver bathroom had begun to drip.
    â€œRight! I’ll see to it first thing to-morrow morning,” said Tasker, making a note. He reflected that in the early daysof his marriage to Marian, he would have taken off his coat, got out his tool box, and put a new washer on the tap inside ten minutes. Now he would have to pay a plumber to do the job less efficiently than he could do it himself. Tasker detested the class from which he had sprung, regarding them as enemies who would drag him down to their level again, the level from which he had had to struggle so fiercely to escape, if they got a chance; he therefore had no sympathies with their aspirations, and employed non-union labour whenever he could. As he paced up and down his wife’s room, jingling the keys in his pockets, waiting impatiently for her to conclude her account of her sufferings through the day which was just over, he wondered what Walter’s views were on the subject of labour. Could he handle men at all? It might be rather important. “But I shall be behind him,” thought Tasker,