He roused himself with a little attempt at cheer. “Ay, well, I’ve landed at last!” he said, with a smile. “I never thought I’d see the old spot again.”
Thomas and Agnes gave him a double beam. “It’s a sight for sore eyes to see you here, I’m sure!”
“Marget wasn’t best pleased at me coming away,” the old man said. “She’s had a deal to say about it, these last few week.”
“And wi’ the rough side of her tongue for it, I’ll swear!” Thomas laughed. “I heard tell she was taking on and terble wild. Ay, well, you’ll have none o’ that wi’ Agnes, don’t you fret.”
Agnes threw him a laughing glance, and said it was early days to talk like that. Happen, if he waited, she would show him different, later on. Thomas, however, wasn’t to be put off. “There isn’t a smarter lass in the country-side,” he said, “and she’s a rare hand at managing a house.” The showman in him was aching to be out, and he was driven as well by an urgent need that he didn’t know how to explain. It was as if he was bent upon manufacturing a barrier of good things, an insurmountable barrier of comforts and kind words.... He had a sense of delicacy about beginning to praise the house, but it couldn’t be taken amiss if he praised his wife. “She’ll do you that well you’ll think you’re the king,” he said, “and she’s as bonny as they make ’em, as you can see for yourself.”
“Marget’s not much in the way o’ looks,” Kit said. “She’s the cankert sort, is Marget, wi’ a nippit nose.”
Thomas laughed and said it was just as well she couldn’t hear, but the bitter disparagement gave him a slight shock. It had never been like his father to say bitter things. He had had a good word for every erring soul, a tolerant explanation for every doubtful deed. Marget must have been dreadful indeed to have altered him like that. The thought of his own share in the matter troubled Thomas’s heart. “Bob’s catched a Tartar,” he added, after a while. “He darsent call his soul his own, poor lad!”
“Ay, she keeps folk stirring, Marget does,” Kit said, but after his little outburst he sat quiet. It was strange how Marget was present with him even here, so that he could not so much as open his mouth but she came jumping out. He tried to put her away from him as he watched Agnes moving about the hearth, all colour and curves and deft handling and neat ways. Agnes was flushed with the excitement of the occasion, and her eyes shone when she smiled. He could not remember that he had ever seen Marget smile except for the purpose of a sneer. She had never even smiled at the red-haired baby or Bob, and certainly not at the daft old man who was only a burden in the house. He liked a smiling face, but it embarrassed him as well, because he had forgotten what to do with people who smiled. That was why he shifted his eyes when Agnes looked his way, though he watched her again as soon as she left him alone. He liked her air of hurry without fuss, which filled the room with a vigour that did not fret. Marget would have spilt the kettle over the fender and one of the brats, and in the midst of the hissing and howling would have blamed himself. Somehow he could not picture Agnes ever spilling a drop. She brought the grand new tea-pot to be filled on the hearth, and the room was reflected in its polished side. Her blue gown, crossing and crossing the bars of gold, made him think of a coloured bird that kept flashing through the sun. From his window at Marget’s he had often watched the swifts darting and dipping in the evening light. The tiny whir of their wings across the pane had come to him in a series of little shocks. The long, pointed wings were like little slender swords, crossing and darting and never getting home. Now, if he looked from the farm-window, he would see the birds of the marsh, the long legs of the heron and the stately swing of the gull. The redshank and the curlew he would see lonely on the sands ... yet here he was busy thinking of Marget’s and the swifts.
It seemed as if the farther he went away from Marget’s the closer it followed up. Just at first he had seemed to leave it right behind, and yet in the heart of the dream it was waiting on the step. The one door of the viaduct that he had seen still wide had not succeeded in closing, after all. That meant that, when he went to bed, he would not be safe, because Marget might come and peer at him as he slept. The thing that might have swamped her and shut her out had not so much as begun to come to pass. He could not conjure her out of the house, because magic had failed him as he stepped inside. If there was anything there that belonged to himself, it had done nothing for him yet but make him sad. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that the joy was only slightly out of reach; as if he looked at it through a window, but could not come inside. His heart was heavy, as heavy as wet grass. Nothing, he told himself, was going right. Even the chair he sat in wasn’t right.
“I doubt I mun be getting old bones,” he said at last. “Chair don’t seem to fit me same as it used.”