‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Nothing at all that I know of.’
But her denial did not convince him. All the evening he tried to guess what could have upset her, but she evaded him, pretending that she was her normal self. He knew better. Even when she spoke to the children or to Mrs Mamble, who came in to talk about the havoc of the storm and to give them the news that a sheep had been struck by lightning on Williams’s farm, Mary was listless and dull.
Abner used her gently. He knew that women must have their moods, and that a man needed to be patient with them if he would be happy; but day after day now passed without any change in her attitude. Since the discovery of his own passion that he had made by the sea-crows’ pool, it had been hard enough as it was for him to live with her on ordinary terms; but now, even though he humoured her, she was distant with him.
He tried to make her explain herself. She only shook her head. It seemed, indeed, as if a single day had thrown them back into all the awkwardness of his early life at Wolfpits, and that she had suddenly taken it into her head to upset the convention under which they had agreed to live. Most of all, she avoided him whenever he spoke of money, and when he brought her his wages at the end of the week she left them lying on the table as though touching them would have burned her fingers. If he had not loved the woman, and her children too, he would have broken away in accordance with his nature. As it was, he hung on, sore and bewildered, wondering what new coldness she could inflict upon him.
Another shock awaited her. One day, when Abner was away at work, the postman bicycled up to Wolfpits and handed her a letter. This was so rare an event at Wolfpits that the man waited, as country postmen, who also act as interpreters, often do, to hear its contents.
‘You’ll see by the postmark it’s come from Shrewsbury,’ he said.
‘Yes, so I see,’ she replied, thrusting it into the pocket of her apron.
She had already recognised George’s freehand writing. He went away, but she kept the letter in her pocket unopened. She dared not open it; and when at last she did so, the words sent a chill over all her body.
‘My dear Wife,’—she read, shivering—‘Although I may be doing time I’m not yet dead that I know of. They say that love is blind, but don’t you go imagining that other people haven’t got eyes.
‘Your loving husband,
‘George.’
She was seized with a pain that had scarcely abated when Abner came home at night. She could not bring herself to speak to him. She desired, passionately, to show him the letter, but shame would not let her do so. He, in his turn, was sick of the wretchedness of their present relation, and when the children had been put to bed, he told her so in words that he had chosen for their roughness. She stared at him from the other side of the supper table with grief and resentment in her eyes.