“I have never really driven a car before this trip,” said Tam as they started. “In England I am no motorist, though a friend’s Rolls Royce occasionally wears Lucy and me as buttons. But I am no driver and it alarms me to have anyone but Lucy in the seat beside me.”
Lucy looked at the country with a patient expression. The angle of her head followed the line of the hills. The line was like a feverish temperature chart against the sky and Lucy watched it with uncritical attention.
Emily put her hand upon Edward’s thin arm. “You know, Edward,” she said, “you’re a masochist.”
“I suppose I am,” said Edward despondently. “What is it?”
“A person who enjoys hurting himself.”
Edward considered this.
“That’s what makes me want to love you without being loved,” he thought. “Yes, I want that. I want to be hurt and to make myself sick with pitying myself. I want to ensure that you shouldn’t love me by telling you the worst about myself.”
He found it suddenly a real effort to be silent. He wanted to tell her how unhappy he was; he wanted to try and make her cry for him, or rather to satisfy himself that she would never cry for him. He wanted to tell her how often his head hurt and how poorly his ears served him and of the unbearable thundering and crashing that was always in the foreground of his hearing. He wanted to tell her how impossible he found it not to drink too much, how impossible he found it to be like other men. He wanted her to say, “Poor Edward, poor man...” and stroke his hand.
He said, “Emily, are you really as hardhearted as Tam says?”