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to being intimidated by her birth than her father was.
    Such memories were a farewell look at where she had been. From her reading she made up her own name for the place she was determined to leave: the lumpen-middle-class. If the dynamic of aristocratic life, she had thought, was the past (you inherited your status), that of middle-class life was the present, what you now materially possessed. For lineage, read money, the mechanical womb in which her parents had conceived her and from which they saw her own children coming. They seemed dead to the possibilities that lay beyond it.
    That was one reason why, besides being in love with Dan Scoular, she had felt an intellectual identification with what she understood to be working-class life. The knowledge she had acquired of it through him made her want to be a part of it. From the first image she had had of him at a wedding to which she was taken by somebody else, she had wanted to know more about how he came to be the way he was, with a relaxed assurance and a smile that would have thawed a glacier. The company of his relatives she had found herself among welcomed her as if she belonged to a branch of their family they were delighted to make contact with again.
    That same openness was something he had brought to their continuing relationship. She had never quite become immune to the attractiveness of his vulnerability. She had never known a man who was so obviously without effective defences. He didn’t hide behind any pretence of worldly wisdom. He seemed to have no sense of you that you were meant to be able to fit. He had met her with a kind of uninhibited innocence. It seemed to give them licence to find out together about themselves, and they did. Their previous involvements didn’t cause any aggressionsbetween them. Marriage happened as a natural consequence, or so it had felt at the time.
    But somehow the daily proximity of marriage had eventually compromised their original feeling. She began to see less attractive implications in his easiness of manner. She sensed him struggling to come to terms with how many restrictions there were on her apparent acceptance of him as he was. In their coming to understand the small print of each other’s nature, resentments grew.
    The resentments were at first just the ghosts of things not done that haunt our lives in a gentle, house-trained way, the half-heard sough of chances missed, the memory of a relationship you allowed to starve to death through inattention, the place you might have been that stares reproachfully through the window of the place you are. But such resentments, born of the slow experience of how each choice must bury more potential than it fulfils, were always seeking incarnation. Then their tormentingness could be given shape, their slow corrosion be dynamic. In the shared closeness of a marriage, it was very easy to exorcise the growing awareness of the inevitable failures of the self to live near to its dreams into the nature of the other, to let the lost parts of yourself find malignant form in unearned antipathy to the other one’s behaviour.
    It had happened to them, not dramatically but in small, daily ways. But then habit commits its enormities quite casually, like a guard in an extermination camp looking forward to his tea. Each day Betty sensed something in herself she didn’t like but couldn’t prevent from happening. She knew that what presented themselves to her as random thoughts were taking careful note, like shabby spies compiling a dossier against him.
    One reiterated secret accusation concerned his propensity for violence. She knew it was grossly exaggerated in Thornbank. He had said to her once, Thank God, one fight avoids ten years of scuffles.’ He had confessed to her that he had never been in a fight without experiencing rejection symptoms of fear afterwards, a shivering withdrawal, a determination not to do the same again. She had seen that at first hand. Once he had struck her, one