The mother was indifferent. She did not know what was going on, or what the little girl suffered. For it was a 'game' and the squeals and protests were from her own childhood and therefore in order, healthy, licensed. From her came a blankness, the indifference of ignorance. She cooed and talked to her stolid open-mouthed infant while the father went on with his task, from time to time looking at his wife with a wonderfully complex expression — guilt, but he was unaware of that; appeal, because he felt this was wrong and ought to be stopped; astonishment that it was allowable and by her, who not only did not protest, but actively encouraged him in the 'game'; and, mingled with all these, a look that was never far from his face at any time, of sheer incredulity at the impossibility of everything. He let his knees go slack, and pretended to release the child, who nearly fell, reached for a knee to steady herself, but before she could run away, was caught again as the knees clapped together on either side of her. The exquisite torture began again. 'There, there, there, Emily,' muttered the great man, flooding her in an odour of tobacco and unwashed clothes. 'Now then, that's it, there you are you see,' he went on, as the fingers thicker than any of her ribs dug into her sides and she screamed and pleaded.
This scene faded like a spark or like a nightmare, and the same man was sitting in the same room but in a chair near the bed. He wore a heavy brown dressing gown of some very thick rough wool, a soldier's garment, and he smoked and sat watching his wife. The large healthy woman was discarding her clothes in a rapid efficient way on her side of the bed near the fire: only now it was summer, and the fireplace had red flowers standing in it. The curtains hung limp and still, very white, but drawn back to show areas of black glass which reflected the man, the room, the movements of the woman. She was unaware of her husband, who sat there watching her nakedness emerge. She was talking, she was creating her day for him, for herself: 'And by four o'clock I was quite exhausted, the girl had her half day, and Baby was awake all morning, he did not have his sleep, and Emily was very trying and demanding today… and… and…The plaint went on, while she stood naked, looking about her for pyjamas. She was a fine solid woman with clear white flesh, her breasts small and round. The nipples were virginal for a woman who had had two children: small and with narrow pink aureoles. Her plentiful brown hair fell down her back, and she scratched first her scalp, then under one arm, lifting it to expose wisps of long brown hair. On to her face came a look of intense satisfaction which would have appalled her if she could have seen it. She scratched the other armpit, then allowed herself to scratch, voluptuously, with both hands, her ribs, her hips, her stomach. Her hands did not stray lower. She stood there scratching vigorously for a long time, a couple of minutes, while red marks appeared on the solid white flesh behind the energetic fingers, and from time to time she gave a great shudder of pleasure, masked as cold. Her husband sat quiet and watched. On his face was a small smile. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a deep lungful, and slowly let it out, allowing it to trickle from half-open mouth and nostrils.
His wife had finished with her scratching, and was bundling herself into pink-spotted cotton pyjamas, in which she looked like a jolly schoolgirl. Her face was unconsciously greedy — for sleep. She was already in imagination drifting to oblivion. She got efficiently into bed, as if her husband did not exist, and in one movement lay down and turned her back to him. She yawned. Then she remembered him: there was something she ought to do before allowing herself this supreme pleasure. She turned over and said 'Good night old thing,' and was at once sucked down and lay asleep, facing him. He sat on, smoking, now openly examining her at his leisure. The amusement was there, incredulity, and, at the same time, an austerity that had begun, from the look of it, as a variety of moral exhaustion, even a lack of vitality, and had long ago become a judgement on himself and on others.
He now put his cigarette out, and got up from the chair, gently, as if afraid of waking a child. He went into the next room, which was the nursery with its red velvet curtains, its white, white, white everywhere. Two cots, one small one, one large. He walked delicately, a large man among a thousand tiny items of nursery use, past the small cot, to the large one. He stood at the foot of it and looked at the little girl, now asleep. Her cheeks flamed scarlet. Beads of sweat stood on her forehead. She was only lightly asleep. She kicked off the bedclothes as he watched, turned herself and lay, her nightgown around her waist, showing small buttocks and the backs of pretty legs. The man bent lower and gazed, and gazed… a noise from the bedroom, his wife turning over and perhaps saying something in her sleep, made him stand straight and look — guilty, but defiant, and above all, angry. Angry at what? At everything, that is the answer. There was silence again. Lower down in this tall house a clocked chimed: it was only eleven. The little girl tossed herself over again and lay on her back, naked, stomach thrust up, vulva prominent. The man's face added another emotion to those already written there. Suddenly, but in spite of everything not roughly, he pulled a cover over the child and tucked it in tight. At once she began to squirm and whimper. The room was much too hot. The windows were closed. He was about to open one, but remembered a prohibition. He turned himself about and walked out of the nursery without looking again at the two cots, where the little boy lay silent, his mouth open, but where the girl was tossing and struggling to get out, to get out, to get out.
In a room that had windows open to a formal garden, a room that had a 'feel' to it of another country somewhere, different from the rooms in this house, was a small bed in which the girl lay. She was older, and she was sick and fretful. Paler, thinner than at any time I had seen her, her dark hair was damp and sticky, and there was the smell of stale sweat. All around her lay books, toys, comics. She was moving restlessly and continuously, rubbing her limbs together, tossing about, turning over, crooning to herself, muttering complaints and commands to someone. She was an earthquake of fevers, energies, desires, angers, need. In came the tall large woman, preoccupied with a glass she was carrying. At the sight of the glass the girl brightened: here at least was a diversion, and she half sat up. But already her mother had set down the glass and was turning away to another duty.
'Stay with me,' pleaded the girl.
'I can't, I have to see to Baby.'
'Why do you always call him Baby?'
'I don't know, really, of course it is time… he's quite old enough to… but I keep forgetting.'
'Please, please.'
'Oh very well, for a minute.'
The woman sat on the extreme edge of the bed, looked harried, looked as she always did, burdened and irritated. But she was also pleased.
'Drink your lemonade.'
'I don't want to. Mummy, cuddle me, cuddle me…'
'Oh, Emily!'
With a flattered laugh, the woman bent forward, offering herself. The little girl put her arms up around the woman's neck, and hung there. But she got no encouragement. 'Cuddle me, cuddle me,' she was crooning, as if to herself, and it might just as well have been to herself, since the woman was so puzzled by it all. She suffered the small hot arms for a little, but then she could not help herself — her dislike of flesh raised her own hands, to put the child's arms away from her. 'There, that's enough,' she said. But she stayed, a little. Duty made her stay. Duty to what? Sickness, very likely. 'A sick child needs its mother.' Something of that sort. Between the little girl's hot needful yearning body, which wanted to be quieted with a caress, with warmth, wanted to lie near a large strong wall of a body, a safe body which would not tickle and torment and squeeze; wanted safely and assurance — between her and the mother's regularly breathing, calm body, all self-sufficiency and duty, was a blankness, an unawareness; there was no contact, no mutual comfort.