But first she made tea on Ewan’s gas-ring with the kettle and teapot they’d bought together in a Saturday evening scrimmage at Woolies, China tea, Ellen kneeling to make it, having made Εwan sit and be quiet and not fuss, tired out with haunting the streets for a job. And he’d say But I’m not, and she’d say then he ought to be—Sit still and read and don’t argue. Εwan would laugh and drag down a book, silence in the room but for the gas-hiss, Ellen drowsy as she watched the bubbling gas-flame and the kettle begin to simmer and stir. Housekeeping comfy and fun, alone in a room with Εwan: though the house wasn’t theirs, nor the room, nor the furniture, nothing but a sixpenny kettle and teapot and cups and saucers at a penny a piece!

She’d glance up at him, deep in his book, and not heed the book, but only him, nice arms bare and the curve of his head, strange and dear, nice funny nose, lips too thick, like her own, brown throat—she could catalogue them forever, over and over, and know a fresh thrill every word every time—oh, damnable and silly and lovely to be in love!

And they’d drink the tea in a drowse of content and talk of his books and the men of old time, the Simple Men who had roamed the earth before Civilization came. If ever men attained that elemental simplicity again—

And Ellen would rouse: But then, what’s the use? If we don’t believe in that we’re just—oh daft, as you Scotch people say, wasting our lives instead of—And Ewan would ask Instead of what?—Saving up to get married? and laugh and hold her face firm between his hands, young rough hands, the look in his eyes that made her responses falter even while at his laugh and the thing he laughed at something denying struggled up in her, almost shaped itself to words on her lips. Sometime, surely—Oh, sometime they’d get married when the Revolution came and all was put right.

And sometimes, she’d feel just sick and desolate the way he would talk of that coming change, he didn’t expect it would come in their time, capitalism had a hundred dodges yet to dodge its own end, Fascism, New Deals, Douglasism, War: Fascism would probably outlast the lot. Ellen said that she didn’t believe that a minute else what was the good of all their struggles, what was the good of dissolving the League and both of them joining the Communist Party? And Ewan would smile at her: No good at all. Child’s play, Ellen, or so it’ll seem for years. And we’ve just to go on with it, right to the end, History our master not the servant we supposed….

He’d fall to his books again, dryest stuff, economics she never could stick, she would reach up and catch the book from him and his eyes meet hers, blank a while, cold, blank and grey, horrible eyes like a cuttle-fish’s—like the glint on the houses in Royal Mile, the glint of grey granite she thought once, and shivered. And he asked her why and she said she was silly and he said he knew that, eyes warm again, and they fooled about, struggling a little in the fading June night: and then were quiet, her head on his knee, looking out of the window at summer-stilled Duncairn, little winds tapping the cord of the blind, far off in the fall of the darkness the winking eye of Crowie Point lighting up the green surge of the North Sea night. And Ellen would say Oh, aren’t we comfy? Fun, this, he’d say nothing, just cuddle her, staring out at that light wan and lost that bestrode the sky.