But in the seaside lodging-houses she had taken a spade and bucket and gone out to spend a day on the beach. Now it was Trevor who went out, taking a small attaché-case containing sandwiches and a thermos of milk coffee, to spend the day at a bank. At first—for they were very much in love with each other—Trevor’s departure only initiated a delightful process of waiting for Trevor’s return, the snatched embrace before the others got at him, his regular inquiry, ‘Well, my darling, how have things been going?’ Nothing had gone at all, she would reply. Life had been a blank. As time went on and the inquiries continued, it became apparent that another kind of answer was now due and must acknowledge the Gilmans. The acknowledgment was no sooner made than it seemed a guilty acknowledgment. The guilt was evasive and obscure, for it did not lie merely in occupying a bedroom which had previously 141been occupied by Topsy Gilman (who now doubled up with Patricia) and occupying it with Trevor (since Trevor’s parents often and amply expressed their confidence that Rachel was going to make Trevor a wonderful little wife), nor in being penniless and without useful relations (since it was a Gilman axiom that money was not everything, and a Gilman tradition that what can’t be got through unassisted effort is not worth having), nor even in speaking with a different accent and calling a serviette a table-napkin (since every Gilman knew that it takes all sorts to make a world). It was a guilt compounded of finer elements, such as not knowing the way to the fishmonger’s. Any Gilman labouring under a similar sense of guilt would have known and applied the remedy: to live it down. Rachel did not feel that she possessed enough stamina to undertake a process with so much perspective in it. She compromised by redoubling her acknowledgments of the Gilman way of life, their cheerfulness, their unselfishness, their goodness and sterling worth, their devotion to fresh air, good nourishing food and traditional laxatives, their abounding, resounding, unremitting obsession with a home that reminded her of a seaside lodging-house. She was becoming quite good at this, when her participation in a thorough Gilmanlike merry Christmas brought on a miscarriage.

It is among the weaker and more feather-pated animals that one finds the most resolute capacity for self-mutilation. Discovering herself irreparably an alien among Gilmans, she proceeded to cut herself off from all her former friends; and knowing that childless couples were the last to 142be aided by the Borough Housing Committee, she refused to be got with child until that child could be born in a house of its own. That was how she phrased the stipulation. In fact, it would have been more closely expressed if she had said, until it could have a father of its own. Trevor at home could not fulfil that stipulation; at best, he would only be instrumental, Mrs Gilman’s eldest boy who had acceded to her natural longing to be made a grandmother. So everyone concerned went on being uncomfortable and frustrated till Mr Gilman senior exerted a masonic grip on a friend in the Council Offices and got the young couple into a bungalow on a new housing estate. The plaster was still damp on its walls when they moved in, and Trevor immediately caught a cold, which went, as all his colds did, to his chest. To be nursing Trevor unaided, and hearing milk boil over without an accompanying, ‘Rachel, dear! The milk!’ from her mother-in-law, imparted a sensation of such prowess and amplitude that it seemed to her that henceforward nothing could dash her spirits, not even the suite of two armchairs and a sofa—all alike brown, shiny, vast and unyielding—which the Gilmans had given as a parting present. Now only one thing was needed to make her completely happy—for Trevor to recover and go back to work, leaving her free to repaint all the interior woodwork.