The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge Read Free Book Online Page A

went without saying, but good-looking and a marvelous suit. But probably she was no use, and anyhow she wouldn’t stay. Anyone would go around the bend living in that ghastly house. No, she won’t stay, thought Valerie, and if she does I wouldn’t have time to be friends, I’m too tired to bother.
    She picked up her paintpot and carried it to the little garage beside the cottage. Their car was a secondhand one and she was ashamed of it. However much she cleaned and polished the thing it still looked awful. But it was all they could afford and she had to have a car for the shopping. She wasn’t strong enough now to bike everywhere. She wished they could move to the town but Paul would not budge. A blind man was best in the country, he said, it was less confusing and he needed the quiet for his work.
    Valerie came around to the front of the cottage again and her habitual mood of sullen endurance was warmed by a glow of pride. It really looked very pretty, with the new turquoise paint against the pink walls, the small latticed windows and the steep hillocky old roof. It was a tiny place, and sometimes when Valerie complained of the vast amount of work she had to do her friends silently wondered why. For the garden was as small as the cottage. Behind the clipped escallonia hedge and the wrought-iron gate there were only two flower beds, filled now with tulips, and a paved path to the front door, and at the back of the cottage a little vegetable plot bordering on the orchard of the Dog and Duck. Yet her friends had to agree that there was never a weed to be seen in Valerie’s garden, or a speck of dust in her perfect rooms. One had to hand it to her that she did everything she did supremely well.
    She went in to her sitting room, with the charming chintz curtains and covers that she had made herself and the horse brasses hanging over the old fireplace, consumed by a longing for a cup of tea, but when she glanced at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece she saw there was no time if she was to have supper ready punctually. She cooked exquisitely and elaborately. In the early days of their marriage Paul, who had simple tastes and a shocking digestion since the war, had put in a plea for steamed fish and an occasional rice pudding, but Valerie had been so terribly hurt that ever since he had dutifully eaten whatever she set before him and taken bicarb afterward.
    In her dainty kitchen-dining room, tying on her flowered overall, Valerie said to herself, No time even for a cup of tea. That’s married life. What’s to happen to Paul and me? Do we just go on and on like this till we go mad? Or I do, for he won’t. I don’t think I’d find him so maddening if only he’d realize how rotten our life is. But he never realizes anything. He’s self-centered as a cow. Her thoughts ran on in this habitual manner, a tragic Greek Chorus to the central figure, until there came a sudden check. . . . I liked that woman, she thought. She looked as though she’d had an interesting life. Not like me. . . . And then the Chorus was back and telling her what rotten luck it had been that she, at nineteen, not long out of school, should have married a man who a few months after their marriage was back on her hands a blind and nerve-shattered wreck. And his plane had been shot down in the last two weeks of the phase of the war. If it had ended a fortnight earlier it wouldn’t have happened. She could remember as though it was yesterday standing in the hospital corridor on VE Day, waiting for permission to go in and see Paul, trembling and reluctant, for suffering in any form terrified her, thinking that it was VE Day and everyone had been happy and rejoicing in the streets, and this had happened to her and Paul. Of course it had been awful for Paul but it had been much worse for her. It was always worse for the wife. Everybody said so. And it got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They