Arthur & George

yesterday’s behaviour?’
    ‘She will not. She cannot.’
    ‘Arthur. There is always gossip. There is always the tattle of maids and servants. People write anonymous letters. Journalists drop hints in newspapers.’
    ‘Then I shall sue. Or, more likely, I shall knock the fellow down.’
    ‘Which would be a further act of recklessness. Besides, you cannot knock down an anonymous letter.’
    ‘Hornung, this conversation is fruitless. Evidently you grant yourself a higher sense of honour than you do me. If a vacancy occurs as head of the family, I shall consider your application.’
    ‘
Quis custodiet
, Arthur? Who tells the head of the family he is at fault?’
    ‘Hornung, for the last time. I shall state the matter plainly. I am a man of honour. My name, and the family’s name, mean everything to me. Jean Leckie is a woman of the utmost honour, and the utmost virtue. The relationship is platonic. It always will be. I shall remain Touie’s husband, and treat her with honour, until the coffin lid closes over one or the other of us.’
    Arthur is used to making definitive statements which conclude discussions. He thinks he has made another, but Hornung is still shuffling about like a batsman at the crease.
    ‘It seems to me,’ he replies, ‘that you attach too much importance to whether these relations are platonic or not. I can’t see that it makes much difference. What is the difference?’
    Arthur stands up. ‘What is the difference?’ he bellows. He does not care if his sister is resting, if little Oscar Arthur is taking a nap, if the servant has her ear to the door. ‘It’s all the difference in the world! It’s the difference between innocence and guilt, that’s what it is.’
    ‘I disagree, Arthur. There is what you think and what the world thinks. There is what you believe and what the world believes. There is what you know and what the world knows. Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.’
    ‘I will not be lectured on the subject of honour,’ Arthur roars. ‘I will not. I will not. And especially not by a man who writes a thief for a hero.’
    He takes his hat from the peg and crushes it down to his ears. Well, that is that, he decides, that is that. The world is either for you or against you. And it makes things clearer, at least, to see how a prissy prosecuting counsel goes about his business.
    Despite this disapproval – or perhaps to prove it misconceived – Arthur begins, very cautiously, to introduce Jean into the social life of Undershaw. He has made the acquaintance in London of a charming family called the Leckies, who have a country place in Crowborough; Malcolm Leckie, the son, is a splendid fellow with a sister called – what is it now? And so Jean’s name appears in the Undershaw visitors’ book, always beside that of her brother or one of her parents. Arthur cannot claim to be entirely at his ease when uttering sentences such as, ‘Malcolm Leckie said he might motor over with his sister’, but they are sentences that have to be uttered if he is not to go mad. And on these occasions – a large lunch party, a tennis afternoon – he is never entirely sure his behaviour is natural. Has he been over-attentive to Touie, and did she notice? Was he too stiffly correct with Jean, and might she have taken offence? But the problem is his to be borne. Touie never gives an indication that she finds anything amiss. And Jean – bless her – behaves with an ease and decorum which reassures him that nothing will go wrong. She never seeks him out in private, never slips a lover’s note into his hand. At times, it is true, he thinks she is making a show of flirting with him. But when he considers it afterwards, he decides that she is deliberately behaving as she would do if they knew one another no better than they were pretending to. Perhaps the best way to show a wife that you have no designs on her husband is to flirt with him in front of her. If so, that is remarkably clever thinking.
    And twice a year, they are able to escape to Masongill together. They arrive and leave by separate trains, like weekend guests who just happen to coincide. Arthur stays in his mother’s cottage, while Jean is lodged with Mr and Mrs Denny at Parr Bank Farm. On the Saturday they sup at Masongill House. The Mam presides at Waller’s table, as she always has, and presumably always will.
    Except that things are no longer as simple as they were when the