Born in 1902, Elizabeth was too young for the first World War. By the time she reached college the War Veterans were returning, demigods, demidevils, a people apart. Elizabeth began to be aware she was shut out from something, but there was no sesame for that door. She stayed out and went on working. She worked like a puppy at a sandbank. By 1928 (when this story begins) she was organising the welfare services of a big paper mill. She ran to conferences and read reports and reviews, but tested all the bright new ideas with a level sobriety of judgment. The millgirls loved her like a sister.

"Our Bet's got her horns out," said her mother. "She was always a grand hand at arranging people's lives. It's a great mercy there's jobs about that lets her do it in peace."

Not only in peace, but to the tune of a salary that made her uncles and forty-second cousins, the small farmers and country carriers from whom she was sprung, chuckle with approval. They were proud of their Betsy, and what was more, they liked her, too; which isn't always the case with the ones that get on. A jolly brown girl, freckles on her nose and big teeth, no beauty, but with a frank open face that won immediate trust, and steady eyes. Red-headed, to be sure, but red heads kept you out of languor. Shoulders squared, she marched on life with such zest that she had nearly forgotten the door without the sesame. Yet sometimes she had dreams; she dreamed of engulfing seas, but no seas engulfed her. Busy, practical and gay, prodigal of herself in good works, like a little hill pony for sturdy strength, she lived on the solid earth and loved her life.

So, when she told her people she was going to marry that lank, stuck-up lad — half a corpse he looked even then — not one among her folk but thought her ill-advised. Not that they said the likes of that to Betsy, who was earning a mint, and had the right to keep her man in idleness if so she pleased. Her mother sniffed with one side of her nose in a way she had, and asked: "And which of the pair of you will stay at home and mind the bairns, I should like to be informed."

Elizabeth, who had a temper, kept it. She knew that the question was not a question, but a plummet dropped in the gulf between Elizabeth as her parents had made her, and Elizabeth as she had made herself; for already this marriage had swung her whole universe away from her habitual self. In a sallow hag-ridden prisoner of war, whose body had been released but not his mind — indeed whose body was still in bondage to the shucks he had eaten and the exposure he had endured — Elizabeth had found a freedom so immense that she trembled before it; and she resented angrily the conclaves of old men and spinsters who talked her man over. No wound, no pension, neither crippled nor blinded nor bedridden – what sort of man was he then, to let himself be kept by his wife? A disordered stomach seemed a queer sort of reason for living off a woman's wages.

"No guts, that's what ails the lad," they said.

"What business is it of theirs?" cried Elizabeth in fury.

"They'll make it their business, whether or no," said her mother, realist to the bone, "so you'd best tell them all about it to begin with."

She hated the need to justify her lover to her tribe. Old men! she thought, baring her teeth. But she was of the tribe; their forthright speech was her own. She knew that the old men were proud of her — their bonny Liz, kind and capable, a spirity lass that warmed you like a nip of Scotch. Half the things they said about her marriage were for the pleasure of her retorts.

"He's just like any other body," said Uncle Benjie. "A gey, ordinary kind o' chiel."

As though, scoffed Elizabeth, he knew all the great ones of the earth.

"A gey few," said Benjie. "I've spoken wi' the Marquis."

"Well," said Elizabeth, "he looks ordinary enough to me."

"O ay," said Benjie, "but he gets his name in the paper."

"Well, so will my man," said Elizabeth. "Just you wait and you'll see."

"And not even a stick leg," continued Uncle Benjie. "I thought I was to see a lad wi' a stick leg. What's come o' the timmer leg, lassie?"

"Ach," said Elizabeth, "it's his intimmers, Benjie." And she flung a phrase over her shoulder that caused the old fellow to double up with mirth. A dozen times in the evening he muttered over to himself "stickit intimmers," and, catching Elizabeth's eye, winked. But Elizabeth's face was stony.

At the wedding feast, Tommy made a sorry bridegroom.

"Ye were some ill," as Uncle Benjie said, "for forgetting he was there." He had not the knack of speech, not with these country folk, forcey with their drinking as with their tongues, and thanks to his connached stomach he couldn't even win their respect by the way he tackled his dram.

"Neither dram nor conversation — you might as well be with the nowt in the field," they thought. When he rose to the toast, he didn't even habber, a graceful thing in a bridegroom, reassuring to the herd. Four drawling chilly sentences, and he was down again. "What was you langnebbit word?" whispered a cousin — and Elizabeth was on her feet, laughing, flinging back the challenge of their indifferent eyes.

"I don't see why a bride can't speak for herself," she cried. And then Tommy heard her prophesy before them all the fame that waited for his book — the book that was his secret and his doom, that had been shaping itself in his tormented mind ever since he hung by the wrists in a German forest.

They cheered her with a bellow; but it wasn't the grand future they were cheering, it was the present, it was Elizabeth herself with her flushed face and shining eyes. When, seven years later, they buried her man (and Tommy Martin remained "yon man of Bet's" to most of his wife's relations, who hardly saw him from the day they married him to the day they saw Elizabeth stand erect and quiet beside his open grave), one and another recalled her sparkling face as she prophesied his fame. "Ay, and she believed it, too, that was the mischief o't."

But it was not the mischief of it. That she believed in Tommy, and he in her belief in him, began his slow release from captivity, which as yet had been nominal. She was the first on whom he had been able to discharge that wood — a handful of defiant boys in the power of a confident enemy. Idiots! They had committed the folly of telling the truth, in wartime, about themselves, and there they were, self-convicted engineers, told off to make enemy munitions. And to counter their refusal, the wood. Six of them hung up by the wrists, toes just off the ground. Life ended there — some other man was born. And between his two faints — Tommy brooded, his slow voice running on in the dusk — some sort of apocalypse. He couldn't explain it, nor why it was him it should have come to. Delirium, perhaps. But no, his brain was never clearer. He seemed to be out of the body, pain was gone: and with superhuman clarity he saw the truth of things. Then, he supposed, he must have fainted again. He remembered the untying and his vain attempt to stand — he pitched over under an officer's horse.

There were two years of prison camps after that, but since that moment of illumination nothing had really mattered but getting it into words. He knew, now, the meaning of human destiny.

The first time she heard the story, Elizabeth thrust out her hand in the dark and touched him. It was a tough hand. He held it and grew calmer.

"But, you know," he said apologetically, in his low voice, "I did see something then — understand something. Something pretty fundamental. If I could work it out, I see it as the basis of a whole philosophy of living. It was a sort of crucifixion. And I think — the thing I saw — could save mankind. If I could work it out."

He had gone into newspaper work on his return; it seemed to offer the experience he needed. But the provincialism, the deadening, exhausting round of trivialities! And then he was never well. He had eaten dirt and it stood between him and the good food that should have nourished his body.

Elizabeth, in her rare moments went fey, leaping into the future without a glance. She leaped then.

("Havers," said Elizabeth's mother to her father — Mrs Archibald knew more about her daughter than Elizabeth dreamed. "It was our Bet that did the asking, you take my word for that. And yon quiet laddie didn't take it easy, either. But, bless me, she's that sort.")

So the first year of their marriage was perfect for Elizabeth. They had an old cottage out of town, and Tommy worked steadily at his book, but welcomed her home from work with odd surprises — rare food or flowers or the table set in the garden — imaginative things unknown to Elizabeth's hardier breed. She ate new kinds of food — "gentry's food," Uncle Benjie would have called it — and with a shy disarming smile Tommy would blame it on his wretched digestion.

Only one thing marred her happiness — that the book grew so slowly. Sheets covered with notes — yes; but nothing coherent. Nothing she could read and weigh.

"Not even Chapter One yet?" she would ask, leaning her chin upon his hair.

One day he said, "Perhaps you'd like to look at this."

"Chapter One?" she cried, her eyes gleaming as she took the sheaf of papers.

With his shy smile he said, "Chapter Five, I think."

"Oh, don't you write a book from the beginning?"

He said slowly, "I'm working it into shape."

She read with mounting excitement. It was tart, firm writing. Each word told. "No wonder he took months," she thought, "to this." It was good — without favour, it was good. And a sense of tremendous issues flooded her mind.

"Look," she said, "this stands alone. It's a finished thing, by itself. You want to be known before the big book comes — let's send this to one of the Reviews."

When it was accepted, she said, "Of course! I knew that it was good." And in a dream of joy she walked with Tommy over the September fields. It was a day so filled with light that the stubble shone and in the sun-saturated atmosphere floated gossamers, thistledown and the seeds of willowherb, airier than snowflakes, more delicate than moths, as though light had flaked itself off in filament and frond and brushed their cheeks like a tangible presence. Everything, she felt, was coming to fulfilment, the book would go on and on and conquer the world. She didn't know even yet what Tommy's philosophy was. It was vague to her — beautiful and solemn. When he talked of it, new horizons opened before her, but this was less from intellectual apprehension than from the emotion induced by his low vibrating voice and her sense of sharing in a profound experience. At last she was inside. She could hardly bear her happiness as she walked through the sun-soaked fields, and saw the book growing and growing till it re-vitalised the world.

The book, however, did not grow. Tommy toiled at it, wresting from his uneasy brain a word here, a word there, building them painfully into sentences that the following week he smashed. He covered many pages with oddments, but they remained incongruous. Chapter Five alone had form.

His health, too, which had improved enormously, grew worse again in the hard east Spring. He tried to hide from Elizabeth the pain and nausea that wrung him, keeping himself in hand till she was gone to work, and then collapsing in exhaustion. Often it seemed to him that his whole day's business consisted in gathering himself together against her return, and Elizabeth, whose health was perfect, did not guess.

Besides, the comfort she brought him had softened his apocalyptic fervour. Still in his teens when he was captured, a boy of singular innocence of mind whom life had hardly touched, he had been exposed unarmed to its indignities and degradations, and, till he met Elizabeth, had gone sustained by an exaltation. Now she had released him from horror, and, by such gentle degrees that he had not yet perceived it, from the need of exaltation also. Sometimes, by fasting (but that was easy), and by discipline of his wandering attention, he strove to induce the moment of vision. The mood came, the sense of seeing deep into truth, but what that truth was he could ever quite discern.

In April he fell ill with gastritis, and his mother-in-law came to nurse him. Mrs Archibald was a foursquare Scot, with bones like rocks and a face large out of all proportion to her height. She regarded her son-in-law with a kindly contempt, which he returned, putting manners in place of the kindness. Elizabeth's family riled him. They were as rude as a blatter of sleet, and he grudged their animal soundness and animal insensitivity. Refusing his cornflour, he muttered that Elizabeth would bring him a patent food he craved.

"Well, and that's what she won't do," said Mrs Archibald sharply. "That things costs money."

"And what's money between Elizabeth and me?" he asked. Wasn't he using her money in trust — in a sacred trust — to make himself strong for the great work he was to write? But spoken aloud, the sentiment sounded odd. An audience altered its relevance. He listened to its doubtful echo on the air and supposed Mrs Archibald would take it with dudgeon.

"Bet," said Mrs Archibald reasonably, "would buy you the king's crown if she had the cash and wanted you to have it. Don't I know she's a terror? But that's no cause for us to take advantage."

The subtlety of the us (unintentional on Mrs Archibald's part) surprised him into pleasure. To be ranged with her mother against an abandoned Elizabeth moved in him a gentle sense of fun. Besides, a philosopher, fretted by the plain speech of a woman! A smile played on his thin face and he said, with more warmth in his tone than he had yet used to her:

"Ach, mother-in-law, away home with you."

"I'll go home quick enough, my lad, once you're able to be up and writing at that book that's to make all our fortunes."

This version of his labours was novel, and caused Tommy to say, "Oh it's a fortune I'm to make, is it?"

" 'Deed'," said Mrs Archibald plainly, "and I've never expected it myself. It takes a deal of wit to make a fortune, be it by a book or any other road. But Bet has set her heart on it, you'd best be trauchlin' on, you might make a hit, who knows. The folks that read the books have funny tastes, I often say."

The next morning, towards eleven, Tommy dragged himself into his clothes and crept downstairs and out. A faint mist of green was in the hollows of the sown fields, a faint powdering of green on the birches. Fresh and chill and pure, April stood there, lovely beyond all his remembering. He gasped, and doubled over with weakness in the quickening air. Back in bed, he lay aching from exhaustion, but fought the need to sleep till he heard Mrs Archibald's solid step upon the landing. When she came in he was seated against pillows, his manuscript in front of him and his pencil making senseless trails across the paper.

"I'm at your fortune," he said, without raising his eyes.

"If you'd lie down and rest you'd be better able for your cornflour," she said severely.

Whether by pique or desire of the April he had glimpsed, in a few days he was able to walk again, and Mrs Archibald went home.

Now that he had recovered, Tommy worked very hard at the book. But in the weakness of convalescence, his devils came back at him, and again Elizabeth delivered him. After such spectral nights (she going sound and fresh to a day of exacting work) he could do little in the morning but lie in the sun or wander among trees, savouring with his body the exquisite sense of release she gave him. One morning he had wandered thus among young birches, that were hung with a thousand crystal drops of rain. The sun glowed and blazed in them, and the air was filled with the tart good smell of wet birch. A blackbird sang exultantly, bees zoomed above the clover, life was bursting on every side; and his heart leaped in tumult, he wanted to be part of this force of creation. Write! Write! But what am I to write, he pondered. What have I to write? As though the blaze of sun in the myriad crystals illumined his own inner self, he began to review the contents of his mind; and with the force of a revelation it came to him that he had no philosophy to offer the world, no book to write, nothing to say. And again he felt a sense of release. No more agonising struggle for words; words that refused him because there was no task for them to perform. No horrible responsibility towards the fellow-men he was to redeem by his proclamation of truth. What! he had been living on a false pretension! There would be no book, Chapter Five was all. I must tell Elizabeth, he thought. But he could not. He didn't want to tell her. He wanted nothing but to savour each moment as it passed, being, merely being, set free from all preoccupation. He surrendered himself to the world as he had surrendered himself to her, and in the surrender was the same release. To be nothing, not to matter, to have no importance — how sane it was, and good. He had never really lived till that morning.

The elation passed; and a deep dismay succeeded. He, a nobody, who had agonised upon his tree? But he saw plainly now that it was so. His was no crucifixion, merely an accident. You must be slung up because you are you, not because you happen to be on the spot, if you are to save men. And with the pitiless clarity of a sane man, he saw that this thing had merely happened to him; it had no inner necessity. He stared for a long time at this stripped version of himself.

The mood of humiliation passed also. A trick of his indolent mind, to escape the labour demanded by the book! And soberly, with a stiff lip, he sat down again, to castigate himself into the writing of it. But in a few days he knew beyond all cavil that the book was a dream. He had nothing to say.

So now he must tell Elizabeth.