Tucker

Tucker is a local businessman whose relationship with Paula collides with his plans for Banfield’s commercial future. As the village anticipates a boom, he delays making promises about a supermarket; when Paula demands a stake in the venture and threatens to reveal their relationship, his evasions give way to an attempt to strangle her. The episode turns a dispute over money and intimacy into a sudden eruption of violence, and leaves Tucker confronting conduct he cannot explain as his usual self.

Business Ambitions and the Coming Boom

Tucker’s conversation with Paula places him amid plans for commercial expansion in Banfield. He says the supermarket scheme is still at an early stage and that the district council has yet to approve it. Even if planning permission is granted, he estimates, construction would take another year or perhaps longer. His account emphasizes delay and uncertainty, a sharp contrast with Paula’s conviction that everything is already going ahead.

Paula recalls a more immediate proposal: Tucker had said he would buy two High Street shops and combine them. He explains that he would have done so, but that no one is willing to sell now that a boom seems likely. The exchange shows how anticipated growth has already changed the local property market. Tucker presents himself as having to wait on approvals and sellers, while Paula treats the expansion as a settled opportunity in which she expects a place.

Paula’s Demand and Their Conflict

The disagreement is not only about whether the supermarket will be built. Paula rejects the position of someone who is merely being promised a future benefit and says she wants to become a partner, taking part rather than claiming the whole venture. Tucker reacts with incredulity and calls her mad. Their different responses expose the imbalance between his control over the proposal and her attempt to secure a material interest in it.

The argument also brings their intimate relationship into the open between them. Paula says that Tucker does not care about her and wants her for only one thing; his private response acknowledges the truth of the accusation. When she threatens to tell another woman everything, the prospect of exposure becomes the immediate pressure on him. Paula frames the threat as a refusal to be treated like dirt, while Tucker sees it as an attempt to blackmail him. The scene thus links her demand for partnership to a broader struggle over what she is owed and what he is willing to acknowledge.

The Attempt to Strangle Paula

The confrontation becomes physically dangerous in the car. When Paula lunges for the steering wheel, Tucker pushes her back with one hand while steering with the other. He curses his involvement with her and recognizes that he has misjudged her, describing her to himself as both stupid and conniving. He slows the Jaguar, turns off the main highway onto a side road, stops, and switches off the engine and lights. The move removes them from the main road before the argument resumes.

As Paula renews her accusation and threat, Tucker’s hands close around her throat. The narration stays close to his thoughts as he experiences the fit of his grip as pleasing and responds to the pressure on her neck with excitement. He reads her resistance and fear as satisfying, and continues squeezing as her speech gives way to a strained, gurgling sound. His thoughts turn her attempted exposure into a justification for silencing her. The scene’s disturbing force lies in the gap between the ordinary dispute that precedes the assault and the pleasure he takes in it while it is happening.

That violence does not settle into a deliberate plan. The narration breaks off as Tucker recognizes what he is doing and asks himself what has come over him. Paula is gone by the time he calls after her and tells her not to tell anyone. He remains in the car, the door closed, for a long time, enclosed in darkness and wondering why he tried to strangle her. He insists to himself that the act was not like him, but the physical detail and sustained internal relish have already made the violence more than a momentary reflex.

Characterization and Significance

Tucker’s conduct exposes the coercion beneath his calmer account of business delays. He can describe obstacles in procedural terms—council approval, construction time, and the lack of sellers—yet Paula’s demand for a partnership unsettles the arrangement he appears to prefer. Once she threatens to expose their relationship, he responds not by resolving the dispute but by trying to silence her. The violence is therefore tied both to his fear of disclosure and to the power he exercises when Paula challenges his terms.

His self-recognition after the assault complicates, but does not erase, the scene. Tucker is horrified enough to wonder why he acted as he did, yet his thoughts during the strangling show deliberate enjoyment rather than simple panic. Paula’s departure leaves the threatened disclosure unresolved, while Tucker is left alone with the discrepancy between his claim that this was unlike him and what the episode has shown. In the novel’s portrait of Banfield’s sudden commercial hopes, his scene gives personal menace to the pursuit of opportunity: the anticipated boom creates leverage and expectation, but it does not make Tucker’s promises, or his treatment of Paula, secure.