Seeing herself being stared at from across the road by old Mr Crutwell, who mended clocks, Penelope became aware that she was grinding her teeth with rage. She gave him an airy friendly wave with the hand which was not holding the suitcase, and hurried on. A minute later she was ravaged by a conviction that she had somehow left the letters behind, and had to stop and look for them in her handbag. They were there, tucked into her passport, the letter to her mother, the letter to her employers. There, too, was the barrel-shaped glass button. Poor Mother would not 67get the buttons in time to complete the new dress for Mrs Bedford Bowden’s canasta party. Instead, she would receive a telegram saying, Not returning to-night all well love Penelope, and subsequently, after the letter, a parcel of much more elegant buttons from Paris. Poor Mother, it was a pity she could not be told beforehand in some painless way. She loved excitements, and had so few of them beyond those she contrived for herself out of dress-lengths bought at sales and improvements on the pictures in Vogue.

The acid assay of love told Penelope that these reflections on her mother were mere pasteboard in comparison with the vital apprehension of being bitten by the milk-cart pony. She discarded them, and wrestled with a new conviction that she had packed the old bedroom slippers by mistake. She was now near enough to the station for her shortsighted eyes to read the station clock. It showed her that, as she had hoped, she had set her wrist-watch so extravagantly fast that there was ample time for her to catch the train she had intended to catch. Having bought her ticket, she bought a Times, in case any acquaintances should get into the same compartment. People do not hesitate to interrupt the reading of a three-halfpenny daily, but they respect The Times on which the reader has spent fourpence.

She saw no one she knew, and as the train pulled out a sensation of fearless tranquillity descended on her. Her heart left off thumping, her limbs relaxed, the skin on her face felt limber and released, as though an actual mask had been lifted off it. After a series of reviving yawns (the first was spontaneous, the rest self-indulging) she began 68to look out of the window. All that she knew so well was duly on parade: the tennis-courts, the Wesleyan chapel, the old pear tree in the builder’s yard, the swivelling perspectives of Olga Road and Dagmar Road, the dumpy tower of the parish church, the five poplar trees and the two gas containers. Because she might never see them again, they already partook of the inexpressiveness of something seen in passing. By this time to-morrow, Robin and she would be approaching Paris, having breakfasted in the train. Her hair would be limp and salt-scented after a night spent romantically and economically sitting on deck, and they would have breakfasted ravenously, drinking coffee out of squat lavender-blue cups. Though she had never been to France, this prospect of tomorrow morning was more conceivable than the fact that ten minutes before she had walked down Laburnum Road. After staying for a couple of nights in Paris (there went the rubbish-tip with the pond beside it, fringed with derelict willows, where the girl who escaped from a reformatory had drowned herself), they would go on to that village in the Auvergne where Robin’s friends, none of whom would care a snap of the finger whether you were married or no, were making a film. Robin would be doing something technical. She would look on, or sit among autumn crocuses.