Crossing the room, she seemed to herself to wade through silence, as though she were wading out to sea against a mounting tide. Silence embraced her thighs and almost overthrew her. She sat down at the desk and took a sheet of paper from a pigeon-hole. The light from the window fell on the desk over her left shoulder, just as it had done in the flat of then. And, just as she had done in the flat of then, she wrote the date—the date of now—and the words ‘My Dear.’

‘I am keeping my promise,’ she wrote. ‘The flat is very comfortable. There are no black beetles, and the person overhead plays Bach by hand, which seems very old-fashioned and soothing. I have found a nice charwoman. She is called Mrs Darbyshire. She wears trousers. I hope—’ The pen stopped. What did she hope?

After birthdays and Christmases there came the hour when one was set down to write the letters of thanks. ‘Thank you so much for the gorgeous chocolates,’ one wrote, or, ‘It was very kind of you to give me that nice bottle of scent.’ The chocolates had been eaten, the scent had been spilled—but still they had to be thanked for. One’s handwriting sagged down the page as if from weariness, the 10words ‘nice’ or ‘jolly’ dogged one from sentence to sentence, and with every recommencement of gratitude the presents and the festivities became more irrevocably over and done with. One stared at the unfinished sentence and wondered what false thing to say next. Yet what she wanted to say to Willie was clear enough in her mind, clear as the printed words on India paper which had levelled themselves at her heart from that speech in The Winter’s Tale:

To me can life be no commodity;

The crown and comfort of my life, your favour

I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,

Yet know not how it went …

But in real life one cannot write so plainly the plain truth; it would look theatrical. She must think of something she could legitimately hope. A hope about Mrs Darbyshire would do nicely. She wrote, ‘I hope she will like me enough to look on me as a permanency.’

Oh, poor Willie! That sentence would not do at all. She tore up the unfinished letter and threw it into the grate, which Mrs Darbyshire had left neatly laid with crumpled paper and sticks and a few well-chosen lumps of coal, in case the lady should wish to light a fire in the evening; for a newly-moved-into place always strikes chilly at first, and though the autumn weather was keeping up wonderfully, almost as mild as spring, one could feel winter in the air.

11

Hee-Haw!

A mile or so on the hither side of the village of St Prew, Mrs Vincent stopped the taxi she had engaged at the railway station, telling the driver that she had an attack of cramp and must walk about a little. She could not give the excuse that she wanted to look at the view—the admired view of the cliffs, crested like bulls with shaggy moor and standing sullenly at bay against the Atlantic—for the forgotten, familiar sea fog obscured all but the immediate landscape of rough turf laid thinly over rocky ground, outcrops of granite, an unmortared stone wall laced with brambles and tufted with fern, and the telegraph poles. She walked forward along the road, seeming to carry this landscape with her through the surrounding mist, and looking about for something she could identify. Thirty years ago, every yard of this road had been as familiar to her as her own hand. She had walked it in all moods, in all weathers, and the last time she had come this way, but in the counter direction, she had seemed almost to fly along it, so great was the force of her anger, her frenzy to escape and never, never set foot on it again.