13
That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost perfect—almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had heard of and seen in church.
They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it seemed horribly remote. Her journey to it had been through immense distances. Threading the little sapling-planted asphalt-pavemented roadways between houses whose unbroken frontage was so near and so bare as to forbid scrutiny, she felt she had reached the centre, the home and secret of North London life. Off every tram-haunted main road, there must be a neighbourhood like this where lived the common-mouthed harsh-speaking people who filled the pavements and shops and walked in the parks. To enter one of the little houses and speak there to its inmates would be to be finally claimed and infected by the life these people lived, the thing that made them what they were. At Wordsworth House she was held up by the presence of the Pernes and Julia Doyle. Here she was helpless and alone. When she had discovered the number she sought and, crossing the little tiled pathway separated from the pathway next door by a single iron rail, had knocked with the lacquered knocker against the glazed and leaded door, her dreams for the future faded. They would never be realised. They were just a part of the radiance that shone now from the spacious houses she had lived in in the past. The things she had felt this morning in the examination room were that, too. They had nothing to do with the future. All the space was behind. Things would grow less and less.