5
Here and there in the long sunlit hours of the holiday by the Brighton sea Miriam found the far-away seaside holidays of her childhood. Going out one afternoon with Eve and Miss Stringer walking at Eve’s side, listening to the conversation of the two girls, she had felt when they reached the deserted end of the esplanade and proposed turning round and walking home, an uncontrollable desire to be alone, and had left them, impatiently, without a word of excuse and gone on down the grey stone steps and out among the deserted weed-grown sapphire-pooled chalk hummocks at the foot of the cliffs. For a while she was chased by little phrases from Miss Stringer’s quiet talking—“if you want people to be interested in you, you must be interested in them”; “you can get on with everybody if you make up your mind to”—and by the memory of her well-hung clothes and her quiet regular features spoilt by the nose that Gerald said was old-maidish, and her portmanteau full of finery, unpacked on the first-floor landing outside the tiny room she occupied—piles of underlinen startlingly threaded with ribbons.
At the end of half an hour’s thoughtless wandering over the weed-grown rocks she found herself sitting on a little patch of dry silt at the end of a promontory of sea-smoothed hummocks with the pools of bright blue-green fringed water all about her watching the gentle rippling of the retreating waves over the weedy lower levels. She seemed long to have been listening and watching, her mind was full of things she felt she would never forget, the green-capped white faces of the cliffs, a patch of wet sand dotted with stiffly waiting seagulls, the more distant wavelets ink black and golden pouring in over the distant hummocks, the curious whispering ripples near her feet. She must go back. Her mind slid out making a strange half-familiar compact with all these things. She was theirs, she would remember them all, always. They were not alone because she was with them and knew them. She had always known them she reflected, remembering with a quick pang a long, unpermitted wandering out over the cliff edge beyond Dawlish, the sun shining on pinkish sandy scrub, the expression of the bushes; hurrying home with the big rough spaniel that belonged to the house they had hired. She must have been about six years old. She had gone back with a secret, telling them nothing of the sunlight or the bushes, only of a strange lady, sitting on the jetty as she came down over the sands, who had caught her in her arms and horribly kissed her. She had forgotten the lady and been so happy when she reached home that no one had scolded her. And when they questioned her it seemed that there was only the lady to tell them about. Her mother had looked at her and kissed her. And now she must go back again, and say nothing. The strange promise, the certainty she felt out here on the rocks must be taken back to the Brighton front and the boarding-house. It would disappear as soon as she got back. Here on the Brighton rocks it was not so strong as it had been in Dawlish. And it would disappear more completely. There had been during the intervening years holidays with Sarah and Eve and Harriett in seaside lodgings, over which the curious conviction that possessed her now had spread like a filmy veil. But now it would hardly ever come; there were always people talking, the strangers one worked for, or the hard new people like Miss Stringer, people who had a number of things they were always saying.
She tried to remember when the strange independent joy had begun and thought she could trace it back to a morning in the garden at Babington, the first thing she could remember, when she had found herself toddling alone along the garden path between beds of flowers almost on a level with her head and blazing in the sunlight. Bees with large bodies were sailing heavily across the path from bed to bed, passing close by her head and making a loud humming in the air. She could see the flowers distinctly as she walked quickly back through the afternoon throng on the esplanade; they were sweet williams and “everlasting” flowers, the sweet williams smelling very strongly sweet in her nostrils, and one sheeny brown everlasting flower that she had touched with her nose, smelling like hot paper.
6
She wanted to speak to someone of these things. Until she could speak to someone about them she must always be alone. Always quite alone, she thought, looking out as she walked across the busy stretch of sea between the two piers, dotted with pleasure boats. It would be impossible to speak to anyone about them unless one felt perfectly sure that the other person felt about them in the same way and knew that they were more real than anything else in the world, knew that everything else was a fuss about nothing. But everybody else seemed to be really interested in the fuss. That was the extraordinary thing. Miss Meldrum presiding at the boarding-house table with her white padded hair and her white face and bright steady brown eyes, listening to everybody and making jokes with everybody and keeping things going, sometimes looked as if she knew it was all a pretence, but if you spoke to her she would think you were talking about religion and would kiss you. She had already kissed Miriam once—for playing accompaniments to the hymns on a Sunday evening, and made her feel as if there were some sly secret between them. If she played the hymns again she would play them stonily ... mother would look as she always did if you suddenly began to talk anything about things in general as if you were going to make some confession she had been waiting for all her life. Now, with the operation and all the uncertainty ahead she would probably cry. She would want to explain in some way, as she had done one day long ago; how dreadful it had been ... mother, I never feel tired, not really tired, and however I behave I always feel frightfully happy inside ... my blessed chick, it’s your splendid health—and the influence of the Holy Spirit.... But I hate everybody.... What foolish nonsense. You mustn’t think such things. You will make yourself unpopular....
She must keep her secret to herself. This Brighton life crushed it back more than anything there had been in Germany or at Banbury Park. In Germany she had found it again and again, and at Banbury Park, though it could never come out and surround her, it was never far off. It lurked just beyond the poplars in the park, at the end of the little empty garden at twilight, amongst the books in the tightly packed bookcase. It was here, too, in and out the sunlit days. As one opened the door of the large, sparely furnished breakfast-room it shone for a moment in the light pouring over the table full of seated forms; it haunted the glittering scattered sand round about the little blank platform where the black and white minstrels stood singing in front of their harmonium, and poured out across the blaze of blue and gold sea ripples, when the town band played Anitra’s Dance or the moon song from the Mikado; it lay all along the deserted promenade and roadway as you went home to lunch, and at night it spoke in the flump flump of the invisible sea against the lower woodwork of the pier pavilion.