I.
Things were happening in the village.
The old people were dying. Mr. James had died in a fit the day after
Christmas Day. Old Mrs. Heron had died of a stroke in the first week of
January. She had left Dorsy her house and furniture and seventy pounds a
year. Mrs. Belk got the rest.
The middle-aged people were growing old. Louisa Wright's hair hung in a limp white fold over each ear, her face had tight lines in it that pulled it into grimaces, her eyes had milky white rings like speedwell when it begins to fade. Dorsy Heron's otter brown hair was striped with grey; her nose stood up sharp and bleak in her red, withering face; her sharp, tender mouth drooped at the corners. She was forty-nine.
It was cruel, cruel, cruel; it hurt you to see them. Rather than own it was cruel they went about pulling faces and pretending they were happy. Their gestures had become exaggerated, tricks that they would never grow out of, that gave them the illusion of their youth.
The old people were dying and the middle-aged people were growing old.
Nothing would ever begin for them again.
Each morning when she got out of bed she had the sacred, solemn certainty that for her everything was beginning. At thirty-nine.
What was thirty-nine? A time-feeling, a feeling she hadn't got. If you haven't got the feeling you are not thirty-nine. You can be any age you please, twenty-nine, nineteen.
But she had been horribly old at nineteen. She could remember what it had felt like, the desperate, middle-aged sadness, the middle-aged certainty that nothing interesting would ever happen. She had got hold of life at the wrong end.
And all the time her youth had been waiting for her at the other end, at the turn of the unknown road, at thirty-nine. All through the autumn and winter Richard Nicholson had kept on writing. Her poems would be out on the tenth of April.
On the third the note came.
"Shall I still find you at Morfe if I come down this week-end?—R.N."
"You will never find me anywhere else.—M.O."
"I shall bike from Durlingham. If you've anything to do in Reyburn it would be nice if you met me at The King's Head about four. We could have tea there and ride out together.—R.N."