“It is, mother, it’s lovely.”
“Oh—eh—well.”
Miriam turned fiercely to the roadway on her left.
4
She had missed the first swing forward of the vehicle and the first movements of the compact street.
They were going ahead now at a steady even trot. Her face was bathed in the flow of the breeze.
Little rivulets played about her temples, feeling their way through her hair. She drew off her gloves without turning from the flowing roadway. As they went on and on down the long road Miriam forgot her companion in the tranquil sense of being carried securely forward through the air away from people and problems. Ahead of her, at the end of the long drive, lay three sunlit weeks, bright now in the certainty of the shadow that lay beyond them ... “the junior school” ... “four boarders.”
5
They lumbered at last round a corner and out into a wide thoroughfare, drawing up outside a newly-built public-house. Above it rose row upon row of upper windows sunk in masses of ornamental terra-cotta-coloured plaster. Branch roads, laid with tram lines led off in every direction. Miriam’s eyes followed a dull blue tram with a grubby white-painted seatless roof jingling busily off up a roadway where short trees stood all the way along in the small dim gardens of little grey houses. On the near corner of the road stood a wide white building, bulging into heavy domes against the sky. Across its side, large gilt letters standing far apart spelled out “Banbury Empire.”
“It must be a theatre,” she told herself in astonishment. “That’s what they call a suburban theatre. People think it is really a theatre.”