“Well,” said Alma rising, her hands moving up to her bright hair, adjusting it, with delicate wreathing movements, “I’m so glad you’ve come, old fing.” She hummed herself to the door with a little tune to which Miriam listened standing in the middle of the room in a numb suspension. The door was opened. Alma would be gliding gracefully out. Her song ceased, and she cleared her throat with that little sound that was the sound of her voice in quiet comment.
“Wow. Old brown-study.” She turned to look. Alma’s pretty head was thrust back into the room. To shake things off, to make one shake things off.... She smiled, groaning in spirit at her accentuated fatigue. One more little amused gurgle, and Alma was gone.
She went into her own room. Next door. Opposite to it was Hypo’s room. Opposite to her own door, the door of the bathroom, and just beyond, the swing door leading to the landing and the rooms grouped about it. Outside the low curtained windows was the midst of the garden. She was set down at the heart of the house. Sounds circled about her instead of coming faintly up.... She drew back the endmost curtain an inch or two. Bright light fell on her reflection in the long mirror. She was transformed already. It would be impossible to convince anyone that she was a tired Londoner. Here was already the self that no one in London knew. The removal of pressure had relaxed the nerves of her face, restoring its contours. Her mushroom hat had crushed the mass of her hair into a good shape. The sharp light called out its bright golds, deepened the colour of her eyes and the clear tints of her skin. The little old washed out muslin blouse flatly defining her shoulders and arms, pouched softly above the pale grey skirt.... I do understand colour ... that tinge of lavender in such a pale, pale grey; just warming it ... and belonging perfectly to Grannie’s spidery old Honiton collar.... The whole little toilet was quite good; could be forgotten, and would keep fresh, bleached by the dry bright air to paler grey and whiter white, while the notes of bright living colour in her face and hair intensified from day to day. She hunted out her handglass and consulted her unknown eyes. It was true. They were brown; not grey. In the bright light there was a web, thorny golden brown, round the iris. She gazed into its tangled depths. So strange. So warm and bright; her unknown self. The self she was meant to be, living in that bright, goldy brown filbert tint, irradiating the grey into which it merged. It was a discovery. She was a goldy brown person, not cold grey. With half a chance, goldy brown and rose. And the whites of her eyes were pearly grey-blue. What a number of strange live colours, warmly asserting themselves; independently. But only at close quarters.
She followed Alma back through the swing door. Alma hummed a little song; an overture; its low tones filled the enclosed space, opened all the doors, showed her the whole of the interior in one moment and the coming month in an endless bright panorama passing unbroken from room to room, each scene enriched by those accumulated behind it, and those waiting ahead; the whole, for her, perpetually returning upon its own perfection. Alma paused before a scatter of letters on the table below the long lattice. Links with their other world; with things she would hear of, stated and shaped in their way, revealing a world to which they alone seemed to have an interpreting key; making it hold together; but inacceptable ... but the statement was forever fascinating.... Through the leaded panes she caught a glimpse of the upper slope of the little town. A row of grey seaside boarding-houses slanting up-hill. A ramshackle little omnibus rumbling down the steep road.
“Edna Prout’s with us for the week-end.” Alma’s social tone, deliberately clear and level. It made a little scene, the beginning of a novel, the opening of a play, warning the players to stand off and make a good shape, smoothly moving without pause or hitch, playing and saying their parts, always with an eye to the good shape, conscious of a critical audience. There would be no expansive bright beginning, alone with Alma and Hypo, the centre of their attention.
“Who is Edna Prout?” she demanded jealously.
Alma turned with a little bundle of the letters in her hand, speaking thoughtfully away through the window. “She writes; rather wonderful stuff.”
Away outside the window stood the wonderful stuff, being written, rolled off; the vague figure of a woman, cleverly dressed, rising pen in hand from her work to be socially brilliant. Popular. Divided between mysteriously clever work and successful femineity. Alma glanced, pausing, and looked away again.
“She has a most amazing sense of the past,” she murmured reflectively. As if it had just occurred to her. But it must be the current description. His description.
“The Stone Age?”