“The Bollingdons are coming round, silly.”
“Well?”
“With one small chicken and a blancmange.”
“Heaven help us.”
When they sat down to play halfpenny nap after supper Miriam recovered her cigarette from its hiding place. She did not know the game. She sat at Harriett’s new card-table wrapped in the unbroken jesting of the Bollingdons and the Ducaynes, happily learning and smoking and feeling happily wicked. The Bollingdons taught her simply with a complete trustful friendliness, Mrs. Bollingdon leaning across in her pink satin blouse, her clear clean bulging cheeks and dark velvet hair like a full blown dark rose. Between the rounds they poured out anecdotes of earlier nap parties, all talking at once. The pauses at the fresh beginnings were full of the echoes of their laughter. Miriam in the character of the Honourable Miss Henderson had just accepted Lord Bollingdon’s invitation to join the Duke and Duchess of Ducayne and himself and Lady Bollingdon in an all-day party to Wembley Park in a break and four on Easter Monday and had lit a second cigarette and accepted a small whisky and soda when Mr. Grove was announced. Harriett’s face flushed jocular consternation.
When the party subsided after Mr. Grove’s spasmodic handshakings Miriam got herself into a chair in a far corner, smoking her cigarette with burning cheeks. Sitting isolated with her cigarette and her whisky while he twice sent his low harsh clearly murmuring voice into the suddenly empty air to say that he had been to evensong at the Carmelites and was on his way home, she examined the relief of his presence and the nature of her farewell. Mr. Bollingdon responded to him remarking each time on the splendour of the evening.
3
Strolling home towards midnight along the narrow pavement of Endsleigh Gardens Miriam felt as fresh and untroubled as if it were early morning. When she had got out of her Hammersmith omnibus into the Tottenham Court Road she had found that the street had lost its first terrifying impression and had become part of her home. It was the borderland of the part of London she had found for herself; the part where she was going to live, in freedom, hidden, on her pound a week. It was all she wanted. That was why she was young and glad; that was why fatigue had gone out of her life. There was nothing in the world that could come nearer to her than the curious half twilight half moonlight effect of lamplit Endsleigh Gardens opening out of Gower Place; its huge high trees, their sharp shadows on the little pavement running by the side of the railings, the neighbouring gloom of the Euston Road dimly lit by lamps standing high in the middle of the roadway at long intervals, the great high quiet porched houses, black and still, the shadow mass of St. Pancras church, the great dark open space in front of the church, a shadowy figure-haunted darkness with the vague stream of the Euston Road running to one side of it and the corridor of Woburn Place opening on the other. The harsh voice of an invisible woman sounded out from it as she turned off into her own street.... “Dressed up—he was—to the bloody death.” ... The words echoed about her as she strolled down the street controlling her impulse to flinch and hurry. The woman was there, there and real and that was what she had said. Resentment was lurking about the street. The woman’s harsh voice seemed close. Miriam pictured her glaring eyes. There was no pretence about her. She felt what she said. She belonged to the darkness about St. Pancras church ... people had been garrotted in that part of the Euston Road not so very long ago.... Tansley Street was a soft grey gloaming after the darkness. When she rattled her key into the keyhole of number seven she felt that her day was beginning. It would be perpetually beginning now. Nights and days were all one day; all hers, unlimited. Her life and work at Wimpole Street were something extra, thrown in with her own life of endless day. Sarah and Harriett, their lives and friends, her own friends, the Brooms, the girls in Kennett Street, all thrown in. She lit her table lamp and the gas and two candles, making her little brown room brilliant under a brilliant white ceiling and sat down eager to tell someone of her wealth and freedom.
4
Someone must know she was in London, free, earning her own living. Lilla? She would not see the extraordinary freedom; earning would seem strange and dreadful to her ... someone who would understand the extraordinary freedom.... Alma. Alma! Setting forth the London address in a heavy careless hand at the head of a postcard she wrote from the midst of her seventeenth year, “Dear A. Where are you?”