There were material considerations equally unknown to Clevedon Square and to the austere but systematic doling-out of convent necessities, which were brought home to her with a startled sense of dismay from her first evening at 252. She had never thought of bringing soap with her, or boxes of matches, yet these commodities did not appear as a matter of course, as they had always done elsewhere. There was gas in both the rooms, but there were no candles. There was no hot water.
"You can boil your own kettle on the gas-ring on the landing," Mrs. Hoxton said indifferently, and left her new lodger to the realization that the purchase of a kettle had never occurred to her at all.
Buying the kettle, and a supply of candles and matches and soap, left her with only just enough money in hand for her second week's rent, and when she wanted notepaper and ink and stamps to write to Barbara, Alex decided that she must appropriate Cedric's cheque for the servants' wages to her own uses. She felt hardly any qualms.
This wasn't like that bill from Rome, which she would have been afraid to let him see. He would have talked about the dishonesty of convents, and asked why she had not told him sooner of their charges against her, and have looked at her with that almost incredulous expression of amazed disgust had she admitted her entire oblivion of the whole consideration.
But this cheque for the servants.
It would enable her to pay her own expenses until she could get the work which she still vaguely anticipated, and the sum meant nothing to Cedric. She would write and tell him that she had cashed the money, sure that he would not mind, in fulfilment of his many requests to her to look upon him as her banker.
But she did not write, though she cashed the cheque. The days slipped by in a sort of monotonous discomfort, but it was very hot, and she learnt to find her way to Hampstead Heath, where she could sit for hours, not reading, for she had no books, but brooding in a sort of despairing resignation over the past and the nightmare-seeming present. The conviction remained with her ineradicably that the whole thing was a dream—that she would wake up again to the London of the middle 'nineties and find herself a young girl again, healthy and eager, and troubling Lady Isabel, and, more remotely, Sir Francis, with her modern exigencies and demands to live her own life, the war-cry of those clamorous 'eighties and 'nineties, of which the young new century had so easily reaped the harvest. She could not bring herself to believe that her own life had been lived, and that only this was left.
Alex sometimes felt that she was not alive at all—that she was only a shade moving amongst the living, unable to get into real communication with any of them.
She did not think of the future. There was no future for her. There was only an irrevocable past and a sordid, yet dream-like present, that clung round her spirit as a damp mist might have clung round her person, intangible and yet penetrating and all-pervading, hampering and stifling her.
The modicum of physical strength which she had regained in Clevedon Square was ebbing imperceptibly from her. It was difficult to sleep very well in Malden Road, where the trams and the omnibuses passed in incessant, jerking succession, and the children screamed in the road late at nights and incredibly early in the mornings. The food was neither good nor well prepared, but Alex ate little in the heat, and reflected that it was an economy not to be hungry.