Curtains of thin silk, brilliant magenta, letting the light through. The hanging green bough of a plane tree, high up on the pane, between. A worn magentaish rug on the dark floor.
She went through the door on the right and found a short, narrow passage. Another French window opening from it on to the balcony. A bathroom on the other side; a small white panelled bedroom at the end.
She had no new gown. Nothing but the black chiffon one (black because of Uncle Victor) she had bought two years ago with Richard's cheque. She had worn it at Greffington that evening when she dined with him. It had a long, pointed train. Its thin, open, wide spreading sleeves fell from her shoulders in long pointed wings. It made her feel slender.
* * * * *
There was no light in the inner room. Clear glassy dark twilight behind the tall window. She stood there waiting for Richard to come down.
Richard loved all this. He loved beautiful books, beautiful things, beautiful anemone colours, red and purple with the light coming through them, thin silk curtains that let the light through like the thin silky tissues of flowers. He loved the sooty brown London walls, houses standing back to back, the dark flanks of the back wings jutting out, almost meeting across the trenches of the gardens, making the colours in his rooms brilliant as stained glass.
He loved the sound of the street outside, intensifying the quiet of the house.
It was the backs that were so beautiful at night; the long straight ranges of the dark walls, the sudden high dark cliffs and peaks of the walls, hollowed out into long galleries filled with thick, burning light, rows on rows of oblong casements opening into the light. Here and there a tree stood up black in the trenches of the gardens.
The tight strain in her mind loosened and melted in the stream of the pure new light, the pure new darkness, the pure new colours.
Richard came in. They stood together a long time, looking out; they didn't say a word.