In that quick way—natural to Barbara Clutton—they decided it. Pamela fell obediently into the life at Beaufort Street. It was almost conventual. Day after day she rose from her bed, looked at the mourning band of river and despaired. She was cut off from London; it was part of the compact that she was not to go beyond the Chelsea end of Sloane Street. She shopped in King’s Road. Sometimes she walked out to Fulham, or penetrated farther still, to a lonely green, belted with red and yellow houses. The omnibuses pulled up there. She used to stare at them wistfully, and think of Wormwood Scrubbs and the old, dead days of anguish.
Furtively she bought newspapers and read them with a hungry eye. She read everything which might hold a trail of Edred. She bought City papers, made her head ache by puzzling over market quotations. She read accounts of frauds, read all the criminal news. She read the lists of bankrupts, read death notices, advertisements. She never saw his name. It seemed suddenly sponged from all the places which had formerly placarded it.
She beat against the bars of that house by the river. She wasn’t happy; neither she nor Barbara was happy after the first glow of novelty wore off. They weren’t of the mold to be completely satisfied with the companionship of their own sex.
Summer died; leaves, whirled by October gales, swept the Embankment. Pamela was lonely, bored. She had fancied that the society of clever people—people with the public certificate of cleverness—would be invigorating. But the distinguished people who came to Beaufort Street were stupid; they seemed to go out of their way to be commonplace.
“Conversational brilliance is out of fashion,” Barbara said flippantly.
Pamela was tired of Barbara Clutton, tired of her volubility, her pettishness, her whims. She was very grateful to her, she liked her very much, of course—she was sick to death of her.
How would it end? She studied the newspapers, for other than sentimental reasons: she looked for a situation. That would be the end—a situation. They would never take her back at the boarding-house in Bloomsbury; Edred’s history, and her connection with him, was too notorious. But there were other boarding-houses. She would go back to the old life—that would be the end. She would help carve, talk smoothly on safe, commonplace subjects at the dinner-table.
She knew the life. She remembered; and it turned her sick. A woman in subservience was only half a woman. But that was to be the end. She was to finish as she had begun. Perhaps, by years of saving, she might be able to start a boarding-house of her own. Perhaps Jethro would help her to do so, if Maria would permit him.
The boarding-house! She remembered the narrow hall, where the dinner always hung on the close air; remembered the shabby manservant, the guests. They had mostly been women, those boarders: old maids who called each other “dear,” “darling,” “sweet one,” and gathered by twos into corners of the big, shabby drawing-room to tear each other to shreds. They were fussy old women, susceptible to draught, and given to wearing ragged fur tippets in the house when an east wind was blowing. She knew—and shuddered. But it was the only thing left.
Her thoughts flew to Folly Corner, and then to Edred. She would remind herself reproachfully that she had not once thought of him that day. She wanted to forget him; she tried to forget, and yet she reproached herself because she was beginning to succeed. She must forget—it wasn’t respectable to remember. Barbara Clutton was always impressing that on her.