Only the window remained unchanged, holding up its great autumnal tree-tops to her gaze; but their unmoving pageant stared back and did not greet her. She was dispossessed entirely.
There on the corner was Jennifer’s door fast-closed, and bearing an unknown name. The sunshine sloped across to it in a dusty beam.
A maid came round the corner carrying a tray of crockery. She stopped, blushing with delight. It was Rose, who had always been so pretty and coy and smiling, and who had once brought a hot limp bunch of wallflowers from her mother’s garden, and laid them on her table. She was quite well thank you, and pleased to see you again. She and some of the other girls were only saying the other day they quite missed you. She wasn’t staying much longer now: she was leaving to get married.
Even Rose would soon be gone.
Now she must get out again as quickly as possible without being seen. She had meant to pause again and listen at Miss Fisher’s door; but now that was impossible. When now and then on her way down a footstep started, coming closer, a voice was raised, her heart beat in a wild terror of detection. Nobody must see her slinking out again from the place where, in her presumptuous folly, she had returned unannounced, expecting welcome. The place was terrible—a Dark Tower. She must escape. How had she been deluded for three years into imagining it friendly and secure—a permanent dwelling? In four months it had cast her off for ever.
Out again into the courtyard and quickly into the waiting taxi. Jennifer would appreciate the grimness of the story when she told her. She sat back weaving it into a dramatic recital for Jennifer’s sympathetic ears.
The town lay shining and smiling secretly in the sunlight, windless, its buildings, spires and streets caressed with a dusty golden light. Here, too, all was quiet. They were playing games. Where had been so many familiar faces, all seemed strange; and the few undergraduates she passed looked commonplace, dingy even, and schoolboyish.
She hesitated on the threshold of a bookshop and then passed on. To be recognised was now as great a dread as not to be recognised. What would people think of her, wandering about alone? How should she explain her presence to enquirers?
Trinity Great Court grieved in the sun for Martin. It had not yet quite forgotten him. It did not like its handsome young men to die.
If only Jennifer would come soon she could clasp her hand and feel a strange voluptuous stir at the heart of her sorrow; but to flit and pause alone like this, obliterating herself with a sort of shame, looking out for a chance familiar face and yet fearing to see one—this was appalling. It happened to people revisiting their university with twenty years between them and youth.