Gradually she came to the conclusion that total freedom is an unmitigated evil. There ought to be someone waiting up for one, there ought to be someone with whom one could communicate, even quarrel. But there was no one. She found herself moving in the world like a shadow. And she didn’t visit much. There was no one really she wanted to visit and she felt that people might be sorry for her. So she tended to stay in the house a great deal. At first she passed the time by reading but this soured on her. Later she would knit and sew a lot but after a while she thought there was no particular reason for that either. Then she took to going to night classes and she would attend courses such as ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ and ‘Inflation and How to Deal with it’. But she found the same small earnest women at these courses, not understanding what the lecturer was saying, but only going there because they couldn’t bear to stay in the house. And so she had stopped going to these courses as well.
But the long summer holidays were the biggest problem of all. She couldn’t stay at home then all the time. She had to go away for a while and therefore she usually took a holiday of about a week. Before she left she carefully turned off the water and the electricity and worried sometimes even after she had reached her destination whether the fire or the immersion had been left on. She was very careful with the doorkey, which she hung round her neck. One of her greatest nightmares was to find herself at the door and not be able to find her key. Once she had left the house lights on all night after going to bed, and a neighbour in the block of flats opposite had come over in the morning wondering if there was anything wrong. They did think about her and they did worry about her. But of course they couldn’t be expected to understand what it was to be lonely.
She came out of the cinema, not waiting for the cartoon (she didn’t like cartoons) and went outside again. The sun was still hot and there were still as many people on the street as there had been before. It was only eight o’clock and she didn’t want to go back to the hotel as early as that. People in hotels noticed you and summed you up, even receptionists. For instance that young girl had asked her if she had a car and she had to confess that she hadn’t. Things like that marked you out, made you different. And the more there were of these absences, of these differences, the more wary people became of you. If there were enough differences they would avoid you altogether.
She made her way to the Gardens and sat down on a bench. Even as late as this – eight o’clock in the evening – the sun was still hot though not intolerably so. She sat in the shadow of a tree on a bench on which no one else was sitting. She crossed her legs and automatically pulled her skirt down. Her skirt was of medium length, there was no point in her wearing one of those very short skirts. And she simply watched the people passing. There were young couples with their arms round each other, an Indian girl of quite astonishing beauty who wore clothes the colour of a peacock, accompanied by two grave children – a girl and a boy – who also wore very bright clothes and looked like two perfect statues walking. They wore yellow socks, red shoes and lilac jerseys. A lone Negro went past and a boy on the back of whose blouse was written the number and name 15784 Pentonville. Two small girls rolled on the grass till the park-keeper blew a whistle and when he began to stride towards them they ran away. On the bench next to hers an oldish woman was sitting by herself throwing bread to the fat blue pigeons who waddled towards her, interrupted now and then by diminutive birds which would fly away with large morsels almost as big as themselves.
It occurred to her that most of her life she had been watching other people pass by as if she herself had no life but were the spectator of the lives of others. Other people often astonished her. So many of them walked instinctively into the future without thinking as if they expected that the water would buoy them up and that nothing would ever happen to them that they could not foresee. They accepted the motions of the present in a way that she could never do. They laughed and played in a forgetfulness which they seemed to be able to summon at will. For instance, she herself found it difficult to sit still on the bench. She wanted to walk about and at that moment she did so. She took a path which deviated from the main road and again sat under a tree. Here it was darker and there was more vegetation, truncated tree trunks and so on. It was some time before she noticed that only a few yards away from her a boy naked to the waist was lying on top of a girl who was also naked to the waist. It was some time too before she pulled her eyes away from them: not that she found the sight disgusting but that she wondered what it was like. She felt stirring within her a motion of regret,
