After a while she left the party and entered a small chapel which was dedicated to St Margaret. There was a portrait of her in colour with folded hands set in the window, and a Bible on the table. She had a certain tranquillity about her such as she had already seen in the illuminated manuscripts. What was a saint? she wondered. How did one become a saint? Was it when all anger left one, when all passion was drained away, when one was utterly transparent and all life moved in front of one as in pictures? And were saints saints all the time, or only at particular moments?
She left the chapel and went into the museum which contained all sorts of stuff, uniforms, helmets, guns. She stayed for a long time staring at a black Prussian cap which was shaped like a skull. Once she saw the uniform of a British soldier which had a charred hole in the breast where the bullet had entered. There were pictures on the wall of battle scenes. One showed a British soldier in the act of driving his sword through a French standard bearer at Waterloo. She shuddered. What was it like to kill a man with a sword? It would be easier to do it with a gun. She couldn’t imagine herself killing anyone with bare steel, it would be an impossibility.
She wandered about studying waterbottles, guns, powder-horns, armour. She read the names of those who had been killed in wars and read the memorial to the unknown dead. She had a look at the Scottish jewellery, the Honours of Scotland. It looked tawdrier than she expected.
When she came out she sat down on a bench near the black cannon wondering what she would do next. From where she was sitting she could look down into the mouths of the cannon and above them the roofs of the city, on which gangs had written with chalk words like groovy and so on. Eventually she got up and left the Castle and walked down the brae and into a restaurant where she had her lunch.
It was two o’clock when she came out and she was at a loss what to do next. She thought that perhaps she might go and sit in the Gardens. So that was what she did. She sat on a bench and half read a book and half snoozed. There were a number of people on the putting green and others lying in the sun, their arms about each other, while in the Pavilion a religious singer sang with great fervour a song about Jesus’s saving blood.
All around her was movement and laughter. She tried to concentrate on her book, which was a paperback copy of Rebecca, but she couldn’t, and finally she laid it down. It was as if she was feeling a change coming over her, a mutation, but she couldn’t imagine what it was and she felt dizzy and slightly frightened. She got up again and walked over to the Information Bureau which was quite near. She discovered that there was a play on that night and decided that she would go. It was about Hitler but she didn’t know what to expect. Time passed very slowly. She bought an evening paper but most of it seemed to be about cricket and tennis. There was, however, a story about a man and his wife who had picked up a hitch-hiker in their car. After they had been travelling for some time the hitch-hiker had dragged the wife into a wood threatening the husband that if he said anything he would kill him. She nodded over the paper and fell asleep. When she woke up it seemed to be cooler and the place slightly more empty. She got up and went along for her tea. It was now five o’clock.
It occurred to her as she walked along that she ought to have more friends, people she could go and stay with. The previous summer she had actually gone to stay with a friend of hers, a college friend called Joan, who had recently married. But she had found the stay constricting and tedious as Joan had become very dull and respectable and responsible since her marriage, and she had left earlier than she had intended. It was odd how people changed. Before her marriage Joan had been very gay and exciting; now she looked as if she were carrying the weight of the whole world on her shoulders. She also worried a lot about money though her husband had a good job and was making at least three thousand a year.
She went into a restaurant and had some tea. By this time she was almost getting tired of eating. After her tea, which she prolonged till half past five, she went down and sat in the station waiting-room for a while, till the play would begin. She thought about being married and being single. When one was married there were all sorts of things one had to do: the world became untidy. One had to adjust to a husband, then one had to cope with noisy children. She could do this all right in the school because the children she taught were not her own. She saw them to a certain extent at their best, not when they were screaming for attention, or harassing one when one was tired. On the other hand, to be single was not a particularly good state
