“Perhaps you go for walks instead?”
“Well, I generally stay in bed and have a rest.”
That dreadful room with the dreadful man hiding in it and reading “Titbits” and staying in bed in it on bright Sunday mornings.
How heavily they were treading on the orange and yellow faces of the Tom Thumbs scattered over the short green grass.
“How much do you think people could marry on?” said Mr. Parrow suddenly in a thin voice.
“Oh well, that depends on who they are.”
“I suppose it does do that.”
“And where they are going to live.”
“D’you think anyone could marry on a hundred and fifty?”
“Of course,” said Miriam emphatically, mentally shivering over the vision of a tiresome determined cheerful woman with a thin pinched reddish nose, an everlasting grey hat and a faded ulster going on year after year; two or three common children she would never be able to educate, with horribly over-developed characters. It was rather less than the rent of their house. “Of course, everything would depend on the woman,” she said wisely. After all a hundred and fifty, with no doubt and anxiety about it was a very wonderful thing to have. Probably everybody was wasteful, buying the wrong things and silly things, ornaments and brooches and serviette rings; … and not thinking things out and not putting things down in books and not really enjoying managing the hundred and fifty and always wanting more. It ought to be quite jolly being thoroughly common and living in a small way and having common neighbours doing the same.
“But you think if a man could find a young lady who could agree about prices it would be possible.”
“Of course it would.”
The houses on the eastern ridges of Brighton came into sight in the distance and stood blazing in the sunlight. There was a high half broken-down piece of fencing at the edge of the cliff to their left a little ahead of them, splintered and sunlit.
“How much a week is a hundred and fifty a year?”
“Three pound.”
They gravitated towards the fence and stood vaguely near it looking out across the unruffled glare of the open sea. Why had she always thought that the bright blue and gold ripples seen from the beach and the promenade on jolly weekdays was the best of the sea? It was much more lovely up there, the great expanse in its quiet Sunday loneliness. You could see and think about far-off things instead of just dreaming on the drowsy hot sands, seeing nothing but the rippling stripes of bright blue and bright gold. She put her elbows on the upper bar. Mr. Parrow did the same and they stood gazing out across the open sea—Mr. Parrow was probably wondering how long they were going to stand silently there and thinking about his tea … of course; let him stand—until Eve’s voice sounded near them in a dimpling laugh. They walked home in a row, Eve and Mr. Green in the centre, asking riddles one against the other. Every time Miriam spoke Mr. Parrow laughed or made some little responsive sound.
When Mr. Green and Mr. Parrow went back to London at the end of the week Eve and Miriam saw them off at the station. The four went off boldly together down the flight of white stone steps and made their way up into the town.
“Goodbye,” called Miss Meldrum affectionately from the doorway. “I shall send both of you a copy of the photograph.”
“It’s most generous of Miss Meldrum to go to all that expense to give us a pleasant memento,” said Mr. Green in his small ringing voice as they all swung out into the clean bare roadway. Miriam felt as if they were a bit of the photograph walking up the hill, and went freely and confidently along with a sense of being steered and guided by Miss Meldrum. Why had she had the group taken—so odd and bold of her, having the photographer waiting in the garden for them before they had finished breakfast, and then laughing and talking and pushing them all about as if they were her dearest friends. It was whilst they were all out in the garden together, hanging about and being arranged, with the photographer’s voice like the voice of a ventriloquist, knocking them coldly about, that Gerald and Mr. Green had arranged about the evening at the Crystal Palace on the last day of Miriam’s holiday. Miriam had held back from the group, feeling nervous about her hair, there had been no time to go to their rooms, and had forced Eve to do the same. Harriett, with a cheerful shiny face, was sitting on the grass with Gerald in a line with the traveller from Robinson and Cleaver’s, and his thin-voiced sheeny-haired mocking fiancée. They all looked very small and bald. The fiancée kept clearing her throat and rearranging her smart feet and rattling her bangles. The traveller’s heavy waxed moustache was crooked and his slippery blue eyes looked like the eyes of an old man. Next to him were two newly arrived restively sneering young men, one on either side of the saintly-faced florist’s assistant from Wigmore Street, who sat in an easy pose with her skirt draping gracefully over her feet and her long white chin propped on her hands. She looked reproachfully about amongst the laughing and talking and seemed to feel that they were all in church.
Miss Meldrum and Miss Stringer, the two bald Scotch chemists who went out every evening to look for a comet, the pale frowning girl from Plaistow with her mad-eyed cousin whose grey curls bunched in a cherry-coloured velvet band seemed to say “death—death” to Miriam more dreadfully out here amongst the greenery than when she suddenly caught sight of them at table, sat disconnectedly in chairs behind the squatters on the grass. At the last moment she and Eve were obliged to fall in at the back of the group with Mr. Green and
