She tried to remember when the strange independent joy had begun and thought she could trace it back to a morning in the garden at Babington, the first thing she could remember, when she had found herself toddling alone along the garden path between beds of flowers almost on a level with her head and blazing in the sunlight. Bees with large bodies were sailing heavily across the path from bed to bed, passing close by her head and making a loud humming in the air. She could see the flowers distinctly as she walked quickly back through the afternoon throng on the esplanade; they were sweet williams and “everlasting” flowers, the sweet williams smelling very strongly sweet in her nostrils, and one sheeny brown everlasting flower that she had touched with her nose, smelling like hot paper.
She wanted to speak to someone of these things. Until she could speak to someone about them she must always be alone. Always quite alone, she thought, looking out as she walked across the busy stretch of sea between the two piers, dotted with pleasure boats. It would be impossible to speak to anyone about them unless one felt perfectly sure that the other person felt about them in the same way and knew that they were more real than anything else in the world, knew that everything else was a fuss about nothing. But everybody else seemed to be really interested in the fuss. That was the extraordinary thing. Miss Meldrum presiding at the boardinghouse table with her white padded hair and her white face and bright steady brown eyes, listening to everybody and making jokes with everybody and keeping things going, sometimes looked as if she knew it was all a pretence, but if you spoke to her she would think you were talking about religion and would kiss you. She had already kissed Miriam once—for playing accompaniments to the hymns on a Sunday evening, and made her feel as if there were some sly secret between them. If she played the hymns again she would play them stonily … mother would look as she always did if you suddenly began to talk anything about things in general as if you were going to make some confession she had been waiting for all her life. Now, with the operation and all the uncertainty ahead she would probably cry. She would want to explain in some way, as she had done one day long ago; how dreadful it had been … mother, I never feel tired, not really tired, and however I behave I always feel frightfully happy inside … my blessed chick, it’s your splendid health—and the influence of the Holy Spirit. … But I hate everybody. … What foolish nonsense. You mustn’t think such things. You will make yourself unpopular. …
She must keep her secret to herself. This Brighton life crushed it back more than anything there had been in Germany or at Banbury Park. In Germany she had found it again and again, and at Banbury Park, though it could never come out and surround her, it was never far off. It lurked just beyond the poplars in the park, at the end of the little empty garden at twilight, amongst the books in the tightly packed bookcase. It was here, too, in and out the sunlit days. As one opened the door of the large, sparely furnished breakfast-room it shone for a moment in the light pouring over the table full of seated forms; it haunted the glittering scattered sand round about the little blank platform where the black and white minstrels stood singing in front of their harmonium, and poured out across the blaze of blue and gold sea ripples, when the town band played “Anitra’s Dance” or the moon song from The Mikado; it lay all along the deserted promenade and roadway as you went home to lunch, and at night it spoke in the flump flump of the invisible sea against the lower woodwork of the pier pavilion.
But every day at breakfast over the eggs, bacon and tomatoes—knowing voices began their day’s talking, the weary round of words and ugly laughter went steadily on, narrow horrible sounds that made you feel conscious of the insides of people’s throats and the backs of their noses—as if they were not properly formed. The talk was like a silly sort of battle. … Innuendo, Miriam would say to herself, feeling that the word was too beautiful for what she wanted to express; double entendre was also unsatisfactory. These people were all enemies pretending to be friends. Why did they pretend? Why not keep quiet? Or all sing between their eating, different songs,
