‘Just a few particulars,’ Mrs Gandell had begun, ‘you are from …’
‘I do not think that is very important, Mrs Gandell,’ and Miss Vaughan had bent low and peered at the proprietress through her spectacles. ‘It is Mrs Gandell?’
Mrs Gandell had said that was correct, and had smiled sweetly.
‘What will you do in Garthmeilo, Miss Vaughan, if I may ask.’
‘You may not ask. It is my business.’
‘Of course, of course,’ replied Mrs Gandell, and thought quickly, ‘Not too much fuss, no indeed.’
Miss Vaughan delved into her handbag. ‘I have your terms here, Mrs Gandell. I shall pay you one month in advance,’ on which Mrs Gandell positively beamed, and sighed her thanks.
‘Please show me to my room.’
‘Of course, my dear.’
The notes had never felt warmer in Mrs Gandell’s hands, and she fussed Miss Vaughan all the way up to her attic room.
‘There!’
Miss Vaughan looked round, then said quietly. ‘It will do. Thank you.’
Mrs Gandell had rushed away very excitedly to make a nice hot cup of tea.
Miss Vaughan opened her eyes, and closed them again.
‘It is quiet here, and I am myself,’ and she smiled and raised her arms above her head, and stared at her outspread fingers. Sometimes Miss Vaughan thinks of her home, that white cottage far away that seemed always to be lost in the bracken, and sees quite clearly the belt of kingly oaks that stood in the corner of a far field. Sometimes there would come to her ear the distant cold bark of a dog fox, and it made her remember where the blood pulled, and the root held. She remembers the very look and feel and touch and shape of her home, through the windows of which she had often stared with the large, questioning eyes of childhood. She remembers her mother. But now the cottage is leagues away, and life ends up in this small room. Within the area of the kingly oaks life had seemed to rise up, vaunting, but here, in a dark room, it was different. Life crouched. Suddenly she sat up in her bed, and switched on the light. She thought of a coming visit to the dining-room for lunch, and the sight of a tall woman, and a medium-heighted and inexplicable man that answered to the name of Jones.
‘I’ll go out to lunch,’ she thought. ‘I’ll go out to lunch,’ she said.
Her daily journeys from room to office and back again were always voyages. Sometimes she slept like a child, dreamed like a child. But the clock will strike when it must, and another day will break, and she will walk into the world again. Down the same streets, and past the same hurrying and scurrying people that did not seem to matter. The same stride, and the same onward glance, and always the head lifted high, as if it were seeking some new level of air itself. In the hooded darkness that fell the moment she switched off the light, Miss Vaughan again talked to Miss Vaughan.
‘A very strange dream I had last night, and when I woke up whole mountains of leaves were fluttering down.’ If Miss Vaughan got lost, Garthmeilo always knew where to find her, but did not bother, since one and then another had assumed that she was best lost. Sometimes she walked down to the shore and sat, and watched, and listened, and once watched a moon fall to the sea, heard waves break and die on a long, curling sweep of sand. And once she heard quite distantly the cries of running-by and running-after children, all shrill and winter wild as their energy pounded the shore, but not once had she seen them. And there was the long, lone walk back to her room that was not lonely, and that steady climb away from the tight and noisy streets. Sometimes when the town was very silent she could hear the sound of her own footsteps. After which came the darkening and darkened stairs, and the door of her room that was never quite shut and never quite open, within which stood table, chair, and bed, waiting, like friends. She moved suddenly, and the bed creaked.
Negations sometimes claw at her, especially when she remembers the tiniest things. The bell that remains unanswered, and the office press that will not quite close, an unstamped and forgotten letter, and got up and slowly fingered through the few books on her shelf, one of which she picked up and held to her, then opened, and read upon its flyleaf, ‘Gan Tad-Cu, Geraint Vaughan’, and turned its pages one after another, idly, thoughtfully, finally lowering her eyes to read the quotation that followed.
And with a long, slow smile, she closed the book. She thought of a man that had stared at her, long and penetratingly from a chapel pulpit, a stare so vivid that she had immediately closed her eyes against it, and walked out, and none since had ever seen her enter the Penuel chapel. He came even clearer to her now as she stood in front of her mirror and looked in. A man dressed entirely in black whom she now knew as one Mervyn Thomas, a minister in the town. Once he had followed behind her all the way to the office, and another time she found him standing opposite the Decent Hotel when she returned home. And he had smiled, and she had not. She had heard Jones talk of him with Mrs Gandell, and of his sister, ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘Mr Thomas depends on smiles.’
She went to the door and opened it wide, and stood listening. Mrs Gandell was actually singing to herself in the kitchen, but Jones himself seemed silent. She supposed that at any time now she would hear that call to lunch. Immediately she put on coat and hat and gloves, picked up her handbag and went downstairs and straight out of the hotel, only to bump into Jones at the first corner she turned. He stopped dead and stared at her.
‘Why? Miss Vaughan! Well indeed. I thought you were resting. I thought you were having lunch with us.’
She noted the parcel tightly hugged under his arm. ‘I am going for a walk,’ she said, and passed him by, and Jones hurried back to the hotel.
Mrs Gandell was waiting for him, and seized the parcel and hurried off with it to the kitchen, to return a few moments later with a cigarette in her mouth, and a glass of gin in each hand.
‘Sit down,’ and Jones sat down.
‘I thought you were never coming.’
‘But I did come, didn’t I, Mrs Gandell. I did my duty.’
She flung him a cigarette which he lit, and they drank each other’s health.
‘Everything’s ready, Jones.’
‘Good. Good.’
‘She won’t be long now. Perhaps you’d better give her another shout.’
‘Who?’
‘Who on earth d’you think?’
‘I hardly know, such abruptness, Mrs Gandell.’
‘Go and call her.’
‘Call who?’
Mrs Gandell, glass at her lips, screeched, ‘Miss Vaughan. Who else?’
‘She’s gone out.’
‘Gone out?’
‘Passed her in the street, nose in the air as usual.’
