IT’S EARLY WHEN she boards the London train—dark when she leaves the house and still dark when she arrives at the station in Leeds and enters her compartment and nods to her fellow passengers.
What do they see, her fellow passengers?
They see a small, plain, obscure woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining—a small, plain, obscure-looking woman who has been to London several times before and has no plan when she gets to her lodgings to do anything differently from the last time or the time before that or the time before that.
It’s only the next morning when she is walking along Gracechurch Street that she decides to do it—and even then it doesn’t feel like a decision, it feels like she is being carried along on a wave of something she cannot help.
For a long time she stands there before going in. She knows that in a great many ways she has led a sheltered life and that there are plenty of things she doesn’t know, such as the right places to go for certain things. Even now, when she comes to London, she feels most of the time like a clumsy traveller in a foreign land.
She can see herself in the glass: her black travelling outfit, her big dark bonnet with its grey lining; her reflection very clear in the sparkling window.
How clean the window is!
She herself has been doing a lot of cleaning lately. When she can’t write, and these days she cannot seem to write a single line, cleaning feels like a good productive thing to do.
Still not quite knowing what she’ll do when she gets inside, she pushes open the door.
He wants to talk to her, he said in his letter, about her next book. The appointment is at four o’clock which means she has two hours.
As soon as she’s inside, the bell on the door ringing out its last chimes behind her, she knows why she’s come.
The choice is bewildering.
‘That one,’ she says, pointing, after much deliberation over the possibilities, and takes the money from her purse. A huge amount, it seems, for such a thing. And then she takes off her bonnet, and puts it on the counter and watches it being taken away through the curtain, and sits, and waits till it’s ready. She feels naked, without her bonnet; almost asks if there is one she can borrow while she’s waiting.
At a quarter to four she leaves the shop, her bonnet back on her head, and makes her way along Gracechurch Street and from there to Cornhill to attend the meeting that is due to take place at four with her young publisher.
He has written her a letter, her tall, dark-haired, handsome young publisher, but she has not received it.
Not the letter asking if they can meet to talk about her next book.
Another letter, a second letter.
It was early when she left home yesterday and climbed into her compartment, first at Keighley, then at Leeds, and she has not received this second letter, as he had expected she would have, before her visit.
A second letter in which he’s told her the news that he has fallen in love with a Miss Elizabeth Blakeway and is engaged to be married.
He is standing behind his desk when she is shown into his office, a collection of papers in his hand.
His pale complexion is flushed from his morning ride in the park, and in the half-second it takes for him to look up from his reading, she takes him in afresh: his rangy, athletic height, his youthful, generous, intelligent, shrewd and sensitive face.
Never, in her whole life, has she been as conscious of her own appearance as she is at this moment—and she is always always acutely and painfully conscious of her own appearance when she is with him here in London, here in his office or having dinner with his mother and his sisters, or out in public, at the opera, or at an exhibition or at some terrifying literary party; but she has never, ever, been as conscious as she is now of her own tiny body and large, ill-proportioned head; her crooked mouth and her thin hair, bulked up with its little pad of stuffed brown silk—of her big nose, of her spectacles, of her age, or of how until this moment, she has never appeared before him in anything other than black or grey.
It is pink, the new lining of her bonnet—a lustrous, pearly pink like the interior of a shell, and it is the worst imaginable thing, when he looks up, for him to see it; for him to see this small plain woman, his friend, with this unexpected bonnet on her head.
For a moment he is speechless—all he can do is stand there looking at her and wishing that he could tell her something, the future perhaps—that before she dies in eighteen months’ time, at the age of thirty-eight, she will marry and be so happy, eventually, in this brief, late marriage with her quiet clergyman husband, that she will not care if she never writes another word; but he knows nothing of her future—nothing that could come now to her rescue or to his, and all he can do is to move towards her and shake her hand with what he hopes is all his usual warmth and invite her to sit, and for an hour they talk about her books, and the books of other people—they have always got along so well together, their discussions have always been so lively and full of interest—and he says nothing about the bonnet and neither does she but it is the worst imaginable thing for her to sit and feel the bright new silk around her face, like a shout, and see how embarrassed he is, how he can’t look at it.
It’s late when she boards the night train—dark when she leaves her lodgings and arrives at Euston Square and enters her compartment and nods to her fellow passengers. By six the next morning she is a world away, in Leeds, and by eight in Keighley again where, unable to face the prospect of being collected in the Haworth gig, she begins at once the long walk home, keeping her eyes down to avoid her reflection in shop fronts and the windows of houses. It has been raining though, here in the north. There are puddles everywhere, and she is in all of them: a small, plain, obscure-looking woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining.