It was Sunday morning, and old people passed me like sad grey waves on their way to church. The streets smelt of roasting meat cooked by mothers; and the pavement was wet, with crushed brown leaves upon it. A dog stood in the road barking at nothing. When I came near, it barked at me until a man threw a stone at it and it ran away howling. It was that kind of day; but I wasn’t really sad because I was returning from having my new costume fitted – a beautiful grey one, trimmed with braid, and the skirt was to be so full behind it was almost a train. It was Rosa who had persuaded my father that I needed new clothes. Lucy’s mother was making them. I liked to have my fittings on Sunday because Lucy was there. She would sit on the music-stool and twist round and round as she talked on her hands. I couldn’t answer much because I had to keep my hands still while the dressmaker went round me with pins in her mouth. Lucy admired my fringe and I admired her hair, which was like a door-knocker – a doubled-up plait with an enormous black bow on the top. Once when we were going to the front door together, she showed me a book rather like an autograph album. She explained that you rubbed the leaves on your face and powder came off and improved it. Lucy’s face was usually a gentle green. Now it was quite white; but I thought I preferred it green.
When I returned home Rosa and Father were drinking port in the dining-room, and the beef that was boiling in the kitchen was nearly dry and the carrots had stuck to the bottom of the saucepan. I added more water, and balls of dough to make dumplings. The dumplings swelled up huge and danced in the boiling gravy, and the kitchen was filled with steam. Water poured down the windows like rain inside out. I began to think I could hear water pouring and falling. Then I thought I could see it, and it was as if floods had come, and everywhere there was water very grey and silvery, and I seemed to be floating above it. I came to a mountain made of very dark water; but, when I reached the top, it was a water garden where everything sparkled. Although the water was rushing very fast, it always stayed in the same beautiful shapes, and there were fountains and trees and flowers all shimmering as if made of moving ice. It was so unbelievably beautiful I felt how privileged I was to see it. Then the birds came, enormous birds slowly flying, and they were made of water, too. Sometimes clouds covered them, but they would appear again, very proud and heavy, and each keeping to his appointed route. This wonderful water world didn’t last long because a mist came, and gradually it wasn’t there, and something was hurting my head. Somehow I’d managed to fall on the kitchen floor, and knocked my head on a coal scuttle. Coal had got in my hair, but otherwise everything was as it had been before I’d seen the water garden – just boiling beef and steam, and I heard Rosa’s and Father’s voices coming through the wall.
My costume was finished and I collected it, all new and elegant in a box Lucy had smuggled from her shop. I tried it on in my bedroom. I stood on a chair so that I could see the skirt properly in my tiny mirror, and there it was, wide and flowing round my ankles and slightly longer at the back. Then it came into my mind that I’d read somewhere about hobble skirts, and I felt rather saddened. I pulled my skirt tight round my legs, but it didn’t look right. Rosa said I hadn’t enough calf to my legs, and gentlemen liked a good calf. Then I thought, ‘To hell with gentlemen; I’ve never seen one I liked.’
I climbed down from the chair and ran downstairs to show Rosa how well the costume fitted. She tweaked it and pulled it, and felt the material between her thumb and forefinger, and said I looked ‘real nice, but I would have preferred a more fancy material myself’. Then she said she would take me out to tea the next day to a new place that had just opened in the High Street, where you ate things called pastries and all the customers were ladies and gentlemen. ‘You’ll be surprised, dear, at the people you meet there.’ Then she suddenly started laughing and rolling her eyes and saying I was ‘a scream’, although I hadn’t said anything at all.
I went away feeling rather silly, and there was my father in the hall. Seeing him unexpectedly like that, I saw him very clearly: he wasn’t as large as I’d remembered him, but quite an ordinary size, and his cheeks hung down rather yellow and sad; only his moustache remained as it had always been – black and fierce and pointed. When he saw me, he jerked his head towards the dining-room and said, ‘Rosa in there?’ and when I said she was, he went in. I could hear angry voices. I guessed Father was angry because Rosa had been out to lunch with another ‘gentleman’, a ‘very nice traveller I’ve known a long time’. When she had told me about the traveller, I’d imagined a man in an enormous travelling coat, smelling of trains, and a deerstalker hat, and accompanied by lots of heavy leather trunks; but he wasn’t that kind of traveller at all – just a man with a little case filled with hair-oil which he tried to make chemists buy. I stayed in my bedroom till the angry voices ceased. Then I went to keep the parrot company in the downstairs lavatory because he seemed to be pining in there. The house had been quiet for some time when Rosa and Father appeared, all dressed up, and said they were going out for the evening, and I was told all the things I was to do in their absence.