MILLY HAD RARELY in her life felt happier than she did that afternoon, as she walked home along the sea-front with one pound forty in her pocket, and with a lunch of lamb chops, mashed potatoes and sprouts still warming her through and through, like remembered joy. The wind had dropped, and through the gathering mist of the winter afternoon Milly could hear the invisible small waves slapping and sighing along the shingle, and she felt herself alive, and tingling with hope, in a way that she had not known since her teens. Oh, she had experienced hope all right, in adult life: wild, desperate, frenzied hopes, sometimes to be fulfilled for a while, more often to be disappointed, to be shattered and destroyed under her very eyes. But this was something different. Adult hopes are hopes of something … that this or that will happen or not happen. What Milly was experiencing now was the sort of hope that belongs normally only to the very young: not hope of anything in particular, but just Hope, its very essence, huge, unfocused, as undefined and as ungraspable as Eternity itself.
It was because she was young, of course: younger than she could ever remember, only three days old. Propelled by disaster grown too big to grasp, she had finally been hurled like a thunderbolt out of all her worries, all her fears, out of all the burden of her mistakes and crimes, and had crashed down into peace: into the still, golden winter mist, by the side of the quiet sea. It was like dying and going to heaven … it was like dying as a peculiarly intense form of life … it was new, new! And in all this new heaven or new earth, whichever it might be, Milly was the newest thing of all!
What a success she had made of her new life, so far! Last night’s euphoria was still with her, quite undiminished by that brief panic over the telephone call this morning. Rather, that moment of overwhelming terror and guilt seemed to have done something to her which had wiped out guilt and terror for ever. Because her fears at that particular moment had proved unfounded, she now felt immunised against fear.
It was like being vaccinated—something like that. She was innoculated, now, against trouble, in some way that the doctors don’t know of. The sea-mist gleaming all around her was like the lifting of the anaesthetic after an operation … there was that same dazed, exalted feeling that the pain is all over … when in fact it may sometimes be only just beginning.
But not all the gains were illusory: Milly was sure of that. She had done well as a Daily Help: astonishingly, unprecedentedly well, considering how few things she had succeeded in doing well in her former life. She had cleaned Mrs Graham’s kitchen and dining-room really thoroughly: she had kept Alison quiet: she had helped cook lunch; and (she was sure of it) provided real moral support to her employer when, at twelve-fifty or thereabouts, disaster struck, in the form of Professor Graham coming home to lunch a full ten minutes earlier than expected.
“Oh, God!” his wife had greeted him, glancing up from her typewriter with a hunted look. “What’s happened, Arnold? You said one o’clock! You said you wouldn’t be back for lunch till one!”
Milly, peering through the kitchen door, saw a tall, scholarly-looking man with greying hair settling his umbrella carefully in the umbrella stand. Then he straightened up and walked towards the sitting-room door. At the door he paused, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, all steamed-up from the sudden change from outdoors to the central-heated flat, and set himself to polishing them assiduously with his handkerchief. His mild brown eyes blinked owlishly without them, creating a barrier of gentle non-seeing-ness between himself and his aggrieved wife. Only after he had settled the glasses on his face again and returned the handkerchief to his pocket, did he seem constrained to answer her.
“I got a lift,” he explained. “Carstairs has to go to the Library Committee lunch, and so he offered to drop me on the way. But don’t worry, dear, finish what you’re doing, I’m in no hurry.”
“Finish what I’m doing!” His wife, with a huge sigh, pushed her papers aside and ostentatiously fitted the lid back on to the typewriter. “I sometimes think I’ll never finish anything I’m doing! First Alison woke up early from her morning sleep—and now you’re home! You don’t know how lucky you are, Arnold, being allowed to work when you’re working! How I envy you that room of yours at the University … all your things to hand…. No one bothering you …!”
“They do bother me, you know, dear, sometimes,” he pointed out mildly. “The telephone goes a lot in my room, you’d be surprised. Committees. Visiting lecturers. Trouble in the typing pool. All sorts of things. I can’t always get on with my work as I’d like to.”
“But you don’t have Alison screaming her head off!” countered Mrs Graham. “And lunch to see to … and then I’ve got this new woman this morning, I’ve had to settle her in. It’s amazing how many questions they seem to have to ask … Mrs Er!”—here she raised her voice to a ringing shout to reach Milly in the kitchen—though in fact Milly could already hear every word of her clear, carrying, complaining voice.—“Mrs Er! Could you hurry the potatoes a bit? Professor Graham is back earlier than he planned….”
How one hurried potatoes, Milly wasn’t quite sure. They boiled at the speed they did boil, no matter who went down on their knees to them. But she judged (rightly) that the shouted instruction was meant more as a reproof to Professor Graham than as a command to Milly: and so she simply went on with her preparations for the meal as quickly as she could, and radiated respectful sympathy—on, off, on, off—as Mrs Graham flapped in and out of the kitchen bemoaning her unfinished correlations.
Thanks to Milly, lunch was on the table, and Alison strapped in her high-chair, on the dot of one, and so Professor Graham had nothing to complain of, as his wife assured him, three or four times in succession. He’d said one o’clock, hadn’t he?
And indeed he wasn’t complaining. He sat consuming his lamb chops, mashed potatoes and sprouts with obvious enjoyment, a copy of Scientific American propped against the bottle of ketchup in front of him, and on his face the look of a man at peace with the world: a look off which his wife’s barbed attempts at conversation bounced harmlessly.
So after a bit she turned her attention to Milly, and began explaining to her about Alison’s diet, and how important it was that she should have plenty of salad now that she was eleven months old and on mixed feeding. She pointed out to Milly, with modest maternal pride, that a tomato and a shredded lettuce leaf had been added to Alison’s share of the meal: and Milly murmured suitable words of approval, meanwhile watching with fascinated admiration, Alison’s skill in extracting from the mush in front of her every scrap of tomato and lettuce leaf and throwing it on the floor. Like most babies in this diet-conscious age, she had a passion for all non-protein, non-vitamin foods, and it seemed to Milly that she and her mother had evolved a very good working arrangement: Mrs Graham talked fluently and enthusiastically to all comers about how much salad she gave Alison and how many vitamins it contained, and what a good effect they had on the child’s teeth and complexion (which were indeed perfectly all right), while Alison stuffed herself contentedly on mashed potato flavoured with ketchup. This way, they were both happy. The only loser was Milly, whose task it proved to be to sweep, wipe and scrub Alison’s vitamins from the floor after the meal was over.
Still, one pound forty! Not to mention Mrs Graham’s heartfelt “Well, thank you, Mrs Er! You will be back tomorrow, won’t you? Ten o’clock, as usual?”
Rich, and successful, and sought-after, Milly had sailed down in the lift to the ground floor, and swept like royalty out of the central-heated building and into the sudden, exhilarating cold of a January afternoon, with the white, glittering fog rolling in from the sea.
By the time she had re-lived this triumphant morning in every detail, as she strolled along, Milly had reached the point where she must leave the sea front and turn inland. Actually, this was by no means the quickest way from Mrs Graham’s to Milly’s lodgings, but somehow she had wanted, in her happiness, to walk along by the side of the sea; to let the sea share it with her, its soft waves rippling in through the mist, just as it had shared with her, thirty-six hours ago, the long night of storm, and darkness, and despair.