She glanced down at her frock, and stopped dead. Instead of her familiar blue-and-white striped cotton, she was wearing an affair covered with an absurd, niggly pattern of palmtrees and pineapples. She raised her eyes again, and looked round. Every other cotton frock in sight was inches longer and far fuller than hers.
Frances blushed. She walked on, trying to look as if she were not blushing; trying, too, to pretend that the skimpy frock did not make her feel as if she had come out dressed in a rather inadequate bath towel.
Clearly, there was one thing to be done about that; and done at once…
She made haste towards Weilberg’s Modes.
Stitch in Time
On the sheltered side of the house the sun was hot. Just inside the open french windows Mrs Dolderson moved her chair a few inches, so that her head would remain in the shade while the warmth could comfort the rest of her. Then she leant her head back on the cushion, looking out.
The scene was, for her, timeless.
Across the smooth lawn the cedar stood as it had always stood. Its flat spread boughs must, she supposed, reach a little further now than they had when she was a child, but it was hard to tell; the tree had seemed huge then, it seemed huge now. Further on, the boundary hedge was just as trim and neat as it had always been. The gate into the spinney was still flanked by the two unidentifiable topiary birds, Cocky and Oily, wonderful that they should still be there, even though Oily’s tail feathers had become a bit twiggy with age.
The flowerbed on the left, in front of the shrubbery, was as full of colour as ever, well, perhaps a little brighter; one had a feeling that flowers had become a trifle more strident than they used to be, but delightful nevertheless. The spinney beyond the hedge, however, had changed a little; more young trees, some of the larger ones gone. Between the branches were glimpses of pink roof where there had been no neighbours in the old days. Except for that, one could almost, for a moment, forget a whole lifetime.
The afternoon drowsing while the birds rested, the bees humming, the leaves gently stirring, the bonk-bonk from the tennis court round the corner, with an occasional voice giving the score. It might have been any sunny afternoon out of fifty or sixty summers.
Mrs Dolderson smiled upon it, and loved it all; she had loved it when she was a girl, she loved it even more now.
In this house she had been born; she had grown up in it, married from it, come back to it after her father died, brought up her own two children in it, grown old in it… Some years after the second war she had come very near to losing it, but not quite; and here she still was It was Harold who had made it possible. A clever boy, and a wonderful son… When it had become quite clear that she could no longer afford to keep the house up, that it would have to be sold, it was Harold who had persuaded his firm to buy it. Their interest, he had told her, lay not in the house, but in the site as would any buyer’s. The house itself was almost without value now, but the position was convenient. As a condition of sale, four rooms on the south side had been converted into a flat which was to be hers for life. The rest of the house had become a hostel housing some twenty young people who worked in the laboratories and offices which now stood on the north side, on the site of the stables and part of the paddock. One day, she knew, the old house would come down, she had seen the plans, but for the present, for her time, both it and the garden to the south and west could remain unspoilt. Harold had assured her that they would not be required for fifteen or twenty years yet much longer than she would know the need of them Nor, Mrs Dolderson thought calmly, would she be really sorry to go. One became useless, and, now that she must have a wheelchair, a burden to others. There was the feeling, too, that she no longer belonged that she had become a stranger in another people’s world. It had all altered so much; first changing into a place that it was difficult to understand, then growing so much more complex that one gave up trying to understand. No wonder, she thought, that the old become possessive about things; cling to objects which link them with the world that they could understand…
Harold was a dear boy, and for his sake she did her best not to appear too stupid but, often, it was difficult Today, at lunch, for instance, he had been so excited about some experiment that was to take place this afternoon. He had had to talk about it, even though he must know that practically nothing of what he said was comprehensible to her. Something about dimensions again she had grasped that much, but she had only nodded, and not attempted to go further. Last time the subject had cropped up, she had observed that in her youth there had been only three, and she did not see how even all this progress in the world could have added more. This had set him off on a dissertation about the mathematician’s view of the world through which it was, apparently, possible to perceive the existence of a series of dimensions. Even the moment of existence in relation to time was it, seemed some kind of dimension. Philosophically, Harold had begun to explain but there, and at once, she had lost him. He led straight into confusion. She felt sure that when she was young philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics had all been quite separate studies nowadays they seemed to have quite incomprehensibly run together. So this time she had listened quietly, making small, encouraging sounds now and then, until at the end he had smiled ruefully, and told her she was a dear to be so patient with him. Then he had come round the table and kissed her cheek gently as he put his hand over hers, and she had wished him the best of luck with the afternoon’s mysterious experiment. Then jenny had come in to clear the table, and wheel her closer to the window…
The warmth of the slumbrous afternoon carried her into a halfdream, took her back fifty years to just such an afternoon when she had sat here in this very window, though certainly with no thought of a wheelchair in those days waiting for Arthur.. wanting with an ache in her heart for Arthur… and Arthur had never come Strange, it was, the way things fell out. If Arthur had come that day she would almost certainly have married him. And then Harold and Cynthia would never have existed. She would have had children, of course, but they would not have been Harold and Cynthia… What a curious, haphazard thing one’s existence was… Just by saying “no” to one man, and “yes” to another, a woman might bring into existence a potential archbishop, or a potential murderer… How foolish they all were nowadays trying to tidy everything up, make life secure, while behind, back in everyone’s past, stretched the chance studded line of women who had said “yes” or “no,” as the fancy took them…
Curious that she should remember Arthur now. It must be years since she had thought of him…
She had been quite sure that he would propose that afternoon. It was before she had even heard of Cohn Dolderson. And she would have agreed. Oh yes, she would have accepted him.
There had never been any explanation. She had never known why he had not come then or any more. He had never written to her. Ten days, perhaps a fortnight later there had been a somewhat impersonal note from his mother telling her that he had been ill, and the doctor had advised sending him abroad. But after that, nothing at all until the day she had seen his name in a newspaper, more than two years later.
She had been angry of course a girl owed that to her pride and hurt, too, for a time… Yet how could one know that it had not been for the best, in the end? Would his children have been as dear to her, or as kind, and as clever as Harold and Cynthia…?
Such an infinity of chances… all those genes and things they talked about nowadays The thump of tennis-balls had ceased, and the players had gone; back, presumably, to their recondite work. Bees continued to hum purposefully among the flowers; half a dozen butterflies were visiting there too, though in a dilettante, unairworthy-looking way. The further trees shimmered in the rising heat. The afternoon’s drowsiness became irresistible. Mrs. Dolderson did not oppose it. She leant her head back, half aware that somewhere another humming sound, higher in pitch than the bees’, had started, but it was not loud enough to be disturbing. She let her eyelids drop…