Free Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

up from the black earth. There was also abitter wind, which tired her and seemed to set rigid all the down-going folds of her face.
    It was late afternoon, a time of day which depressed her. There were now, there were beginning to be, little glimpses of domesticity through lit but not curtained windows. She could glimpse bed-sitting rooms – like Ludo’s, some of them – where once cooks had attended ranges, rattling dampers, hooking off hot-plates, skimming stock-pots, while listening to housemaids’ gossip brought from above stairs. Mrs Palfrey went slowly by, imagining those days, which were almost clearer to her than this present structure of honeycomb housing and the isolation of each cell, because they were the days that belonged to her being young, and so were the clearest of all to her.
    Some of the basement windows were covered by vertical iron bars, so that it must be like being in prison to live behind them, she thought. One could peer up at feet going by, and the wheels of cars; but no sky, only the stuccoed wall of the area, the dead leaves blown there, a fern growing out of a crack in the plaster, or moss covering bricks; dustbins; or a row of flower pots containing old earth, but no longer anything growing.
    But there was life stirring below stairs and, occasionally, a hint of cosiness. Smells of cooking came up: a man rose from a sagging wicker chair and yawned, stretched: blue-white television sets flickered in otherwise darkness: plates were being dealt out on a cloth-covered table.
    Mrs Palfrey gave herself a little rest, re-settling herold furs on her shoulders. She glanced down sideways at a lit-up aquarium in a room below her, at the black and golden fish weaving back and forth. Rude old woman, I am, she thought, smiling.
    But the grit swirled about the pavement in this unkind wind, a piece of newspaper wrapped itself round her ankle, and she poked it away with her stick and went on.
    In the back basement of a small hotel, she saw a boy cutting the rinds off rashers.
    Arthur and I, she suddenly thought, would come back from our walk as it was getting dark, and he would carefully put little pieces of coal on the fire, building what he called ‘a good toast fire’. She could picture his hands with the tongs – a strong, authoritative hand, with hair growing on it. If I had known at the time how happy I was, she decided now, it would only have spoiled it. I took it for granted. That was much better. I don’t regret that.
    After their hard, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous married life, that retirement – the furnished house in Rottingdean, had, simply, been bliss. They became more and more to one another and, in the end, the perfect marriage they had created was like a work of art. People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.
    She walked towards the Cromwell Road, and it was quite dark now with the stillness of fog settling down.Back at home …, she began to think, and then checked herself. She stumped on grimly. It had come to her naturally – that the Claremont was home.

    Ludo sped along the Brompton Road, going home from work. All about him the lights were blurred and shaggy, hanging in the mist. The rush hour. Andit was the stale time of the year, between Christmas and spring, and nothing new about it that he could ever find: it was an end, not a beginning.
    Everytime he saw a pair of white boots flashing towards him, or standing in a bus queue, he thought of Rosie. In the middle of the day, he had gone for a walk, shrugging off stiffness. He passed and repassed the boutique where Rosie worked, he peered through the windows. It was teeming with the Sou-Ken flat girls, trying things on in their lunch-hour. Beatles beat forth. ‘Wednesday morning at five o’clock when day begins …’ Plaintive, beautiful. Shifting, coloured lights rayed the ceiling. He had entered,