for her, the bottom frame almost level with the top of her head.
There were steps down on to the overgrown lawn. She looked around for something to stand on—a bucket, perhaps. She jumped into the air to try to see into the kitchen, but she caught only a glimpse of a varnished cupboard door with a calendar pinned to it. If anyone is watching, she thought, I must look absurd. She wondered if she could get a grip on the windowsill and pull herself up for long enough to see if there was anyone in the kitchen. No, she thought, I draw the line at gymnastics, I am not trained for it. There must be another door, she thought, going into the kitchen or the hall from this sort of greenhouse. The panes were so filthy that she could hardly see inside. It seemed to be full of rubbish, boxes piled high. Something scurried away from her feet and she jumped aside. It was beginning to drizzle, and she realised suddenly that she had become very cold, and wanted a cup of tea. She pushed up her coat sleeve to look at her watch in the fading light: something past four. She walked back around the side of the house. It was like a place not occupied but still furnished, she thought, where some old person has recently passed away; and the relatives are going to come next weekend with a van, and take away what they call the decent stuff, and sell the good solid wardrobes for a couple of pounds each. There was a clean milkbottle with an envelope inside it. She bent down and touched it; coins jingled. Milk-money. She removed her hand quickly, feeling like a petty thief. She could not grow accustomed to the licence her profession gave her to enquire into the lives of other people. To look through their letterboxes, which she now did. It is beyond me, she thought, how anyone learns much by looking through letterboxes. The doormat said WELCOME, in green. There were no letters, no pile of circulars, no bills left to lie by a person broken-hipped or hypothermic. It was early in the year for hypothermia. And the daughter was quite young, wasn’t she, and able-bodied, and reasonably capable? She had enough sense to get help, if anything was really wrong. The note in the milkbottle, left early, suggested people who had gone out and would be away for the evening; as if they might come back late, talkative and giddy, and forget to do it. It seemed an unlikely picture, but she supposed they might have friends, this odd mother and daughter who were familiar to her only from a buff-coloured file. The strangest people have friends, she thought, even me.
On the front path, she hovered again. One day, she thought, I shall always know what to do in these doubtful situations. When I am perfectly wise. When I am thirty years old. The rain began to fall harder. Deciding quickly, she turned and dashed back to the car, splashing the back of her tights. She was just going to miss the rush-hour traffic.
Up at her bedroom window, Florence turned away, to resume the living of her own life.
The new offices were open-plan. It was four thirty-eight when Isabel got in. The day was winding down. In the old offices, with their brown peeling doors, over-subscribed lavatories, dingy walls, you could shut yourself into the little cubbyhole that was designated to you and rub your hands over your own one-bar fire. They had merits, but they were not pleasant for the clients to visit.
‘Tea?’ she said unhopefully.
‘We’ve had it.’
‘Messages?’
‘On your desk.’
She walked over the expanse of blue cord carpet. There had been a phone call from the Probation Service. The Housing Aid office reported their failure to find housing for someone. A child with leukaemia would have to go back to hospital. What concerns are these of mine, she thought tiredly. The Education Welfare office had been ringing. And Mr Sidney. This year social workers had become ‘generic’. It was a new dispensation, for everybody to know everything about everything: and how to heal it.
‘What’s this?’ she said to the secretary.
The woman looked up resentfully. ‘Your messages.’
‘This last one—Mr Sidney. Who is Mr Sidney?’
‘A personal call, that was.’
Oh yes, Isabel thought. Colin. Who’s going to leave home for me. She sat down at her desk and took the evening paper out of her bag. She read of a car-crash and a dog that had drowned. She did not want to go home, did not relish the evening ahead of her. But then she did not look forward, either, to the next working day. There is something radically wrong with my life, she thought, that I have fallen to such vicious amusements; and such stretches of emptiness between them.
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