Appointment with Yesterday by Celia Fremlin Page A

visible effort to recover her poise. “It’s not that I mind Mrs Day having you in the afternoons, Mrs Er, not a bit, I’m only too glad, if that’s whatsuits you both. It’s only that I do wish people wouldn’t go round telling everybody…. You won’t let me down, Mrs Er, will you?”
    And Milly, graciously, as became the great lady she had so recently become, promised that she would not.

CHAPTER VIII
    M ILLY 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 toheaven … 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 thesudden change from outdoors to the central-heated