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By Root 2290 0

of the house, and one for which I can produce no rational explanation, is that on the ground floor and on the first floor there is an inner room. By this I mean that there is, between the front room and the back room, a room which has no external window, but is lit by an internal window giving onto the adjacent seaward room (the drawing room upstairs, the kitchen downstairs). These two funny inner rooms are extremely dark, and entirely empty, except for a large sagging sofa in the downstairs one, and a small table in the upstairs one, where there is also a remarkable decorative cast-iron lamp bracket, the only one in the house. I shall certainly not occupy these rooms; later on, by the removal of walls, they shall enlarge the drawing room and the dining room. The whole house is indeed sparsely furnished. I have introduced very little of my own. (There is only one bed; I am not expecting visitors!) This emptiness suits me; unlike James I am not a collector or clutterer. I am even becoming fond of some of the stuff which I complained so much about having to buy. I am especially attached to a large oval mirror in the hall. Mrs Chorney’s things seem to ‘belong’; it is my own, few in fact, possessions which look out of place. I sold a great many things when I left the big flat in Barnes, and removed most of the remainder to a tiny pied-à-terre in Shepherd’s Bush where I pushed them in anyhow and locked the door. I rather dread going back there. I cannot now think why I bothered to keep a London base at all; my friends told me I ‘must’ have one.

I say ‘my friends’: but how few, as I take stock, they really are after a lifetime in the theatre. How friendly and ‘warm-hearted’ the theatre can seem, what a desolation it can be. The great ones have gone from me: Clement Makin dead, Wilfred Dunning dead, Sidney Ashe gone to Stratford, Ontario, Fritzie Eitel successful and done for in California. A handful remain: Perry, Al, Marcus, Gilbert, what’s left of the girls . . . I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.

Still no letters.

The sea is noisier today and the seagulls are crying. I do not really like silence except in the theatre. The sea is agitated, a very dark blue with white crests.

I went out looking for driftwood as far as the little stony beach. The tide was low, so I could not swim off the tower steps, and until I can get some handholds fixed I think I shall shun my ‘cliff’ except in calm weather. I swam at the beach but it was not a success. The pebbles hurt my feet and I had great difficulty in getting out, since the beach shelves and the waves kept tumbling the pebbles down against me. I came back really cold and disgruntled, and forgot the wood which I had collected.

I have now had lunch (lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits: a light Beaujolais) and I feel better. (Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine. I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.)

I shall now go and have an afternoon rest.

It is night. Two oil lamps, purring very faintly, shed a calm creamy light upon the scratched and stained surface of what was once a fine rosewood table, the erstwhile property of Mrs Chorney. This is my working table, at the window of the drawing room, though I also use the little folding table, which I have brought in from the ‘inner room’, to lay out books and papers. I have had to shut the window against the moths, huge ones with beige and orange wings, who have been coming in like little helicopters. The lamps, there are