She rested after lunch and then a taxi took her up to Hampstead and a shop that sold a certain kind of ethnic clothes not available elsewhere. The shop was round the corner in Back Lane. She bought a dress made for a Peruvian bride, high-necked, tight-waisted, with big sleeves and a big floor-length skirt, white as a white rose, with white satin ribbons and white lace. They said they would send it, they got so far as taking her address, but she changed her mind, she wanted to wear it that night.

Taxis
There was no shortage of taxis going down Heath Street and Fitzjohn's Avenue. She let them pass, came to Hampstead tube station and thought what an adventure it would be to go home in a train. Buying the dress had altered her mind. She was possessed by a reckless excitement.

Day in day out
This she knew to have its pathetic side. What would they say to her if they knew, these people who were obliged to use this means of transport day in, day out? The thought of their contempt, their disgust and envy, drove her in. Some minutes were occupied in the buying of a ticket. She did not know what to ask for at the ticket window so she essayed the machine. It was a triumphant moment when the yellow ticket fell into the space behind the small window bringing her change with it. She watched what other people did, showing their tickets to the man in the booth, and she did the same.

Deepest station
There was a lift. A notice informed the public that this was the deepest underground station in London, three hundred stairs to the bottom. Passengers were advised to take the lift. The gates of the lift closed as she approached it. If she waited, surely another would come. It was then that she reflected how complicated a process it was, this travelling by tube. She thought of herself as intelligent and had been called so. How was it then that all these ordinary people seemed to manage it with effortless ease?

Lift
The lift came and she got into it fearfully. She was alone in the lift. Would she have to operate it herself and, if so, how? It was a relief when others came, others who took no notice of her, but if they thought of her at all, must think her as seasoned a traveller as they. An illuminated indicator told them to stand clear of the doors and then they closed. The lift went down of its own accord.

Trains
Down there in the depths, and she was very aware of how deep it was, a sign pointing ahead and then to the left said: Trains. Some people, instead of going ahead, turned directly left, thus indicating their sophistication, their experience, their refusal to be baulked of a short cut by officialdom. On the platform she was not at all sure that she was in the right place. She might find herself not being carried down to London but spirited away to distant unknown suburbs such as Hendon and Colindale.

The train coming in made a noise that was fearful and seemed dangerous. All her energies were devoted to appearing in the eyes of others as nonchalant. At the same time she watched them to see what they did. It seemed that she might sit anywhere she chose, that there were no rules to obey. She had never been very obedient in other areas of her life but in the tube she was a child again, learning, wary, and without that presence which had always been there in her childhood.

Endurance test
She sat in a seat near the doors. To be near the doors seemed safest. She had forgotten this was supposed to be an adventure, an experience her life lacked. It had become an endurance test. The train started and she breathed deeply; with hands folded in her lap, artificially composed into an attitude of relaxation, she took long slow breaths. Her fear was that it would stop in the tunnel. She understood that she did not like tunnels, though this was something she had previously been unaware of. She did not have claustrophobia in small rooms or lifts. It was possible she had never been in a tunnel before, except perhaps in a car going quickly through some underpass.

Tottenham Court Road
But she was surviving. She was all right. The train came into Belsize Park and she looked curiously out at the station. This one and the next, Chalk Farm, were tiled in white and buff, reminding her of the servants' bathrooms at Temple Stephen. She occupied herself with studying a map on the opposite wall because she knew she would have to change trains at some point. Tottenham Court Road must be that point, an interchange from the black line to the red. This train would take her there, was bearing her there rapidly now, and at the station she would follow the signs, for signs there must be, to the Central Line going westwards.

Wrong
They had reached Camden Town, blue and cream, another shabby bathroom. Mistake, what happened next. Such things happen in bad dreams, dreams of the recurring kind from which one awakens in panic and fear, though she had never dreamed anything like this. How could she, never before having been in the tube? The next station should have been Mornington Crescent but it was not. It was Euston. It took her quite a long time to understand what had occurred and what she had done wrong. The map explained, once she understood how to use the map. By this time she was trembling.

The train she was in was one bound for south London, as perhaps all were, but it would be reached via the Bank instead of Tottenham Court Road, describing a loop through the City to do so. She had got into the wrong train. All this time she had scarcely noticed there were other people in the car with her. Now she did. They did not look like the kind of people she usually associated with but seemed inimical, common, even savage, and with truculent, peevish faces. She told herself to be calm. Nothing irreversible had taken place. She could change at Bank and take the Central Line, the red line, from there.

Fire
At King's Cross a large number of people got in. This was the station where the fire had been, she had read about it and seen it on television. Her husband - she had still been married then - told her not to look. 'Don't get involved. There's no one you're likely to know.'

She could see nothing out of the window to show there had been a fire. By the time the train moved off she could see nothing at all out of the window, she could scarcely see the window, so many people were squeezed between her and it. She sat very still, making herself small, the bag with the dress in it crammed behind her legs, telling herself it was a privilege to have a seat. There were people, thousands if not millions of people, who did this every day.

Crowded
One thing to be thankful for was that no more could get in. She had to revise this at Angel and again at Old Street. Perhaps a point was never reached where no more could get in, but they would be pushed and crushed until they died or the sides of the car burst with the pressure of them. She thought of a tired analogy she had often heard, people in a crowded train compared to sardines in a tin. If things go wrong inside a tin, gases build up and the contents swell and the whole thing explodes...

After Moorgate she had to think how she would get out at the next station. She watched what others did. She found it was not possible even to get up out of her seat without shoving people, elbowing her way, pushing past them. The doors had come open and there was a voice on a public address system shouting something. If she could not get out, the train would carry her on to the next station, to London Bridge, it would carry her on under the river. That was what that band on the map was, that zone of blue bending up and back like a water pipe, the river.

Others got out and she was carried along with them. It would have been hard at that point not to be ejected from the train. She felt tumbled out, pushed and pummelled. On the platform the thick, sour air seemed fresh after the atmosphere inside the car. She breathed deeply. Now she must find the red line, the Central Line.

Soiled
The strange thing was that it did not occur to her then to follow the Way Out signs, leave the station and go out into the street where a taxi could be found. It occurred to her later, when she was in the westbound Central Line train, but not then, not when she was trying to find her way to the interchange. All her concentration and all her thought were bent on finding where to go, on doing it right. The bag with the dress in it was crushed, her pale shoes were covered with black scuff marks. She felt soiled. Once she went wrong. She waited for some minutes on a platform, a train came and she would have got into it if that had been possible. She could not have brought herself to do as some did, step in and squash her body against the bodies of those who formed the dense wad of people which already bulged from the open doors.