And it was this distant yet indelible air of populous summer which brought home to the heart, so gloomily, the present cold and bleakness of the boarding-house in winter and war and black-out.

The red chequered tables were, of course, fewer in number than in those days, and what remained were huddled in relation to the gas-fire in the middle of the wall opposite the window. The room was lit by two electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling – these bulbs being as weak in spirit as the one in Miss Roach’s bedroom, and shaded by the same pink parchment.

The table for four, at which Mr. Thwaites sat, occupied the best situation in regard to the fire, and Miss Roach and Mrs. Barratt sat at this table. The other guests sat at tables for two, either in couples or by themselves.

This system of separate tables, well meant as it may have been, added yet another hellish touch to the hellish melancholy prevailing. For, in the small space of the room, a word could not be uttered, a little cough could not be made, a hairpin could not be dropped at one table without being heard at all the others; and the general self-consciousness which this caused smote the room with a silence, a conversational torpor, and finally a complete apathy from which it could not stir itself. No one, it seemed, dared to speak above the level of a murmur, and two people, sitting at the same table and desiring to talk to each other, in order not to call attention to themselves, to enable the whole room to enter into the question and reply of their conversation, were compelled to employ that adenoidal, furtive, semi-audible tone such as is used by two lovers about to kiss each other.

Sometimes an attempt at a conversational jailbreak was made, and there would be some unnecessarily loud and cheerful exchanges between table and table: but this never had any hope of success. As the maid handed round the vegetables one voice dropped down after another: the prisoners were back in their cells more subdued than ever.

Mrs. Payne would, of course, have done better to have reverted to the practice of her boarding-house forebears, and have put back – in place of this uncanny segregation in the midst of propinquity – the long table with herself at the top dominating a free, frank intercourse in which all would be obliged to join as at a party. But no such step backwards had entered her mind, and, in the existing state of affairs, she made no attempt to assist her guests in their predicament, for she was careful never to appear at meals.

It was in this respect that Mr. Thwaites yielded, unwittingly, a certain measure of relief. For long periods the self-conscious guests gave up any attempt at talking, and listened to Mr. Thwaites, who was not self-conscious.

4

‘Oh, how the lodgers yell

When they hear the dinner bell! . . .’

went the old parody of the hymn. But all that exuberance has gone into the distant past. They enter now, not yelling, but slinking, murmuring, in a desultory manner, often three or four minutes late.

When Miss Roach came in they were all in their places and no one was speaking.

Mr. Prest was at his separate table, and Miss Steele was at hers. The two new war-time guests – the two shy American ‘Lootenants’ who had only arrived yesterday – were at their table for two in a corner by themselves. Mr. Thwaites and Mrs. Barratt were at the table at which she had to sit.

How she had originally got ‘put’ at this table Miss Roach could not remember, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Nothing, that is, apart from asking to be put at a separate table, which, in a room and atmosphere of this sort, would bring about a sensation such as she was incapable of causing.

‘Ah – good evening, Miss Roach,’ said Mr. Thwaites, and she saw his moustached, elderly face giving her a funny, slightly nasty look. It was a look (or so it seemed to her acutely sensitive imagination) which seemed to be conscious of her having dodged him on the journey downstairs from the Lounge and of his having lost thereby a moment or so of good torturing-time, and for this reason it was a faintly rebuking, menacing look. At the same time this look bore traces of gratification at having got her safely now, of relief at the fact that she was back and was going to be present at dinner to be tortured – after all, she might have somehow managed to have got a meal with a friend outside. Mr. Thwaites was certainly on Miss Roach’s ‘nerves’.

‘Good evening, Mr. Thwaites,’ she said. ‘Good evening, Mrs. Barratt .