. .’ And she smiled feebly at both as she sat down.

This Thwaites was a big, tall man, anything between sixty and seventy. He had a fresh complexion, and was, for his years, and for one who took practically no exercise, unusually healthy and virile. He resounded, nasally and indefatigably, with a steady health and virility. He was, above all, a steady man in all his ways. In his large, flat, moustached face (with its slightly flattened nose, as though someone in the past had punched it), in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler through the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call the ‘bully’. That steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy’s wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him. He had money of his own and he had lived, resounded through boarding-houses and private hotels all his life. Such places, with the timid old women they contained, were hunting-grounds for his temperament – wonderfully suited and stimulating to his peculiar brand of loquacity and malevolence. He was as unfamiliar with toil as he was with exercise. He had at one time had a family connection with a firm of solicitors in London; but here he had never worked seriously, save at the task of torturing clerks and typists. ‘Ah – I Knows the Law’, or ‘Ah – I Happens to Know the Law’ were favourite expressions of his. He was particularly fond of this facetious substitution of the third in place of the first person in the verb.

He had further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad, where he had again always made his way to the small hotels. He was noticeably clean in his person, and wore high white collars and old-fashioned ties with a tiepin. He wore suits of durable material, coats with high lapels, trousers which did not turn up at the bottom, and elastic-sided boots.

He could make himself agreeable when he wished, and had frequently been known to charm old ladies in the early stages of his acquaintanceship with them, going out of his way to do small services for them. Behind their backs, however, he would speak of them, to fellow-guests or servants, as ‘old frumps’, ‘desiccated spinsters’, and so forth.

Having said ‘Good evening’ and looked at Miss Roach, Mr. Thwaites had nothing more to say at the moment, and no one else in the room spoke as Sheila, the Irish maid-of-all-work, now working as a waitress and dressed as such, hurried about putting plates of soup on the table.

This soup, like the rest of the food, came up on a small service lift hidden behind a screen in a corner of the room. The lift-shaft communicated directly with the kitchen underneath, and conversations frequently took place through this medium between whoever was serving the guests above and whoever was serving the lift below – enquiries, comments, and sometimes remarks of a censorious nature being hurled down from above in the hearing of the guests, and appropriate rejoinders from below feebly making their way to the surface amidst the rumbling of the lift. In the long pauses, when no one was talking, the guests listened, in a hypnotised way, to these back-stage noises and manœuvres.

Soon after Mr. Thwaites had started upon his soup – which he always sprinkled, first of all with lumps of bread, and then with pepper, with a vigour and single-mindedness which displeased Miss Roach – he opened the conversation.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Your friends seem to be mightily distinguishing themselves as usual,’ and oh God, thought Miss Roach, not that again, not that again.

5

Miss Roach’s ‘friends’ – according to Mr. Thwaites – were the Russian people, and Mr. Thwaites did not like or approve of these people at all. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that the resistance and victories of the Russian people in the last year had practically ruined this man’s peace of mind – a state of affairs which was aggravated bitterly by the fact that he was unable fully to vent his mind upon the matter in public.

Mr. Thwaites had since 1939 slowly learned to swallow the disgrace of Hitler, of whom he had been from the beginning, and still secretly remained, a hot disciple. He could now even force himself to speak disparagingly of Hitler: but to speak well of the Russians was too much for him. He could not mention them save gloweringly, defensively, almost savagely. He had also undergone the misfortune of capturing Moscow and Leningrad within three weeks of the outbreak of the war, and so his boarding-house sagacity had been struck at along with his personal feelings.

Actually the Russians were not in any very particular sense Miss Roach’s ‘friends’. Miss Roach was too completely bewildered, stunned, and unhappy in regard to all that was happening in the world around her for this to be so. But Miss Roach sometimes brought back literary political weeklies from London, and had been foolish enough to leave them about in the Lounge, and this, in the eyes of Mr. Thwaites, was in itself a diseased and obscurely Russian thing to do.