She even had a faint feeling of displeasure, perhaps jealousy, at the thought of this meeting, and at the way in which Lieutenant Lummis had at such an early date found his feet and learned to get about generally. Nor was it quite the first time that she had felt faint internal intimations of this ungenerous feeling. It was, perhaps, because it was always Lieutenant Lummis with whom Lieutenant Pike had the appointment to which he was going when leaving her; and because no information had ever been forthcoming as to what took place at these meetings. Not that she had ever asked, or that any sort of pressure or curiosity under the sun would ever induce her to contemplate asking.

His eyes were glued upon the screen and he did not answer her.

‘It’s about time you were going,’ she tried again, ‘isn’t it?’

In answer to this he kept his eyes fixed on the screen, but, to show that he had heard her, he put out his hand and held hers.

What a man this was! And what perfect inconsequence again! What did he mean to convey now? ‘Be quiet – I want to look at the picture’? Or ‘Never mind – I’ve plenty of time to catch the train’? Or ‘Bother the train – I’ll catch the next one’? Her knowledge of his character informed her that the answer might lie in any or all of these.

She sat in silence, and he held her hand. And this hand-holding, in the darkness, with its quiet possessiveness and informality, seemed all at once to convince her finally that she was at any rate in a position to regard him, without any sort of presumption, as ‘her’ American in Thames Lockdon.

But what if someone else could claim him as ‘their’ American in another locality? At Skindles tonight, for instance? What if he went out and behaved in the same way with other girls (or rather with girls, for she was not a girl)?

And what, again, if he did nothing of the sort? What if, as was extremely likely, he was exclusively and faithfully her American? What if, as she still in her heart honestly believed, he had as good as told her that it was she herself whom he desired or intended to marry?

What then? What about ‘love’? What about the Laundry business? What if he ‘loved’ her, and she ‘loved’, or came to ‘love’, him, and they were one day ‘married’? So unreal and outlandish was the whole hypothesis that she was compelled at present mentally to put these words in inverted commas: all the same, she had to put the hypothesis in front of her. What if her present existence as a toiler in London and boarding-house solitary in Thames Lockdon were to be exchanged for one as the inspirer, mistress, and power behind the throne of a Laundry business in America – a Laundry queen?

What was there so peculiarly droll about the thought of the Laundry business, which always brought her back to earth when she indulged in these flights of fancy? Wherein did it differ from the car business, say, or the building business, or the legal business, or the book business? What, also, was there so faintly yet persistently chilling to her heart about the Laundry business when thought of as a steadfast flame of ambition burning in the breast of her companion?

‘Come on, then,’ he said suddenly. ‘Let’s get going.’ He removed his hand from hers, and they rose, and went down and out into the street, upon which the black-out blackness of night had already fallen.

She said that he would have to hurry to catch his train, and he said that he would not have to do this, and told her that she was to come round with him to see if he got it. On their arrival arm-in-arm at the station he was proved right: he had six minutes in hand. This was not to be wasted: he rushed her over to the public-house immediately opposite. She would drink nothing, for any time before six o’clock she regarded instinctively as tea-time, and her whole chemical and spiritual being forbade her to drink alcohol during such a well-defined phase of the evening: instead she watched him drink, with some haste and difficulty, a large whisky and soda. As he drank he asked her what she was doing with her evening. She said she was meeting Vicki. He asked her who was Vicki, and she said the German girl, she had told him about her. He said he remembered, and he was surprised at her going out with Germans, and she told him not to be so silly.

All at once he banged down his drink and made her escort him over to the station and on to the platform. He found an empty compartment, pulled down the window, leaned out, and made her wait till the train moved off. When she heard whistling noises she was about to go, but he called her back. This was so that he might kiss her. She was not used to being kissed by him at this time of the evening – did not, indeed, remotely associate such a time of the evening with kissing – and as the train pulled out she walked down the platform in the state of confusion and bewilderment he only too often evoked in her, but not displeased.

2

She had arranged to meet her German friend at half-past six at the River Sun.

It was not, as might be thought, the Lieutenant who had introduced Miss Roach to the River Sun or to the habit of meeting and drinking in bars. The blitz in London, with its attendant misery, peril, chaos and informality, had already introduced Miss Roach to this habit. She had no longer any fear of entering public-houses, and would, if necessary, and provided she was known in the place, enter one unaccompanied. Here again the war, the sombre begetter of crowds everywhere, had succeeded in conjuring into being yet another small population entirely of its own to help fill and afflict the public places – a population of which Miss Roach was a member – of respectable middle-class girls and women, normally timid, home-going and home-staying, who had come to learn of the potency of this brief means of escape in the evening from war-thought and war-endeavour. Without any taste for drink, and originally half-scandalised by the notion of drinking in public or of drinking at all, these women would at first imagine that the pleasure they obtained from the new habit lay in the company, the lights, the conversation, the novelty or humour of the experience: then, gradually, they would perceive that there was something further than this, that the longer they stayed and the more they drank the more their pleasure in this pastime was augmented, reaching, at moments, a point, almost, of ecstasy. Finally would come the realisation that the drink itself was not only intimately associated with, but was almost certainly the immediate cause of their sensations, and the bolder spirits among them would come to profess this openly, going so far as to make jokes about it, urging their friends, with naïve abandonment, to ‘have another’, speaking of having ‘had too much’, finally of being ‘drunk’ or of the danger of getting ‘drunk’. Actually very few of these women were constitutionally capable of getting drunk – but only of getting swimming sensations in their heads and wanting to go home and eat or go to bed.

Miss Roach, then, had had no hesitation in arranging to meet her friend at the River Sun – she had, in fact, met her there two or three times before. Then again, the River Sun had a reputation in Thames Lockdon which rendered it something slightly different from an ordinary public-house. Well known to those who knew the river well, and, owing to its position or some obscure tradition, singled out as the rendezvous of the well-to-do in the town itself, it had a style of its own, and to be heard of drinking in there was not altogether the same thing as to be heard of drinking elsewhere. In almost every country town nowadays there is a house, or more than one house, of this sort.

If Miss Roach had had any apprehensions this evening, they would have arisen, rather, from the nationality and reputation of the woman with whom she was to be seen in public – the fact that she was ‘going out with a German’, as the Lieutenant had put it. But this did not disturb Miss Roach either. On the contrary, she took a certain defiant and perhaps slightly childish pleasure in her enlightenment in regard to this matter – an attitude which probably had in fact assisted in bringing about the friendship. Certain self-indulgent shopping and shopkeeping members of the Thames Lockdon public, on the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1939, having stampeded themselves into the exhilarating assumption that a German spy was flaunting herself in their midst, Vicki Kugelmann had to some extent been victimised.