She is not sleeping well because of the noise of the traffic in front of the house, so she is moving over to a quiet room over the way, and I am coming into hers.’

‘What – next door to me?’

‘Yes. That’s what Mrs. Payne said. Next door to you. What do you think of that?’

‘But this is marvellous!’ said Miss Roach. ‘What made you go and see her?’

‘Oh – I don’t know. You told me she might do something, so I plucked up my courage and went round and saw her yesterday. She knows Mr. Jordan too. I’m coming in the week after next.’

‘Well,’ said Miss Roach, ‘I think that’s marvellous!’ And as further details were given her, she kept on saying well, and kept on saying that it was marvellous. But her heart, instead of fully seconding what she was saying, was feeling, for some reason, slightly hurt, and her brain was busily looking into the future to see what cause there was, if any, for misgiving.

She could not fully explain to herself this slightly hurt feeling. Snubbed was the word, perhaps, rather than hurt. She felt snubbed because it was she who, as the fairy-godmother of the lonely German girl in the town, had originated what had at the time seemed the audacious and adventurous suggestion of Vicki coming to stay at the Rosamund Tea Rooms – and now it had all happened without any bother, had been coolly and calmly fixed up, apart from her. You might almost say it had happened behind her back! The worst part about this feeling was that she not only had to grin and bear it: she had to grin and make a pretence of absolutely adoring it!

‘Well,’ she said, a little later, ‘I think this calls for another drink.’ And she went to the bar with the empty glasses.

No sooner had Miss Roach got to the bar, which was now crowded, and at which she had to wait some time to get served, than she saw how peculiarly vile, petty, and absurd she was being all along the line. What was the matter with her? What business was it all of hers? Why shouldn’t the wretched woman act upon a recommendation of a friend and make arrangements on her own behalf to enter a boarding-house? And why shouldn’t she be attractive to men (if she was)? And why shouldn’t men take her out (if they did)? And why shouldn’t she talk in a rather absurd, old-fashioned, ‘foreign’, kittenish way about men? Was she (Miss Roach) becoming spinsterish, possessive, jealous, jaundiced, or what? She must really take herself in hand.

Feeling the force of all these arguments in a sudden wave, the hurt feeling in her heart was as suddenly dispelled, and she returned in an entirely different mood to the table with the drinks.

They talked cheerfully for about ten minutes, then went out into the darkness, walked a little way together, and parted at a corner.

‘We will be going the same way home soon!’ said Vicki.

‘Yes. Rather!’ said Miss Roach, and noticed that this time her heart was responding to her voice, and that she was completely restored to a state of tranquillity and happiness over the whole matter.

She then wondered whether this feeling of tranquillity and happiness was wholly dependent upon her new attitude, or partially dependent upon the three drinks inside her.

The thought of these three drinks, as she let herself into the Rosamund Tea Rooms, accidentally brought to her mind another thought – the thought that whereas she had paid for two out of these three drinks, Vicki had only paid for one, and that this unequal division of payment had taken place, actually, on three other occasions. She rebuked herself for this thought.

She was, she saw, always having thoughts for which she rebuked herself. It then flashed across her mind that the thoughts for which she rebuked herself seldom turned out to be other than shrewd and fruitful thoughts: and she rebuked herself for this as well.

CHAPTER FOUR

1

DAWN, slowly filling Church Street with grey light, disclosed another day of war.

Because it did this, this dawn bore no more resemblance to a peace-time dawn than the aspect of nature on a Sunday bears a resemblance to the aspect of nature on a weekday. Thus it seemed that dawn itself had been grimly harnessed to the war effort, made to alter its normal mode of existence, had been Bevin-conscripted.

As the weak, winter light grew, however, a charming thing happened: the time of day permitted the withdrawal of black-out curtains, and a few lights shone from the windows of early risers. These remained on for ten minutes or so, and in this period there was a Christmas-card effect, a brief resumption, or rather imitation, of the happy and unstrenuous lighting arrangements of the days before the war.

Much the same sort of thing would happen in the evening, when other social benefactors would keep on their lights unscreened until the last moment allowed by the regulations. But these evening lights gave forth, of course, quite a different atmosphere from those of the morning. At the end of the day such lights spoke soothingly of ease, recreation, repose: in the morning they burned intently and dramatically, speaking of renewed tension, of the battle of life, of the arduous endeavour and agitation of the day ahead.

Awareness of what went on outside penetrated hardly at all into the consciousness of those who lay on in bed within the walls of the Rosamund Tea Rooms. To these people, this part of the day in Church Street remained a pallid secret, which was either never disclosed to them at all, or was only disclosed when one of them, for some strange and forceful reason or other, got up to catch the early train to London. Then this adventurer would be delighted and impressed by the freshness, novelty, and quietness of what he saw: would be aware of being let into a secret: but the next day, sleeping on, he would become totally oblivious of its existence once again.

Certain sounds from the street did, indeed, float up into the stuffy, curtained bedrooms – an occasional lorry crashing through, the desultory disturbance of the quiet caused by the milkman and by the street-sweeper, the footsteps of the few people hurrying to the early train, the conversation of girls going to their war-work on bicycles – but the day did not begin at the Rosamund Tea Rooms until Sheila began to bounce about and knock on doors.

Even then the guests did not wake into full life. Instead, there was a dazed period in which each guest, turning in bed, renewed his acquaintanceship with his own problems and the fact that a war was being waged all over the world, and, finally rising and flinging back the curtains, contemplated the awful scene of wreckage caused by his sleep. The feeling of the morning after the night before is not a sensation endured by the dissolute only: every morning, for every human being, is in some sort a morning after the night before: the dissolute merely experience it in a more intense degree. There is an air of debauch about tossed bedclothes, stale air, cold hot-water bottles, and last night’s cast-off clothing, from which even the primmest of maiden ladies cannot hope to escape. Sleep is gross, a form of abandonment, and it is impossible for anyone to awake and observe its sordid consequences save with a faint sense of recent dissipation, of minute personal disquiet and remorse.

This perception, on the part of the guest, of his animal self, was made even more dreary by certain impressions which were now wafted towards him of the coarser bedroom selves of his fellow-guests. These impressions were conveyed to him in partially ghostly and mysterious ways – in the uncanny gurgling and throbbing of unlocated water-pipes, which seemed softly and eerily to answer each other all over the house: in the sound of unidentified windows shrieking open or being slammed shut: in sudden furious rushes of water from taps into basins: in the sound of bumps, and of thuds: of tooth-glasses being rattled with tooth-brushes, and of expectorations: of coughs, and stupendous throat-clearings: of noses being blown: even of actual groans. To listen carefully to these noises was to sense a peculiar intensity in the bedroom life of the boarders: it was as if they were taking advantage of their brief privacy to serve too eagerly the physical compulsions of life.

Mrs.