That hiss, in the blackness of the station, might have been the sound of the crouching monster’s last, exhausted, people-expelling breath in this riverside outpost of its daily influence and domain. Or it might, tonight, merely have been the engine hissing through its teeth against the cold.

One waiting at the barrier to meet a friend could see compartment doors being flung open rapidly everywhere (as though some sort of panic had occurred within the train), and the next moment a small army of home-seekers, in full attack, came rushing towards the dim black-out light – like moonlight gone bad – above the ticket-collector. Those who were early enough got through at once, but soon the rush of the crowd was caught in the bottle-neck, and there was formed a slow, shuffling queue of people, having green tickets snatched from them in the bad moonlight.

Once through the barrier the wayfarer thundered over the bare wooden floor past the booking-office out into the three-times-night. Here, waiting for the rich, or the overloaded with luggage, a few cars and taxis could just be discerned, lurking silently, or with their self-starters throbbing, or moving cautiously away. Torches came flashing on and going out like fireflies. These fireflies went away in all directions in an atmosphere which was one blended of release, of caution in the blackness, and of renewed painful awareness of the cold.

In order to reach the Rosamund Tea Rooms (which were not Tea Rooms any more, but a boarding-house) Miss Roach, who was thirty-nine and worked as secretary and in other capacities with a publishing firm in London, could either turn to the left and walk through the shopping streets, or turn to the right and go by the houses along the river-front. There was nothing in it – it was five to six minutes either way. She usually chose the way by the river, however, for the river, being open and flowing and made of water, without her knowing it gave her a sense of briefly escaping, of getting a ‘breather’, as one would when walking along a front on a seaside holiday – and this in spite of the fact that she could not see the river, or anything at all in the universe save the other fireflies and the patches of pavement coming within the radius of her torch-light.

She heard a couple of frozen people muttering and blundering behind her, and another couple muttering and blundering ahead of her. A solitary firefly-holder came blundering by her. The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other. This was war late in 1943.

In the glass door of the River Sun – perhaps Thames Lockdon’s most popular and fashionable public-house, which stood on a corner facing the river, and which she now passed on her left – she could see the cheerful word ‘OPEN’ gleaming dimly through transparent violet inserted in the black-out material. But even this small token of light and welcome, because of the way in which it had perforce to be made, gave again an impression of being muffled, bringing to the mind a picture of dark and surreptitious pleasures taking place within – as if the River Sun were some sort of waterside brothel instead of a healthy public-house.

When she was level with the bridge she turned off to the left, and went past the church up Church Street. The Rosamund Tea Rooms were about half-way up on the left.

She could not see Church Street, yet imagined it more vividly because of the blackness – imagined it with the brightness of vision such as a blind man may have, or a sleepless man who, having stared at his light, suddenly puts it out and forces his eyes shut. She saw it in the sunshine of summer – this broad and not very long shopping street, which was not the main shopping street, the High Street, but one having a greater air of distinction than that because of its breadth and the Church at its end. She saw each shop and building – the garage, the public-house, the Bank, the butcher, the tobacconist, the ironmonger, the various Lunch and Tea rooms, and all the other street-level commercial fronts inserted in the architectural farrago – the jostling of the graceful and genuine and old by the demented fake and ye-olde – characteristic of the half-village, half-town which Thames Lockdon was – a place a stockbroker or book-maker, passing through in his car in peacetime on the way back to his centrally-over-heated flat in a London block, would designate as ‘very pretty’ – a place to pass through, above all.

2

As she let herself in by the front door she could in the same way see the Rosamund Tea Rooms – the somewhat narrow, three-storied, red-brick house, wedged in between a half-hearted toy-shop on one side, and an antique-shop on the other. She saw its bow-window on the ground floor, jutting out obtrusively on to the pavement; and above this, beneath the first-floor windows, the oblong black wooden board with faded gilt letters running its length – ‘The Rosamund Tea Rooms’. But now, since the war, it was the Rosamund Tea Rooms no more – merely, if anything, ‘Mrs. Payne’s’. Mrs. Payne would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been far too blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea. All the same, a few stray people in summer, probably driven slightly mad by the heat, did still enter with that idea in mind, and quietly had their error made clear to them.

What did ‘Rosamund’ mean? Why, in heaven’s name, ‘Rosamund’? A ye-olde Rosamund’s Tea Bower, or what? Mrs. Payne could not have told you, and no one else knew. This active, grey-haired, spectacled, widowed woman had no interest in knowledge, only in gain. She had taken over the Rosamund Tea Rooms some four years before the war, run the place, as Tea Rooms, with very little profit, until the outbreak of the war, and then, with the general evacuation from London, had seen its possibilities as a boarding-house and proceeded to furnish it for that purpose. Her initiative had been more than justified, for when the first blitz came to London – with private cars still on the road and Thames Lockdon like a riverside Blackpool at the height of its season – she could have crammed her rooms with exhausted people at whatever price she cared to charge. And since then – after the blitz had subsided practically into nothingness – Mrs. Payne had never had a room empty.

Miss Roach closed the front door. A small, dim oil-lamp burned in the hall, just illuminating the hall table, the bright, tinny, brass Oriental gong, and the green baize letter-rack criss-crossed with black tape. Mrs. Payne had put a stop to electricity on the landings simply by taking all the bulbs out – thus succouring her hard-pressed country, the spirit of the black-out generally, and her own pecuniary resources.

Miss Roach kept on her torch as she went up the stairs.