by Bryher;
The very thing we want to avoid, Burlap reflected; it was bad enough having the soldiers land, and essential to keep them from mixing with the population. These elderly volunteers gave way to a foolish kindness without a thought of the consequences. Besides, it was a bit suspicious, first living abroad and now wanting to work with a lot of Czechs and Poles. He wondered how well the old fool really knew Harris. “What is your experience? Have you a degree?”
Ferguson shook his head. “I have handled groups of men,” he could not help a slight emphasis on the word, “since I was twenty, but I have no teacher’s diploma.”
“I’m afraid they’re sticky about that now, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose they are.”
There really was no vacancy, but if there had been one, Burlap thought, he would choose his own man to fill it. Ferguson irritated him, for there was no knowing what was going on in the visitor’s head. “I appreciate very much the offer of your service,” he said with what was intended to be a warm smile, “but just at present I am afraid that your qualifications are impossibly high,” it was better to flatter the fellow. “If you care to fill up this rather … importunate … form in triplicate and post it back at your leisure I’ll advise you at once if anything turns up.” He leaned back in his chair with a technique that had warned countless visitors that their interview was at an end.
“You mean … you have no suggestion for me at present?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I must not take up more of your time.” Ferguson reached for his hat.
“Oh, a delightful interlude, I assure you, in my dreary routine. Drop in for a chat sometime when this tiresome business is over. Where’s your pass? I’m supposed to fill in the time you leave. Silly, isn’t it?” He signed his initials with a flourish. “But rules are rules. The lift is at the end of the corridor; can you find your way downstairs?”
“Easily, thanks.” Ferguson got up. “Goodbye, I’ll tell Harris that I saw you.”
The passage was full of girls chattering over cracked mugs of tea. Ordinarily he would have smiled at them, but now they seemed part of the unreality of the building. So the spirit—it came over him in a blinding flash—could be conquered? Perhaps when a world was doomed, each person, no matter how innocent, had to go through some personal destruction? This is the end and not a raid, Ferguson thought, jabbing the lift button impatiently. His Swiss friends had been right, he should never have come home.
8
“NOW, JOE,” EVE SAID, stepping off the bus, “I know the name is funny and the place looks prehistoric, but the Tippett does have good cakes and lots of the gayer places ration you to one apiece.”
“Anywhere you say, Eve, so long as there’s food.” It seemed a long time since lunch, Joe thought, and then there had not been much of it; between his father’s liver and his mother’s theories meals at home were always dull and cheerless. They never had those big steak-and-kidney puddings that he loved, with bits of bacon added and crusts soaked in gravy. They never had steak, with golden onions on top of it. He always said that he could count his age by his mother’s experiments; she had stopped eating bread the week he had changed schools and had introduced nut cheese just after he had gone to business. If he had not been given his midday lunch at school he would have grown up too weedy ever to pass the medical. “Mother’s got a new diet,” he giggled, “straight out of Food Facts. She sits by the fire all evening, nibbling a raw carrot.”
“Don’t!” Eve shivered. “It’s worse than the time she fasted two days a week and sipped milk the rest of the time. Remember how you used to tell me about it at the office?” They grinned sympathetically at each other.
“Oh, she’s crazy! Still,” Joe added loyally, “she’s good about everything else. She even cuts the football news out of the Sunday papers now to send on to me.”
The wind tore up the narrow street, and Eve plunged her hands into her warm pockets. She really could not bother if this did pull her coat out of shape when it was so cold. It seemed strange to be here with Joe. She had not noticed him at the office any more than the furniture, the new linoleum at the entrance, or the shiny cover with a rent in it that always caught in the typewriter. It had been a complete surprise when he had turned up, half an hour before, on the pretext of thanking her for some cigarettes she had sent him, just as she was finishing her work. Time was hanging on his hands, she imagined; his father was in business and his school friends, like himself, were in the Army. He had looked round with an air of triumph, asked her how things were, and hung about, with his cap in his hand, until for sheer lack of knowing what to say to him she had suggested tea. He seemed so happy and self-confident as they strode along the pavement, a different boy from the one who had muddled up the envelopes and waited impatiently for Saturday afternoon and freedom.
“Here we are.” Eve pushed through the Warming Pan door. It was so early that most of the tables were still empty, but on the far side of the room where a long narrow window had had to be permanently blacked out there was a light. This was the corner old Mr. Rashleigh preferred, and he was already in his place. Selina, for some reason, wasn’t at her desk, and Mary, the kitchen maid, was taking orders instead of Ruby. There was a pleasant smell of baking, coffee, and warmth coming from the kitchen.
They sat down next to Horatio, to his mingled annoyance and delight. He loved to listen to people talking, but a nice girl like Eve ought not to gallop in, treating that boy with her (a brother, it was to be hoped) as if they were equals. “Two teas, Mary, scones and all the cakes you’ve got, please,” Eve ordered. “My friend’s just come on leave and he’s hungry.”
A visitor had left a bunch of asters from her garden. They were fading already into a smoky bonfire blue, though Selina had put them at once into her favourite pottery bowl. Autumn, Horatio thought, looking at them; they made him homesick for roads smelling of crisp leaves.
“How’s food in the camp, Joe?” Eve inquired, getting up to hang her coat beside his, on the row of bright, varnished pegs.
“All right. You never know. The material’s good, but you never know what the cooks will do to it.” The chief thing was that rations were plentiful and there was none of the nagging home discussions about the harm meals did to the digestion. “My appetite kind of worries Mother; she’s always telling me that I’ll eat myself into my grave before I’m fifty. How does she know that I’m going to live to be fifty, anyhow, these days?”
When Joe grinned like that, with his round, blue eyes and rounder ploughboy cheeks, he looked exactly twelve and not a day older. “You can’t expect your family at their age to keep pace with this world,” Eve suggested. “Don’t you find it hard to keep up with it yourself?”
“Guess I’m lucky,” Joe said, pulling the cracked majolica ash tray over towards him. There were not many smokers here, by the look of it, but Eve was right, the cakes were wonderful and he bit a large piece out of his second scone. “I’m glad I’m living now, with everything changing and moving; it’s such fun.” If it had not been for the war he might have been stuck for life in that poky, dismal office. It made him shiver to remember it. He had a score to settle, not with the Germans, brutes though the Huns were, but with his headmaster. He could see Denham now, sitting regally at a desk and disposing of the future as if he, Joe, were just a bit of scrap. The walls had been lined with books and the blinds half drawn to shut out the summer day. The old tyrant hadn’t even known his name, for Joe had watched him look it up in a drawer full of cards. “So your son wants to leave us,” he had said coldly, coming down like a roller on Joe’s dream of being a mechanic. “He’ll regret it all his life if he does,” and he had elaborated to Joe’s only too sympathetic father all the reasons against his son’s entering the local works. “Why, Joe is not like some of them here,” the headmaster had insisted, “he will be able to take the exam in his stride next July, and there is, as you are aware, eventually a … pension.” He had paused before that word as if it
were too sacred to be uttered. But the Civil Service had not got him. No, Joe had ended that idea by failing his papers deliberately, but then his father had been so angry that he had sent him into the City within the week, just because he travelled up daily in the train with a man who wanted an office boy.
“Do you know,” Joe noticed that Eve’s plate was empty and he pushed the cakes across to her, “we had a talk at our camp the other night about New Guinea. A chap showed us pictures of the tribes and of the big idols they set up in their villages. They had the oldest, India-rubber faces streaked with paint, and people used to put skulls in front of them. They were so queer they gave me a nightmare afterwards; I thought one was chasing after me. The head was awfully familiar, and suddenly I remembered who it was.” Joe swallowed another mouthful slowly; it tasted as if there really was some butter in it and he grinned. “It was my headmaster! I got a boot at my bed for making such a noise, but I lay and laughed till the tears came into my eyes. The same small eyes and a big stripe instead of lips. Before this war, each summer, we were taken up to him like skulls.”
“You hated the office, didn’t you?” Eve said. He had been a misfit from the moment he had come into the room, a big, burly boy who could not move without knocking something over. It was a comment on civilization, she reflected, that it had taken a war to settle him into his right place.
“Well, who wouldn’t? It was just a live grave.”
Eve offered him the final cake. She could not explain that to her the office was a haven, a place where she could grow, the first freedom that she had ever known. Rural life was delightful if you enjoyed growing peas and feeding chickens as her sisters did; but from the time that she could remember, she, herself, had liked cities. She loved the lamps coming out at dusk in peacetime, the sky that hung above the shops as if it were an orchid hung between blocks of buried masonry. It was less lonely here in a single room than in the crowded farm house with her sisters moving backwards and forwards with apples and knitting and chicken food, chattering and grumbling, “It’s so selfish of you, Eve, to read when we want to talk.” Joe was a kind boy but he was like her family; there were things in life that he would never understand.
Mary collected the cups with a great clatter from a table that two customers had just left. She wished she could persuade Cook to come to the Underground with her. Old Tippett disapproved of the least bit of fun. They had games in the big shelter and you could meet nice friends, like the boy at Miss Eve’s table who was stuffing himself with muffins. Cook was stupidly afraid of the extra walk in the blackout, but it was not so difficult as she complained, if you had a torch.
“There are lots of opportunities now,” Joe continued eagerly. “One fellow who had been an apprentice told me that we were learning more in a month than he had in a year. Things are moving so fast; why, they are flying speeds as routine that we thought were impossible, and it’s come to stay. Do you know,” he went on, in a sudden burst of confidence, “most of the time since I joined up I’ve been doing the things I really enjoy.” He was only afraid that Fate might snatch him from machinery again, and he wanted to be sure that he would have oil on his hands and the rhythm of an engine in his ears as long as he lived. That and food. “Do you think,” he asked, looking at the table, “they would let us have another plate of cake?”
Horatio looked up angrily at Mary as she passed his table with a second dish of gingerbread and scones. It was strictly against the regulations, but Miss Tippett, for some reason or another, was still upstairs. Didn’t that boy know that there was a war on? The young seemed to have no sense of responsibility these days. Why did a girl like Eve waste her time with a lout who could not even talk to her; for nobody could call that muttering between mouthfuls conversation? People who spoke about living on memories were fools. Just to recall the Sunday evenings when he had moved among his pupils, speaking of art, was to know that he was just as capable of enjoyment today as he had been twenty years ago. It was opportunity—and money—that were lacking. What a calendar he could paint of Eve just as she was sitting now, her cheeks like berries in October’s hedges; but he had nothing to offer her, he could not even, until Agatha wrote, invite her to a cup of tea. Yet she needed him to talk to her. “There are aspects of life,” he would say, “that I hope, my dear, you will never know, but is it wise, do you think, to sit in a public place with that boy you brought in the other afternoon? Would your mother approve of him? Oh, I have nothing against the young fellow, and of course times have changed since I was young, but he was so obviously not … not …” what could he say, Eve only laughed if he used the word class, “… one of us. We should set our standards high, Eve, very high; and believe me, then we shall never disappoint ourselves.” Horatio finished the last morsel of the solitary cake that he dared permit himself until at least some of the arrears he owed Miss Tippett had been settled; and then, leaning back in his chair, he scowled at Joe’s neck.
Eve wondered desperately how to start another conversation. Boys naturally were enthusiastic about football, but it was hard to think of a phrase that would start Joe talking about it. They ought to have gone to a gayer place; the faded chintz cushions and the blackout curtains made the room seem dingier than it was. It was so quiet too that she felt every sentence must be overheard. She wanted to give Joe a good time, to make him feel the office still remembered him, but kind intentions alone could not break his impenetrable shyness. “You really like your camp,” she said, realizing that it was the fourth time that she had asked the same silly question; and at that moment, looking round unconsciously for rescue, she found herself staring into the placid eyes of a huge plaster dog, whose wrinkled jaw precisely matched the chin of a woman sipping tea at the adjoining table. The resemblance was so striking that there was nothing to do but laugh.
“Now, Eve, what’s up?”
Eve could only point. “Why breed bulldogs?” she whispered; and then Joe saw the resemblance too and grinned. “Boy! What a dog; wherever did they get it from?” he asked.
“I wonder! It’s so unlike Tippett.” The black muzzle was too smug and restful; for Selina acted, if she did not look, a lady with a past. “Perhaps some evacuated customer dumped it here? You couldn’t take a thing like that on a train.”
It added somehow, in spite of its vulgarity, to the atmosphere of the place. A few feet away the buses stopped on their way to and from the City, the Underground was beneath them, but here, as Angelina said, they had “a corner of an English garden flowering in our great Metropolis.” You walked up to the Warming Pan if you wanted a recipe for quince marmalade or if Auntie had trapped a swarm of bees in her garden and had written for advice. Somebody was always there to embellish the information with lore and local anecdotes, just as if London were still a collection of villages along the Thames. There was a hand-drawn poster on the mantelpiece advertising a litter of terriers; gradually the numbers had been altered as the puppies had been sold, till now only a forlorn two, written up in red ink, remained. Yet the room was bleak; foreigners, Eve thought, would hurry away from its cheerlessness, but if it were destroyed, and she wondered if the spirit of a place survived a bomb, something draughty but kind would be broken. Perhaps there would be no more generations to potter in and out of gardens, plaiting straw hats and ready to murder each other over their delphiniums? How they had tormented her in childhood, calling her out to pick raspberries or shell peas; but once you had escaped, there was something proud and even perceptive about them. They respected your soul if they did not respect your leisure.
They sat in front of their empty plates, smoking. Eve hesitated to be the first to move, and Joe thought gloomily of the long ride home. In such a blackout there was not even the fun of watching his fellow passengers, and it was only too easy to miss the stop and to have to crawl a mile, feeling his way back by the walls. One or two customers left, cautiously lifting the curtain that kept the light from the street. “Oh, dear,” Eve said suddenly, looking up at the clock, “do you
think it will ever end?”
“What, the raids?” It was hard for a girl to have to go to work every morning, over rubble and broken glass, after a night in a shelter. “Look, Eve, why don’t you join up? You could be out in the country with a swell group of girls. Don’t let on that you’ve ever been in business, but make them train you as a driver.” She would look grand at the wheel, he thought, instead of the old maid with no chin who came round with the van.
“No,” Eve said, picking up her bag. “I didn’t mean the raids, I meant the war.” There were worse things than danger; there was this terrifying sense of having a cylinder full of fog clapped over one’s face.
“The war?” Joe scratched his ear tip; the cold wind always made it itch. “Don’t worry about that.” It was strange how a girl’s mind worked, but it must be that dingy office. He could not, now, see further than his brilliant present. “All we have to do is to be prepared. They couldn’t invade us really, but they’re so stupid they might try.”
What is going to happen, Eve thought, staring at the broad, wind-burnt face in front of her; Joe doesn’t want it to end. So many people were happy, really happy, now for the first time; and others, like herself, were suicidal. “I always wanted to see Paris,” she said, then wished she had not spoken.
“England’s good enough for me; you can’t even get your own cigarettes the other side of the Channel, and a chap I know told me the food was terrible, all sauce and sawdust.” He wondered superstitiously if it were good to talk about travel; sometimes a rumour flew around that they might be drafted overseas. “I might get sent to Egypt,” he said, “but Africa wouldn’t be …”
“As bad as Europe,” Eve finished the sentence for him.
“Well, you don’t like foreigners, do you?” He was so sure that he never waited for her to reply. “Seriously, Eve, you ought to get out of London. This bombing—and, mind you, I don’t blame you—is getting on your nerves.”