The Slaves of Solitude (11 page)

Whatever the answer, Miss Roach now had a definite feeling that this new Vicki Kugelmann was not quite the one she had bargained for, and that the friendship was not likely to develop on quite
the lines she had hoped. In fact, she was not quite sure, if conversations of this sort were going to be the order of the day, that she would be absolutely happy in having Miss Kugelmann staying in
the same boarding-house with her. This, in its turn, reminded her that she had promised to speak to Mrs. Payne about this very matter. She had failed to do so, and sooner or later she had to make
some excuse for her failure. She decided that there was no time like the present, and that this would also serve to change the subject.

‘Oh – by the way,’ she said, ‘you know I was going to talk to Mrs. Payne – round at my place . . .’

‘Ah yes? Mrs. Payne?’ said Vicki, suddenly sitting up, and looking at Miss Roach with the utmost interest.

‘Well, I was going—’

‘No. Don’t go on. I have a surprise!’ Vicki put forth an admonishing finger with one hand, and finished off her drink with the other. ‘I have a surprise! . . . Now. What
are you going to have? The same again?’

‘A surprise? . . . What?’ said Miss Roach. ‘Go on. Tell me.’

‘No,’ said Vicki gleefully, as she rose and collected the glasses. ‘First we have a drink and then I tell you. A great surprise, but first we have a drink. The same?’

Miss Roach said she would have the same, and Vicki went to the bar. Miss Roach wondered what was coming, and guessed that, as is so often the case on these occasions between friends, the person
surprised was not going to take anything like the same amount of pleasure in the surprise as the surpriser. Trying to anticipate this one, she had a feeling that Vicki was engaged to be married,
and was either going to leave the town altogether, or was going to settle down in it comfortably elsewhere. She did not know why she had this feeling, but it somehow fitted in with Vicki’s
conversation and manner in the last five minutes.

Vicki returned with the drinks, sat down, said, ‘Well – here’s to you,’ and drank.

‘Well. Go on,’ said Miss Roach, masking a faint feeling of exhaustion behind a show of delighted interest. ‘Tell me. What is it?’

‘Your Mrs. Payne . . .’ said Vicki, and took another sip.

‘Yes?’

‘I have seen your Mrs. Payne,’ said Vicki. ‘I have had a long talk with her!. . .’

‘No! . . . Really? . . .’

‘Uh-huh. . . .’ (Vicki had a rather irritating habit, which Miss Roach had noticed before, of saying ‘Uh-huh’ instead of ‘Yes’.) ‘And what do you
think?’

‘What?’

‘I am coming to stay with you, my dear. You have a new lodger at the Rosamund Tea Rooms!’

‘
No!
’

‘Yes indeed. It is all fixed up. What do you think of that?

‘But, my dear, this is
marvellous
!’
 
said Miss Roach, that slight film coming over her eyes which comes over the eyes of those who, while proclaiming intense
pleasure, are actually thinking fast.

‘Yes. It is marvellous, isn’t it?’ said Vicki. ‘Now we shall be together.’

‘But you don’t mean,’ said Miss Roach, finally managing completely to dispel the slight film, ‘staying in the
house
? It’s full up in the house, isn’t
it?’

‘Yes. In the house. Your Mrs. – what is her name – Bart?’

‘Barratt?’

‘Yes. Mrs. Barratt. 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

D
AWN
, 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. Payne, pettishly hitting at her gong below, announced the proper commencement of day, and the end of privacy.

2

Mr. Thwaites made a habit of being the first in the dining-room for breakfast. No one had ever been known to beat him to it. Five, or even ten minutes before the time, he
would be found sitting in his place at the table for four in the corner. It was as though he were fretful for the day to start, to be in his presidential position and to take charge of the day from
the beginning. However early they appeared, those who entered after him, saying ‘Good morning, Mr. Thwaites’ and catching his eye, had a distant feeling of being on the mat for being
late. Miss Roach did, at any rate.

This morning, the Saturday following the one on which she had had drinks with Vicki Kugelmann at the River Sun, Miss Roach was in the room while the gong was still being hit, and took her place
at the table with Mr. Thwaites.

‘Good morning,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘You’re very early, aren’t you?’ But this was not intended as a compliment: it still meant that she was late. It implied
merely that a chronically late Miss Roach had appeared relatively early upon the scene.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Roach, ‘I suppose I am.’

Mr. Thwaites, fingering his knife, now quietly stared at Miss Roach. When alone with her he frequently stared at her like this, quite unconscious of her embarrassment and even of the fact that
he was doing it. It was the preoccupied stare of one who sought to discover some fresh detail in her appearance or demeanour about which he could say or think something nasty. Prepared for this
stare, she had come armed with her newspaper, which she now took up, looking at the headlines. She was defiantly conscious of her paper being the
News Chronicle
, which was, strictly
speaking, banned by Mr. Thwaites. All newspapers, with the exception of the
Daily Mail
, which he himself took, were strictly speaking banned by Mr. Thwaites. But the fires of personal
liberty are unextinguishable, even in so unlikely a precinct for their survival as the Rosamund Tea Rooms, and Miss Roach was not actually alone in her defiance. Miss Steele took
The Times
and Mr. Prest the
Daily Mirror.

Miss Steele now came in, followed by Mrs. Barratt and, a little later, by Mr. Prest. Plates of porridge and racks of toast were handed round by Sheila, and breakfast began. The sky had cleared
outside, and the sun, low in the sky, now shone into the room with the peculiar yellow brilliance which only a winter sun can achieve. In this hard and revealing light Mr. Thwaites succeeded in
looking more immaculately clean and radiantly healthy than ever. There was not even any hope for Miss Roach that Mr. Thwaites would ever die.