SELINA TIPPETT, WHO ought to have been called Madge, trotted down the stairs. Ruby, she surmised, would be late; she always was on Thursday, a day nobody at the Warming Pan had time to stand around and chat with her. It was astonishing how the draught got under the windows; the corridors (“so much lighter than you usually find in London houses”) were hardly an advantage in winter. A solitary china plate hanging on the wall looked as if its fragile colours were not worn but frozen out of it. Undoubtedly Angelina had got her chill running up from the hot kitchen to see that the beds had been made. If I were not in business, Selina thought, I should certainly wear mittens; and she saw herself suddenly, as clearly as if Mr. Rashleigh had painted the scene in a calendar, standing outside her father’s door one Christmas Eve and pulling a pair of grey, woolly, fingerless gloves out of a packet with “to Miss Roly Poly” in Cook’s writing on the tiny, attached label. Mittens … they were mixed up with snowmen and her mother’s displeasure. “Selina, your hair ribbon is untied; I will not have you playing with those rough boys.” Dear me, she frightened herself by saying the words aloud, how the world has changed since I was ten. Changed for the better, too, in spite of the raids. Nobody questioned a girl like Evelyn about her friends, she went unchallenged to her work in the mornings; even, in peacetime, might aspire to a post abroad.
“Good morning, Timothy.” The shop blinds were down, of course, for they did not open until ten, but the floor was swept and the tables replaced in rows. “Good morning, madam, it was a terribly noisy night.” Timothy flicked his duster over the office desk and chair and waited with his permanent inborn sadness for comfort. “Yes, if we listen to the Prime Minister we shall have worse to endure before it’s over”—the people, poor dears, were being magnificent but it only encouraged them to lose their nerve if you let them discuss the horrors. “It was a land mine, madam, at the corner of the Square; the milkman told me it ’ad ’it two empty ’ouses. Fairly blazing, it was; at eleven last night, I could see to read the time as plain as day.”
“Indeed, we must be thankful that there was not more damage.” These extraordinary events needed, Selina thought, a new and quite other vocabulary, but morale—that was the important thing; it was the difference that severed England, more than the Channel did, from the Continent. “The best thing to do, Angelina,” she had repeated this twice to her partner the previous evening, “is to go on as if everything were absolutely normal. The staff copies us unconsciously and in that way we are influencing not just Ruby, Timothy, and the customers but perhaps hundreds of people.” For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids. It was inspiring really, especially on such a cold, dreary morning, to think how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.
In wartime, however, it was impossible to be gay or brave for long. Selina glanced at her desk; there was a pile of letters stacked on the worn leather, and the contents were bound to be unpleasant. Some people, she supposed, really liked their post; news came from strange, far-off places or spoke of acquaintances amusingly. A letter ought to be the sharing of a life, but now correspondence had come to mean answering stupid questions after the day’s work or pointing out an error in the gas account. The postman himself was Fate with a large F, for at nine or eleven or four he might bring the papers that she was sure to receive one day: either they must pay the arrears of rent or the landlord would have regretfully (she saw the polite, pinched phrase) to give them notice.
There was a circular from the Ministry of Food. Butler’s, of course, wanted something on account, they always did at the beginning of the month. She planned to take them methodically but it was no use; she had to run them through her hands, anxiously, until she was sure that the dreaded white envelope stamped with Private had not arrived. Only when she was certain of the landlord’s silence could she begin to slit them open with her pet paper knife, the one with a carnelian handle made from pebbles she had once picked up on the beach, and begin to arrange them for reply.
Omens… if one let one’s self believe in them, she would say that something was about to happen. Selina turned, not the pages of the ledger with the fish account nor the note with indecipherable signature, but a great photograph album of the Warming Pan. She would never forget an evening when she had faced Miss Humphries in a dreary Bournemouth hotel. The coffee had been cold and powdery for the third evening in succession, but she had seen herself, exactly as if in a dream, walking down a street past an empty shop.
Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom. Only those people, she thought, who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was. From Friday morning until the following Thursday noon she read aloud, matched wool, pushed the bath chair, or dreamed whilst “poor Miss Humphries” slept, but on Thursday afternoon she strolled out, dressed as she herself chose, to meet some friend at the local confectioner’s. They discussed their “posts,” the Church, the Court, the necessity to keep in touch with fashion but not to be dominated by it, and the food. Her budget permitted her to spend only one and six, but such a sum offered vast possibilities of choice. She could have, for example, buttered toast or scones, a piece of plum cake, a tartlet, or some sandwiches. There was no temptation in expensive foreign-looking pastry. Selina collected teashops as wealthier people tasted wines. Sometimes she had taken the train into the country, ostensibly to pick bluebells, really to try out a recommended “Farmhouse Tea.” In one place the butter was good, another excelled in crumpets but the cakes were soggy; she had never found “the toast, the temperature, and the tea,” as she paraphrased to Angelina gaily, all together. Then, that evening when everybody in the sombre hall except herself had been well over seventy, she had seen it suddenly, complete even to its name, the perfect meeting place, not smart but homelike, with gay primrose china and tiny, polished tables. “No, Selina, people always lose money on them,” Angelina had insisted. It had happened to be her free evening and they had been sitting together in her bedroom with the door open, in case Miss Humphries should call. “Of course, but nobody ever runs them properly; it’s the little things that they always forget, but men are so insensitive.” That, at least, was a point upon which they were both agreed. “Yes, but as often as not they are started by women, the fat and fussy type. Now look at that place we went to last Saturday; the tea was filthy and the crumpets stank of margarine and there wasn’t a male in the place.”
It was Angelina’s way, her friend had thought, to oppose all projects not originated by herself. There were days during the next year when Selina almost talked herself into believing that the Warming Pan existed, whilst it had, all the time, the quality of pure dream until Miss Humphries had died, had left her unexpectedly three hundred pounds, and she had walked one morning into the ideal, empty shop.
The seven years telescoped themselves into one, for there had not been a day when she had not felt vibrantly, excitedly alive. She had been frightened at first, no, never when they had actually opened, only during those early moments when they had signed the lease, engaged the waitresses, and she had wondered if she would be able to pay the bills. She remembered now looking up at the newly distempered walls and saying to Angelina, “But will customers ever come?” It had been so astonishing when the first ones had arrived, a flustered lady with parcels and two quarrelling little boys. The second arrival, she had recognized her immediately, had been a governess. “Look, Angelina,” she had whispered, “there is somebody there, what must I do?” Yet it had been sheer gaiety, almost a pretense of being frightened; she had behaved as if she had been for twenty years, not a lady companion with excellent references, but the manageress of a smart hotel. Everything had happened just “as if it had been meant”; for Sarah, the assistant, whose help had been invaluable at the start, had married and left the place indisputably under Selina’s control. Angelina looked after the staff and the purchases, but her heart was really with the courses that she was always taking to improve, as she said, “the future of us women.”
“Number Seven is leaving this morning,” Timothy remarked. He had emptied the pails of water in the kitchen and had come back to spread his wet cloths on the radiator to dry. Strictly speaking, this was forbidden but Ruby made such a fuss if he cluttered the kitchen up that they pretended not to notice provided that he cleared them away by ten o’clock. “I saw the van draw up as I came down the street. Looks to me as if between the bombs and the people running to the country there won’t be a London left.”
“I read somewhere,” Selina said severely, “that it will take three years and a half to lay the city in ruins.” It might be statistically correct but she could not help agreeing inwardly with Timothy, who looked the essence of gloom, that this was poor comfort after a noisy night.
“You can never believe what you read in them papers,” Timothy objected, appealing to her with damp, brown, spaniel eyes—it was the only phrase to use about him, if it did sound bookish.
“Well, we are not going to give the Germans the satisfaction of making us neglect our jobs; I think that inside handle could do with a rub this morning; it’s the dust, I know, from the explosions.” His glum uneasiness was irritating to the nerves. Selina was just as aware as Timothy that every person gone from the district meant one less possible customer. Those prewar days of January sales when they had served a hundred lunches in a morning had vanished as surely and inevitably as the snowballing moments of her first mittens. To think that she had ever grumbled about the smallness of their oven! Now it was not a question of putting savings in a bank for their old age but of meeting current expenses; she could not even think about the overdue rent. Of course, Selina would have liked to say to the porter, don’t you worry, when you can’t work for us any more there will be a pension waiting; but then someone would have to promise the same thing to Miss Tippett herself, and she could not see the landlord, for instance, offering them anything but notice.
How strange life was! They fulfilled a need in the neighbourhood; they were, as Selina often remarked, a cross between a village shop and the family doctor. They found old Mrs. Holmes a dressmaker, delivered messages to deaf Miss Clark. People rushed in to telephone; if they were favourites, to dump their parcels. They used them unthinkingly, she reflected, taking up a letter with an indecipherable signature, “… and I must have left the gloves on the window ledge, you could not help noticing them, they were an almost new brown knitted pair with blue dots on the gauntlets and besides your restaurant I was only at Barlow’s and the chemist’s and a cinema. Please send them to me registered and I will pay you back the postage the next time I drop in.” That must come from the angular woman who always grumbled about her table. Yes, the Warming Pan was useful, whatever Angelina might say. Her partner had behaved so oddly ever since she had gone to this new political course; it had been so much easier when she had taken up Eastern philosophy, for then she had made an effort to control her temper. Now she was scornful of the customers, called them the “stupid bourgeoisie,” when they were really such nice people. It made life very confusing.
“Timothy,” perhaps he would cheer up if she talked to him a little, “have you seen a pair of brown gloves anywhere? A customer says she dropped a pair here the …”—she looked at the date and at the calendar—“the day before yesterday.”
“Brown gloves, madam?” He was antagonistic immediately, as if she thought that he might have taken them. “There’s this one from last week.” He held up an object from the Found basket with a large hole in one worn, black finger.
“No, that’s not it. She says brown, and new. Probably she left them somewhere else.” Instinctively, Selina treated all customers as she had humoured a succession of Miss Humphries. “In the bus, I expect.”
“It’s surprising what people do leave in vehicles,” Timothy commented mysteriously, “’specially in trams.” He shook his leather and, looking at the doorknob with an almost hypnotized stare, started to flick away the dust.
Selina walked over to the window and began, through sheer habit, to arrange the trays of cakes. With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone. She had prided herself before that nowhere in all the district had good standard things and so much variety been united. There had always been nicely browned crumpets and thick gingerbread, rock cakes and buns, the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch. Certain afternoons (she remembered Miss Humphries), all she could have swallowed were teacakes with just the right amount of butter. Then there were other moments, after days indoors perhaps because of an east wind that caught the old lady’s chest, when a piece of seed cake, made from Grandmother’s mixture, had brought back blackberry days and times when lessons were the only threat to a placid routine of life. She looked sadly at the meagre row; there was something stinted and miserly about it. It was not the bombs that distressed her, awful as the noise was, so much as the lack of loaded trays to make up for the horrors of the night. She hated ration cards, less because she wanted more food herself than because they were a symbol of some poverty of spirit. They reminded her of vegetarian teachers with cramped ideas. If Angelina would only eat more, she would be less restless and talk less strangely. How detestable the propaganda of the Food Ministry was, with the emphasis upon oatmeal and raw carrots; were they not fighting for an England of plenty, for that older England of sirloins of beef and mountains of cheddar cheese?
It looked so cold out too, raw and winterly, and there was poor Mr. Rashleigh trotting up the street in his worn-out overcoat. Selina was thankful that Angelina was not there to see him. “That dreadful old man,” she would say, rapping the desk with her pencil. “But, Angelina, we can’t turn him out, he has nowhere to go.” She dreaded seeing again the contemptuous shrug of her partner’s shoulders. “In a properly organized Britain there would be places for such people.” Perhaps it would be a good idea, though a little gloomy, to have homes for all the old. Still, as it appeared that Britain was not organized—“and, you know, dear, elderly people, and I have had so much experience with them, do get dreadfully jealous of each other”—it cost them very little to let him remain upstairs. Nobody would take an attic these days, anyhow. After all, when Angelina spoke of her “new England” it was always of a world of young people swimming or riding motorcycles, and she was not really mechanical, no, indeed, though Selina hardly liked to tell her so; her colleague could not even hang a picture up without help.
Selina turned back towards her desk. The room was warm and gay, but for the first time she saw clearly a possible To Let sign at the windows and deserted, empty corridors. As long as I have a pair of hands and work (how often she had said this) nothing matters. Yet it was not mere selfishness now to be afraid; there were Timothy and Ruby, even the furniture itself that had been cleaned and polished for so many years. There are worse things than war, she caught herself thinking, though this, of course, was the result of war. Perhaps the bombing would stop and people would come back again or a factory would be opened; perhaps even some morning they would wake up and find that there was an armistice? “Timothy,” she called, “don’t forget to move the cloths from the radiator before we open the shop.”