When the young man at the Peacock Hotel was charged with murder, the townspeople of Dunwater expressed a moderate surprise. They would not, they said, have thought it of him—a convention of speech, since few of us really entertain such uncomfortable speculations. There was one person who might have raised a dissentient voice and said that it was very much what she thought of him. But when her cue came, an accident had silenced her, and the only invocation of her hypothetical testimony came from the accused man, who asked his lawyer whether that Miss St John would be called as a witness. The lawyer shook his head. ‘Was the old lady a friend of yours?’ he asked. ‘Friend? Friend? If it hadn’t been for her driving me crazy—Well, anyway, I wish to God I’d never set eyes on her!’ ‘You won’t again,’ said the lawyer. ‘She’s dead.’ ‘Dead!’ said the accused man incredulously. ‘Do you mean it? Dead? Christ, what a swindle!’ He burst into furious laughter, and the lawyer averted his eyes from a client he already deplored.
Since 1936 Miss St John had lived at the Peacock Hotel, occupying bedroom number five on the second floor and, between 8.30 and 8.50 a.m., the second-floor bathroom, eating breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, going to the Abbey Church on Sundays, the cinema on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the Public Library whenever she wanted another 92biography. The biographies she preferred were those of diplomats, sovereigns, bishops, generals, royal academicians and approved educationalists. Herself leading a regular life, she liked to read of regular lives—lives of well-conducted prosperity closing in well-attended funerals. In autumn, however, when swallows migrate to Africa and the more delicate public shrubs are wrapped in sacking, she allowed herself to read the lives of opera singers and royal favourites. Such a change was in keeping with the seasonal change from cress sandwiches to buttered crumpets.
In all these years Miss St John had made no friends, and only necessary acquaintances—such as shopkeepers and the public librarian. Other visitors at the Peacock she ignored, unless they disturbed her, when she put them down. They were Transients. She was a Permanent. In 1941 inferior Permanents appeared, people who wished to get away from air-raids or had lost their homes. They took up the attention of the management and seduced the servants with ostentatious tips (Miss St John could only afford modest tips, though she made up for this by taking an interest in those who served her, remembering to ask after their parents and to wish, if their afternoons out were wet ones, that they had been dry ones). But foreseeing that Britain would win the war—how could it be otherwise?—Miss St John also foresaw that these people would ultimately go away and that everything would proceed as before.
1946 showed how right she had been. The last bogus Permanents had left, the war was won, Mussolini had been 93hanged head-downward by the mob, Hitler had killed himself, atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Miss St John remained at the Peacock with some new biographies to look forward to. Biographies are a fruit of war. The only thing she had not foreseen was a change of management. The Potters were leaving. The new people would take over at the Michaelmas quarter, and were called Fry.
Miss St John had never known what it is to be a slave. Britons never do. She was therefore unaware that her feelings at this piece of news were slavish. She told herself that it was grossly inconsiderate of the Potters, and that the Frys would certainly be a change for the worse. Once or twice she varied the assessment by hoping that the Frys might be a change for the better. The hope was quite as slavish as the dread. Both sprang from the unadmitted realization that she was being handed from one ownership to another, and could have no say in it. Yet when Mr Potter begged to introduce Mr Fry, Miss St John was curtly condescending to her new owner, and opined that the Fry fellow would now realize her value as a Permanent of long standing, even if he had not been made aware of it already.
The Fry fellow was a large pale man with heavy eyelids and a low slow utterance. When he referred to his wife he did so with a particular husbandly smile, as if to admit she was a weakness. Mrs Fry was of the type known as bright. She walked briskly, she smiled often, her head was always bound up in a bright-patterned scarf, and from under the scarf jutted two careful tinted curls whose position never 94varied by a hair’s-breadth from day to day. There was a Dennis Fry, too: an only child, who would shortly be demobilized from the Air Force. Both Frys talked of him constantly, and exhibited photographs. It was plain they doted. Miss St John allowed this to be natural. She herself had been an only child and doted on, once.
Assured that the Frys were, to all intents and purposes, Potters, Miss St John went on being as Permanent as before: snubbing the Transients, occupying the best chair in the lounge, and frowning at anyone who smoked a pipe in that apartment. Cigarettes she had no objection to; she sometimes smoked one herself. So when she returned from a Friday cinema to find a young man sitting in her chair and smoking a pipe, she settled herself on an inferior chair with a kind of bellicose placidity, sure that she would soon cook his goose.
Betty, the waitress, coming in with Miss St John’s teatray, saw the position, and hesitated.
‘Put it down by my usual chair, Betty. Thank you. That will do.’
Betty removed a tobacco-pouch to the mantelshelf, put down the tray, and went out. The tea-tray sat on the usual table. Miss St John sat on an unusual chair. This state of things had gone on for some time when the young man put down his picture paper, smiled at Miss St John, and remarked, ‘I say. Won’t your tea get cold?’
‘As it is not in the nature of tea to remain hot indefinitely, I should suppose it has already done so,’ replied Miss St John. There was a pause, during which the young man knocked 95out his pipe and began to search through his pockets, rolling from side to side of the deep chair. When he had abandoned the search, Miss St John remarked, ‘It’s on the mantelshelf.’
He rose to get it, and sat down again.
‘I hope it won’t spoil your tea if I smoke?’
‘You may in course of time observe that I am not taking tea.’
‘I wonder whose tea it is, then.’
‘Mine.’
He stared at her. At length, with the most brilliant of his smiles, he got up.
‘I say—I’m so sorry and all that. I’m afraid I have been keeping you off your perch.’
‘You have been sitting in my chair,’ she said, and sat down in it.
The chair was unpleasantly warm. The tea, on the other hand, was unpleasantly cold. The young man, standing with his back to the fire, looked down on her, and whistled under his breath. Even if the toasted bun had remained hot, it would have been impossible to enjoy it. Miss St John left it half-eaten, and took a slice of cake. The cake was stale, and so dry that she could hardly swallow it. It seemed to be moving about her mouth like a sandstorm. She gulped it down. A crumb lodged in her windpipe. Angrily and secretively, she began to choke. The young man thumped her on the back. At last, searing as a clinker, the crumb shot up again.
‘Well, now we ought to be friends for life, Miss St John,’ he said. Raising her flushed face, she glared at him through 96involuntary tears. Even more intolerable than facetiousness from a Transient was the fact that this Transient had somehow possessed himself of her name. ‘You are Miss St John, aren’t you? I’m Dennis.’
She said ‘Oh,’ and added, ‘Indeed,’ and picked up a biography. Soon after he had taken himself off, in came Mrs Fry, who collected the tea-tray, hemmed once or twice, and said, ‘I really must apologize for our Dennis being in your chair when you came in. I’m sure the poor boy was ever so sorry. But perhaps it was a bit of luck, all the same. Suppose you had been alone when you happened to choke!’
Miss St John was of the opinion that if she had been alone she would not have choked. ‘The cake was stale,’ she said.
‘Anything can happen with a choking-fit. But I do hope Dennis didn’t hit you too hard. He’s strong. He doesn’t realize how strong he is.’
Miss St John said briefly that Dennis had not hurt her in the slightest, and resumed the biography. She had had quite enough of Dennis and his strength. Shrug as she might, she could not shrug off the sensation of his masterful unembarrassed hand. That evening she sat up later than usual, turning page after page of a deceased headmaster of Eton with a deliberate consciousness of peace and quiet. It was almost midnight when she left the room. That odious young man was still dawdling at the foot of the stairs. He stood back for her to pass, but she remained in the doorway, adjusting a book-mark in the headmaster, until he was forced to precede her up the stairs, with no more than a ‘Goodnight, Miss St John.’ Even this was enough 97to recall the sensation on her back. Glancing up, rather against her will, she sought and found a glimpse of his large pink palm.
‘And that’s all the thanks I get,’ he said to himself. Really, he did not wish for thanks. He had a disagreeable impression that in some way he had compromised himself by relieving Miss St John of her crumb. The act, no larger than the crumb, stuck in his gizzard. Perhaps it symbolized too plainly his return to civilian life—the come-down, from loosing death, yourself in danger of extinction, on a hundred people all glitteringly unknown, to being obliging to old hags who would be better dead anyhow.
Yet he continued to be obliging. Obligingness was enforced on him by his appearance. His curls were the genuine gold his mother’s pretended to be. His smiles were as frequent as hers, but naturally much fresher, since there had not been so many of them. He obliged as nimbly as Ganymede, a militarized Ganymede with a toothbrush moustache.
When a similar moustache, but occupying at least ten foot of the screen, was presented to Miss St John’s gaze on the following Tuesday, it quite broke up her usual calm conviction that she was enjoying herself at the cinema. Normally, Miss St John’s afternoons at the cinema did not involve her in feelings of participation. Love-stories and crime-stories passed indifferently before her eyes. She was not interested in love, or in crime. What she looked for on the screen was continuity, one thing happening after another, as in the biographies, and, as in the biographies, handsome 98backgrounds with expanses of marble, or table-damask, or the Pacific ocean. But from the moment of apprehending a moustache like Dennis’s, Miss St John’s attention was engaged. Whether it lowered for a kiss, twitched in anger, was halted in a close-up or darted about no larger than a hornet among cactus-groves and religious processions, she watched it and watched nothing else. On her way out she saw Dennis also leaving the cinema. She hastened on, to make sure, at least, of her rightful chair; for it seemed to her inevitable that her tea would be spoilt by Dennis’s company, and that he would try to talk to her about the film. ‘I shall say it was a bad one,’ she said to herself.
But no one came into the lounge except a wretched woman with a cold in her head. A few glances, a raising of the eyebrows whenever she sneezed, was enough to keep her well away from the fireside. After a leisurely tea Miss St John lit one of her infrequent cigarettes. The chair was deep, and dry logs crackled in the grate, contrasting pleasantly with the patter of rain against the window. Even the gasps and snuffles of the woman with a cold became tolerable. To their accompaniment Miss St John reflected on the advantages of Permanence. She had been prepared to say a few words to Mrs Fry about that boy of hers hanging about in the lounge. But no words had been necessary. Mrs Fry could take a hint. The cake, too, had been fresh. Miss St John opened her book. Just now it was a royal favourite. Coming on the photograph of a general, his moustache seemed to her no more than a detail of military discipline.99
A Fry Christmas turned out to be so much richer than a Potter Christmas that Miss St John, exhibiting the seasonal goodwill, almost felt it, too, and mingled with hollyish sprightliness among the Christmas visitors. Mrs Fry certainly talked too much: ‘Our Dennis’s first Christmas in Civvy Street,’ but as her doting expressed itself in a chestnut stuffing for the turkey, Miss St John allowed that the young man had his uses. After Christmas, no doubt, he would go away.
After Christmas he did not go away. Commenting on this to Betty, Miss St John learned that Dennis was remaining at the Peacock in order to study the trade under his father’s guidance.
The shock she felt at this piece of news was in itself disquieting. To dislike a person because you choose to is one thing—because you have to, quite another. The compulsion to dislike Dennis began to menace Miss St John’s peace and quiet. His features again began to seep through the films and the biographies, and he completely spoiled an otherwise most promising life of a Balkan sovereign. Rather than allow herself to be put upon like this, she would move to one of the other hotels in the town. Then the long frost of 1947 set in, and immobilized any such project. It grew colder and colder. People talked of nothing but the cold, and the radio prated of fuel economy and crisis. Miss St John postponed her walk to the Public Library and spun out an Edwardian bishop, reading every word of his correspondence on such subjects as Disestablishment, the Licensing Laws, and the Doctrine of the Atonement, as scrupulously as though they 100were letters to his wife about dining-room carpets. Just as she decided she could suck his bones no further, it began to snow.
A dusky pallor brimmed up every room. No sound came from the wadded streets. It was as though one were a corpse, and lay under a white sheet amid a respectful silence. Traffic was at a standstill, no Transients broke the long silences of the lounge, the weather forecasts on the radio liturgically reaffirmed that the cold weather was likely to continue. If it had not been for Dennis, Miss St John would have read her Bible (she had, of course, a Bible). But Dennis strolled in and out of the lounge as boldly as an undertaker, and somehow she did not wish him to find her reading the Bible. She had just embarked on a fourth voyage through the bishop when Dennis entered on a pretext of making up the fire.
‘Still reading, Miss St John? You read a lot, don’t you?’
‘It saves me from conversation.’
‘That must be a fascinating book you’ve got there.’
Encountering yet again the bishop’s callow indecisions about his fitness to be ordained as deacon, Miss St John was jolted into candour, and said, ‘On the contrary. But it’s all I have till I can get out and change it.’
‘Why not try some of mine? Needs must when the Devil drives, or so they say.’
‘What sort of books are they?’
‘Crimes.’
Presently he came back with half a dozen brightly bound volumes, and tossed them into her lap.101
‘Two international gangs, three killers and a dog-track. Take your choice.’
After he had gone, she began to look through them. Discarding the dog-track, she settled down to one of the murders. She had had no idea that such books were so well printed. Two hours later, Mrs Fry found her absorbedly reading by a dead fire.
‘And he promised me he’d make it up! What a boy! Sometimes I think he’ll never give his mind to anything. But I suppose it’s natural. While he was in the Air Force he got into the way of living like a gentleman, and one doesn’t get out of such ways in a hurry.’ Still reading, Miss St John muttered that she supposed not. After an assaying glance, Mrs Fry continued, ‘And that reminds me, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Now that we’re all alone, wouldn’t it be more cheerful for you if we shared the lounge in the evenings?’
Miss St John looked up. It was as though she had heard, a long way off, a very loud noise. Mrs Fry hurried on.
‘They keep on telling us to save coal, you know. As a matter of fact, our own stocks are running low. We’ve had to give up having a fire in our own little room, as it is. We’d only look in for half an hour or so, just to warm up before bedtime.’
Supremacy disables the victorious. Miss St John had for so long imposed her will on the mild Potters that she had grown unaccustomed to dealing with any overt proposals to cross it. She could think of nothing to say beyond No. She said it. Mrs Fry deftly took it as meaning that Miss St 102John had no objection, gave a final pat to the rekindled fire, and hurried away.
Thereafter the Frys came into the lounge every evening—Mr Fry, a methodical man, remarking, ‘Still deep in crime, Miss St John? Don’t be alarmed. We aren’t the police.’ It was his little joke. But after her first abandonment, Miss St John found that she did not really enjoy crime-stories, and now she only read them to shelter herself against Dennis’s questions and repartees. The shelter was not reliable. His manner of speech was so closely modelled upon the style of the stories that there were times when she felt that she was being addressed by the gangster on the page instead of the young man at her elbow, and this impression was strengthened by his choice of subjects. It seemed to Dennis that he was amusing himself by talking to the old stick-in-the-mud about murders and fornications. In fact, he was yielding to a much deeper compulsion. With the savage morality of the young he discerned that Miss St John’s immovable law-abidingness expressed nothing more than the indifference with which one well-cherished vice can afford to disregard the flimsy satisfactions of crime. Completely selfish, she could afford to be completely virtuous. It was with a kind of proselytizing zeal that he set himself to force on her attention acts of lust and violence which she would always be too cautiously and coldly self-regarding to commit. He tried in vain. Her toughened self-satisfaction was more than a match for his young fury, and his attempts to open the old cat’s eyes opened them to nothing more perturbing than a recognition that Dennis was bored to extinction, and 103cramped by a manner of life quite unsuitable for a strong young man. The male subjects of the biographies, while strong and young, led active lives: they climbed mountains, they hunted foxes, they worked devotedly in slums; if their financial circumstances did not permit of such doings, they split rails or worked devotedly in foundries. The doted-on Dennis did nothing but stroll about with his hands in his pockets. Admitting this, and even feeling a kind of rusty compassion, she continued to find him almost insufferable, and snubbed him whenever an occasion offered. But the presence of the elder Frys protected him like a wadding. Mr Fry sat as though at the head of a table, fingering the coins in his pocket and smiling with manly condescension. Mrs Fry blunted the snubs by exclaiming, ‘Now, now, Dennis! You’ll end by making yourself unpopular.’
Even for a mother, Mrs Fry was uncommonly thick-skinned. Nothing could disabuse her of the notion that to know Dennis was to love him, and as the mother of the loved object she now presumed a considerable degree of love towards herself. Her manner had become far too affable by the morning when she said, ‘Hubby and I are so delighted to see what a liking you have taken to Dennis. You and he will be like old friends when the time comes for him to take over.’
‘Take over?’
‘Yes. Dennis is going to take over the Peacock as soon as he feels ready. We are just keeping the place warm for him.’
While she chattered on about a little bungalow to retire to, and the delights of keeping a few chickabiddies, Miss St 104John stared at a vase of daffodils. They were already wilting in the sun; for spring had come suddenly, alien after the long winter.
That afternoon Miss St John set out to find new accommodation. Of the other hotels in Dunwater, two were booked up till the autumn, and all demanded twice as much money as she was paying or could afford to pay. At the Crown and Anchor, the humblest hotel in the place, the landlady asked how much she could afford. Miss St John named a sum, making it ten shillings more than she paid at the Peacock. ‘I can’t think of anywhere that would take you for that,’ said the woman. She did not speak unkindly, but Miss St John turned her back and stumped out.
The next day Miss St John went by bus to the neighbouring town. It was a low place compared to Dunwater, but the prices were no lower. Returning, she remembered a stationer’s window where she had seen notices of furnished rooms displayed, and went to look in it. The advertisements were for the most part written in curly illiterate handwriting on shabby cards or cheap envelopes. When she went to inspect the rooms, they matched the shabbiness of their advertisements. Even so, they were all beyond her means, except for one bed-sitting-room, and that was so fusty, so wretched and so hedged about with stipulations that she rejected it. She framed an advertisement herself. Lady, elderly but active and healthy, requires … She wrote it out with particular care, but behind the dirty glass it looked much of a muchness with the others—the prams, typewriters and reliable daily women required, the fire-irons and fur necklets for sale. No answer 105came to her box-number. Stifling her memories of dirt and squalor, she went back to the house where she had seen the cheap bed-sitting-room. It was let.
Now, when she visited the public library, the wide floors, the bright windows, the apparatus of sober civic luxury intimidated her. She felt herself unrelated to them, just as she was unrelated to the flawless weather of the finest summer England had known for years. New biographies, the fruits of war which she had foreseen, were on the shelves. But new or old, books had become no more than something to hold up between herself and Dennis, and which at his bidding she would put down to listen with shamed bare face to his chatter about rapine and bloodshed. For his savage whim to violate her decorum had persisted, and matured into an obsession. Each was the other’s victim: her cold and stockish respectability had become a rubbing-post against which, willy-nilly, he must rub himself frantic, and the realization that she was living at the Peacock on terms which no other hotel would accept laid her at his mercy, since her conscience, being entirely materialistic, would not allow her to show fight where she knew herself to be under an obligation.
To escape, she must save money. She gave up her visits to the cinema and sat in the Borough Gardens instead. Passers-by glancing at the old woman dumped on a bench (chairs cost twopence), supposed she was a tramp; for in her desperate ambition to amass every possible penny she wore her oldest clothes and economized on the laundry and the cleaners. She was the more tramp-like because she 106had now fallen into a trick of talking to herself, muttering scraps of poetry learned in childhood, testing her memory of dates and foreign capitals, or commenting to herself on those who walked past. These assertions of a mind at liberty were of the nature of exorcisms: they warded off the frightful consideration of how she would fare later on, when there was no more fine weather allowing her to sit out of doors, and no more summer visitors to the Peacock to stand between her and Dennis. If people in the Borough Gardens supposed her to be a tramp, visitors at the Peacock knew her to be a bore. She encumbered them with attempts at conversation, had nothing to say, and could not be shaken off. Besides, she smelled.
One afternoon she was intercepted on the doorstep by Mr Fry. He had, he said, a little something to request, a little adjustment. Her heart began to bang like a door in an empty house.
‘The fact of the matter is, Mrs Fry and I, we’ve been talking things over with a view to what’s fair to all and will disoblige none. And we’ve got a little proposition to make.’
He had never spoken so slowly.
‘Business is good, this summer. Things are looking up.’
‘No doubt the fine weather has something to do with it,’ she answered, suddenly enabled to be cunning.
‘Exactly! Which being so, we must make hay while the sun shines. So what we have to suggest, Mrs Fry and myself, is that for the present you should take your tea in the little room.’
‘In your room?’107
‘Ours in a manner of speaking. But during the afternoon you can look on it as your own. You’ll find it very snug. By so doing, the lounge will be left free for Transients.’
He paused. His hand stirred the coins in his pocket.
‘I’m sure you’ll see our point of view, Miss St John. Being here as a Permanent, and on such special terms, I am quite sure you will see our point of view.’
Bewildered by relief and ignominy, and the ignominy of feeling relief, she turned mechanically towards the lounge. Mr Fry coughed, and opened the door of the little room.
He had been so sure of her assent that the tea-tray was already set on the partially cleared table, and a small bentwood chair drawn up. For the rest, the little room contained a desk, two filing-cabinets, a linen-press, a sewing-machine, a dressmaker’s dummy robed in a faded cretonne wrapper, a safe, two stuffed armchairs and a wicker one, all greasy and familiarized. She sat down, and immediately became conscious of the noises in the room. The blindcord bobbin tapped on the window-pane. A newspaper thrown down on the floor rustled intermittently. Two bluebottles, caught on the dangling flypaper, buzzed on different notes. One buzzed more feebly than the other, being nearer exhaustion. Ravenous with shock, she devoured bread and butter which was bread and margarine, till only one slice remained. She mastered herself then, and left it. Sipping her tea, she looked at the trade calendars on the walls: horses ploughing, a child feeding a parrot, a thatched cottage … Suddenly, there was a new noise in the room. The wicker chair had creaked. As she listened, it creaked again. She sprang up and touched 108the cushion. It was warm. She knew infallibly that Dennis had been sitting in it.
That afternoon she was left in peace. The next afternoon she found Dennis in the wicker chair, smoking his pipe, and reading the evening paper. The tobacco smoke drifted round her. It made her throat dry, and with that, and her haste, she began to cough. Remembering how she had choked, and how he had thumped her back, she broke into a sweat, thinking that he would hit again, but this time more roughly and shamelessly. But his reading absorbed him, and it was not till some minutes later that he laid down the paper and began to talk about a murder reported in it. The murdered woman was a street-walker, and elderly. This conjunction of age and profession enabled him to torment Miss St John very piquantly.
For the next few days she went recklessly to a teashop. But having been tempted by a sixpenny ice, she panicked at the thought of further extravagances, and went back to the little room. The little room faced west, and was stiflingly hot. It wilted even Dennis’s powers of disagreeable conversation. But he could torment in silence, too. Sometimes he would walk slowly round the table, staring at her as though she were on exhibition in a cage. Sometimes he feigned to make love to the dressmaker’s dummy, tweaking at the wrapper, and snuffing the brown holland bosom. Miss St John tried another expedient. This was to abjure her tea and sit in the Borough Gardens till dinner-time. Parched with thirst and stupefied with headache, she sat watching the tennis-players and the 109slow clock. Sometimes fragments of passing conversation lodged in her ears, and rang on there, meaningless as music. Then, one afternoon, the word murder alighted on her hearing. ‘Did you see that another of those wretched women has been murdered? It’s as bad as Jack the Ripper.’ ‘Oh well, I suppose the poor creatures expect it.’ The shadows of the two speakers flicked over her, and were gone. The words remained, and she sat nursing them, a figure of such self-forgetting and abject misery that a young man on his way to the tennis-court turned back and laid a half-crown on the bench beside her hand. Miss St John instantly rose to her feet and walked away.
After ten days’ resistance, she gave in, and told Betty, forcing herself to speak unconcernedly, that she would have her tea served in the little room as usual. ‘The old cat’s come back to her saucer,’ commented Betty, reporting this to Mrs Fry. Mrs Fry did not even smile. The heat and the busy season had knocked the spirit out of her. She looked careworn and listless, only her two curls retained their spruce appearance. ‘I know someone who won’t be best pleased,’ continued Betty. ‘Poor Mr Dennis, he doesn’t seem to be in the best of spirits anyhow, and I should think this’ll be the last straw.’ ‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Mrs Fry, suddenly alert. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Dennis. He overdid himself on that week-end in town, that’s all.’
Dennis was there to witness Miss St John’s return to the little room, getting up to bow ceremoniously, and saying, ‘Miss St John, I presume? Why, you are quite a stranger. May I have the pleasure of dusting your chair?’110
The taunting manner was just as usual, but he stared at her as though she had suddenly taken on a meaning for him.
‘And where have you been all this long while?’ he continued. ‘What wonderful weather we are having, are we not? It really seems quite a pity to come indoors.’
It was plain enough that he knew she had been sitting tealess in the Borough Gardens. Keeping up his pretence that her return to the little room was a return from an authentic absence, he expatiated on the benefits of a little change. He, too, had been away for a few days, seeing life. Enduring his mockery, and telling herself that it was nothing new and no more than she expected, she was presently driven to entertain a most fantastic surmise: that Dennis was glad to see her.
She was too much bewildered by the notion of such a development to speculate whether it would make things better or worse. His loquacity saved her from having to answer him, that, at any rate, was so much gained. She bundled away her impression of having been welcome, and hoped he might not be there next day. He was there. When she entered, his expression was so savage and morose that she hastened to sit down with her back to him, opening the book she was too nervous to read. On his return from Switzerland Canon Edgeworth took up once more the project of furthering the establishment of an organisation designed to promote the welfare of those engaged in the boot and shoe trade … The words were still dancing about the page when Dennis began to talk. Again she received this extraordinary impression that during her exile in the Borough Gardens their 111relationship had changed. His familiarity, which had been as formalized as an obscene gesture, assumed an almost boyish quality of gush and self-commendation; it was as if he were sitting up to beg for a lump of sugar off her tea-tray; and when he resorted to his threadbare jest of imploring her not to choke herself, he grew quite sentimental as he recalled their first encounter, when, as he said, she might have died if he had not intervened. Resigned to this new variety of persecution, she drank and munched, munched and drank, giving more attention to the recovered solace of her afternoon tea than to his rigmaroles.
Though she had lost any real hope of her advertisement at the stationer’s, she continued to call there once a week. Doing so gave a regularity to her days, and replaced the Friday visit to the cinema. One afternoon, interrupting her usual, ‘I have called to inquire,’ the stationer handed her a card, saying that it had been left five days before, and that it was a pity she had not called sooner.
‘Where is Albion Terrace?’
‘Behind the slaughterhouse.’
Her bedraggled dignity reared up, and she said severely, ‘That is out of the question.’ But after she had left the shop, she turned about and went in search of Albion Terrace. Though it lay in the poorest quarter of the town, it had retained a kind of jettisoned gentility. Miss St John noticed that the windows of number six were cleanly curtained and that its doorknob was polished. She was telling herself that one would soon grow accustomed to the smell from the gasworks, when a girl ran past, jostling a perambulator 112and screaming. Heads popped out of windows, more people came running, children darted among them like firecrackers, and a cow charged down the street, dragging along two men who were wrenching at her horns. Miss St John hurried into an alleyway. The alley branched into further alleys; before she could feel herself in safety, she knew herself to be lost. Her tongue was so swollen with fear that she did not feel able to ask her way. She stumbled on, tossed from street to street, rebounding from blind alleys, pursued by bursts of laughter, stared at by impassive men on doorsteps, and bewildered by a growing sensation that she was not in Dunwater at all. When at last she caught sight of the Minster spire it seemed to belong to another life.
Nearly an hour behind her usual time she walked into the little room. It was so homelike, so securely familiar, that she scarcely troubled to notice if Dennis were there.
‘I thought you would never come!’
His voice was so warped by impatience, and fatigue had put her so much off her guard, that she replied, ‘Why, did you want me?’
‘Did I want you? My dear Miss St John, you know I cannot bear to miss a moment of your society. No one appreciates me as you do. There is no one else I can tell my little secrets to. Besides, you make me laugh, you keep me fresh and jolly.’
It was as though he did indeed depend on her, and now meant to punish her for keeping him waiting. But the tea-tray was still there. Her hand shook so much that she could barely lift the pot. She sat impaled between Dennis behind 113her and the headless watchfulness of the dressmaker’s dummy in its corner by the door.
She realized that for some minutes she had been hearing only the buzzing of the flies on the flypaper. She drew a long breath, and poured out another cup of tea. Instantly the wicker chair creaked.
‘I’d give a lot to know how many cups of tea I’ve seen you put away since our first merry meeting. What an introduction! Fate threw us together, as you might say. That little crumb that took the wrong turning … that’s what set the ball rolling! If I saved your life, Miss St John, you’ve certainly changed mine. It’s been a mutual … What’s that?’
The door opened. Mrs Fry stood on the threshold. Her face was grey and brittle as if something had withered it.
‘Dennis! Dennis dear, you’re wanted. They want to have a word with you.’
There were two police officers behind her, and now they came forward.
‘Dennis Fry, I am going to arrest you for the murder of—’
There was a crash of breaking glass. Sitting with her eyes fixed on the teapot, Miss St John disassociated herself with the struggle behind her.
‘I’ll come, I’ll come. I’ll do anything in reason. God rot the whole beastly lot of you! And as for her, sitting there … Well, it’s goodbye, Miss St John!’
Panting, and with blood streaming from his hand, Dennis was led past her.
‘I suppose I can take my hat.’114
Mrs Fry held it out to him.
‘Oh, Dennis, Dennis, it can’t be true! I know it must be some ghastly mistake. I can’t believe such a thing!’
‘More fool you, then,’ he retorted. One of the officers said, as though he were continuing an interrupted sentence, ‘You need not say anything at this stage, but if you do so, it will be taken down and may be given in evidence.’
After they had gone, Miss St John rose softly and nimbly, and closed the door, which had been left open. The little room seemed to be spinning round her, and she must keep its excitement to herself. For she was alive, saved by a miracle. Not only was she not murdered, not only was she still here—but Dennis had been taken away. Nothing remained of him but the sighing wicker chair with its lap spotted with his blood. In step with the spinning room she perambulated round the table, holding a slice of cake in her hand. A phrase swam into her mind: The bread of freedom. A quotation from a biography, no doubt, for it was not the sort of thing that anyone would actually say. She took a bite of cake. A pistol shot cracked out. It was so immediate a sound that it seemed to her she must have been wounded by it. Oh! she exclaimed, with her mouth full. A moment later she exclaimed again. A silly crumb had gone the wrong way. She set herself to cough it up. How tiresome! It was still there. She did not seem able to cough as vigorously as usual, the energy of her coughing only drove the blood into her head. She attempted to beat herself on the back. Her hands, flapping ineffectively, drew no strength from her heavy arms. A swallow of tea would do it. But the cup 115was empty. Well, that could be overcome, she must pour out another cupful. The essential thing was to keep one’s presence of mind. She saw her hand take a lump of sugar and drop it into the cup. That was a waste of time, and silly. But the teapot was there. She had only to lift it, it could not be as heavy as all that. She took a firmer grasp, and raised it. But a dart of anguish ran along her arm, the pot tilted, all that was left of the tea poured on to the tray. The milk-jug was empty, they never gave her enough milk. Oh, she was dying, she would choke to death, unless she could get help! She went on all-fours, trying to vomit. She saw the leg of the table, and in a frantic attempt to attract attention, she pulled at it. The table swayed, and toppled, and very, very slowly the tray fell off with a clatter of crockery. The sugar-basin spun like a foolish top, and came to a standstill under her nose. Beyond the closed door everyone was talking, a noise like waves on shingle, but inside her was an even louder noise, a noise so loud and awful that the tea-things had seemed to fall in silence. And now, but this time in the back of her head, more pistol shots were going off, exploding with black flashes behind her eyes.
Momentarily recovering consciousness, she looked round the little room and saw with perfect lucidity that she was alone in it.