“If everybody leaves London,” Selina said, collecting the teacups, “perhaps they will declare a moratorium?” Crockery was another item. The price was going up by leaps and bounds, and there seemed no ending to the pieces that Ruby could chip. She fitted the milk jug cautiously behind the plates; they could have bought a whole set, she was sure, for what her partner had paid for that wretched dog.
“You will never get anywhere by worrying.”
“I know, dear, but I can’t stop thinking; and when I think, I worry. I am going now to arrange about sandwiches. If you don’t mind, I’d rather picnic in the shelter, because hearing that siren just as we are sitting down to supper gives me indigestion. I shall collect Rashleigh, because if anything did happen I should never be able to get him down those stairs, and Cook can fill the thermos with soup. After all, as long as the guns are firing it is very difficult to sleep.”
Was it dampness or was it the camp bed? Selina rubbed her neck as she got up, it seemed to be permanently stiff and she must remember to take her liniment down with her. It seemed monstrous that they should all be suffering so much. War… it was like an endless succession of rainy days in a small country place on a brief summer holiday. Oh, dear, every winter brought her a year nearer that date (she had watched it come to so many) when the hustle of the tearoom would be too fatiguing to be borne; and she had dreamed, not of escaping it, no, there was a moment when evasion was impossible, but of pushing it just a little further away. If I had my life over again, she thought, staring at the empty, crackling twigs of the plane trees, I should like to be a housekeeper in one of those funny little City houses. What fun it could be to sit in a high attic with a gable, overlooking the crowded streets, at one not with London only but with the inner kernel of it, with those early moments when Chelsea gardens were a day’s ride away. She imagined the pavement in the June light, a little fainter really than apricot, the men gone, the offices silent and herself painting (for if she were born into the situation that she wanted, she would also have the skill)… think of the history recorded in a solitary cornice! How often she had wanted to say to her companions, this is not dust, this is not smoke or cloud, it is a rainbow floating over battlements. Above all, she wanted to wait in the summer dusk and know that though it was holiday-time she did not have to go away and sit beside a bath chair on some promenade listening to Miss Humphries. London was unhealthy, Miss Humphries had always complained, but what was the using of living if you became a great, rank vegetable without any interests?
It was stupid to dream, her aunt had always reproved her for it, but tonight age haunted her. Poor Mr. Rashleigh, how sad it must be to feel sureness go, the skill of his hand. Worse than if he had never been a painter. What must he think of Beowulf? That dog… but she must try to be tolerant, it gave Angelina so much pleasure. “You will come down to the shelter, won’t you, dear, before the guns begin? I know you’ll laugh at me, but I have a feeling that it is going to be bad tonight. It makes me nervous to know that you are upstairs.”
They could hear the shop door constantly open and close, as Selina went out with the tray; the girls from neighbouring offices were coming in for early tea before the stampede home.
7
MR. BURLAP WALKED straight over to the window. “Bricks and mortar, Miss Wilkins,” it was his inevitable greeting but the new secretary was getting used to it, “bricks and mortar; ah, if I had my life to live over again I’d farm.” He looked down at the square that was full of plane trees and a half-dug shelter trench. “If we had not drifted away from Nature we should never have had this horrible war. You would never find bird-watchers raking up the skies with those miserable aeroplanes.” A silver barrage balloon floated above the black, desolate branches. “It’s going to be a dreadful night,” he said, wrinkling up his nose, “I hope I shall get home.” His mother worried so when he was late and he simply could not afford to ask for sick leave at present. Everything was upset and the raids made him feel—it was useless pretending that they didn’t—that life was not worth living.
“It must be a terrible journey, Mr. Burlap,” Rose Wilkins said respectfully, “especially now the days are so dark.”
“Yes, it means feeling my way to the coach stop in the morning, and crawling along the lane in pitch blackness at night. But we have the stars, Miss Rosy Wings, we have the stars. You must not think that I blame your ancestors for the bombers. Peter Wilkins did his flying in imagination, that is its proper place.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Burlap, but we never had a Peter in our family. My great-grandfather’s name was Alfred, I looked it up.”
“Dear, dear, I perceive that you have never adventured into the byways of our literature. Winged beings drew Mr. Wilkins, but his name was Peter, to an island full of marvels.
