“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
