“Now, Eve, what’s up?”
Eve could only point. “Why breed bulldogs?” she whispered; and then Joe saw the resemblance too and grinned. “Boy! What a dog; wherever did they get it from?” he asked.
“I wonder! It’s so unlike Tippett.” The black muzzle was too smug and restful; for Selina acted, if she did not look, a lady with a past. “Perhaps some evacuated customer dumped it here? You couldn’t take a thing like that on a train.”
It added somehow, in spite of its vulgarity, to the atmosphere of the place. A few feet away the buses stopped on their way to and from the City, the Underground was beneath them, but here, as Angelina said, they had “a corner of an English garden flowering in our great Metropolis.” You walked up to the Warming Pan if you wanted a recipe for quince marmalade or if Auntie had trapped a swarm of bees in her garden and had written for advice. Somebody was always there to embellish the information with lore and local anecdotes, just as if London were still a collection of villages along the Thames. There was a hand-drawn poster on the mantelpiece advertising a litter of terriers; gradually the numbers had been altered as the puppies had been sold, till now only a forlorn two, written up in red ink, remained. Yet the room was bleak; foreigners, Eve thought, would hurry away from its cheerlessness, but if it were destroyed, and she wondered if the spirit of a place survived a bomb, something draughty but kind would be broken. Perhaps there would be no more generations to potter in and out of gardens, plaiting straw hats and ready to murder each other over their delphiniums? How they had tormented her in childhood, calling her out to pick raspberries or shell peas; but once you had escaped, there was something proud and even perceptive about them. They respected your soul if they did not respect your leisure.
They sat in front of their empty plates, smoking. Eve hesitated to be the first to move, and Joe thought gloomily of the long ride home. In such a blackout there was not even the fun of watching his fellow passengers, and it was only too easy to miss the stop and to have to crawl a mile, feeling his way back by the walls. One or two customers left, cautiously lifting the curtain that kept the light from the street. “Oh, dear,” Eve said suddenly, looking up at the clock, “do you think it will ever end?”
“What, the raids?” It was hard for a girl to have to go to work every morning, over rubble and broken glass, after a night in a shelter. “Look, Eve, why don’t you join up? You could be out in the country with a swell group of girls. Don’t let on that you’ve ever been in business, but make them train you as a driver.” She would look grand at the wheel, he thought, instead of the old maid with no chin who came round with the van.
“No,” Eve said, picking up her bag. “I didn’t mean the raids, I meant the war.” There were worse things than danger; there was this terrifying sense of having a cylinder full of fog clapped over one’s face.
“The war?” Joe scratched his ear tip; the cold wind always made it itch. “Don’t worry about that.” It was strange how a girl’s mind worked, but it must be that dingy office. He could not, now, see further than his brilliant present. “All we have to do is to be prepared. They couldn’t invade us really, but they’re so stupid they might try.”
What is going to happen, Eve thought, staring at the broad, wind-burnt face in front of her; Joe doesn’t want it to end. So many people were happy, really happy, now for the first time; and others, like herself, were suicidal. “I always wanted to see Paris,” she said, then wished she had not spoken.
“England’s good enough for me; you can’t even get your own cigarettes the other side of the Channel, and a chap I know told me the food was terrible, all sauce and sawdust.” He wondered superstitiously if it were good to talk about travel; sometimes a rumour flew around that they might be drafted overseas. “I might get sent to Egypt,” he said, “but Africa wouldn’t be …”
“As bad as Europe,” Eve finished the sentence for him.
“Well, you don’t like foreigners, do you?” He was so sure that he never waited for her to reply. “Seriously, Eve, you ought to get out of London. This bombing—and, mind you, I don’t blame you—is getting on your nerves.”
“Oh, I’m all right. It’s a splendid excuse to turn up late in the mornings. Instead of saying the bus was late, I just say I walked.”
How hard it was for human beings to adjust to one another! The roots of war were always present in daily life, for it was not really crimes that upset people but their inability to enjoy the same pleasures. She wanted to travel and Joe wanted to take an engine to bits. Was there no way of persuading people to be tolerant, to let each other alone? Still, it was stupid to spoil what she hoped had been a successful afternoon by dragging in philosophy.
