Beowulf

September there had been sparrows outside, the bobbing tassels of a plane tree, and what he liked to call not cirrus but the nainsook puffets of a cloud. He looked angrily at the black square of paper that kept out the sky. He could have slept for hours after the barrage all night had it not been for the wireless.
It was Eve, and she was quite shameless about it. “I set my alarm for six forty-five and then I roll over and turn on the portable. A bit of swing wakes me up and helps me to get breakfast.” In a well-ordered world, girls would not tear down the stairs to business, clattering like a fledgling manat-arms in a leather coat without even the pretence of a cap on short, smooth hair. It was so different from the picture he remembered, a lawn with croquet colours as the only primitive note (it had been an idea of his to bring out a set of balls in pastel shades), where static figures in silk had watched the game from rustic seats. Nature, clouds, trees, peonies, had moved, just as a painter would have wished, only the people had been quiet, grouped around his wife (and he saw her again for the first time) smiling at the daisies in her hand.
The noise was worse than a dozen roundabouts. “My dear,” he had remonstrated gently, “I am an old man, old enough to be your grandfather, but I like gaiety as well as anyone else if it is melodious. How can you bear to listen to such discord?”
“Oh, it has a plan, only it’s hard to explain. I do turn it low so as not to disturb you.” There had been no question of apology or silence. Forty years ago Eve would have been taught to creep past his door had a necessary errand called her forth early in the morning. It was all a question of money, of greed; dignity had vanished from the world with the passing of Queen Victoria. His wedding day, such a coincidence, had been the birthday of the Queen. People needed to return to the old simplicities, not to say, like Evelyn (perhaps the child had not really meant to be rude), “And whom would you get to carry your scuttle of coal three flights up from the basement? You ought to be thankful that they invented gas fires.”
“She’s steadier than most,” Miss Tippett had commented when he had, no, not complained, there was no vice more intolerable than intolerance, but just mentioned the wireless. “We old folks have got to march with the times.” Of course, nobody could accuse Selina of artistic sensibilities. Poor woman, she was one of nature’s less successful drawings, a little sketch scribbled on a telephone pad, and he chuckled, of superimposed O’s from rump to chin.
Eleven and fourpence, that was the chemist. Agatha grumbled that he took care of himself almost to foolhardiness. “I may as well die from a bomb in my bed as from pneumonia in the shelter.” Yet if other people would tramp down to the cellar at night, catching heavy colds, how could he help his bronchitis coming on? This was the week to buy himself some tea. He must have paints, he needed a new camel’s-hair brush. There was a book of stamps; three, five, no, he must have ten shillings for the extras. “I can’t think, Cousin Horatio, why you have to write so many letters?” Agatha did not know what it felt like to be a lonely old man after thirty years of real domestic happiness. Try as he would, the fuel bill went up and up and he owed Miss Tippett five weeks for the rent. However promptly the monthly cheque arrived, he would need one pound eighteen, no, better say two pounds, to clear everything on his list.
Something would have to be done. There had been a time when he had sold his water-colour sketches for three guineas each. He sat up, pulled his dressing gown about his shoulders and glanced down the names in his address book. Some of them were marked at the side with a cross in red ink, others were underlined in blue. H.I.J…. old Mrs. Johnson had been so good to him, perhaps he would try her daughter. He lifted over the little tray with his writing block and settled it on his knees.
“Dear Lady…” All he could remember of the Johnson girl was a snapshot that her mother had sent him of a school girl with a big white bow on her hair, standing on the beach. “An old man has few pleasures save remembrance, and I am an old man, seventy-six years of age on my next birthday though my neighbours (kind folk if I may not call them friends) teasingly ask me when I am joining the Home Guard? Turning over my papers yesterday, for I would not wish to cause pain or trouble after I am gone, and Jerry” (no, that was too familiar, he scratched the word out) “and the Germans have paid us Londoners rather too much attention of late, I found this letter from your mother that she wrote to me many years ago about a tiny water colour of mine, Sunrise over London Tower. She had had the delightful thought to send some copies to her friends at Christmas. You will smile, I expect, but lying here at night with the guns going overhead, I could not help wondering what happened to those pictures? I should like to think, vanity, you will say, that my brush was the means of first acquainting some young boy or little girl with the glorious history of their native land.”
Horatio shivered. It was chilly writing before breakfast. He pushed the tray aside and pulled up the blankets again, well over his ears. He hoped that Miss Johnson, he had never heard that she had married, was not one of those aggressive women who