Beowulf

to comfort him without these fiendish noises and the Government cutting down his butter. Let them keep his meat if they wanted, but he had never tasted margarine, poor as he had been, and he was not going to begin now. Perhaps he felt so gloomy because he was restless and the room was cold; it did not do to resign one’s self to melancholy. Very cautiously he sat up, pulled a second dressing gown about his shoulders, and felt for his slippers. An icy draught blew under the badly fitting door. Most people of his age would be stiff, half bedridden; if he did not leap up, at least he was as agile as he had been at sixty. He filled the kettle, set a match to the gas fire.
It was too chilly to open the window, and the black paper sternly obscured the light. The sputtering flame scorched Horatio’s legs but he dared not leave its comfort. Getting up had never been a problem in the old days when he had crept out at dawn with his easel to watch the cows advancing with slow, comfortable steps over multitudinous little flowers. Those were the hours that he would choose to live again; how one had tossed away one’s riches! For the very sky that was symbolical of peace, of heaven, was desecrated by barbarian beasts flinging missiles at the roof, at his own head! He had seemed to be walking in a wood the night before, remarkably like the little copse near his early home, when from nowhere something had sprung at him with a great noise—then he had wakened to the sirens. Oh, why were people destructive? They had pulled down the windmill he had painted, they laughed at his lace valentines; it reminded him of that terrible moment in his boyhood that he had never quite forgotten, when a horde of shouting, older boys with feathers and wooden tomahawks had sprung on him from behind trees and knocked him, sprawling, into the moss that had been his castle.
He would feel better, he always did, after he had had a cup of tea.

2
SELINA TIPPETT, WHO ought to have been called Madge, trotted down the stairs. Ruby, she surmised, would be late; she always was on Thursday, a day nobody at the Warming Pan had time to stand around and chat with her. It was astonishing how the draught got under the windows; the corridors (“so much lighter than you usually find in London houses”) were hardly an advantage in winter. A solitary china plate hanging on the wall looked as if its fragile colours were not worn but frozen out of it. Undoubtedly Angelina had got her chill running up from the hot kitchen to see that the beds had been made. If I were not in business, Selina thought, I should certainly wear mittens; and she saw herself suddenly, as clearly as if Mr. Rashleigh had painted the scene in a calendar, standing outside her father’s door one Christmas Eve and pulling a pair of grey, woolly, fingerless gloves out of a packet with “to Miss Roly Poly” in Cook’s writing on the tiny, attached label. Mittens … they were mixed up with snowmen and her mother’s displeasure. “Selina, your hair ribbon is untied; I will not have you playing with those rough boys.” Dear me, she frightened herself by saying the words aloud, how the world has changed since I was ten. Changed for the better, too, in spite of the raids. Nobody questioned a girl like Evelyn about her friends, she went unchallenged to her work in the mornings; even, in peacetime, might aspire to a post abroad.
“Good morning, Timothy.” The shop blinds were down, of course, for they did not open until ten, but the floor was swept and the tables replaced in rows. “Good morning, madam, it was a terribly noisy night.” Timothy flicked his duster over the office desk and chair and waited with his permanent inborn sadness for comfort. “Yes, if we listen to the Prime Minister we shall have worse to endure before it’s over”—the people, poor dears, were being magnificent but it only encouraged them to lose their nerve if you let them discuss the horrors. “It was a land mine, madam, at the corner of the Square; the milkman told me it ’ad ’it two empty ’ouses. Fairly blazing, it was; at eleven last night, I could see to read the time as plain as day.”
“Indeed, we must be thankful that there was not more damage.” These extraordinary events needed, Selina thought, a new and quite other vocabulary, but morale—that was the important thing; it was the difference that severed England, more than the Channel did, from the Continent. “The best thing to do, Angelina,” she had repeated this twice to her partner the previous evening, “is to go on as if everything were absolutely normal. The staff copies us unconsciously and in that way we are influencing not just Ruby, Timothy, and the customers but perhaps hundreds of people.” For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids. It was inspiring really, especially on such a cold, dreary morning, to think how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.
In wartime, however, it was impossible to be gay or brave for long. Selina glanced at her desk; there was a pile of letters stacked on the worn leather, and the contents were bound to be unpleasant. Some people, she supposed, really liked their post; news came from strange, far-off places or spoke of acquaintances amusingly. A letter ought to be the sharing of a life, but now correspondence had come to mean answering stupid questions after the day’s work or pointing out an error in the gas account. The postman himself was Fate with a large F, for at nine or eleven or four he might