Beowulf

bring the papers that she was sure to receive one day: either they must pay the arrears of rent or the landlord would have regretfully (she saw the polite, pinched phrase) to give them notice.
There was a circular from the Ministry of Food. Butler’s, of course, wanted something on account, they always did at the beginning of the month. She planned to take them methodically but it was no use; she had to run them through her hands, anxiously, until she was sure that the dreaded white envelope stamped with Private had not arrived. Only when she was certain of the landlord’s silence could she begin to slit them open with her pet paper knife, the one with a carnelian handle made from pebbles she had once picked up on the beach, and begin to arrange them for reply.
Omens… if one let one’s self believe in them, she would say that something was about to happen. Selina turned, not the pages of the ledger with the fish account nor the note with indecipherable signature, but a great photograph album of the Warming Pan. She would never forget an evening when she had faced Miss Humphries in a dreary Bournemouth hotel. The coffee had been cold and powdery for the third evening in succession, but she had seen herself, exactly as if in a dream, walking down a street past an empty shop.
Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom. Only those people, she thought, who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was. From Friday morning until the following Thursday noon she read aloud, matched wool, pushed the bath chair, or dreamed whilst “poor Miss Humphries” slept, but on Thursday afternoon she strolled out, dressed as she herself chose, to meet some friend at the local confectioner’s. They discussed their “posts,” the Church, the Court, the necessity to keep in touch with fashion but not to be dominated by it, and the food. Her budget permitted her to spend only one and six, but such a sum offered vast possibilities of choice. She could have, for example, buttered toast or scones, a piece of plum cake, a tartlet, or some sandwiches. There was no temptation in expensive foreign-looking pastry. Selina collected teashops as wealthier people tasted wines. Sometimes she had taken the train into the country, ostensibly to pick bluebells, really to try out a recommended “Farmhouse Tea.” In one place the butter was good, another excelled in crumpets but the cakes were soggy; she had never found “the toast, the temperature, and the tea,” as she paraphrased to Angelina gaily, all together. Then, that evening when everybody in the sombre hall except herself had been well over seventy, she had seen it suddenly, complete even to its name, the perfect meeting place, not smart but homelike, with gay primrose china and tiny, polished tables. “No, Selina, people always lose money on them,” Angelina had insisted. It had happened to be her free evening and they had been sitting together in her bedroom with the door open, in case Miss Humphries should call. “Of course, but nobody ever runs them properly; it’s the little things that they always forget, but men are so insensitive.” That, at least, was a point upon which they were both agreed. “Yes, but as often as not they are started by women, the fat and fussy type. Now look at that place we went to last Saturday; the tea was filthy and the crumpets stank of margarine and there wasn’t a male in the place.”
It was Angelina’s way, her friend had thought, to oppose all projects not originated by herself. There were days during the next year when Selina almost talked herself into believing that the Warming Pan existed, whilst it had, all the time, the quality of pure dream until Miss Humphries had died, had left her unexpectedly three hundred pounds, and she had walked one morning into the ideal, empty shop.
The seven years telescoped themselves into one, for there had not been a day when she had not felt vibrantly, excitedly alive. She had been frightened at first, no, never when they had actually opened, only during those early moments when they had signed the lease, engaged the waitresses, and she had wondered if she would be able to pay the bills. She remembered now looking up at the newly distempered walls and saying to Angelina, “But will customers ever come?” It had been so astonishing when the first ones had arrived, a flustered lady with parcels and two quarrelling little boys. The second arrival, she had recognized her immediately, had been a governess. “Look, Angelina,” she had whispered, “there is somebody there, what must I do?” Yet it had been sheer gaiety, almost a pretense of being frightened; she had behaved as if she had been for twenty years, not a lady companion with excellent references, but the manageress of a smart hotel. Everything had happened just “as if it had been meant”; for Sarah, the assistant, whose help had been invaluable at the start, had married and left the place indisputably under Selina’s control. Angelina looked after the staff and the purchases, but her heart was really with the courses that she was always taking to improve, as she said, “the future of us women.”
“Number Seven is leaving this morning,” Timothy remarked. He had emptied the pails of water in the kitchen and had come back to spread his wet cloths on the radiator to dry. Strictly speaking, this was forbidden but Ruby made such a fuss if he cluttered the kitchen up that they pretended not to notice provided that he cleared them away by ten o’clock. “I saw the van draw up as I came down the street. Looks to me as if between the bombs and the people running to the country there won’t be a London left.”
“I read somewhere,” Selina said severely, “that it will