Beowulf

take three years and a half to lay the city in ruins.” It might be statistically correct but she could not help agreeing inwardly with Timothy, who looked the essence of gloom, that this was poor comfort after a noisy night.
“You can never believe what you read in them papers,” Timothy objected, appealing to her with damp, brown, spaniel eyes—it was the only phrase to use about him, if it did sound bookish.
“Well, we are not going to give the Germans the satisfaction of making us neglect our jobs; I think that inside handle could do with a rub this morning; it’s the dust, I know, from the explosions.” His glum uneasiness was irritating to the nerves. Selina was just as aware as Timothy that every person gone from the district meant one less possible customer. Those prewar days of January sales when they had served a hundred lunches in a morning had vanished as surely and inevitably as the snowballing moments of her first mittens. To think that she had ever grumbled about the smallness of their oven! Now it was not a question of putting savings in a bank for their old age but of meeting current expenses; she could not even think about the overdue rent. Of course, Selina would have liked to say to the porter, don’t you worry, when you can’t work for us any more there will be a pension waiting; but then someone would have to promise the same thing to Miss Tippett herself, and she could not see the landlord, for instance, offering them anything but notice.
How strange life was! They fulfilled a need in the neighbourhood; they were, as Selina often remarked, a cross between a village shop and the family doctor. They found old Mrs. Holmes a dressmaker, delivered messages to deaf Miss Clark. People rushed in to telephone; if they were favourites, to dump their parcels. They used them unthinkingly, she reflected, taking up a letter with an indecipherable signature, “… and I must have left the gloves on the window ledge, you could not help noticing them, they were an almost new brown knitted pair with blue dots on the gauntlets and besides your restaurant I was only at Barlow’s and the chemist’s and a cinema. Please send them to me registered and I will pay you back the postage the next time I drop in.” That must come from the angular woman who always grumbled about her table. Yes, the Warming Pan was useful, whatever Angelina might say. Her partner had behaved so oddly ever since she had gone to this new political course; it had been so much easier when she had taken up Eastern philosophy, for then she had made an effort to control her temper. Now she was scornful of the customers, called them the “stupid bourgeoisie,” when they were really such nice people. It made life very confusing.
“Timothy,” perhaps he would cheer up if she talked to him a little, “have you seen a pair of brown gloves anywhere? A customer says she dropped a pair here the …”—she looked at the date and at the calendar—“the day before yesterday.”
“Brown gloves, madam?” He was antagonistic immediately, as if she thought that he might have taken them. “There’s this one from last week.” He held up an object from the Found basket with a large hole in one worn, black finger.
“No, that’s not it. She says brown, and new. Probably she left them somewhere else.” Instinctively, Selina treated all customers as she had humoured a succession of Miss Humphries. “In the bus, I expect.”
“It’s surprising what people do leave in vehicles,” Timothy commented mysteriously, “’specially in trams.” He shook his leather and, looking at the doorknob with an almost hypnotized stare, started to flick away the dust.
Selina walked over to the window and began, through sheer habit, to arrange the trays of cakes. With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone. She had prided herself before that nowhere in all the district had good standard things and so much variety been united. There had always been nicely browned crumpets and thick gingerbread, rock cakes and buns, the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch. Certain afternoons (she remembered Miss Humphries), all she could have swallowed were teacakes with just the right amount of butter. Then there were other moments, after days indoors perhaps because of an east wind that caught the old lady’s chest, when a piece of seed cake, made from Grandmother’s mixture, had brought back blackberry days and times when lessons were the only threat to a placid routine of life. She looked sadly at the meagre row; there was something stinted and miserly about it. It was not the bombs that distressed her, awful as the noise was, so much as the lack of loaded trays to make up for the horrors of the night. She hated ration cards, less because she wanted more food herself than because they were a symbol of some poverty of spirit. They reminded her of vegetarian teachers with cramped ideas. If Angelina would only eat more, she would be less restless and talk less strangely. How detestable the propaganda of the Food Ministry was, with the emphasis upon oatmeal and raw carrots; were they not fighting for an England of plenty, for that older England of sirloins of beef and mountains of cheddar cheese?
It looked so cold out too, raw and winterly, and there was poor Mr. Rashleigh trotting up the street in his worn-out overcoat. Selina was thankful that Angelina was not there to see him. “That dreadful old man,” she would say, rapping the desk with her pencil. “But, Angelina, we can’t turn him out, he has nowhere to go.” She dreaded seeing again the contemptuous shrug of her partner’s shoulders. “In a properly organized Britain there would be places for such people.” Perhaps it would be