Beowulf

a good idea, though a little gloomy, to have homes for all the old. Still, as it appeared that Britain was not organized—“and, you know, dear, elderly people, and I have had so much experience with them, do get dreadfully jealous of each other”—it cost them very little to let him remain upstairs. Nobody would take an attic these days, anyhow. After all, when Angelina spoke of her “new England” it was always of a world of young people swimming or riding motorcycles, and she was not really mechanical, no, indeed, though Selina hardly liked to tell her so; her colleague could not even hang a picture up without help.
Selina turned back towards her desk. The room was warm and gay, but for the first time she saw clearly a possible To Let sign at the windows and deserted, empty corridors. As long as I have a pair of hands and work (how often she had said this) nothing matters. Yet it was not mere selfishness now to be afraid; there were Timothy and Ruby, even the furniture itself that had been cleaned and polished for so many years. There are worse things than war, she caught herself thinking, though this, of course, was the result of war. Perhaps the bombing would stop and people would come back again or a factory would be opened; perhaps even some morning they would wake up and find that there was an armistice? “Timothy,” she called, “don’t forget to move the cloths from the radiator before we open the shop.”

3
THE SHOP WAS SMALL, a few doors from the Warming Pan, and so inconspicuous that strangers, unless they knew, dismissed it as a warehouse. There was a dingy, Victorian quality about the windows, and the white canisters standing on the counter reminded Horatio, as he stepped inside, of an apothecary’s den. He longed to run his fingers over the blue spirals down their sides or sniff the lids; they must hold spices, he thought, as well as coffee. One expected the owner to be eccentric and bad-tempered, and sometimes Mr. Dobbie was both; at a first glance he looked like an innkeeper, but to the initiate the passivity of his oblong face suggested tea and china.
Horatio had timed his visit exactly. Jim, the boy, was still polishing the handles of various doors. In ten minutes shoppers would arrive, from real households where they had a wad of ration books and bought not in miserable ounces but in pounds. He looked forward to this chat, for it was a contact with the life he missed so sorely now that his wife was dead and there were no more Sunday suppers where his pupils (“Quite Bohemian, my dear, from all ranks and classes, but art—art is unity”) were welcomed.
“Good morning, Mr. Dobbie, and how are you this morning? You had rather a noisy night of it, I am afraid.”
“Noisy! We were up till two with that fire in the Square.” A ledger banged as if its owner would like, with such a gesture, to smash up the war.
“Ah, yes, incendiaries. Well, well, to think I didn’t hear them, but my hearing’s not so good as it used to be; age, Mr. Dobbie, age, but it’s uphill work quarrelling with time!”
“Quite.” Mr. Dobbie stared at the empty packing cases that cut off most of the light. “Take the mat outside and shake it, Jim, we must try to get rid of that dust.”
“Sometimes I feel that to be hard of hearing these days is a blessing in disguise.”
“Certainly it has its compensations. And what can I do for you this morning, Mr. Rashleigh?”
It was an inauspicious day, Horatio reflected; Mr. Dobbie was tired. “Why, the same as usual, with Whitehall’s permission.” He handed over his book. “All this rationing must be very bad for business.”
“Bad! It’s ruinous. And to think,” Mr. Dobbie’s forehead wrinkled into as many lines as the Chinese characters above him, “to think that the Conservative Party did this to me. Lied to us, they did, lied to us… and I voted for them at the last election!” Dobbie could bear any stupidity ill, least of all his own.
“Don’t say that, Mr. Dobbie, I am sure Mr. Baldwin meant well even if he was misinformed.”
“Misinformed! Misinformed, Mr. Rashleigh, is hardly the word to use. What do we pay the Government for, I should like to know, with good money taken from your pocket and mine, if they go and deliberately mislead us? They knew—half a pound of second-quality breakfast, Jim, for the gentleman—they knew what those Germans were arming for; and where are they now? Helping us to put out fires and freeze in the dark? Oh, no, most of them are in Canada, safe and warm and toasting their toes at a log fire whilst we, who were idiotic enough to vote for them, catch bronchitis and pay for Spitfires.” He snatched the funnel from Jim’s hand and poured tea through it into a twist of paper.
“I have heard,” Horatio ventured timidly, “that in Canada they have radiators.”
“Doesn’t matter, they’ve feathered their nests all right. It’s a shame,” he added kindly, “that a gentleman of your age can’t have a pot of tea when he chooses without having to count the leaves.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dobbie, it is a little hard, especially, if I may say so, for one who has a palate for the beverage. Better a cup a day of the best, though, than four out of some nameless packet.” He hoped Mr. Dobbie had not noticed how many months it was since he had been able to afford his favourite blend.
“You are right, you are supremely right; now which was it that Mrs. Rashleigh used to come in for at Christmas?” Dobbie glanced admiringly up at the jars above his head. “This one, wasn’t it?” He pointed to a canister.
“Yes, that was Margaret’s gift to me for years. Such a bitter loss,” he sighed, “I was thinking of