Beowulf

meal. “No use to mope,” he would say if she were late. “’Ow about a nice cup of tea?”
A distant clock struck five. It was almost blackout time. Some rubble shifted and two of the diggers jumped cautiously to the ground. Tears rolled down Ruby’s cheeks as the details of her last visit crowded into her mind. Connie had been less buoyant than usual; she hadn’t bothered to turn the scarred side of her face away from the customers, as she usually did. “I may ’ave to shut,” she had said, popping the last pie on the tray into Ruby’s basket, “I can’t get no eels.” She had stared across the street as if the ocean were the other side of it, as puzzled as a lost puppy. “Go on, h’armistice will be ’ere and you’ll be dancing down the streets with us before you’ve ’ad time to turn round.” It made all the difference to Ed’s temper if he got the tea he liked, and Connie was probably working too hard now that she was alone. “It’s Alec I worry about,” she had answered, slamming the drawer of the cash register so that it sounded exactly like a tram, “’e’s so fond of the place, and sometimes I wonder if the Government don’t mean to close all us small people down.”
Now Connie and the counter and the shop were all part of the fire-swept graveyard, this rubble that was neither khaki nor grey but a queer colour nobody had seen before, sweeping up to the ragged brick edge that marked the first shell of the still standing houses. A knot of blackout curtains flapped from a hole that had once been a window. Ruby sniffed and wiped her eyes; it was quiet now that the picks had stopped, all that she could hear was a newcomer’s violent sobbing. “I couldn’t get no fish so I went to my sister’s for the night. I wanted to match the teapot lid, the one that got smashed, and my sister said, ‘It isn’t right for you to be wandering round in all that blackout. You stay with me.’”
The woman, she was in brown with a veil round her hat, was staring at the pit in front of her. “Mee ’ome,” she wept, and her sobs were small explosions in the silence, “mee ’ome, the boiler, the new blankets … and h’everything. ’Ow shall I ever tell Alec?”
“Connie!” Ruby scolded in a shocked, reproachful voice, “you’re ’ere, you’re not missing and I’m standing around in the cold in mee black for you. Now don’t you go getting yourself all fussed up and upset, we’ll go to my place and have a good cup of tea. It won’t do you no good to ’ang around looking at them stones; come along,” she grabbed her by the arm, “and stop snivelling.”

6
ANGELINA FLUNG HER beret onto the hand-woven quilt. They had forgotten the curtains again. The war was a manifestation of governmental incompetence, but as a citizen she would cooperate with the blackout for it involved the masses as well as herself. There was “neither rhyme nor reason,” however, she quoted firmly, in darkening the room during the day. Just because she had forgotten to tie back the extra hangings, Ruby had left them shut. They were more trouble to fix in the evening but she wanted light, the whole world wanted light; if people were wise they would hoard every moment of it, as the silly bankers hoarded gold.
The window looked out over chimney pots to a plane tree and a square of grey sky. Oh dear, Angelina thought as she twisted the cord round the hook, there is going to be trouble with Selina. The old dear simply has no imagination. Can you believe it, Ella, she had said only yesterday at the meeting, my partner never stops working and she’ll listen to a hard luck story when I should bundle the miscreants out of doors, but she simply does not know what the word “vision” means. I cannot make her grasp the first elements of proletarian economy. “Liquidate her,” Ella always joked, but you could not do that with the Tippett. Selina was classless; it was just that you could not make her see anything that was not, literally, in front of her nose. “Beowulf is a symbol for us, colleague” (“comrade” simply didn’t suit Selina), but no, all the answer she would ever get would be “I’m afraid that plaster dog of yours will pick up a lot of dust.”
It would soon be time for their early cup of tea, the very nicest moment of the day, Angelina felt, after the dull routine of the morning was over and before they settled to the evening’s task. She looked up at the engagement list hanging over her chest of drawers, but there was nothing down until Saturday. She had always been what the French called “an amateur of meetings.” It gave her such an illusion of travel to hurry off, sometimes before supper, to a hall in some unheard-of suburb of London; you had little adventures, it was most instructive, and occasionally you made new friends. There was that nice schoolmistress whom Selina disliked so much, merely because the poor woman would drop in for tea whenever she was in their neighbourhood, and the extraordinary Czech, whose name they could never pronounce. It added such richness to life, making so many contacts, hearing and learning so many things even if occasionally something went wrong, like the night that odious lecturer had insisted upon coming back with her and they had had, literally, to turn him out at three o’clock in the morning.
“Come in!” That must be Selina with the tea. She would not say a syllable about being annoyed, but simply create a grey, fluffy atmosphere of rigid disapproval. Perhaps it would be better to say something at once to make it burst? Only this was such a pleasant time,