The Slaves of Solitude (17 page)

CHAPTER NINE

1

T
HE
meal was breakfast: the subject, utility clothing. ‘As for the stuff they’re turning out for men nowadays,’ said Mr. Thwaites bitterly, ‘I wouldn’t give it to my Valet.’

Mr. Thwaites’ valet was quite an old friend. An unearthly, flitting presence, whose shape, character, age, and appearance could only be dimly conceived, he had been turning up every now
and again ever since Miss Roach had known Mr. Thwaites. Mostly he was summoned into being as one from whom all second-rate, shoddy, or inferior articles were withheld. But sometimes things were
good enough for Mr. Thwaites’ valet, but would not do for Mr. Thwaites. Mr. Thwaites’ spiritual valet endowed Mr. Thwaites with a certain lustre and grandeur, giving the impression that
he had had a material valet in the past, or meant to have a material valet in the future. Mr. Thwaites also occasionally used, for the same purposes, a spiritual butler, a spiritual footman, and,
in moments of supreme content, a spiritual stable-boy. He had at his disposal a whole spiritual estate in the country.

‘Ah – you men complain,’ said Vicki. ‘But what about us? What do you think we poor things go through?’

It was odd, thought Miss Roach, the way that Vicki always managed, when talking to Mr. Thwaites, to turn whatever subject came up into a sort of contest between male and female, to somehow
oppose feminine weakness and fastidiousness to masculine strength and insensibility.

‘Well –
what
about you?’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘
You
still seem to keep up appearances, as far as I can see.’

And by the look in Mr. Thwaites’ eyes it was not easy to tell whether, by his stressing the ‘
you
’, he meant Miss Kugelmann personally, or Miss Kugelmann as
representative of her sex. Vicki had now been at the Rosamund Tea Rooms nearly three weeks, and Miss Roach had noticed that these ambiguities on the part of Mr. Thwaites had been growing more and
more frequent.

‘Though it’s not the Clothes . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites, a moment later, but as no one understood exactly what he meant by this, no one made any attempt to reply.

‘I said it’s not the Clothes . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites, and it was left to Vicki to take him on.

‘What is it, then, Mr. Thwaites?’ she said.

‘It’s what happens to be inside ’em,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘Or that’s what
1
was taught, when
1
was at school.’

‘Really, Mr. Thwaites,’ said Vicki, ‘you’re very gay for so early in the morning.’

‘I’m a very gay fellow,’ said Mr. Thwaites, and Miss Roach, looking at him, realised that there was a certain amount of truth in this. Since Vicki’s arrival there had
definitely been a certain gaiety and difference in Mr. Thwaites. At first a little embarrassed, puzzled, and sheepish under Vicki’s ‘handling’ of him, after two or three days he
had noticeably begun to react. It could not be said that he had begun to dress better, for Mr. Thwaites was always, in his old-fashioned clothes, immaculate, but there was something in his whole
demeanour more alert, lively, and responsive when Vicki was present.

‘Certes, the damsel,’ Miss Roach had once heard him saying, in his awful language, when the subject of Vicki had been brought up when she was absent from the Lounge –
‘Certes, the damsel doth not offend the organs of optical vision. Moreover she hath a way with her, withal.’

And one could see him awaiting, and even listening for, her return, slightly bracing himself in her presence, referring his conversation to her, even getting up and making room for her on chairs
and sofas.

Was it possible, Miss Roach wondered, that Vicki was right – that she knew how to ‘handle’ him? And if this was so, might she not come to be grateful to Vicki, as taking Mr.
Thwaites’ mind off herself? Unfortunately, at present, Mr. Thwaites still found time to remember and duly torture her. Indeed, Miss Roach sometimes thought that there was a new savagery and
sarcasm in his manner towards her, as if he were angrily comparing her and Vicki.

He now stared at Miss Roach in a prolonged manner. He stared at her in a prolonged manner at least once a day, but nowadays his stares were getting longer.

‘I fear our Lady of the Roach,’ he said, ‘is somewhat shocked by my ribaldry – is’t not so?’

‘No, not at all, Mr. Thwaites,’ she said, and Mr. Thwaites went on staring at her.

‘Wherefore doth she thus grace our breakfast table this Moonday morn?’ he went on. ‘Doth she not e’en go forth, unto the populous city, to earn her daily wage?’

Miss Roach had wondered when this was coming. Mr. Thwaites was the only one who had not yet been informed of her new arrangement with her firm, and today was her first day at home.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m only going up once or twice a week nowadays.’

‘What?’ said Mr. Thwaites, reverting as usual, when surprised or displeased, to plain language. ‘What’s happened, then.’

‘Oh – I’ve come to a new arrangement.’

‘What new arrangement? Aren’t you going to work any more?’ It was clear that Mr. Thwaites did not like the idea of this at all.

‘Oh yes. But I’m going to do it at home.’

‘Oh. Are you? What are you going to work at?’

‘Oh – reading manuscripts mostly,’ said Miss Roach.  ‘I can do it just as well at home.’

Although Miss Roach was actually going to do a lot of secretarial, accounting, and other work at home, she stressed the manuscript-reading side practically to the exclusion of the others,
because this gave her a certain colour and dignity. It gave her, in fact, almost an atmosphere of being a qualified literary woman or publisher herself. She was surprised by her own pettiness, but
she had felt for a long while that it was about time she stuck up for herself a bit and gave back some of the digs which were given her.

‘Reading manuscripts?’ said Mr. Thwaites, in his bad temper hardly thinking what he was saying. ‘I thought you
published
manuscripts. I didn’t know you read
them.’

‘Well, you have to read them before you publish them, don’t you?’

Looking sideways at Vicki, she had a fleeting impression that Vicki also did not altogether like her as a reader and judge of manuscripts. This was not the first time that she had sensed in
Vicki, the vet’s secretary, a certain distaste in regard to her connection and activities with a publishing firm in London. But this might be pure imagination.

‘And they leave that to you?’ said Mr. Thwaites.

‘Well – not only me. There are others.’

There was a pause.

‘
I’m
going to publish a book one of these days,’ said Mr. Thwaites, with vast resentment, and there the matter was left.

2

Miss Roach, who had decided to give herself a day’s holiday, discovered a certain elation and sense of mystery in walking about the town as her own mistress on a
Monday morning. It was as though she saw the town, as it really existed, for the first time – not as a week-end Saturday locality in which she was a week-ender. Remaining, as yet, a
week-ender in all the reflexes of her spirit, she was able to feel the shock and to observe the uncanny difference between the weekday and the weekend. It was as though the town was becalmed,
steeped in an air of non-Saturday lethargy, indifference, desultoriness; the shops, the people, the streets were all subtly altered – particularly the shops. In place of the eager,
exhilarating, panic-stricken bartering of Saturday, or the aloof, shuttered shutness of Sunday, there was something between the two – the shops being open without urgency, active without
anxiety – a general loitering, puddling, pottering . . .

Most peculiar of all was the atmosphere of the station, which seemed to have lost all its intense seriousness and obsessed preoccupation with London, and was playing, instead, a silly game of
dreamy shunting, inadvertent whistling, absent-minded trolley-rolling, offhand loading, casual booking, and general woolgathering – all as if it had never known what war or trouble meant.
Looking at the station thus, one was made aware that Thames Lockdon was, after all, a mere village right off the map.

Seeing these placid things, she foresaw a placid future down here with her work. She had had misgivings about having to spend all the day under a roof resonant with Mr. Thwaites, but she
believed now that she could cope with this, particularly as she now had Vicki, if not exactly on her side, at any rate there, to absorb a certain amount of his personality. (It was queer how Vicki
could not be induced quite openly to take her side against Mr. Thwaites. A sort of reticence came over her when Miss Roach spoke about him disparagingly. She would answer Miss Roach, or look at
her, as if Miss Roach was somehow at fault for not knowing how to ‘handle’ him.)

She had had her misgivings, of course, about Vicki too – but even these were diminishing. Now that Vicki was established in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, now the excitement of that first night
was over, they saw less of each other, had not found any occasion to go out together to the River Sun, and practically only met at meals, in the Lounge, or in each other’s rooms a few minutes
before going down to meals.

Also Miss Roach had taken the precaution of putting her comb away in her drawer when not using it, and this had made a lot of difference. It was that comb-using which had put Miss Roach off
– she was sure of that – it was amazing what a small thing like that could do. Vicki was all right. As long as she was kept from using Miss Roach’s comb she was perfectly all
right. In fact, apart from her slightly affected ways, which were not really her fault, she was really very nice. Miss Roach liked her. Now that they were going to be together more, she must make
up her mind to like her more.

Thus made calm, happy, and resolute in her walk in the strange weekday town, Miss Roach returned to the Rosamund Tea Rooms at about twelve.

‘There’s been a phone call for you, Miss Roach,’ said Sheila, but on being questioned could not say from whom the call had come. Mrs. Payne had taken it, but Mrs. Payne was now
out of doors.

Miss Roach at once had a feeling of terror, suspecting that an important call had come from the office while she was out playing, and she spent an uneasy three-quarters of an hour until Mrs.
Payne returned.

‘Oh yes – only Lieutenant Pike,’ said Mrs. Payne. ‘He says he’ll call you again at one o’clock.’

Enormously relieved, Miss Roach went upstairs to her room to prepare for lunch.

3

The Lieutenant! A problem she had almost forgotten!

‘And where is the nice big American?’ Vicki had asked her, only a few days ago, and she had answered, quite truthfully, that she did not know, she hadn’t seen or heard of him
for nearly a fortnight.

She had found a curious pleasure in telling Vicki this – she did not exactly know why, any more than she had exactly known why she had refused to take Vicki out to meet the Lieutenant
again that night.

She had, actually, seen the Lieutenant only once since that occasion – and that had been on a Saturday morning when she had run into him quite by accident in Church Street. Believing then,
because he had not rung up for a week, that she had offended him by her obduracy over the telephone, and that he had no intention of meeting her, let alone taking her out and kissing her in the
dark any more, ever, she had been surprised by the profuseness of his cheerfulness and cordiality.

They had only spoken to each other for half a minute, for each was hurrying elsewhere, but in that short space of time he had made it clear that she was now forgiven – if, indeed, she had
ever been out of favour. He had said that he had been ‘up to his eyes’, that he had been having ‘the goddarnest awful time’, and that he had been meaning to phone her, and
that he would now do so ‘just as soon as ever he got a moment to get round to it’.

That was a fortnight ago. He had not phoned until just now, and in the intervening period she had had time to wonder to what he alluded when he had said that he was ‘up to his eyes’.
As she had gathered from other sources that nothing unusual had taken place or was taking place in his unit, as she knew, in fact, almost for certain, that he was entirely free every evening of the
week, the problem grew more and more perplexing. But she was by now resigned to being perplexed by the Lieutenant – whose appearances and disappearances, whose enthusiasms and fluctuations,
whose bland mental reconciliation of almost explicit offers of marriage with almost complete withdrawal of his person from the recipient, whose burning faith in the Laundry business, and whose
habit of drinking much too much, could be withstood and surmounted by resignation alone.

4

The Lieutenant having said that he would phone again at one o’clock, it was hardly likely that he would phone at all. Least of all was it likely that he would phone
precisely at one o’clock. He phoned, in fact, at five and twenty past one, in the middle of lunch. Sheila announced the fact, saying ‘Lieutenant Pike, miss’ at the door in front
of everyone, and she left the room.

On her way to Mrs. Payne’s room she found herself experiencing, in spite of herself, a certain amount of relief and pleasure. Cynical as she was in regard to all things appertaining to the
Lieutenant and his behaviour, she had not, in the last three weeks, looked upon the prospect of his total disappearance from her life with complete equanimity. If only as a diversion, the
Lieutenant had his uses, and his charm. She was glad, too, to find him keeping his word twice running – first in phoning her at all after his promise to do so when he had talked to her in the
street, and now again after telling Mrs. Payne that he would ring at one o’clock – the inexactitude of five and twenty minutes being neither here nor there, part of the very character
of the man. Perhaps, after all, he had a liking for her. Perhaps she had a liking for him.

‘Hullo,’ she said, and, as he answered, listened eagerly to detect how much he had had to drink. ‘Gee – it’s nice to hear your voice again,’ he said, and she
could detect nothing of drink. ‘Same here,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ ‘Oh – I’ve been having an awful time,’ he said. ‘How are you?’ And
each went on repetitively asking how the other was, as people will who are embarrassed both by a long absence from each other and by mere embarrassment.