The Slaves of Solitude (5 page)

He had further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad, where he had again always made his way to the small hotels. He was noticeably clean in his person, and wore high white
collars and old-fashioned ties with a tiepin. He wore suits of durable material, coats with high lapels, trousers which did not turn up at the bottom, and elastic-sided boots.

He could make himself agreeable when he wished, and had frequently been known to charm old ladies in the early stages of his acquaintanceship with them, going out of his way to do small services
for them. Behind their backs, however, he would speak of them, to fellow-guests or servants, as ‘old frumps’, ‘desiccated spinsters’, and so forth.

Having said ‘Good evening’ and looked at Miss Roach, Mr. Thwaites had nothing more to say at the moment, and no one else in the room spoke as Sheila, the Irish maid-of-all-work, now
working as a waitress and dressed as such, hurried about putting plates of soup on the table.

This soup, like the rest of the food, came up on a small service lift hidden behind a screen in a corner of the room. The lift-shaft communicated directly with the kitchen underneath, and
conversations frequently took place through this medium between whoever was serving the guests above and whoever was serving the lift below – enquiries, comments, and sometimes remarks of a
censorious nature being hurled down from above in the hearing of the guests, and appropriate rejoinders from below feebly making their way to the surface amidst the rumbling of the lift. In the
long pauses, when no one was talking, the guests listened, in a hypnotised way, to these back-stage noises and manœuvres.

Soon after Mr. Thwaites had started upon his soup – which he always sprinkled, first of all with lumps of bread, and then with pepper, with a vigour and single-mindedness which displeased
Miss Roach – he opened the conversation.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘
Your
friends seem to be mightily distinguishing themselves as usual,’ and oh God, thought Miss Roach, not that again, not that again.

5

Miss Roach’s ‘friends’ – according to Mr. Thwaites – were the Russian people, and Mr. Thwaites did not like or approve of these people at
all. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that the resistance and victories of the Russian people in the last year had practically ruined this man’s peace of mind – a state of
affairs which was aggravated bitterly by the fact that he was unable fully to vent his mind upon the matter in public.

Mr. Thwaites had since 1939 slowly learned to swallow the disgrace of Hitler, of whom he had been from the beginning, and still secretly remained, a hot disciple. He could now even force himself
to speak disparagingly of Hitler: but to speak well of the Russians was too much for him. He could not mention them save gloweringly, defensively, almost savagely. He had also undergone the
misfortune of capturing Moscow and Leningrad within three weeks of the outbreak of the war, and so his boarding-house sagacity had been struck at along with his personal feelings.

Actually the Russians were not in any very particular sense Miss Roach’s ‘friends’. Miss Roach was too completely bewildered, stunned, and unhappy in regard to all that was
happening in the world around her for this to be so. But Miss Roach sometimes brought back literary political weeklies from London, and had been foolish enough to leave them about in the Lounge,
and this, in the eyes of Mr. Thwaites, was in itself a diseased and obscurely Russian thing to do. He had therefore come practically to identify Russia with Miss Roach; and in the same way as
Russia gnawed at him, he gnawed at Miss Roach.

Miss Roach now tried to dodge his fury, to apologise, in so far as it was possible, for the present state of affairs on the Eastern Front, by smiling, making a vaguely assenting and agreeable
noise in her throat, and looking hard and giddily at her soup. But Mr. Thwaites was not the sort of man who would permit you to look at your soup when he was anxious to talk about the Russians.

‘I said,’ he said, looking at her, ‘
your
friends seem to be mightily distinguishing themselves, as usual.’

‘Who’re
my
friends?’ murmured Miss Roach, and she was, of course, aware that the rest of the room was listening intently. Sitting at the same table with Mr. Thwaites,
and having him talk at you directly, was very much like being called out in front of class at school.

‘Your
Russian
friends,’ said Mr. Thwaites, who was never afraid of coming to the point. There was a pause.

‘They’re not
my
friends . . .’ said Miss Roach, wrig-glingly, intending to convey that although she was friendly enough to the Russians, she was not more friendly than
anybody else, and could not therefore be expected to take all the blame in the Rosamund Tea Rooms for their recent victories. But this was too subtle for Mr. Thwaites.

‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘they’re not your friends?’

‘Well,’ said Miss Roach, ‘they’re not my friends any more than anybody else.’ And here Mrs. Barratt came to her rescue, as she often did.

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Barratt. ‘You must admit they’re putting up a wonderful fight, Mr. Thwaites.’

Mrs. Barratt was a grey-haired, stoutish, pince-nezed, slow-moving woman of about sixty-five, with an unhappy and pallid appearance which probably derived from the preoccupation which secretly
dominated her life – a pre-occupation in pills, medicines and remedies for minor internal complaints – for indigestion, constipation, acidity, liver, rheumatism – as advertised in
the daily newspapers and elsewhere. An elderly believer in magic, with passion yet patience she sought and sought for ideal remedies, without ever finding what she sought, but without ever a
thought of abandoning her quest. Mrs. Barratt’s eyes, behind her enlarging pince-nez, bore, if one could but see it, the wan, indefatigable, midnight-oil look of one who yet had faith in the
Philosopher’s Stone of the sedentary sufferer inside. She gave her mind over to research, and her body over to endless experiment upon herself. No new advertisement in the paper, with a fresh
angle, approach, or appeal, ever escaped her close inspection, nor did any article ‘By a Doctor’ or ‘By a Harley Street Specialist’. She grew iller and iller – an
ageing, eerie product of the marriage between modern commercial methods and modern medicine. Her outward behaviour was, however, entirely normal, and the Rosamund Tea Rooms had no knowledge of the
influences which in fact dominated her life, though it noticed the many different pills and patent foods which appeared from time to time upon her table. She had a kind heart and now came to the
rescue of Miss Roach.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘They’re putting up a fight all right.’

And the savage and sombre way in which he said this suggested that they were not putting up a fight as other and decent people would, or that they were only doing so because they jolly well had
to, or that their motives were of a kind which he did not care to make public.

‘You know,’ said Mrs. Barratt, ‘I don’t think you really like the Russians, Mr. Thwaites. I don’t think you realise what they’re doing for us.’

‘No,’ said Miss Roach, taking heart, ‘I don’t believe he does.’

Mr. Thwaites was momentarily taken aback by this unexpected resistance, and there was a pause in which his eyes went glassy.

‘Ah,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t I? . . . Don’t I? . . . Well, perhaps I don’t . . . Maybe I thinks more than I says. Maybe I has my private views . .
.’

Oh God, thought Miss Roach, now he was beginning his ghastly I-with-the-third-person business. As if bracing herself for a blow (as she looked at the tablecloth), she waited for more, and more
came.

‘I Keeps my Counsel,’ said Mr. Thwaites, in his slow treacly voice. ‘Like the Wise Old Owl, I Sits and Keeps my Counsel.’

Miss Roach, shuddering under this agonisingly Thwaitesian remark – Thwaitesian in the highest and richest tradition – knew well enough that there was more to follow. For it was a
further defect of Mr. Thwaites that when he had made a remark which he thought good, which he himself subtly realised as being Thwaitesian, he was unable to resist repeating it, either in an
inverted or a slightly altered form. He did not fail to do so on this occasion.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I Keeps my Counsel, like the Wise Old Bird . . . I Happens to keep my Counsel . . . I Happens to be like the Wise Old Bird . . .’

And in the silence that followed, broken only by the scraping of soup-spoons on plates, the whole room, with all its occupants, seemed to have to tremble in hushed reverence before the totally
unforeseen and awful Bird which had materialised in its midst – its wisdom and unearthly reticence . . . Miss Roach guessed that honour was now satisfied, and that this would be enough. It
was not, however, enough. With Mr. Thwaites nothing was ever enough.

 ‘I Hay ma Doots, that’s all . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘I Hay ma Doots . . .’

(He is
not
, thought Miss Roach, going to add ‘as the Scotchman said,’ is he?
Surely
he is not going to add ‘as the Scotchman said’?)

‘As the Scotchman said,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘Yes . . . I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said – of Yore . . .’

(Only Mr. Thwaites, Miss Roach realised, could, as it were, have out-Thwaited Thwaites and brought ‘of Yore’ from the bag like that.)

The room, which had by this time finished its soup, maintained its stupefied silence – a silence permeated and oppressed, of course, by the knowledge that Mr. Thwaites, in regard to the
Russians, kept his counsel like the wise old bird, and hayed his doots as the Scotchman said of yore. If he had nothing else, Mr. Thwaites had personality in a dining-room. The maid went round
quietly removing the soup-plates . . .

‘Ah, Wheel . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites, philosophically, and by some curious process of association identifying himself with the Scotchman of yore whom he had quoted. ‘Ah, Wheel .
. .’

And again, as the maid replaced the soup-plates with the plates of warm spam and mashed potatoes, the room seemed to have to echo reverently Mr. Thwaites’ ‘Ah, Wheel’, and to
be bathing in the infinite Scottish acumen with which it had been uttered.

‘Oh, well,’ said Mr. Thwaites a little later, briskly returning to his own race and language, and with a note of challenge, ‘we’ll all be equal soon, no doubt.’

This, clearly, was another stab at the Russians. The Russians, in Mr. Thwaites’ embittered vision, were undoubtedly perceived as being ‘all equal’, and so if the Germans went
on retreating westward (and if Miss Roach went on approving of it and doing nothing about it) before long we should, all of us, be ‘all equal’.

‘My Lady’s Maid,’ continued Mr. Thwaites, ‘will soon be giving orders to My Lady. And Milord will be Polishing the Pot-boy’s boots.’

Failing to see that he had already over-reached himself in anticipating very far from equal conditions, Mr. Thwaites went on.

‘The Cabby,’ he said, resignedly, ‘will take it unto himself to give the orders, I suppose – and the pantry-boy tell us how to proceed on our ways.’

Still no one had anything to say, and Mr. Thwaites, now carried away both by his own vision and his own style, went on to portray a state of society such as might have recommended itself to the
art of the surrealist, or appeared in the dreams of an opium-smoker.

‘The Coalman, no doubt, will see fit to give commands to the King,’ he said, ‘and the Navvy lord it gaily o’er the man of wealth. The Banker will bow the knee to the
Crossing-Sweeper, I expect, and the millionaire take his wages from the passing Tramp.’

And there was yet another silence as Mr. Thwaites gazed into the distance seeking further luxuriant images. He had, however, now exhausted himself on this head, and for half a minute one could
hear only the clatter of knives and forks upon plates. . .

‘The Lord Forefend,’ said Mr. Thwaites, at last. ‘The Lord, in His grace, Forefend . . .’

And Miss Roach had a fleeting hope in her heart that, with this little prayer, the discussion, or rather monologue, might be terminated. But Mr. Thwaites, suddenly aware of the quietness which
had for so long surrounded him, and sensing, perhaps, that it was a little too heavy to be wholly applauding, looked around him and did not hesitate to throw down the gauntlet.

‘At least,’ he said, looking straight at Miss Roach, ‘that’s what
you
want, isn’t it?’

Miss Roach, putting food into her mouth, now gave as clever an imitation as she was able of one who was not being looked at at all, but knew how futile such an endeavour was.

‘I gather that’s what
you
want,’ said Mr. Thwaites, ‘isn’t it?’

This was the whole trouble. It was always
she
who had to bear the brunt,
she
who had to be made the whipping-boy in public for his private furies and chagrins.

‘No,’ she said, her voice insecure with humiliation and anger, ‘it’s not what
I
want, Mr. Thwaites.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr. Thwaites, ‘isn’t it? That’s funny. I thought it was.’

Here Miss Steele, who sat at a table by herself, behind Miss Roach but in view of Mr. Thwaites, took a turn at helping her out.

Miss Steele was a thin, quiet woman of about sixty, who used rouge and powder somewhat heavily, whose white, frizzy, well-kept hair had the appearance of being, without being, a wig, and whose
whole manner gave the impression of her having had, without her having had, a past. Miss Steele affected infinite shrewd worldly wisdom acquired in this imaginary past, reticence in conversation
(she prided herself that she ‘never opened her mouth unless she had something to say’), and the spirit of modernity generally. She was careful to avow at all times her predilection for
‘fun’, for ‘cocktails’, for ‘broadmindedness’, for those who in common with her were ‘cursed’ with a sense of humour, and for the company of young
people as opposed to ‘old fogies’ like herself. But she had, in fact, little fun, no cocktails, and no company younger than that furnished by the Rosamund Tea Rooms. She was also
advanced in the matter of culture, for she had ‘no time for modern novels’. Instead she read endless Boots’ biographies of historical characters, and was, in fact, a historian.
This came in handy, for if you ‘happened to know a little something about History’, you were able to compare present events with those in the past, and roughly see how things would be
going in the future. All this, of course, made Mr. Thwaites furious, and he would have used her as the Rosamund Tea Rooms whipping-boy had he not been a little afraid of her and had he not already
fixed upon Miss Roach. Behind her not unpitiful and not uncourageous little shams, Miss Steele had, like Mrs. Barratt, a kind and sensible heart.