Beowulf Read online

  It was Eve, and she was quite shameless about it. “I set my alarm for six forty-five and then I roll over and turn on the portable. A bit of swing wakes me up and helps me to get breakfast.” In a well-ordered world, girls would not tear down the stairs to business, clattering like a fledgling manat-arms in a leather coat without even the pretence of a cap on short, smooth hair. It was so different from the picture he remembered, a lawn with croquet colours as the only primitive note (it had been an idea of his to bring out a set of balls in pastel shades), where static figures in silk had watched the game from rustic seats. Nature, clouds, trees, peonies, had moved, just as a painter would have wished, only the people had been quiet, grouped around his wife (and he saw her again for the first time) smiling at the daisies in her hand.

  The noise was worse than a dozen roundabouts. “My dear,” he had remonstrated gently, “I am an old man, old enough to be your grandfather, but I like gaiety as well as anyone else if it is melodious. How can you bear to listen to such discord?”

  “Oh, it has a plan, only it’s hard to explain. I do turn it low so as not to disturb you.” There had been no question of apology or silence. Forty years ago Eve would have been taught to creep past his door had a necessary errand called her forth early in the morning. It was all a question of money, of greed; dignity had vanished from the world with the passing of Queen Victoria. His wedding day, such a coincidence, had been the birthday of the Queen. People needed to return to the old simplicities, not to say, like Evelyn (perhaps the child had not really meant to be rude), “And whom would you get to carry your scuttle of coal three flights up from the basement? You ought to be thankful that they invented gas fires.”

  “She’s steadier than most,” Miss Tippett had commented when he had, no, not complained, there was no vice more intolerable than intolerance, but just mentioned the wireless. “We old folks have got to march with the times.” Of course, nobody could accuse Selina of artistic sensibilities. Poor woman, she was one of nature’s less successful drawings, a little sketch scribbled on a telephone pad, and he chuckled, of superimposed O’s from rump to chin.

  Eleven and fourpence, that was the chemist. Agatha grumbled that he took care of himself almost to foolhardiness. “I may as well die from a bomb in my bed as from pneumonia in the shelter.” Yet if other people would tramp down to the cellar at night, catching heavy colds, how could he help his bronchitis coming on? This was the week to buy himself some tea. He must have paints, he needed a new camel’s-hair brush. There was a book of stamps; three, five, no, he must have ten shillings for the extras. “I can’t think, Cousin Horatio, why you have to write so many letters?” Agatha did not know what it felt like to be a lonely old man after thirty years of real domestic happiness. Try as he would, the fuel bill went up and up and he owed Miss Tippett five weeks for the rent. However promptly the monthly cheque arrived, he would need one pound eighteen, no, better say two pounds, to clear everything on his list.

  Something would have to be done. There had been a time when he had sold his water-colour sketches for three guineas each. He sat up, pulled his dressing gown about his shoulders and glanced down the names in his address book. Some of them were marked at the side with a cross in red ink, others were underlined in blue. H.I.J…. old Mrs. Johnson had been so good to him, perhaps he would try her daughter. He lifted over the little tray with his writing block and settled it on his knees.

  “Dear Lady…” All he could remember of the Johnson girl was a snapshot that her mother had sent him of a school girl with a big white bow on her hair, standing on the beach. “An old man has few pleasures save remembrance, and I am an old man, seventy-six years of age on my next birthday though my neighbours (kind folk if I may not call them friends) teasingly ask me when I am joining the Home Guard? Turning over my papers yesterday, for I would not wish to cause pain or trouble after I am gone, and Jerry” (no, that was too familiar, he scratched the word out) “and the Germans have paid us Londoners rather too much attention of late, I found this letter from your mother that she wrote to me many years ago about a tiny water colour of mine, Sunrise over London Tower. She had had the delightful thought to send some copies to her friends at Christmas. You will smile, I expect, but lying here at night with the guns going overhead, I could not help wondering what happened to those pictures? I should like to think, vanity, you will say, that my brush was the means of first acquainting some young boy or little girl with the glorious history of their native land.”

  Horatio shivered. It was chilly writing before breakfast. He pushed the tray aside and pulled up the blankets again, well over his ears. He hoped that Miss Johnson, he had never heard that she had married, was not one of those aggressive women who centred their lives on dogs. Perhaps to be on the safe side, he would add a vague sentence about animals. “I once had the unique privilege of sketching two of the late Queen Victoria’s cream ponies for my little nephews.” The sentence was pleasantly historical if she happened to prefer the animal world. “Actually, I wanted to ask you, forgive my discursiveness, would you care to have your mother’s letter returned to your own keeping? She was so truly thoughtful for others that I have always treasured it and cannot bear that it should be turned over by strangers.” He reached a cold hand unwillingly towards the tray again—but it was age, a good sentence had a habit of slipping away like those dear little cirrus clouds he was so fond of, if he did not jot it down. “And you, I fear you must be finding it difficult in these hard times to keep the beautiful garden cared for as you would wish?” He had done a sketch of Mrs. Johnson’s hollyhocks one summer. It had been, in fact, the way that their acquaintanceship had begun. She had found him sketching in a neighbouring meadow, had offered him tea and eventually the commission to do her paved walk. The pen scratched, the ink was running dry; it was, no doubt, the cold. “At least you have been spared, I hope, the attentions of our unwelcome visitors. Yours most sincerely, Horatio Rashleigh.”

  First he must wait a moment for his chilly hands to thaw under the blanket, then he would get up and light the fire. After breakfast he would make a clean copy of the letter and write, perhaps, a postcard to Agatha. It was no morning to be tardy if he were going to buy his tea; unless he reached Mr. Dobbie’s shop by a quarter to ten, there would be no opportunity for a chat.

  Horatio rubbed his hands together, impatient for an activity that the icy room denied. His seascape seemed to reproach him with its galleons and billowing clouds. He had hung it directly over what had once been the fireplace but was now, alas, blocked in except for the chalklike pipes of the gas stove. Perhaps it was, as they had teased him in his youth, a shade too influenced by Turner, but it was his own spirit that was in every line of Drake’s ship. The firm precise lines of the rigging stood out as if drawn in sepia, gallantly, under the clouds and flame of the Spanish hull. A prophecy perhaps: “We are all now, Miss Evelyn, Drakes in our own small way,” to which the child had replied (these modern schools, what did they care about the past?), “Well, if the Ministry of Food continues its wilful course we could do with some more ducks.”

  Forty years ago the picture had hung proudly in the Academy. Not, naturally, in a good light, but then not all whom the Muses called were able to withstand the intoxication of success. If his peers had passed him by, Art, itself, had not failed him. It was better to bring beauty to untutored eyes, and now that he was an old man he could say this convincingly, than to hang bleakly in a gallery before a dozen students and halfhearted visitors tramping from room to room to while away the time. His ships had been the gay cover for First Steps to History, Part II. They had been a calendar, even a jigsaw puzzle. Some might laugh, like that fellow Dale who sneered about “coloured photographs” just because he had never learned to draw but made splotches in red and black with his thumb that he called Abstract No. 7. What the world needed was not machinery but penitence, a return to apprenticeship, to straight lines and “taking pains.” Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste
, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall. “The artist abhors engines,” he had said stiffly to Evelyn only the night before. “And what about Leonardo and his flying machines?” she had joked; it had surprised him that she knew a painter’s name. “Da Vinci,” he had rebuked her, “was a genius, but there is an element about his work, I except the Mona Lisa, that we can only describe as, well… bitter.” He had not cared, though the young women of today talked about things that hardly entered even a man’s head, to mention the unfortunate circumstances of Leonardo’s family life. “Someday,” he had suggested, for you never knew, some chance words might reveal the treasures of the spirit to the young, “you must come with me to the National Gallery. There is a blue in a Fra Angelico there that is the absolute colour of the Tuscan sky.” “I’ll be so glad, Mr. Rashleigh, when peace comes that I’ll do anything”; and he had recalled with a start that the pictures, of course, were transferred to the country for the duration.

  After the war. Horatio shivered suddenly, less with cold than with hatred. Those vandals! All his life he had been resisting some mysterious power, and there it was in the sky with its shrieking engines (Grandfather had been right to predict the doom of the world at his first sight of a locomotive) tearing up moral values, lustily destroying homes. (Miss Tippett had told him yesterday that men and women were sleeping together in the shelters, without even a screen.) If one were seventy-six, every moment counted. There were no brave words about death except when one was young. Suppose he were too ailing, when it stopped, to go to the National Gallery again? Suppose Agatha should really be unable to send him his allowance, his hand fail, his last clients abandon calendars? It was dreary enough to be an old man and have no soul to comfort him without these fiendish noises and the Government cutting down his butter. Let them keep his meat if they wanted, but he had never tasted margarine, poor as he had been, and he was not going to begin now. Perhaps he felt so gloomy because he was restless and the room was cold; it did not do to resign one’s self to melancholy. Very cautiously he sat up, pulled a second dressing gown about his shoulders, and felt for his slippers. An icy draught blew under the badly fitting door. Most people of his age would be stiff, half bedridden; if he did not leap up, at least he was as agile as he had been at sixty. He filled the kettle, set a match to the gas fire.

  It was too chilly to open the window, and the black paper sternly obscured the light. The sputtering flame scorched Horatio’s legs but he dared not leave its comfort. Getting up had never been a problem in the old days when he had crept out at dawn with his easel to watch the cows advancing with slow, comfortable steps over multitudinous little flowers. Those were the hours that he would choose to live again; how one had tossed away one’s riches! For the very sky that was symbolical of peace, of heaven, was desecrated by barbarian beasts flinging missiles at the roof, at his own head! He had seemed to be walking in a wood the night before, remarkably like the little copse near his early home, when from nowhere something had sprung at him with a great noise—then he had wakened to the sirens. Oh, why were people destructive? They had pulled down the windmill he had painted, they laughed at his lace valentines; it reminded him of that terrible moment in his boyhood that he had never quite forgotten, when a horde of shouting, older boys with feathers and wooden tomahawks had sprung on him from behind trees and knocked him, sprawling, into the moss that had been his castle.

  He would feel better, he always did, after he had had a cup of tea.

  2

  SELINA TIPPETT, WHO ought to have been called Madge, trotted down the stairs. Ruby, she surmised, would be late; she always was on Thursday, a day nobody at the Warming Pan had time to stand around and chat with her. It was astonishing how the draught got under the windows; the corridors (“so much lighter than you usually find in London houses”) were hardly an advantage in winter. A solitary china plate hanging on the wall looked as if its fragile colours were not worn but frozen out of it. Undoubtedly Angelina had got her chill running up from the hot kitchen to see that the beds had been made. If I were not in business, Selina thought, I should certainly wear mittens; and she saw herself suddenly, as clearly as if Mr. Rashleigh had painted the scene in a calendar, standing outside her father’s door one Christmas Eve and pulling a pair of grey, woolly, fingerless gloves out of a packet with “to Miss Roly Poly” in Cook’s writing on the tiny, attached label. Mittens … they were mixed up with snowmen and her mother’s displeasure. “Selina, your hair ribbon is untied; I will not have you playing with those rough boys.” Dear me, she frightened herself by saying the words aloud, how the world has changed since I was ten. Changed for the better, too, in spite of the raids. Nobody questioned a girl like Evelyn about her friends, she went unchallenged to her work in the mornings; even, in peacetime, might aspire to a post abroad.

  “Good morning, Timothy.” The shop blinds were down, of course, for they did not open until ten, but the floor was swept and the tables replaced in rows. “Good morning, madam, it was a terribly noisy night.” Timothy flicked his duster over the office desk and chair and waited with his permanent inborn sadness for comfort. “Yes, if we listen to the Prime Minister we shall have worse to endure before it’s over”—the people, poor dears, were being magnificent but it only encouraged them to lose their nerve if you let them discuss the horrors. “It was a land mine, madam, at the corner of the Square; the milkman told me it ’ad ’it two empty ’ouses. Fairly blazing, it was; at eleven last night, I could see to read the time as plain as day.”

  “Indeed, we must be thankful that there was not more damage.” These extraordinary events needed, Selina thought, a new and quite other vocabulary, but morale—that was the important thing; it was the difference that severed England, more than the Channel did, from the Continent. “The best thing to do, Angelina,” she had repeated this twice to her partner the previous evening, “is to go on as if everything were absolutely normal. The staff copies us unconsciously and in that way we are influencing not just Ruby, Timothy, and the customers but perhaps hundreds of people.” For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids. It was inspiring really, especially on such a cold, dreary morning, to think how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.

  In wartime, however, it was impossible to be gay or brave for long. Selina glanced at her desk; there was a pile of letters stacked on the worn leather, and the contents were bound to be unpleasant. Some people, she supposed, really liked their post; news came from strange, far-off places or spoke of acquaintances amusingly. A letter ought to be the sharing of a life, but now correspondence had come to mean answering stupid questions after the day’s work or pointing out an error in the gas account. The postman himself was Fate with a large F, for at nine or eleven or four he might bring the papers that she was sure to receive one day: either they must pay the arrears of rent or the landlord would have regretfully (she saw the polite, pinched phrase) to give them notice.

  There was a circular from the Ministry of Food. Butler’s, of course, wanted something on account, they always did at the beginning of the month. She planned to take them methodically but it was no use; she had to run them through her hands, anxiously, until she was sure that the dreaded white envelope stamped with Private had not arrived. Only when she was certain of the landlord’s silence could she begin to slit them open with her pet paper knife, the one with a carnelian handle made from pebbles she had once picked up on the beach, and begin to arrange them for reply.

  Omens… if one let one’s self believe in them, she would say that something was about to happen. Selina turned, not the pages of the ledger with the fish account nor the note with indecipherable signature, but a great photograph album of the Warming Pan. She would never forget an evening when she had faced Miss Humphries in a dreary Bournemouth hotel. The coffee had
been cold and powdery for the third evening in succession, but she had seen herself, exactly as if in a dream, walking down a street past an empty shop.

  Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom. Only those people, she thought, who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was. From Friday morning until the following Thursday noon she read aloud, matched wool, pushed the bath chair, or dreamed whilst “poor Miss Humphries” slept, but on Thursday afternoon she strolled out, dressed as she herself chose, to meet some friend at the local confectioner’s. They discussed their “posts,” the Church, the Court, the necessity to keep in touch with fashion but not to be dominated by it, and the food. Her budget permitted her to spend only one and six, but such a sum offered vast possibilities of choice. She could have, for example, buttered toast or scones, a piece of plum cake, a tartlet, or some sandwiches. There was no temptation in expensive foreign-looking pastry. Selina collected teashops as wealthier people tasted wines. Sometimes she had taken the train into the country, ostensibly to pick bluebells, really to try out a recommended “Farmhouse Tea.” In one place the butter was good, another excelled in crumpets but the cakes were soggy; she had never found “the toast, the temperature, and the tea,” as she paraphrased to Angelina gaily, all together. Then, that evening when everybody in the sombre hall except herself had been well over seventy, she had seen it suddenly, complete even to its name, the perfect meeting place, not smart but homelike, with gay primrose china and tiny, polished tables. “No, Selina, people always lose money on them,” Angelina had insisted. It had happened to be her free evening and they had been sitting together in her bedroom with the door open, in case Miss Humphries should call. “Of course, but nobody ever runs them properly; it’s the little things that they always forget, but men are so insensitive.” That, at least, was a point upon which they were both agreed. “Yes, but as often as not they are started by women, the fat and fussy type. Now look at that place we went to last Saturday; the tea was filthy and the crumpets stank of margarine and there wasn’t a male in the place.”