The Slaves of Solitude (34 page)

Then Mr. Lindsell said that she was to have a drink before she did anything else, and she was taken into the big bright main lounge.

They found a table in a corner, and Mr. Lindsell, persuading her to take whisky, ordered two large ones. Before long she was talking volubly with Mr. Lindsell and looking around her with a
feeling of having already settled down.

She did not recognise anyone approximating to her notion of princes. Instead she saw one or two old ladies very much of the type of Miss Steele or Mrs. Barratt (only with an air of being bored
to distraction in much greater luxury, space, and comfort), and there were many men in uniforms, English and American.

These uniforms reminded her that she was back in the centre of things, the world and the war. She was glad to be back, in spite of the danger of bombs. You had to square up to the war. The
horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms resided in just the fact that it was not squaring up to it. The Rosamund Tea Rooms was hidden away in the country, dodging the war, in its petty
boarding-house lassitude almost insensible of it, more absorbed in the local library. And this was not a war to be taken in a local-library way.

2

Mr. Lindsell persuaded her to have two large whiskies, and took three himself. Then, getting excited by a discussion with her in regard to technical publishing matters, he
decided to have dinner with her, and took her into the restaurant. Here they had wine.

That was a happy, excited meal she had with her scanty-haired, harassed-looking, hard-working, nice employer. Afterwards he insisted upon having a final brandy in the lounge (where she herself
took coffee), and then he saw that it was nearly nine, and said that he had to fly away.

He did not say where he had to fly away to, and she was pretty certain that it was a woman – that our dear old friend ‘love’ was at the back of it. ‘Love’, like
drink, under the influence of the war, was exerting a new sort of pressure everywhere, affecting people it would not have affected before, and in an entirely fresh way.

She escorted him into the black-out, where a horrible war-argument and panic was going on about taxis, and Mr. Lindsell, after having repeatedly and in a panic admonished her to go in and not
bother, at last got a place in a taxi with five other people.

‘Goodbye!’ he yelled. ‘See you tomorrow. Goodbye!’ And she yelled back ‘Goodbye!’ and went in.

3

And, in spite of the taxi-panic, still that feeling of happiness, and of serenity, and of purification, persisted in her soul. Because of this feeling she decided that
before going to bed she would go by herself into the lounge and have a final drink. She was too happy and serene to mind the people, or to bother about being alone in it.

She decided to have a whisky, and here, needless to say, the war got in a little good-night crack at her – the whisky was Off. This did not disturb her, and she ordered a large pink gin
instead.

An orchestra was now playing in the lounge, and, sitting having that last drink, almost heedless of what was going on around her, something else was added to Miss Roach’s frame of mind. In
addition to her sense of serenity and purification there came a sort of clarification of mind, in which she could see in their correct proportions all the things which had occurred to her in the
last few months.

She saw Mr. Thwaites in his right proportions. Why had she ever let him anger and torment her? The trouble with that man was that he had never stepped beyond the mental age of eleven or twelve,
nature having arrested him, and preserved him, at a certain ugly phase – the phase of the loquacious little braggart at school so often met with at that age. If he had grown up, he would have
grown out of it.

She saw the Lieutenant in his right proportions. Not strong of mind, easily affected by drink, in a foreign land, agitated by a mood of sexual excitation, in fear of the future and over-anxious
to live to the full while he could, the poor man had gone about in drink making love to the girls and asking them to marry him. He had probably blindly imitated all that marriage-offering business
from some soldier friend: he was, really, too good-natured and scrupulous, too lacking in initiative, to have thought of it himself. Oddly enough, she believed that the Lieutenant probably liked
her better than all the others, and she could probably have had the Laundry if she had really tried. Anyway, if he was not killed, he would almost certainly one day settle down with a wife and his
Laundry and be sensible again.

She saw Vicki in her right proportions. A wretched woman that – more wretched than evil. Sex-obsessed, of course (but weren’t we all?), and savagely egoistic. And, in her
sex-obsession, vain. And, in her vanity, cruel. And, with that dreadful maladroitness of manner, speech, and soul, a fiend from hell to live with, if you had incurred her dislike. No – on
second thoughts Vicki was possibly as evil as she was wretched. It was hard to say.

She probably wasn’t really the concentration-camp, stadium-yelling, rich, fruity, German Nazi which Miss Roach had at times thought her (and yet she also very possibly was!), and Miss
Roach now found it easy to forgive her.

But how she (Miss Roach) had gone on about it all, and how fearfully she had suffered! Those nights at Thames Lockdon, arriving in the blackness . . . Those dinners, in the pin-dropping silences
around Mr. Thwaites . . . The rumbling of the lift behind the screen . . . The bedroom with the red chequered curtains and the counterpane which slithered off . . . Coffee in the Lounge . . . The
arrival of the German, the comb in the bedroom, the patience-playing with Mr. Thwaites . . . The English Miss, Miss Prim, Miss Prude . . . ‘Really, you are rather A dear.’ . . . The
walk against the wind in the sunset, the walks in the dark! . . . The breakfasts, lunches, teas, dinners . . . The Push! . . . The weird interview with the doctor . . .

Well, well, she supposed that was all part of boarding-house life, that something of the same sort was going on in places of that sort all over the country – all over the world. It was
just that she was not cut out for boarding-house life.

And here she was at Claridge’s – from the Rosamund Tea Rooms to Claridge’s – and now she must go to bed.

4

Leaving the crowd, and exchanging the cheerful sound of the orchestra for the sudden seriousness and silence of the luxuriously mirrored lift with its blue-uniformed
attendant, Miss Roach felt her mood of exhilaration and clarification slipping away from her, and she realised that she was very tired.

She had not seen her room, into which Mr. Lindsell had arranged to have her bag sent up, and, in spite of the instructions of the lift-man, for a long while she could not find it, wandering
about dimly lit, hushed, and thickly carpeted corridors for three or four minutes.

She was somewhat dismayed, on entering, to observe that it was a double room, but there was her suitcase (looking very forlorn, on a sort of trestle), and so there was no mistake, and there was
nothing to be done about it.

Presumably a double room was all they had, but what was going to happen if her aunt didn’t die and she didn’t get that five hundred pounds she didn’t know, for although she had
four hundred odd pounds of her own saved in the bank, that was for old age and illness, and she was not the sort of person to go in for double rooms at places like Claridge’s.

The luxury of the room itself also dismayed her for the same reason, and when she found that a door led off to a private bathroom only one half of her was delighted while the other half was
intimidated.

She found the room too hot, and turned off the heat, and opened the windows as well as she could without causing offence to the black-out authorities, and began to unpack.

Well, this was something better than her bedroom at Mrs. Payne’s! Or was it? Was she really able to adjust herself to such a change in a single night? Wouldn’t she, for a bedroom
simply as a bedroom, rather have Mrs. Payne’s? Was this really her line of country?

Why was she always complaining about everything she got?

‘
Waiter. Chambermaid. Valet’
she saw printed under some buttons to press by the side of her bed. She was horrified by the idea of ringing any of them, and hoped that she might
spend the night, and escape from this hotel next morning, unmolested by waiter, chambermaid, or valet . . .

She must have a Private bath. She must have one tonight, and another tomorrow morning, and linger in both of them. She must privately bathe some of the money back.

As she went into the bathroom, and tried to find out how to work all its wonderful gadgets (which she was not clever enough to do readily), it struck her that it would be funny if the sirens
suddenly went and the blitz came back to London the night she returned to it. That would be just her luck, and no doubt it had to come back some time. Or was she getting morbid again?

Then Miss Roach, knowing nothing of the future, knowing nothing of the February blitz shortly to descend on London, knowing nothing of flying bombs, knowing nothing of rockets, of Normandy, of
Arnhem, of the Ardennes bulge, of Berlin, of the Atom Bomb, knowing nothing and caring very little, got into her bath and lingered in it a long while.

Then she got out and dried herself, and then put on her night-gown, and cleaned her teeth last thing, and then went back into the double room, in which the presence of the other bed made her
feel that she was sleeping with the unhappy ghost of herself.

Then Miss Roach – this slave of her task-master, solitude – had to choose which bed she was going to sleep in, and chose the one nearest the window, and then got into bed and stared
at the ceiling, and then decided that they were heavenlily comfortable beds anyway and that was all that mattered, and it was lovely and quiet and that was all that mattered, too. And then she
decided that she felt like sleeping, and would probably have a good night and so everything was all right, in fact very nice. And then she realised that it would be a bad thing if she didn’t
have a good night as she had to be up early in the morning looking for somewhere to live, and then, of course, she had to go to the office, because Mr. Lindsell had said ‘See you
tomorrow’ when he had left her, not realising that she had to look for somewhere to live. And then she thought she might phone Mr. Lindsell, and ask if she need not go, and then she thought
that this might offend him after all his kindness, and then she was sure it wouldn’t because he was a nice man, and then this thing, and then that matter, and then this thing again, until at
last she put out the light, and turned over, and adjusted the pillow, and hopefully composed her mind for sleep – God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us.