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“He’s all right,” Charley said, seemingly a bit daunted. “We had a bite to eat after.” Mr Middlewitch did not notice the reaction.

“And you had a bit of a chat? Compared notes eh?”

“No,” Charley said. He frowned.

“I remember I was in a situation like that once,” Mr Middlewitch explained. “Very awkward too. It was soon after I left school, and I’d got in with a girl about my own age in the same road. Of course there was nothing to it, we were kids, see. But she went down with something or other, I forget, I believe
it was meningitis, that can be a terrible thing, and when she died I had to spend most of every evening for weeks on end comforting the mother. Nice bit of stuff the mother was as well, but I was too young in those days to tumble the way the wind lay. Not that I wasn’t well developed for a boy mind you.”

There was no response from Summers.

“No, it’s the opportunities missed that get you down as you grow older,” Middlewitch went on, with the wisdom of his prison camp. “Take this rabbit before us now. If I’d ever known I was to have so much coney, why I’d ’ve never cancelled those steaks I used to in the old days, thinking a heavy meal at this hour did me harm. I went regular to the old George at the corner of Wood Lane, which is blitzed down, because most any day you could get a portion of rabbit there. If I’d known then what I do now. But that’s life.”

As for Charley, he did not care by this time what he was eating. And, when Middlewitch called their waitress for cheese and coffee, Rose was no more than a name to him. All the girls at this place were called alike. He concentrated, greedily, on the widow Mr Grant had mentioned.

“Shall I give her a tinkle?” he asked into the silence that had fallen, in a sighing covey of angels, above their table.

But Mr Middlewitch was bored. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll take you over and introduce you to old Ernie. He might do you a bit of good one of these days. What’s that we were saying? Ring her? My dear good lad, do no such thing,” he said. He had forgotten his earlier advice. “Drop in, boy. There you are. Then they can’t say no. Because women are practised on the telephone. Drop in unexpected, that’s my advice, drop in,” he said.

Mrs Frazier sat beside Charley, in front of a roaring fire, in the bed sitting room he hired from her.

“No coal, no nothing,” she remarked. She was about fifty and thin.

He grunted.

“Enjoy this while you have the opportunity,” she said, “take what pleasure and comfort you can, because who is there to tell what may befall. When these new bombs he’s sending over, turn in the air overhead, and come at you, there’s not a sound to be had. One minute sitting in the light, and the next in pitch darkness with the ceiling down, that is if you’re lucky, and haven’t the roof and all on top. But as to our coal, that’s certain. ‘Coal?’ my own merchant said the last time. ‘Coal, Madame? Never heard of it.’ And you don’t catch a sound when they crash, everyone that’s had one, and come out alive, speaks to that.”

He sat vaguely wondering about chances of promotion in the office. Then about his coupons.

“Which is quite different from the last war,” Mrs Frazier continued. “And what a difference, oh my lord how different. Always heard them coming in the last war, and so gave the men time to cast themselves flat. I remember Mr Frazier telling me. But of course in your case you didn’t have long to form a judgement. They took you prisoner within a fortnight of your landing over on the other side, as you informed me. So enjoy this scuttleful while you may,” she ended with relish, “for there’s not another in the cellar. I said to Mary, ‘Let Mr Summers have it, Mary,’
I said, ‘We owe him that for all the poor man’s been through.’ ‘And what about your own fire, Madam?’ ‘Why I’ll sit with Mr Summers, Mary, and see the last fire out we shall have this winter for the gentleman.”’

She said this with an easy mind, who had a ton and a half stowed safe in the other cellar.

She chanced a look at those great brown eyes. He continued to ignore her. But his expression was very pleasant.

“I can’t make up my mind why you don’t go out more often,” she went on. “At the age you are as well, and after what you’ve been in. Find a young lady I mean,” she said.

He gave a happy laugh.

“Laugh?” she asked. “You may laugh but I’m serious.”

He did not take this up.

“Now Mr Middlewitch,” she said, looking into the fire, “that was another kettle of fish, with that man. Why I never had one like it. In the end I was obliged to tell him. Well, I mean to say.”

“Middlewitch?” Charley asked. “Who works in the C.E.G.S.?”

“Oh I couldn’t be certain, I’m sure,” Mrs Frazier answered, but she then gave a description which agreed exactly. “Perhaps you’ve met each other in the way of business?”

“Same man,” Charley said.

“Why I often wonder what’s become of him.”

“Didn’t know I knew him?” Charley enquired.

“Every year you live the world shrinks smaller,” Mrs Frazier replied. “Fancy you knowing Mr Middlewitch. I didn’t intend anything. It’s only that some are different from others. I believe it really was that he thought he’d suit himself best near the Park, in Kensington. Took a fancy to run before breakfast, or suchlike. Whichever way it was, he left here. Paid what was due quite all right. Oh yes, there was nothing of that sort about the gentleman, even if there was a bit too much of the other. You understand I wasn’t altogether sorry to see the back of him. But
I wish the gentleman well, oh yes, I wish him quite well. It was a Mr Gerald Grant recommended Mr Middlewitch.”

Charley was so surprised he spoke sharp.

“Elderly? Lives out at Redham?”

“The same,” Mrs Frazier answered. “Now, of course, you do know him. Why, he recommended you. Very lucky you were, too, even if it is me that says so. If you hadn’t had your experiences I shouldn’t wonder but I might have refused.”

“Of course. I forgot,” Charley mumbled.

“I daresay you think it’s a lot of nonsense,” she said, looking at him with open irritation, “but, when you’ve been back a while longer, you’ll find conditions very different to what you remember of when you went off. Decent flatlets are hard to come by these days. There’s not many roofs left in this whole town, for one thing. So, when Mr Grant rang me, I said, ‘It’s not another Mr Middlewitch, is it?’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘as different as chalk from cheese.’ Because that man. Well I’m a married woman, I’m as broadminded as most, but that gentleman’s love life defied description.”

“Never knew the two were acquainted,” Charley explained, aghast.

“What is there strange in that?” Mrs Frazier enquired, irritable still. “Once you start on coincidences why there’s no end to those things. I could tell you a story you’d never believe but it’s as true as I’m here,” and she at once began a long tale. He hardly listened.

He could not explain it to himself, but the fact that old Mr Grant knew Middlewitch made him deeply suspect. He even asked himself what he suspected, only to find that he could not think.

He saw round and round it in his head.

“So I said, ‘it’s the same person,’” Mrs Frazier was bringing the story to an end. “Look out,’ I said, ‘I’m going to faint away,’ I said, and she came forward to take me by the arm. For they
were as like as two peas,” she finished, with a glance of triumph at Summers.

“Good lord,” he said, not taking it in.

“But you want to brisk yourself up,” Mrs Frazier went on. “There were plenty like it after the last war. Sat about and moped. Of course it was understandable, but then most things are, and when all’s said and done that’s no credit to anyone, to mope,” she said. “Yes, it draws sympathy, going on like that does, but not for long. There’s the rub. Well I mean no one can be expected to put up with it, not for ever. You want to go out and find yourself a nice young lady. There you are.”

“Talking of resemblances,” Mr Summers suddenly began, and he was still staring at the fire. “Children, and their fathers and mothers. Would you say they looked like?” he enquired.

“Nothing in it,” Mrs Frazier said, favouring him with yet another long glance of interest, “nothing at all.” She went into a detailed account of nephews and nieces, while he thought of Ridley. And then blamed himself that he did not think oftener of Rose.

The telephone rang down in the hall, cut Mrs Frazier short.

“I’ll go,” he offered, for he was willing. Curiously enough, it was for him. Odder still, it was Mr Grant wished to speak.

“And Mrs Grant?” Charley asked.

“Mustn’t complain, mustn’t complain at all,” Mr Grant replied. “When you come to consider, there’s compensations in not remembering, as I dare say you’ve found, eh Charley?” His voice was thin. “No, but what I meant to ring you about was this. Did you ever call round on that little lady I mentioned? I’ll tell you why. You’re one of the diffident sort, unsure of yourself. I’ll be bound you’ve done nothing.”

“It slipped me,” Charley admitted.

“Look,” Mr Grant said, “I’m older than you. I can put forward things that perhaps you would never allow from a man your own age. I didn’t altogether make that suggestion just casually as you might say. There was a reason behind.”

“Well thanks,” Charley answered.

“That’s all right,” Mr Grant ended.

When Charley got back to his room Mrs Frazier spoke of rising prices. “Why,” she said, “they rose, they’ve rose …” and the words, because he had not paid attention, the words pierced right through. He held his breath for the pain to which he had grown accustomed, particularly in Germany, he waited for it to break over him, as he sat isolated by Mrs Frazier’s voice he did not listen to as she rasped on. For he was as sure he would feel the ache as he had, on his one early holiday before the war, been certain that he would hear a cuckoo each walk he took, each occasion he passed an open window. It had been the right time of the year for cuckoos. And now, it seemed, was autumn, for he felt nothing at all at her mention of Rose. Nothing. He was amazed. He blamed himself. But he felt nothing whatever.

“No warning,” he brought out in surprise at this new condition in himself, cutting across the landlady’s tideless flow of talk.

“A warning?” Mrs Frazier echoed, agitated. “I never heard the sound. It can’t be our syrens, then.”

“My mistake,” Charley Summers told her. “Talking to myself again.”

She watched him. He was quite unconscious, with a bewildered look on his face.

“Speaking to yourself?” she asked. “Now Mr Summers, you want to watch out. Not at your age. Why,” she said, “your voice rose,” and again, as this word came through, he not even experienced guilt. “You spoke loud,” she said. “Take care, you can do that when you get to my age, but for a young man like you, well …”

There was a silence while he sat there, avidly listening now.

“Take the price of flowers,” Mrs Frazier continued, back to what she had been discussing, “tulips, daffodils, chrysanths, even violets of the field,” and Charley waited, waited for another sign, “why, they’re out of all reason, they’re black market charges right in the light of day. It’s wrong,” she said.

“There it is,” Charley encouraged her. She thought that, when in the end he did regard you out of those great eyes, they seemed to grow from his head, and float in the air before your own. She was actually breathless with them.

“Yes well …” she tried to go on, then hesitated. But her subject carried her forward. “Yes, you say that, you’re like all the others, you take it for granted,” at which, still thinking of his girl, he smiled, her last remark seemed so absurd. “But you do nothing, the next pay day you’ll go in and buy her a bunch; when you find her, that is, which you won’t by sitting here listening to me. I tell you, when I saw the prices they charge round the corner, my gall rose,” she said, and he heard Mrs Frazier no more. He fastened on this word. Once more he waited. But he felt nothing, nothing at all.

Rose was gone.

So he was in a mood to look about, when S.E.C.O., a government department in charge of the contracts on which he was working, found him Miss Dorothy Pitter as his assistant.

The other girls in the office had had to do his typing as and when they could, on top of their own work. Through the weeks that he was losing Rose they were continually saying to him, “When is this new one expected?” Or, “Don’t S.E.C.O. take a time?” He was popular because of his leg, but the office was critically short of staff, and he could not always find a typist to stay late. As a result he could hardly trust his ears when, a few days after this last talk with Mrs Frazier, a member of the counting house met him one morning to say, “She’s in.”

Then, as he went to his room and saw her, he had once again the experience inseparable from government procedure, he had before his eyes the product of a prolonged correspondence; that is, first the discouraging replies, followed by official consent to there being a vacancy, after which a notification that the vacancy would be filled, then, at last, the name of a person to be directed to fill it, then, finally, that wait, a deadly pause of weeks, before, without warning, these letters, these forms and the reference numbers bloomed into flesh and blood, a young woman, with shorthand, who could type.

She was fair, rather untidy. She seemed absolutely null and void. But he was so pleased to see her, he got almost talkative.