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to her fellow human beings. Something (a sense of self-preservation?) could not tolerate much longer her walking and riding and talking the time away under this name or that, this disguise or that; calling strange identities into being with a switch of clothes or a change of voice-until one felt like an empty space without boundaries and it did not matter what name one gave a stranger who asked: What is your name? Who are you?
    Martha crossed the river, left it, moved among streets that looked as if they had just survived an earthquake, and came to the rubble of damage left by the bomb that had fallen on St Paul’s. To Iris,‘where the bomb fell across the river’. She had been to visit the scene the day after. So had Stella and some of her men. City workers emerged everywhere from doorways, hurried off to buses and tubes. This day was ending-and where was she going to sleep tonight? Another telephone box, orangy-pink and faded, stood ahead. She went into it, to ring Phoebe. Soon, on the pile of telephone books, there were bits of paper with telephone numbers on them-Phoebe’s among them. And the café’s number. If she rang there now, saying, even as Martha, ‘I’m coming back tonight, ’ Jimmy or Iris would say: ‘You’re coming back then, are you? ’ And she would walk in, and, after a moment to judge whether she brought pain with her, a snub, they would smile. Extraordinarily kind they were; kindness was stronger than their anxious need to hold, to keep.
    Iris felt for Martha, or rather Martha’s experience that enabled her to drop into the life of Joe’s Café like a migrating bird, exactly the same emotion as she felt for a baulk of timber hauled up out of the tides of the river or a yard of curtain material got oft the ration, or teaspoons found among rubble after a bomb had dropped. Which was not to denigrate what she felt: not at all. Martha had been something extra, something given, something unearned-as the children playing on the bomb site had come running into the café with an old metal meat dish found under some broken bricks, used now for the week’s meat ration at Sunday midday. Treasure. And Martha to Stella was a heady wind from countries she would never visit.
    Henry Matheson’s number, on a bus ticket: she had, also, to telephone Henry. She could sleep at Jack’s-that is, she could if he didn’t have another girl there, which was likely. She should ring Henry. Not wanting to ring Henry was quite a different reluctance from not wanting to ring Marjorie’s sister. Henry Matheson was a relation of Mrs. Maynard. Mr. Maynard had arrived to say good-bye to Martha at the station when she left, not oblivious to the fact that Martha did not want to say good-bye, or even to see him-but not caring. He was in the grip of that need with which Martha had become only too familiar seeing it at work in so many different people: it was to make sure that Martha did not escape from him, or rather, from what he represented. His wife’s cousins the Mathesons would be only too delighted to see her, said he, formidably present for a half-hour before the train steamed out of the station from which she, at last, after having seen so manypeople leave there for adventures in England, was leaving. Clearly her manner had not indicated strongly enough that she would be delighted to see the cousins, so Henry Matheson had been at the boat train to meet her. Martha felt no obligation to be grateful to the Maynards, who were not kind; but did feel she must at least be polite to Henry, who was. Henry, altogether charming, and delightful, had hovered, the eye of the Maynards, in the background of those weeks; and Martha had bought him off by offering-not ‘Matty’, too crude a persona for him, but a slaphappy, freebooting adventuress, cousin of ‘Matty’, who, she thought, was close enough to his secret fantasies about himself-he was the essence of conformity-to keep him quiet. She did not want letters from Henry to the