The Slaves of Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

her hard-pressed country, the spirit of the
black-out generally, and her own pecuniary resources.
    Miss Roach kept on her torch as she went up the stairs. Another little lamp burned on the first floor outside the ‘Lounge’, from behind whose closed door she could hear (she was now
aware that she had been hearing it in anticipation all the way back from the station) Mr. Thwaites’ voice booming nasally, indefatigably, interminably. . .
    She went on up past another landing, which was in complete darkness, to the top landing and her own room, which looked out on to Church Street.
    She was able to perceive that the black-out was not done, and went over and did it. The maid sometimes did this, but one could not rely upon her doing so. One’s responsibility in regard to
the black-out had been the occasion of one of Mrs. Payne’s famous notes. ‘
N.B. Visitors will be held personally responsible for completing their own black-outs in their
bedrooms
’ – this being pinned, sensibly enough (Mrs. Payne was nothing if not sensible), underneath the electric-light switch. Mrs. Payne left or pinned up notes everywhere,
anywhere, austerely, endlessly – making one feel, sometimes, that a sort of paper-chase had been taking place in the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but a nasty, admonitory paperchase. All
innovations were heralded by notes, and all withdrawals and adjustments thus proclaimed. Experienced guests were aware that to take the smallest step in an original or unusual direction would be to
provoke a sharp note within twenty-four hours at the outside, and they had therefore, for the most part, abandoned originality.
    Miss Roach turned on the switch by the door, and saw her room in the feeble light of the bulb which hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room and which was shaded by pink parchment. She
saw the pink artificial-silk bedspread covering the light single bed built of stained-oak – the pink bedspread which shone and slithered and fell off, the light bedstead which slid along the
wooden floor if you bumped into it. She saw the red chequered cotton curtains (this side of the black-out material) which were hung on a brass rail and never quite met in the middle, or, if forced
to meet in a moment of impatience, came flying away from the sides; she saw the stained-oak chest of drawers with its mirror held precariously at a suitable angle with a squashed match-box. She saw
the wicker table by the bed, on which lay her leather illuminated clock, but no lamp, for Mrs. Payne was not a believer in reading in bed. She saw the gasfire, with its asbestos columns yellow and
crumbling, and its gas-ring. She saw the small porcelain wash-basin with Running H. and C. (the H. impetuously H. at certain dramatic moments, but frequently not Running but feebly dribbling
– the C. bitterly C. yet steadfastly Running). She saw the pink wall-paper, which bore the mottled pattern of a disease of the flesh; and in one corner were piled her ‘books’,
treasures which she had saved from the bombing in London, but for which she had not yet obtained a shelf.
    Such was Miss Roach’s pink boudoir in Thames Lockdon before dinner at night. Before washing she looked at what she could see of herself in the mirror – at the thin, bird-like nose
and face, and the healthy complexion – too healthy for beauty – the open-air, sun-and-wind complexion of a uniform red-brick colour, of a texture and colour to which it would be
impossible or absurd to apply make-up of any sort. She had, she knew, the complexion of a farmer’s wife and the face of a bird. Her eyes, too, were bird-like – blackly brown, liquid,
loving, appealing, confused. Her hair was of a nondescript brown colour, and she parted it in the middle. She was only thirty-nine, but she might have been taken for forty-five. She had given up
‘hope’ years ago. She had never actually had any ‘hope’. Like so many of her kind – the hopeless – she was too amiable and