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By Root 5748 0

table in Matchett's basement parlour, Portia stretched her legs out and looked at her toes, as though the change Matchett detected (was there a change really?) might have begun there. Matchett, knitting a bedsock, sat on one of the chairs beside the unlit gas stove, feet up on the rung of another chair—she had unbuttoned the straps across her insteps, which were puffy today. It was twelve noon: the hands of the clock seemed to exclaim at the significant hour. Twelve noon—but everything was too ready, nothing more was to come till an afternoon train steamed into Victoria and a taxi toppling with raw-hide luggage crossed London from S.W. to N.W.1. Therefore, there had happened this phenomenal stop. In the kitchen, the cook and Phyllis tittered to one another, no doubt drinking tea. In here, the two chairs now and then creaked with Matchett's monolithic repose.

She had had her way like a fury. Tensed on the knitting needles (for she could not even relax without some expense of energy) her fingers were bleached and their skin puckered, like the skin of old apples, from unremitting immersion in hot water, soda, soap. Her nails were pallid, fibrous, their tips split. Light crept down the sooty rockery, through the bars of the window, to find no colour in Matchett: her dark blue dress blotted the light up. She looked built back into the half darkness behind her apron's harsh glaze. In her helmet of stern hair, a few new white threads shone—but behind the opaqueness of her features control permitted no sag of tiredness. There was more than control here: she wore the look of someone who has augustly fulfilled herself. Floor by floor over the basement towered her speckless house, and a reckoning consciousness of it showed like eyes through the eyelids she lowered over her knitting.

Portia, looking through the bars of the window, said: "It was a pity you couldn't wash the rockery."

"Well, we did spray that ivy, but that doesn't go far, and those tomcats are always after the ferns."

"I did imagine you busy—but not so busy, Matchett."

"I don't see you had call to imagine anybody, not with all you were up to with them there." (This, though worded sharply, was not said sharply: all the time Matchett spoke she was knitting; there was something pacific about the click-click-click.) "You don't want to be in two places, not at your age. You be at the seaside when you're at the seaside. You keep your imaginings till you need them. Come a spring like this one we've been having, out of sight out of mind should be good enough. Oh, it has been a lovely spring for the airing—down at Mrs. Quayne's, I'd have had my mattresses out."

"But I thought about you. Didn't you think of me?"

"Now when do you suppose I'd have had a minute? If you had have been here, you'd have been under my feet one worse than Mr. and Mrs. Thomas if they hadn't gone away. No, and don't you say to me that you went round moping, either: you had your fill of company where you were, and I've no doubt there were plenty of goings on. Not that you've got much to tell; you keep it all to yourself. However, that's always your way,"

"You didn't ask me; you were still so busy. This is the first time you've listened. And now I don't know where to begin."

"Oh, well, take your time: you've got the rest of the summer," said Matchett, glancing at the clock. "I must say, they've sent you back with a colour. I can't see that this change has done you harm. Nor the shake-up either: you were getting too quiet. I never saw such a quiet girl, for your age. Not that that Mrs. Heccomb, poor thing, could teach anyone to say bo. All I've ever heard her say to Mrs. Thomas was yes. But the rest of them down there sound a rough lot. Did you have enough stockings?"

"Yes, thank you. But I'm afraid I cut the knees out of one pair. I was running, and I fell smack on the esplanade."

"And what made you run, may I ask?"

"Oh, the sea air."

"Oh, it did, did it?" said Matchett. "It made you run." Without a pause in her knitting, she half lifted her eyelids, enough to let her look stay tilted, through