The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [117]
I had reached the edge of the kerb. I was obliged to wait for a lull in the hurtling traffic. A red bus carrying a sweeping advertisement for Gillette Safety Razors in silver and green across its top deck braked in front of me to allow passengers on to the tailboard from a bus stop to my right. Now I was trapped. For an absurd moment I imagined a heavy hand on my shoulder and the whisper of Cockney authority confiding, Madam, we know you’re not Susan Green. I even turned around. But all I saw was the oblivious march of September pedestrians in raincoats under raised umbrellas. When I turned back again, the bus had pulled away and Foyles beckoned.
I will set off tomorrow morning. I have telephoned to arrange the car and they are going to fill the tank with petrol and the radiator with water and check the tyres and the engine tonight. I have arranged to pick the vehicle up at 8 a.m. They were very enthusiastic for me to try their latest model. I told them I didn’t care a jot about the manufacturer or year so long as the car is reliable and its colour black. I want to be as inconspicuous as I can be. At the risk of falling from the Monsignor’s grace, I know that nature contrived to make me a conspicuous woman. It might be committing the sin of pride to allude to this. But really, I think it is only stating a fact. I have never required a crimson sports car to turn the heads of either sex.
Perhaps I should have told them that I do not wish to hire a German car. After Foyles this evening, I walked down past Sheekey’s fish restaurant and along Bedfordbury for the Strand and Embankment Underground station. There was a boy at the station entrance, hawking the Evening News. I glanced at the front-page headline. President Roosevelt has made a speech calling on American Nazis to be more tolerant of other political groups. But tolerance is not a part of the Nazi ideology. The iron broom Hitler talks so fondly about, leaves a trail of blood when he uses it to sweep. Tolerance to them is no different to weakness. That is why appeasement is such a paradox. It can only encourage what it delays and seeks to prevent.
Rather than going straight into the station and taking my District Line train, I walked across to the Embankment and watched the river for a while. I have always loved the river. The night was gorgeously clear and the Thames was at full tide, its oily surface lapping against the mooring rings which depend from the mouths of sad bronze lions’ heads, set in the stone of the bank and grown green in their watery toil. I watched a pugnacious tug pull a long line of barges filled with bitumen or coal upriver while its steersman puffed on a pipe and sipped at something fortifying from a metal flask in his wheelhouse. The sail of a barque sucked light like a vacuum sucks air as it passed blackly across the gas lamps and braziers illuminating the wharves of the far bank. At Cleopatra’s Needle, I stopped and turned back and watched as engines departed Charing Cross Station for points southeast across the river bridges with jubilant screams on their steam whistles and firefly sparks dancing in their furious manes of smoke.
The Germans will bomb London. That is what a man from the Ministry of Defence said on the wireless a few evenings ago before he was forced to resign from his job for the crime of ‘warmongering’. Thus