It took me longer than I had expected to collect what I wanted. Something like two hours had passed before I got back. I dropped one or two things from my armful in negotiating the door. Josella’s voice called, with a trace of nervousness, from that overfeminine room.
“Only me,” I reassured her as I advanced down the passage with the load.
I dumped the things in the kitchen and went back for those I’d dropped. Outside her door I paused.
“You can’t come in.” she said.
“That wasn’t quite my intended angle,” I protested. “What I want to know is, can you cook?”
“Boiled-egg standard,” said her muffled voice.
“I was afraid of that. There’s an awful lot of things we’re going to have to learn,” I told her.
I went back to the kitchen. I erected the kerosene stove I had brought on top of the useless electric cooker and got busy.
When I’d finished laying the places at the small table in the sitting room the effect seemed to me fairly good. I fetched a few candles and candlesticks to complete it, and set them ready. Of Josella there was still no visible sign, though there had been sounds of running water some little time ago. I called her.
“Just coming,” she answered.
I wandered across to the window and looked out. Quite consciously I began saying good-by to it all. The sun was low. Towers, spires, and facades of Portland stone were white or pink against the dimming sky. More fires had broken out here and there. The smoke climbed in big black smudges, sometimes with a lick of flame at the bottom of them. Quite likely, I told myself, I would never in my life again see any of these familiar buildings after tomorrow. There might be a time when one would be able to come back-but not to the same place. Fires and weather would have worked on it; it would be visibly dead and abandoned. But now, at a distance, it could still masquerade as a living city.
My father once told me that before Hitler’s war he used to go round London with his eyes more widely open than ever before, seeing the beauties of buildings that be had never noticed before-and saying good-by to them. And now I had a similar feeling. But this was something worse. Much more than anyone could have hoped for had survived that war-but this was an enemy they would not survive, it was not wanton smashing and willful burning that they waited for this time: it was simply the long, slow, inevitable course of decay and collapse.
Standing there, and at that time, my heart still resisted what my head was telling me. Still I had the feeling that it was all something too big, too unnatural really to happen. Yet I knew that it was by no means the first time that it had happened. The corpses of other great cities are lying buried in deserts and obliterated by the jungles of Asia. Some of them fell so long ago that even their names have gone with them. But to those who lived there their dissolution can have seemed no more probable or possible than the necrosis of a great modem city seemed to me. …
It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here”- that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms.
And now it was happening here. Unless there should be some miracle, I was looking on the beginning of the end of London-and very likely, it seemed, there were other men, not unlike me, who were looking at the beginning of the end of New York, Paris, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Bombay, and all the rest of the cities that were destined to go the way of those others under the jungles.
I was still looking out when a sound of movement came from behind me. I turned, and saw that Josella had come into the room. She was wearing a long, pretty frock of palest blue georgette with a little jacket of white fur. In a pendant on a simple chain a few blue-white diamonds flashed; the stones that gleamed in her ear clips were smaller but as fine in color. Her hair and her face might have been fresh from a beauty parlor. She crossed the floor with a flicker of silver slippers and a glimpse of gossamer stockings. As I went on staring without speaking, her mouth lost its little smile.
“Don’t you like it?” she asked with childish halt disappointment.
“It’s lovely-you’re beautiful,” I told her. “I-well, I just wasn’t expecting anything like this
Something more was needed. I knew that it was a display which had little or nothing to do with me. I added:
“You’re-saying good-by?”
A different look came into her eyes.
“So you do understand. I hoped you would.”
“I think I do. I’m glad you’ve done it. It’ll be a lovely thing to remember,” I said.
I stretched out my hand to her and led her to the window.
“I was saying good-by too-to all this.”
What went on in her mind as we stood there side by side is her secret. In mine there was a kind of kaleidoscope of the life and ways that were now finished-or perhaps it was more like flipping through a huge volume of photographs with one, all-comprehensive “do-you-remember?”
We looked for a long time, lost in our thoughts. Then she sighed. She glanced down at her dress, fingering the delicate silk.
“Silly? Rome burning?” she said with a rueful little smile. “No-sweet,” I said. “Thank you for doing it. A gesture-and a reminder that with all the faults there was so much beauty. You couldn’t have done-or looked-a lovelier thing.”
Her smile lost its ruefulness.
“Thank you, Bill.” She paused. Then she added: “Have I said thank you before? I don’t think I have. If you hadn’t helped me when you did
“But for you,” I told her, “I should probably by now be lying
maudlin and sozzled in some bar. I have just as much to
thank you for. This is no time to be alone.” Then, to change the trend, I added: “And speaking of drink, there’s an excellent amontillado here, and some pretty good things to follow. This is a very well-found apartment.”
I poured out the sherry, and we raised our glasses.
“To health, strength-and luck,” I said.
She nodded. We drank.
“What,” Josella asked as we started on an expensive-tasting pate, “if the owner of all this suddenly comes back?”
In that case we will explain-and he or she should be only too thankful to have someone here to tell him which bottle is which, and so on-but I don’t think that is very likely to happen.”
“No,” she agreed, considering. “No. I’m afraid that’s not very likely. I wonder ” She looked round the room. Her eyes paused at a fluted white pedestal. “Did you try the radio-I suppose that thing is a radio, isn’t it?”
“It’s a television projector too,” I told her. “But no good. No power.”
“Of course. I forgot. I suppose we’ll go on forgetting things like that for quite a time.”
“But I did try one when I was out.” I said. “A battery affair. Nothing doing. All broadcast bands as silent as the grave.”
“That means it’s like this everywhere?”
“I’m afraid so. There was something pip-pipping away around forty-two meters. Otherwise nothing. I wonder who and where he was, poor chap.”
“It’s-it’s going to be pretty grim, Bill, isn’t it?”
“It’s-No, I’m nor going to have my dinner clouded,” I said. “Pleasure before business-and the future is definitely business. Let’s talk about something interesting, like how many love affairs you have had and why somebody hasn’t married you long before this-or has he? You see how little I know, Life story, please.”
“Well,” she said, “I was born about three miles from here. My mother was very annoyed about it at the time.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You see, she had quite made up her mind that I should be an American. But when the car came to take her to the airport it was just too late. Full of impulses, she was-I think I inherited some of them.”
She prattled on. There was not much remarkable about her early life, but I think she enjoyed herself in summarizing it and forgetting where we were for a while. I enjoyed listening to her babble of the familiar and amusing things that had all vanished from the world outside. We worked lightly through childhood, schooldays, and “coming out”-insofar as the term still meant anything.
I did nearly get married when I was nineteen,” she admitted, “and aren’t I glad now it didn’t happen. But I didn’t feel like that at the time. I had a frightful row with Daddy, who’d broken the whole thing up because he saw right away that Lionel was a spizzard and-”