Below him, in the basement flat, the lonely Mr Ridgeway was also meditating a small service to her. In his dark, dampish-smelling sitting-room—only the upper halves of its windows rose above the level of the front-garden—he was re-reading once more a letter which he had written three days before.
‘DEAR MRS WHALLEY,—I am returning, with gratitude, the books which you so kindly lent me some time ago. I have read them with much interest. Please accept my apologies for having kept them so long. But I am the slowest of readers.
‘Since our last meeting I have heard from a medical friend who is specially interested in your husband’s trouble. I enclose some cuttings which he has sent me with reference to a new extract from which excellent results have been obtained, and hope your husband will be persuaded to give the accompanying small supply of it a trial.
‘Yrs sincerely,
‘AMBROSE RIDGEWAY.’
He laid the letter down and sat back in his chair, a stoutish, untidy man of fifty-five or so, with a rather gross and bloated face which had once been handsome and was still redeemed by a pair of very fine eyes. Presently, he told himself, he would shave and put on a clean collar and shirt and his good suit and go up the steep steps to deliver his note and his two small parcels. Perhaps it would be she who would open the door—more probably her husband. Though, in the afternoon he tried to work—poor devil.
Presently, though. There was plenty of time, and not often something to look forward to.
His eyes rested upon the medical journals from which he had clipped the cuttings several days before. They still lay open upon a small table, grey with the dust of Downview Road. Misgiving grew again in him. Was it wise to associate himself in any way with medical matters?
After some meditation he tore up his letter, dropped one of the parcels into a drawer, and then stretched himself on a sofa, covering his face with a dingy handkerchief. He would write just a note of thanks, returning the books.
But presently. There was plenty of time. It was raining. Tomorrow would do just as well.
Harvey Knayle also was thinking just then of Mrs Whalley, in whom, as we shall see, he took an interest of a somewhat complicated kind. He was standing in Edwarde-Lewin’s study, whither they had retired to discuss, before tea, a projected fortnight’s fishing in Ireland, and, while his host fumbled in a drawer, he was telling about the Prossips’ gramophone.
‘What’s the law of the thing, Lewin?’ he asked, jingling his loose silver. ‘How many times may the chap in the flat over you play the same tune on his gramophone continuously before you can take legal action to make him stop?’
Edwarde-Lewin ceased for a moment to be a genial sportsman and became a discouraging solicitor.
‘You can’t stop him,’ he replied curtly. ‘He may play it all day and all night if he wants to. You have no legal redress. Unless you can prove malice.’
‘Now, how does one prove malice?’ enquired Mr Knayle.
‘Just so,’ snapped Edwarde-Lewin, and immediately resumed his geniality and his fumbling. ‘Now, where the deuce did I put that confounded letter—’ He remembered that he had perused, personally, Mr Knayle’s agreement at the time of his last moving. ‘But the lease of that flat of yours is nearly up, as well as I remember. Noisy place, Downview Road, now. You won’t stay on there, will you?’
To his own surprise, Mr Knayle suddenly abandoned a decision at which, upon prolonged and anxious consideration, he had all but arrived that afternoon.
‘Oh yes, I shall stay on,’ he said quite definitely. ‘I’m used to the noise now. Noises don’t worry me. Besides, I like the look-out over the Downs. No houses opposite. Oh yes. I shall stay on.’
Edwarde-Lewin found the missing letter and proceeded to read it aloud. Mr Knayle, however, although, as has been said, he was an ardent fisherman, looked out at the already soaked tennis-courts and went on thinking about the real reason which had decided him to keep on his flat in Downview Road.
5
While he shut the bathroom door, Whalley looked at his wrist-watch. Five past four. He had been sure that it was not yet a quarter to. The kitchen floor always took an hour and a half to do—two hours if one washed the skirtings and the other paintwork. He couldn’t hope now to finish before half-past five. This alteration of a quarter of an hour in his plans threw him into a flurry. He changed feverishly into the old trousers and dilapidated pullover in which he did his housework and, hurrying to the kitchen, began to move its movable furniture out into the passage.
Once a week for the past eighteen months he had performed this detested task—the most detested and most troublesome of the drudgery to which circumstances had doomed him. Like that of all others, its procedure was now stereotyped—a sequence of merely automatic gestures requiring no least direction from will or judgment or even consciousness. He began it, as always, by carrying out the two chairs into the passage and, as he did so, his impatience, already fatigued, rushed on ahead in desperation, foreseeing every dull, familiar detail of the labour before him, every smallest necessary movement, every trifling difficulty, every unavoidabe compromise with the ideal of a perfect kitchen floor perfectly washed.
After the chairs, the small table by the right hand window to be carried into the passage—far enough along it to leave room for the other things to follow it. Then the three baskets in which Elsa kept vegetables and fruit. Then the little cake-larder, which stood on the floor because the walls wouldn’t hold nails securely. Then the set of shelves on which the saucepans and pan stood and hung. Some of them would fall and kick up a clatter. Then the small table by the sink. Then the basins stacked under it. Then the kitchen bin. (That would have to be washed out with hot water and disinfected when it had been emptied into the big bin outside the hall-door). Then the bread-bin and the flour-bin and the three empty biscuit tins under the big table. Then the big table itself (it had to be turned side up to get it through the door and even then its legs had to be screwed through one by one). Then all the small oddments kept on the floor along the walls, because there was no other place to keep them—unused things, most of them—obsolete trays and grids belonging to the electric-cooker—old boxes and jam pots and tins—kept because they might be useful some time.
The sweeping, then—the same old places that took so much time to get into with the sweeping-brush, the same old snags that caught its loose head, the same old stoopings and twistings to get the same old dust and dirt out. Then the dustpan to gather up the dirt. The dustpan to be emptied into the bin. Then the bucket to be rooted out of the cupboard under the sink (it always jammed against the sink’s waste-pipe) and taken to the bathroom and filled with hot water from the geyser. The scrubbing brush and floor-cloths and soap to be collected from the bathroom cupboard. The bucket to be carried back along the blocked passage to the kitchen, very slowly, lest the water should splash over—
At this point, while he hurried from kitchen to passage and back again, his eyes, at each return, fixing themselves for a moment frowningly on the dresser-clock, he began again the old, never-decided debate as to the wisdom of washing the linoleum covering the floor—an expensive, inlaid linoleum which had been a special pride of Elsa’s in the days of the kitchen’s first freshness. Someone had told Elsa that linoleum ought to be washed—with a dash of paraffin in the water. Someone else had told her that it ought to be washed with Lux. Someone else had told her that it ought never to be washed on any account, but done with polish. He had tried various polishes. Certainly the linoleum had looked better when polished—it always looked grey and dull after washing. But the polishes all left a greasy surface in which