half-opened the door, saying heartily, ‘I’ve got to go out, Mabel, don’t wait up for me, I may be late.’ Her mother looked up quickly, her lips pressed tightly together, but he had gone. They heard the front door slam.
The mother sewed and the daughter read in silence. A great dreariness filled Margaret’s heart. The neat, pretty room, the silence, the upright figure of her mother sitting embroidering, seemed unreal, and she felt she was a prisoner, and must sit there for ever. She was so sorry for her mother! and she could not comfort her because they must pretend that nothing was wrong. Yet she could understand how her father must get away from his home; out and away into something more real, at which she could only guess. Oh, surely, she thought wretchedly, there are homes where the evenings aren’t so miserable as they are here!
3
The move to London was as complicated and exhausting as most moves in war-time. On their first night there, as the furniture had not arrived, the Steggleses had to ask hospitality of the Wilsons and Mr Steggles’s reporter friend, who both proved friends indeed; Margaret and her mother going to the Wilsons and Mr Steggles to the reporter’s bachelor flat in Moorgate.
It was a time of strain for Margaret because of her mother’s awkwardness as a visitor; Mrs Steggles was unsociable and suspicious, and disliked paying visits unless it was to relations, and although Mrs Wilson and Hilda were born hostesses, able to make the shyest people feel at home, they were not successful with her; she determinedly made conversation and was anxious every ten minutes about giving so much trouble. After she had gone, Mr Wilson said that he felt as if she had been with them for three years. Mrs Wilson and Hilda rebuked him (for he was not encouraged to express opinions likely to lessen their social activities) but when alone they agreed that for once Dad was right; Mrs Steggles was not easy to get on with. The two families had only met briefly before this, and had known next to nothing of each other’s lives. Now Mrs Wilson and Hilda understood a number of things which had puzzled them about Margaret.
So Margaret was greatly relieved, on the evening of their second day in London, to stand for amoment at the window of her own room at the back of the new house and gaze up at the hill, where lights were shining just before blackout time, and to know that all the bedrooms were ready to be slept in, and their new life fairly begun.
How lustrous, how golden and clear, shone out the evening lights! She rested her hands upon the windowsill and gazed pensively out into the dusk, and thought that before the war they had never looked so beautiful. We had got into the habit of taking them for granted, she thought, and yet a light shining at night is one of the oldest and most beautiful things in human life, and poetry and folk-lore are full of them; the light in the forest that guides the lost traveller to the witch’s hut, and the lamp shining between the trees in The Merchant of Venice, like a good deed in a naughty world , and the Lights of London in all the old novels –.
‘Margaret! Have you seen the spoons your Aunt Chrissie gave us anywhere? I believe those wretched men have lost them. What on earth are you doing up there?’ Her mother’s voice, shrill and irritable, came up the stairs.
‘I’m just doing the blackout, Mother; I’ll be down in a minute,’ she called, and pulled the curtains across her window.
If I couldn’t get five minutes to myself sometimes to think of things like that, I’d get as bad as Mother and Reg, and almost everybody else I know, she thought, running downstairs. The only person I’ve ever known who sometimes thought about things in that way was Frank; even Hilda – who’s a darling – never does. I suppose I’m just different, that’s all.
‘I seem to remember putting those spoons in a corner of the knife-box,’ she said, going into the kitchen