Rowe said, "That's very odd. He got the exact weight? "
There was a little hesitation in her reply -- as if she had been cornered in a witness-box undrilled for that question. "Well, not exact. But he was within three ounces." She seemed to gain confidence. "He guessed three pounds ten ounces."
"In that case," Rowe said, "I keep the cake because you see I guessed three pounds five the first time. Here is a pound for the cause. Good evening."
He'd really taken them by surprise this tiine; they were wordless, they didn't even thank him for the note. He looked back from the pavement and saw the group from the cake-stall surge forward to join the rest, and he waved his hand. A poster on the railings said: "The Comforts for Mothers of the Free Nations Fund. A fête will be held. . . under the patronage of royalty. . ."
2
Arthur Rowe lived in Guilford Street. A bomb early in the blitz had fallen in the middle of the street and blasted both sides, but Rowe stayed on. Houses went overnight, but he stayed. There were boards instead of glass in every room, and the doors no longer quite fitted and had to be propped at night. He had a sitting-room and a bedroom on the first floor, and he was done for by Mrs Purvis, who also stayed -- because it was her house. He had taken the rooms furnished and simply hadn't bothered to make any alterations. He was like a man camping in a desert. Any books there were came from the two-penny or the public library except for The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield, which he read, as people used to read the Bible, over and over again till he could have quoted chapter and verse, not so much because he liked them as because he had read them as a child, and they carried no adult memories. The pictures were Mrs Purvis's -- a wild water-colour of the Bay of Naples at sunset and several steel engravings and a photograph of the former Mr Purvis in the odd dated uniform of 1914. The ugly arm-chair, the table covered with a thick woollen cloth, the fern in the window -- all were Mrs Purvis's, and the radio was hired. Only the packet of cigarettes on the mantelpiece belonged to Rowe, and the tooth-brush and shaving tackle in the bedroom (the soap was Mrs Purvis's), and inside a cardboard box his sleeping pills. In the sitting-room there was not even a bottle of ink or a packet of stationery: Rowe didn't write letters, and he paid his income tax at the post office.
You might say that a cake and a book added appreciably to his possessions.
When he reached home he rang for Mrs Purvis. "Mrs Purvis," he said, "I won this magnificent cake at the fête in the square. Have you by any chance a tin large enough?"
"It's a good-sized cake for these days," Mrs Purvis said hungrily. It wasn't the war that had made her hungry; she had always, she would sometimes confide to him, been like it from a girl. Small and thin and bedraggled she had let herself go after her husband died. She would be seen eating sweets at all hours of the day: the stairs smelt like a confectioner's shop: little sticky paper-bags would be found mislaid in corners, and if she couldn't be discovered in the house, you might be sure she was standing in a queue for fruit gums. "It weighs two and a half pounds if it weighs an ounce," Mrs Purvis said.
"It weighs nearly three and a half."
"Oh, it couldn't do that."
"You weigh it."
When she was gone he sat down in the arm-chair and closed his eyes. The fête was over: the immeasurable emptiness of the week ahead stretched before him. His proper work had been journalism, but that had ceased two years ago. He had four hundred a year of his own, and as the saying goes, he didn't have to worry. The army wouldn't have him, and his short experience of civil defence had left him more alone than ever -- they wouldn't have him either. There were munition factories, but he was tied to London. Perhaps if every street with which he had associations were destroyed, he would be free to go -- he would find a factory near Trumpington. After a raid he used to sally out and note with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longer -- it was like loosening the bars of a prison cell one by one.
Mrs Purvis brought the cake in a large biscuit-tin. "Three and a half!" she said scornfully. "Never trust these charities. It's just under three."
He opened his eyes. "That's strange," he said, "that's very strange." He thought for awhile. "Let me have a slice," he said. Mrs Purvis hungrily obeyed. It tasted good. He said, "Put it away in the tin now. It's the kind of cake that improves with keeping."
"It'll get stale," Mrs Purvis said.
"Oh no, it's made with real eggs." But he couldn't bear the yearning way in which she handled it. "You can give yourself a slice, Mrs Purvis," he said. People could always get things out of him by wanting them enough; it broke his precarious calm to feel that people suffered. Then he would do anything for them. Anything.
3
It was the very next day that the stranger moved in to Mrs Purvis's back room on the third floor. Rowe met him in the evening of the second day on the dusk of the stairs; the man was talking to Mrs Purvis in a vibrant undertone, and Mrs Purvis stood back against the wall with an out-of-depth scared expression. "One day," the man was saying, "you'll see." He was dark and dwarfish and twisted in his enormous shoulders with infantile paralysis.
"Oh, sir," Mrs Purvis said to Rowe with relief, "this gentleman wants to hear the news. I said I thought perhaps you'd let him listen
"Come in," Rowe said, and opened his door and ushered the stranger in -- his first caller. The room at this time of the evening was very dim; beaverboard in the windows kept out the last remains of daylight and the single globe was shaded for fear of cracks. The Bay of Naples faded into the wallpaper. The little light that went on behind the radio dial had a homely effect like a nightlight in a child's nursery -- a child who is afraid of the dark. A voice said with hollow cheeriness, "Good night, children, good night."
The stranger hunched down in one of the two easy-chairs and began to comb his scalp with his fingers for scurf. You felt that sitting was his natural position; he became powerful then with his big out-of-drawing shoulders in evidence and his height disguised. He said, "Just in time," and without offering his case he lit a cigarette; a black bitter tang of Caporal spread over the room.
"Will you have a biscuit?" Rowe asked, opening his cupboard door. Like most men who live alone, he believed his own habits to be the world's; it never occurred to him that other men might not eat biscuits at six.
"Wouldn't you like the cake?" Mrs Purvis asked, lingering in the doorway.
"I think we had better finish the biscuits first."
"Cakes," said the stranger, "are hardly worth eating these days."
"But this one," Mrs Purvis said with vicarious pride, "was made with real eggs. Mr Rowe won it in a raffle." And just at that moment the news began -- "and this is Joseph Macleod reading it." The stranger crouched back in his chair and listened; there was something supercilious in his manner, as though he were listening to stories of which only he was in a position to know the real truth.
"It's a little more cheerful tonight," Rowe said.
"They feed us," the stranger said.