The quality of the light and of the atmosphere changed. The taxi shot forward on to Waterloo Bridge. On either side lay the amplitude and simplicity of water, and the silhouetting of the riverside buildings gave a sudden representation of London as a city and historical. The quality of her thoughts changed to gratitude and a filial tenderness. It was in London that she had first learned how to be solitary and unafraid. And then, London had given her Robin.

Their rendezvous was an establishment called the Trafalgar Bakery, which served morning coffee and afternoon teas in a long narrow room at the back of the shop. Here they had had their first meal together, after a concert at the Festival Hall. It pleased them (they were in a mood to be easily pleased) by being so stuffy and Edwardian, with velvet-covered benches along the walls below speckled mirrors, umbered like the glass walls of a fishmonger’s tank; and Robin had commended the inveterate seamindedness of the English, baking to the honour of Nelson within a stone’s-throw of the other gentleman’s bridge. Often remembering it to praise, they had never happened to go back to it. But sentiment recommended it as a meeting-place, also the fact that it was handy for Waterloo Station, whence they would later take the boat train for Southampton. She walked past the counter and 72between the looped cotton-velvet curtains into the back room. There was no one there.

There was, however, a clock, and it showed her that between her anxiety not to be late and her decision to cut across in a taxi, she was nearly half an hour earlier than the time they had agreed on. There was no reason to imagine that Robin had changed his mind, and no pressing reason to suppose he had been waylaid by his wife or had met with an accident. To realize this was such a relief that she walked quite steadily to a table at the end of the room, where the suitcase would be in no one’s way, and sat down prepared to enjoy an interval of blamelessly remaining in one place. Now, if she had not left her Times in the taxi, she could have read not merely leading articles but the Correspondence and the Personal Column without exposing herself to the ominous; for she had done her part, she had brought herself safely to the Trafalgar Bakery, and all she had to do was to wait.

This she could do quite inconspicuously, as the two women in the shop were busy with customers. The shopdoor (it had a small old-fashioned bell attached to it) was continually being opened and closed, and as there was still twenty-five minutes before Robin could possibly appear, she need not attend to the bell. A card dangling under the clock informed her that Minerals were Served Here, as well as Morning Coffee and Afternoon Teas. (Why, she had said to Robin, was coffee a solitary drink and tea a community one?—and he had replied that coffee, the kind of coffee served here, was in the category of the sins that are done 73by one and one, and from that they had somehow alighted on the subject of life-saving dogs and the pictures in their respective nurseries.) Farther down the room was another notice saying Sandwiches Cut. That sounded genial, more genial than Minerals. Yet Minerals had this much to be said for it, Robin had pointed out, it was a good Edwardian term and preferable to Soft Drinks. In France, of course, they would drink wine. Her eyelids had closed while picturing the table under a striped awning at which Robin and she would drink wine; she felt her head jolt forward and discovered that she was about to fall asleep. She would order a Morning Coffee—she was quite accustomed to drinking bad coffee, in fact she almost preferred it; and there was quarter of an hour before Robin could arrive to find her disgracing herself.