91

Under New Management

When the young man at the Peacock Hotel was charged with murder, the townspeople of Dunwater expressed a moderate surprise. They would not, they said, have thought it of him—a convention of speech, since few of us really entertain such uncomfortable speculations. There was one person who might have raised a dissentient voice and said that it was very much what she thought of him. But when her cue came, an accident had silenced her, and the only invocation of her hypothetical testimony came from the accused man, who asked his lawyer whether that Miss St John would be called as a witness. The lawyer shook his head. ‘Was the old lady a friend of yours?’ he asked. ‘Friend? Friend? If it hadn’t been for her driving me crazy—Well, anyway, I wish to God I’d never set eyes on her!’ ‘You won’t again,’ said the lawyer. ‘She’s dead.’ ‘Dead!’ said the accused man incredulously. ‘Do you mean it? Dead? Christ, what a swindle!’ He burst into furious laughter, and the lawyer averted his eyes from a client he already deplored.

Since 1936 Miss St John had lived at the Peacock Hotel, occupying bedroom number five on the second floor and, between 8.30 and 8.50 a.m., the second-floor bathroom, eating breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, going to the Abbey Church on Sundays, the cinema on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the Public Library whenever she wanted another 92biography. The biographies she preferred were those of diplomats, sovereigns, bishops, generals, royal academicians and approved educationalists. Herself leading a regular life, she liked to read of regular lives—lives of well-conducted prosperity closing in well-attended funerals. In autumn, however, when swallows migrate to Africa and the more delicate public shrubs are wrapped in sacking, she allowed herself to read the lives of opera singers and royal favourites. Such a change was in keeping with the seasonal change from cress sandwiches to buttered crumpets.

In all these years Miss St John had made no friends, and only necessary acquaintances—such as shopkeepers and the public librarian. Other visitors at the Peacock she ignored, unless they disturbed her, when she put them down. They were Transients. She was a Permanent. In 1941 inferior Permanents appeared, people who wished to get away from air-raids or had lost their homes. They took up the attention of the management and seduced the servants with ostentatious tips (Miss St John could only afford modest tips, though she made up for this by taking an interest in those who served her, remembering to ask after their parents and to wish, if their afternoons out were wet ones, that they had been dry ones). But foreseeing that Britain would win the war—how could it be otherwise?—Miss St John also foresaw that these people would ultimately go away and that everything would proceed as before.

1946 showed how right she had been. The last bogus Permanents had left, the war was won, Mussolini had been 93hanged head-downward by the mob, Hitler had killed himself, atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Miss St John remained at the Peacock with some new biographies to look forward to. Biographies are a fruit of war. The only thing she had not foreseen was a change of management. The Potters were leaving. The new people would take over at the Michaelmas quarter, and were called Fry.