A Fry Christmas turned out to be so much richer than a Potter Christmas that Miss St John, exhibiting the seasonal goodwill, almost felt it, too, and mingled with hollyish sprightliness among the Christmas visitors. Mrs Fry certainly talked too much: ‘Our Dennis’s first Christmas in Civvy Street,’ but as her doting expressed itself in a chestnut stuffing for the turkey, Miss St John allowed that the young man had his uses. After Christmas, no doubt, he would go away.

After Christmas he did not go away. Commenting on this to Betty, Miss St John learned that Dennis was remaining at the Peacock in order to study the trade under his father’s guidance.

The shock she felt at this piece of news was in itself disquieting. To dislike a person because you choose to is one thing—because you have to, quite another. The compulsion to dislike Dennis began to menace Miss St John’s peace and quiet. His features again began to seep through the films and the biographies, and he completely spoiled an otherwise most promising life of a Balkan sovereign. Rather than allow herself to be put upon like this, she would move to one of the other hotels in the town. Then the long frost of 1947 set in, and immobilized any such project. It grew colder and colder. People talked of nothing but the cold, and the radio prated of fuel economy and crisis. Miss St John postponed her walk to the Public Library and spun out an Edwardian bishop, reading every word of his correspondence on such subjects as Disestablishment, the Licensing Laws, and the Doctrine of the Atonement, as scrupulously as though they 100were letters to his wife about dining-room carpets. Just as she decided she could suck his bones no further, it began to snow.

A dusky pallor brimmed up every room. No sound came from the wadded streets. It was as though one were a corpse, and lay under a white sheet amid a respectful silence. Traffic was at a standstill, no Transients broke the long silences of the lounge, the weather forecasts on the radio liturgically reaffirmed that the cold weather was likely to continue. If it had not been for Dennis, Miss St John would have read her Bible (she had, of course, a Bible). But Dennis strolled in and out of the lounge as boldly as an undertaker, and somehow she did not wish him to find her reading the Bible. She had just embarked on a fourth voyage through the bishop when Dennis entered on a pretext of making up the fire.

‘Still reading, Miss St John? You read a lot, don’t you?’

‘It saves me from conversation.’

‘That must be a fascinating book you’ve got there.’

Encountering yet again the bishop’s callow indecisions about his fitness to be ordained as deacon, Miss St John was jolted into candour, and said, ‘On the contrary. But it’s all I have till I can get out and change it.’

‘Why not try some of mine? Needs must when the Devil drives, or so they say.’