The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings Page B

again and picked up the teapot and poured the dregs of the tea down the sink. She rinsed out the sink. She took the lid off the teapot and washed it. She scooped leaves out of the pot and dropped them into the rubbish pail. She rinsed out the pot. She picked up the rubbish pail. While she was in the garden, the water in the pan began to boil.
    From John Arven, Kathleen Hosken has learned to look the thing you most fear straight in the eye, not with passion, with a calculating curiosity.
    She is going away because she understands, now, why her uncle valued her company so very much; why he took such an interest in her; and when he was approached by his MP to give a discreet hand to two young men from Whitehall, why he thought to involve his niece in their work.
    She is leaving because she understands why her mother trusted him to employ her, even though she despises him. Why he is not welcome in their house. Why her father went away.
    It is as John Arven said it would be: a problem that is more or less soluble to an active intellect.
    Her mother came back inside and rinsed out the rubbish pail. Kathleen nursed the side of her head. She primed the fuse to her life, and lit it.
    She said, ‘You married the wrong one.’

2
    It was October, the time of the phoney war. Indian summer in the big London parks, a false spring in Highgate and Hampstead, perfect weather for long walks by the Thames in Kew and Barnes; and all of it given poignancy by bad news from far-away places.
    The dust in the streets shone. Perfect cones of sand shone in the sun. Piles of sand ready for bagging piled up in empty lots. Sunshine glinted off the buttons on the tunics of the AFS men. Their hair. Their belt buckles. Kathleen walked the parks of the unfamiliar city. She wandered its embankments and craned her neck up at its statues. She meandered in a daze. She sleep-walked through Chelsea and Richmond and dozed open-eyed on benches in Battersea. On the grassy banks of Parliament Hill she lay down and slept, the sunlight blood-red through her eyelids, the grass smelling nonsensically of spring. The sun was like a gas fire, warming only what put itself directly in its way, and to step into a shadow was to feel the chill of the true season. Kathleen stayed in the sun.
    She did as John Arven had taught her. She approached everything with an aloof curiosity. She assumed nothing. She tuned her feelings out, became all eyes. She followed the advice she had been given, or most of it. Though she neither walked around the city wrapped in an eiderdown, nor strung a sign about her neck, still, she was prepared, at the first whistle of a descending bomb, to leap face-first into the nearest gutter.
    Surrounded by unfamiliar streets and unapproachable people, she made what kind of life she could. She bought milk and bread. She did not know how to cook; her mother had never shown her. Once, she tried to drink milk straight from the jar. It was thick and foamy and it sickened her. She ran water in. It was better. When the bread set hardshe hacked off a slice and ran it under the tap in the communal bathroom and wrung it out; then it was all right again. Sometimes she had jam.
    The first bombs fell.
    There was no outcry, no animosity.
    At the Lyons corner house where she was training to be a waitress, as he was guiding the girls into the shelter he had made for them in the basement, the boilerman said, ‘Them lads is only doing their job, after all.’
    The same night, in the street below Kathleen’s garret window, two drunk AFS men walked by. They looked up at the bombers thundering overhead, and waved goodbye to them. ‘Goodnight!’ they laughed. ‘Good night, Jerry!’ they cheered. ‘Sleep tight!’
    Kathleen jerked away from the window. They might see her. They might see her at the window and know by her face, rosy in the light from distant fires, that the window was not covered.
    On her first night in this guest-house, she had