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for redevelopment; but she could see no further than herself in some other Westringham, kindly moved there by Mr Rathbone and everything much the same as before if not a good deal better. In fact, when the move came, she saw herself stepping out of the house twenty years younger. Suitors would present themselves in the new Westringham and she would probably remarry. Seeing the future like this, Mrs Routledge had everything to look forward to and nothing to dread. The last couple of decades, since Mr Routledge’s death and the necessity to turn a delightful home into what she could privately admit to herself was a low-standard boarding house, had been nothing but a silly mistake. Mr Rathbone, who had assumed husbandly and godly proportions in Mrs Routledge’s mind, would make her young and comfortable elsewhere. Sometimes shewondered if the time was ripe yet to meet him. But she was never feeling quite up to it. If she went to his office in the clothes she wore at the Westringham she would look eccentric and his secretaries might laugh. If he came to her, there was the problem of the basement, and the peculiarity of the residents, who seemed perfectly ordinary on admission but soon started to sleep obsessively, as if the doomed atmosphere of the area had turned the modest hotel into some latter-day temple to Aesculapius. He would be bound to find the place unattractive. Mrs Routledge wished she could set out, as Cecilia Houghton had this morning, on a round of shops and boutiques, fit herself up for the meeting with Mr Rathbone. Mrs Houghton had left for Harrods, complaining loudly that this was a bad part of London for taxis. It was years since Mrs Routledge had left the crumbling crescents and flyblown grocery stores that surrounded the Westringham and crept under the Westway; so long that she could hardly remember what a respectable district looked like, permeated as she was with the experience of living in something that was unnecessary and threatened, like a rumbling appendix. She imagined the streets were clean, and the buildings of uniform height. Sometimes she dreamed she was in a wonderful place like that, but Mr Poynter always appeared in the dream and she took care to wake herself up. Mrs Routledge had no fondness for Mr Poynter, for all his pretensions. When she found herself in a neat residential quarter, and saw him coming towards her through a well-tended garden abloom with fuchsias (dressed in some ridiculous outfit, usually), she asked loudly if this was where Mr Rathbone lived and was instantly woken by his infuriated response. At tea, on the mornings after these dreams, neither she nor Mr Poynter made any reference to the unintended meeting. In the Westringham, at least, it was Mrs Routledge who was in control and not the other way around. She had feared for some time that Mr Poynter, as the only male resident, would try and take charge of theplace and relegate her to the status of some kind of elevated housekeeper. He had appeared at tea a few months ago in a scarlet military tunic with gold tassels and had shouted at Cridge. She had made it perfectly clear that this would not happen again. But sometimes she was afraid to drop off to sleep, in case of seeing him in that beautiful place. If only Mr Rathbone would appear there once, and show him who really belonged where! It was time she pulled herself together and got Mr Rathbone on her side.
    With eyes half closed in pleasant reverie, Mrs Routledge imagined herself in the cocktail-dress department of Harrods, side by side with Cecilia Houghton but infinitely more splendidly attired. She smiled to herself as she lay on the pink bed, the brownish half-moons left by her own greasy head and that of the late Mr Routledge (paler than hers, but still a vivid reminder of their marriage) hanging above her on the padded chintz bedhead like signs from some long-forgotten corporeal zodiac. The sun came in through the window and lit up the frilly lampshades and