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is large
enough for two beds, but she has refused to share the room with another girl.
The elderly women who administer these affairs send for her to come to them in
their bottle-green office in London. Greying print dresses hang over their
drooping figures. They hunch over their desks. One of them tells her, ‘It’s the
regulations that girls under thirty have to share a room. Only women of thirty
and more are entitled to a room to themselves.’
    ‘I need
a room to myself,’ Elsa says. ‘I won’t share.’
    ‘There’s
a war on,’ one of these draped billet-administrators reminds her in a voice
which cracks like a scratchy gramophone needle on an old record.
    ‘But,’
says Elsa, ‘it wouldn’t be possible for me to share with another girl. It
wouldn’t be comfortable for the other girl. I see things.’
    ‘What?’
says the one. ‘You what?’ says the other. Elsa swings her bare brown legs in
the chair. Her clothing coupons do not run to stockings for everyday
occasions.
    ‘Well,
yes,’ she says, ‘I am really a bit uncanny. I have supernatural
communications.’ There is a large round government clock stuck up on the wall,
its size hideously magnifying the importance of working hours and seconds.
Underneath it, a poster, unaccountably weather-beaten, bears the motto,
‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.
    The
billet-administrators, who have been up to now, to all appearances identical,
invisibly separate themselves, hearing Elsa’s explanation, into senior official
and less senior. The senior draws Elsa’s file towards her, puts on her reading
spectacles, and begins to read the details set forth on the first folio, while
her lesser-paid colleague cranes forth her head over her desk and says
probingly to Elsa, as if interviewing her for her qualifications in the field
of aberrant sex, ‘Do you use an instrument?’
    ‘No, it
isn’t necessary,’ says Elsa, ‘for spiritual communication.’ She is looking at
the large clock-face and noting that she is late for her appointment with
Paul. This is their second leave together in London. She says, ‘I can’t wait
too long. I must go, I’m afraid. I’m on leave, actually, you know.’
    Nobody
is put to share her room. Elsa is rather disliked on this account, her only
friend being Poppy Xavier who has the best room in the house to herself as a
matter of course.
     
    ‘Peter
Pan,’ says Paul Hazlett to his son. ‘Is that what
you called me over here to discuss?’
    ‘You
were not called over by me. You said you wanted to come.’
    ‘Garven
is getting me down. A psychoanalyst working in my house as a butler. He’s
determined to document her case history. Our lives will be an open book.’
    ‘Why
don’t you go away?’
    ‘I
can’t leave your mother. What are you saying? What are you telling me?’
    ‘Walk
out. Leave her alone with Garven.’
    ‘Is
that what she wants?’
    ‘I
wouldn’t be surprised.’
    ‘I
couldn’t do a thing like that,’ says Paul. ‘I couldn’t walk out and leave your
mother in difficulties. She was in difficulties with Kiel. Now if she gets in
difficulties with Garven—’
    ‘Something
new,’ Pierre says.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Her
difficulty with Kiel,’ Pierre says. ‘You never said before she was in
difficulty with him.’
    ‘Well,
she was. She’s a difficult woman, and he was a spy. Do you know what he did? He
got himself taken prisoner by us, then he got himself a job with our
intelligence unit on the pretext of being anti-Nazi. After he’d been
broadcasting for our outfit six months he picked a fight and got himself sent
back to the prison camp. Three days later he went on the air in a prisoners of
war exchange-of-greetings programme. He sent a simple message to his mother
and sister. But his voice was recognisable, you see. He’d been broadcasting for
us. We were supposed to be an authentic underground German station. His voice
was recognisable. We weren’t sure, but it was definitely possible that Kiel did
it