Free Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard

back, in which it had proved just possible to put a very small bath. This had been done, and a sink installed in the kitchen. They had bought a secondhand gas cooker, and three secondhand gas fires for their sitting rooms and the dining room. They had paid to have some replastering done and the most damaged walls relined. There remained the decoration. Polly, who now worked for a small, rather grand interior-decorating firm, said they must have wallpapers, and that she could get them slightly cheaper. Clary, who had no faith at all in her own taste, let Polly decide such things. But before the papering there was all the painting, and this they had to do for themselves. It was a warm August Friday evening, and they sat each side of the table with the crooked sash window open to let in the brown dusty air from the street.
    ‘Is there anything else to eat?’
    ‘Some sort of stewed apple. I peeled them and chopped them up and put them in the pan with quite a lot of water so they didn’t burn – like last time.’
    Polly cleared the sausage plates and doled out the apple into their breakfast cereal bowls.
    ‘Is it all right?’
    ‘OK. A bit sour.’ Clary didn’t mention what seemed like finger-nails, but Polly said she was sorry, getting the cores out and leaving any apple was much harder than you’d think. ‘Louise’s house had an apple corer,’ she said. ‘I suppose we should get one.’
    ‘We seem to have got worse at cooking.’
    ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s just that we have to do it all the time. And I don’t suppose we’ll ever have a cook. Noël says that the whole of society will never be the same.’
    ‘As before the war? In my job it looks as though it’s going to be exactly the same. I’m constantly being sent to enormous houses where people are putting their kitchens on to the ground floor so that it won’t be far for the servants to walk.’
    ‘But only rich and grand people have interior decorators. Thousands of people are going to be living in prefabs because of all the bombing.’
    ‘Oh, well,’ Polly said peaceably. ‘Perhaps Noël is right about most of society. Perhaps it will be the same for my little lot – a minority, I do agree – and better for everybody else.’
    ‘He doesn’t say anything is going to be better . He never thinks that anything is going to be that!’
    There was a pause while Polly, who found Noël’s opinions and Clary’s preoccupation with them irritating, tried to think of some way of deflecting her.
    ‘Let’s not do any more painting tonight. Let’s choose our wallpapers. I’ve brought back some lovely books of Cole’s who are easily the best.’
    They did the washing-up first, but anything they did in the kitchen depressed them. There were no shelves or cupboards; nearly everything had to be kept on the floor. The sink did not yet have even a draining board, and their two drying-up cloths seemed always to be damp. They kept a list nailed to the wall on which they wrote their needs. It was already hopelessly long. The room was always hot because the window, as all windows in the narrow little house, faced south, and the boiler, a secondhand Potterton, was installed in it.
    ‘Let’s go to your room,’ Clary said. ‘It’s far the nicest.’ This was not only because Polly had already painted and lined its walls, but, Clary felt, because she had a knack of making places feel comfortable and lived in. It wasn’t just the patchwork quilt on the bed, the fern in a pot on the mantelpiece, the gleaming white paint and the thick brown paper she had taped to the floor; there was the feeling that it was already neat and clean, that the odours of damp and singeing feathers would not dare to penetrate such a place. A door connected this room with the other, small one. This also was clean and painted, with Polly’s clothes hanging neatly on a dress rail.
    ‘Are you going to make this your bedroom?’
    ‘No. I’m going to keep my clothes in it and