The long months of the winter passed on slowly, harder and more difficult than the last. No sugar, no fat, no fuel, and the weary hours of waiting in a queue for the horrid food we got.
I got to loathe the shops where I had to market; the butcher’s shop in the High Street, where I waited every Tuesday and Saturday, the grocer’s where I waited hours, to be told in the end that the margarine had given out, that there were no beans, that tea had risen again in price; I had to take the children very often, and Rachel was heavy now to hold. I watched the other women in the queue, working women mostly, more tired and draggled than me, with children more fretful than mine, and wondered at their patience; and sometimes I wondered if they really minded it all as much as I did.
It was so cold that Winter. I had never known such cold; perhaps it was the lack of fats that made one cold, Maud said so anyway; and there was so little coal. We shut the drawing-room up, and the study too, and lived in the dining-room downstairs. There we could have a fire; and Walter at his office was warm; but I was always cold; and I thought of Guy and Hugo in the trenches; Hugo had always felt the cold so much, and then I thought:
‘George will not feel cold any more, at all.’
Walter and I saw each other very little. He worked almost always in the evenings after dinner; examination papers now, to make more money, not his proto-Hittite Script; and on Saturdays and Sundays as a rule. He was not happy, I knew; how could he be? but we were like people in a fog; we could not see light, nor each other, we could only struggle for breath, to keep alive; and again we said:
‘It cannot last much longer. It is bound to end very soon.’
My grandmother was still at Yearsly. Cousin Delia had kept her there.
XXVII
In February, Hugo came home on leave, and I saw him. He wrote to me that time and said he was coming. He would be in London for a few days first, and then at Yearsly.
His letter came at breakfast time amid the clatter of plates and feeding the children. I opened it, and could think of nothing else.