The Needle's Eye [antikvár]

He stood tfaere and waited. He was good at that There was no hurry. There was plenty of time. He always had time. He was a punctual and polite person, and that was why he was standing there, buying a gift for his hostess. Politeness was an emotion—could one call it an emotion, he wondered? that was how he regarded it, certainly—an emotion that he both feared and understood. There was only one woman in front of him in the off-licence, and she was certainly in no hurry either. She had not even got round to asking for anything yet, because she was too busy telling the man behind the counter about her grand-daughter. Two weeks old, this child was, and the lady had just finished knitting her a pram-cover in stripes of white and blue: it didn't matter that it was blue and not pink, the daughter had said, she didnt like pink anyway. The man behind the counter was interested in the story: not merely polite, but interested. One can teil the difference. The woman was short and broad and she was wearing bedroom slippers. What raffish districts of London his friends inhabited: nwI, this was, with all its smart contrasts. They depressed him unbearably, the well-arranged gulfs and divisions of life, the frivolity with which his friends took in these contrasts, the pleasure they took in such abrasions. It appalled him, the complacency with which such friends would describe the ad-vantages of living in a mixed area. As though they licensed seedy old ladies and black men to walk their streets, teaching their children of poverty and despair, as their pet hamsters and guinea pigs taught them of sex and death. He thought of these things, sadly. Though the old lady did not seem sad. On the contraiy, she 9