Fog of Doubt by Christianna Brand

enough, it was Damien on the telephone. Matilda caught snatches of Rosie’s end of a long and intensely boring quarrel culminating in a slamrned-down receiver, more telephone calls, and a return to bed. She called up to the attic to know what Rosie wanted to do about dinner to-night.
    â€˜I shall be out,’ said Rosie.
    â€˜Out? I thought you were supposed to be so ill?’
    â€˜Well, I am, but I shall be better by this evening and I’m going out.’
    â€˜If it’s because of Raoul, you needn’t see him, darling,’ said Matilda, repenting of having been impatient and unkind when, after all, the poor child was worried and unwell; but people were so hopeless, they got themselves into muddles and then sat back and were aggrieved with everyone but themselves.
    â€˜I just don’t want to see anyone—it’s not especially him.’
    â€˜But there’s going to be an awful fog, Rosie, it’s as black as pitch already. Stay in bed, darling, and I’ll bring you up some dinner on a tray …’ (in the intervals of cooking a Ritzotel dinner for Raoul, putting the baby to bed, dealing with Gran’s post-seduction remorse and steering a safe course between concealing from Thomas that she wanted to be alone with Raoul for the purpose of discussing Rosie, and encouraging him to believe that it was from her own desire to be false to her marriage vow.…)
    But Rosie, muttering darkly about the general rottenness of men, insisted that, fog or no fog, she would get up and go out; meanwhile, could she have her lunch in bed please, now.
    â€˜No, I’m damned if you can,’ said Tilda. ‘If you’re well enough to go gallivanting—with Damien Jones, I suppose? —you’re well enough to have lunch in the dining-room.’
    â€˜Well, if you want to know,’ said Rosie, ‘I am not going gallivanting with Damien, so there; for the simple reason that Damien has a Meeting to-night, and would he leave his precious Meeting for me, oh, no of course not!—much as I might need his sort of support and things … I should think it would be better to do something about just the dull, ordinary person that you saw every day and who ackcherly needed your help, than sit around incessantly discussing a whole lot of people that you never set eyes on, who only might.’
    This accorded so closely with Tilda’s own conception of helping one’s neighbour, that she refrained from remarking that she, personally, had so far received little thanks for trying to help the one, dull, everyday person who actually needed it. She contented herself with saying that Rosie could come down to lunch in her jenking-gowns but to hurry up. Melissa produced the more ruined remnants of her scorched pastry and generously handed them round. ‘Who’re you going out with this afternoon—Stanislas?’ said Rosie, making civil conversation. Melissa gave her a warning grimace. ‘My dear child, if it’s me you’re worrying about, please don’t,’ said Matilda irritably. ‘If you were going out with the King of Greece , I couldn’t care less.’ Though why the poor King of Greece, she could not imagine. My God, what a day, she thought again.
    At six o’clock Damien presented himself at the door, the thick, grey fog swirling in with him as she opened it. He looked rather pink and white, and carried a small, crushed bunch of flowers in a paper cornet. ‘Could I see Rosie, Mrs. Evans, please?’
    For all he was such an ass, Matilda couldn’t help being fond of Damien Jones. He was a nice-looking boy, with a handsome, sullen face and forward-curling hair, and as long as he treated only his equals as Comrades and didn’t drag her up into it, she respected the honest idealism which drove him to improving a world in which he, himself, had not yet learned to live. ‘She is, Damien, dear, but I don’t know whether