Bokelskere.no

They were a ritual in Albion Street, these Sunday breakfasts, served up with appropriate solemnity on plain white utility crokery: one piece of bread, as thick as a hymn book, dunked in fat and fried, with two spoonfuls of powdered egg, scrambled and slopped on top, the whole mass sliding freely on a rainbow film of grease.

The smells and sounds of an English Sunday breakfast curled up the staircase of the Commercial Guesthouse and floated across the landing like a call to arms: the hiss of hot fat frying in the kitchen, the dirge-like strains of a church service being relayed by the BBC, the muffled crack of Mrs Armstrong's worn slippers flapping like castanets on the linoleum floor.

'Well, she never made much secret of it, did she? And if one hates her for what she is - then, really, one can't have loved her very much in the first place, can one?' Her neck had blushed a deep pink. 'If all one wants is a reflection of oneself - well, honestly, there's always the mirror.'
She sat back, apparently as surprised by this speech as he was.

He reaches over and takes the paper and pencil. Half his brain studies the puzzle, the other half studies her -- how she takes a cigarette from her handbag and lights it, how she watches him, her head resting slightly to one side. Aster, tasso, lovage, landau ... It's the first and only time in their relationship he's ever fully in control, and by the time he's completed the thirty clues and given her back the paper they're pulling through the outskirts of a small town, crawling past narrow gardens and tall chimneys. Behind her head he sees the familiar lines of washing, the air raid shelters, the vegetable plots, the little red-brick houses coated black by the passing trains. The compartment darkens as they pass beneath the iron canopy of the station. "Bletchley," calls the guard. "Bletchley station!"

He says, "I'm afraid this is my stop."

"Yes." She looks thoughtfully at the finished crossword, then turns and smiles at him. "Yes. D'you know, I rather guessed it might be."