Bessie’s mother could read the weather in a knee, but she could not read Bessie’s letters. I learnt this on the afternoon I went to ask whether she would work for me again.
Her landlady showed me into a room behind a shop where a hat was being taken to pieces. Bessie sat at the window with the pieces in her lap. Beside her lay a letter in a different hand, addressed to her mother. She put it beneath a saucer when I came in.
“Mrs Bellamy. Is something wrong?”
“No. I was nearby.”
It was a common sort of falsehood, but I wished immediately that I had not chosen it. I was not often in Camden Town. Bessie looked at my boots, then at the parcel in my hand.
“Would you like tea?”
“Only if you’re having some.”
“I was going to. I’m not now obliged to pretend I wasn’t.”
She smiled, and I sat down.
The room had more of her in it than I would have guessed. There was a card with a picture of a beach pinned above the mantelpiece, a bright ribbon hanging from a nail, and a little china dog with one ear missing. A man in uniform looked out of a photograph on the chest. I wondered whether he was a brother, but she had not invited a question and I made myself leave it alone.
“This is for you,” I said, giving her the parcel. “Mrs Wetherby left it at the house.”
It was a book, not new, with a pencilled inscription on the first page. Bessie read it and laughed.
“She said I might enjoy something in which a woman gets to travel without making the arrangements.”
“What’s it called?”
“I haven’t looked.”
She held it for a moment before opening further, enjoying the fact of the gift. Then she put it on the chest, away from the hat pins.
While the kettle heated I explained about the reading evening. She listened, turning a length of wire between her fingers.
“It sounds pleasant.”
“It was. I’d like to hold another. More than one.”
“Does Mrs Fenwick know?”
“She isn’t hiring the room.”
“But does she?”
I had written Ada on Wednesday. There was no need to have been so prompt, or to have made it sound quite so much like a report of something which had happened at my own house without her help. I admitted that she knew.
“I could do Tuesday evenings,” Bessie said. “I’m supposed to finish in Hampstead at six. I don’t always.”
“You would have to finish.”
“Yes.”
She said no more, letting me find the difficulty for myself. Six in Hampstead, then travelling, a meal if there was one left, an evening’s work and another journey home. It had seemed a small request when I left my house. In her chair, with the kettle hissing and the dismantled hat in her lap, I could see most of a day gathered round it.
“What would make it worth doing?”
She put the wire down. “How much work?”
I told her about the cups and the baby. She asked who was to prepare the tea, who to answer the door, whether she would be expected to wash up after nine, whether it would be the same every week. By the time she had finished I was no longer certain the reading circle could pay for her without paying considerably more than three shillings for the room.
“You needn’t decide now,” she said.
“I hadn’t expected it to be so much.”
“I haven’t said a sum.”
She was not smiling. I had heard myself, too late, turn all her questions into a complaint about the price.
“I mean the work.”
“That is what I meant.”
We drank our tea. In the shop beyond the door someone was arguing about the colour of a ribbon. Bessie listened for a moment, then took the bright strip from the nail and brought it to her cheek.
“It’s mine. I paid for it.”
“It’s very pretty.”
“I have to keep reminding myself. Otherwise it goes on somebody else’s hat.”
The woman in the shop called her name. Bessie called back that she would be there in half an hour, and the door did not open. She settled the ribbon over the little china dog. I liked the room immensely then, and felt a small envy of the certainty with which she occupied it.
“I could come one night and see,” she said. “A shilling and sixpence, if I arrive after seven and am finished by half-past nine. Food as well. If it goes longer we must agree something else.”
“I’ll have to ask the circle about the charge.”
“Of course.”
“And Ada.”
“I will speak to Mrs Fenwick.”
She poured the last tea into my cup. I had thought I was bringing her a little work. I left knowing she was offering me a portion of her evening which she could otherwise have spent with her own bright things.
On the way back I bought a small paper bag of sweets. I had no reason to buy them, and no one at home who particularly liked that kind. I ate two as I walked and folded the bag into my pocket.
Nell was in Mr Harcourt’s old room with a woman wearing a hat so broad she could not stand close enough to the washstand to inspect it. The woman lifted the basin, looked beneath it and put it down.
“Would the curtains be included?” she asked.
“Yes,” Nell said.
“I have my own.”
“We could put these away.”
“I should require somewhere to keep my trunks.”
There were two trunks, according to the particulars she had already given Nell, and she did not intend to store anything under the bed because of dust. She was widowed, visiting a sister in London, and would be away for several days at a time. It sounded an admirable arrangement until she asked to bring the sister’s little dog to stay with her when the sister was tired.
“Does he bark?” I asked.
“Only when he’s displeased.”
Nell bent to straighten the rug. I kept my face still.
The woman went away promising to think about it. When the door closed my daughter came up beside me.
“I don’t think the dog would like us.”
“Then we shall have to manage without him.”
We stood in the hall, laughing softly, until Miss Pym appeared on the stairs with an envelope. She had been at her office all day and still wore the ink-stained cuff she pulled over her wrist to protect her blouse.
“This came up to my room by mistake.”
It was the letter I had written to myself in a fit of optimism: Mrs Eleanor Bellamy, Rooms Available. I had enclosed a spare addressed envelope when I sent an advertisement to a small registry Ada had recommended, so they could acknowledge its receipt. Now I took it from Miss Pym with a foolish sense that I had been caught doing something vain.
She looked at the words. “You ought to say which room. And whether there’s a fire.”
“I’ll mention it if anyone asks.”
“They won’t ask if they think there isn’t.”
She told me, standing there in her ink-stained cuff, that her first room in London had looked lovely until November. She had spent the winter sitting in bed with her shoes on, not wishing to admit to the landlady that lovely did not mean warm.
“We could write a better notice,” Nell said.
“Then would you mind looking at ours?” Miss Pym asked her. “At the office. Not a room notice. Some figures. I’ve copied something wrongly and I can’t find it.”
Nell glanced at me. I was about to say we had enough to do; the phrase rose so readily that I could almost feel my mouth shaping it.
“After supper?” she asked.
“Yes. If you have time.”
“I have time.”
I went down to the kitchen without asking to see the figures first.
They spread the papers on the dining table that evening. Mr Leach was in the sitting room asleep behind his newspaper, and Mrs Keene had gone to bed early with a candle and a complaint about the draught near her door. I had planned to mend the loose braid on a chair. Instead I sat where I could see Nell working.
She went through the columns once, following with the end of her pencil. Miss Pym watched her with a growing frown.
“I told you it doesn’t come.”
Nell returned to the first page. She held it closer to the lamp, then laid it beside another sheet.
“You’ve put the same amount in twice.”
“I haven’t.”
“Different name. Here.”
There was a silence. Miss Pym bent over the two lines. Then she said something I was prepared to pretend I had not heard.
“I copied it from the wrong list,” she said. “Mr Simmonds will think I’m an idiot.”
“Then don’t copy it from the wrong list again.” Nell drew a line through the duplicate in pencil, so it could be put right neatly later. “Show him the right figures. He doesn’t have to see tonight.”
Miss Pym sat back. “You should be paid to do this.”
My daughter put her pencil down. She had heard a compliment in the words which was quite different from the thanks I gave when she found a penny missing from the household book.
“I should like to,” she said.
Miss Pym was gathering the papers. “My uncle has a stationer’s. He complains every Sunday about his accounts. He won’t have me do them because he thinks family should do favours, then he resents owing me one.”
“Would he have someone else?”
“I’ll ask.”
Nell looked down at the little pencil beside her hand. She did not look at me for permission.
I put my sewing away. Upstairs I took off my hat, and the paper bag of sweets fell out of my pocket. There were four left. I went to Nell’s room and put two on the blue cloth, which she had fetched from the drawer to measure against the window.
“Miss Pym has eaten with us for a year,” I said. “I never knew about her first room.”
“You haven’t sat still with her for a year.”
She said it gently. I took one of the sweets back and sat on the end of her bed.
“You might tell me about the shop, if you go.”
“I will.”
She moved the cloth aside to make more room for me, then began describing the rooms Arthur had found. This time I heard where the morning sun would fall, and where she meant to put a table of her own.