On Tuesday, Iris found herself lying to a stranger about why she wanted a room.
“Just exploring,” she said.
The stranger, a property manager named Tess Reed, unlocked a glass door on Mill Lane and switched on the lights. They flickered twice before settling.
“Everybody says that. Mind the lip on the floor.”
The room had once belonged to a florist. A square of faded paint marked the old sign. Against the back wall stood a deep sink, and near the window the floor bore a dark ring where something large had been watered more faithfully than the building had been maintained.
It was beautiful.
Not objectively. Objectively, it needed painting, the ceiling had too many fluorescent tubes, and there was a broken blind in the smaller room at the back. But sunlight fell across a long white wall where Iris could see a rail of carefully chosen clothes. The window would hold a dressmaker’s form. There was space for two machines and a cutting table, a mirror tall enough for somebody to stand back from herself.
“How much?” she asked.
“Twelve hundred a month, plus utilities. Two-year term. First month and deposit on signing.”
Iris kept her expression still.
The twelve hundred was not impossible. That was the trouble. A sum small enough to begin arguing with, followed by other sums waiting outside the argument.
“Would the owner consider a shorter lease?”
“Possibly. The rent would go up.”
“Of course it would.”
Tess smiled. “I’m not saying that’s how I’d do it.”
Iris walked to the window. Across the lane a woman was arranging mugs outside a ceramics shop. There was a bakery at the corner, a bus stop, people passing who might remember they had trousers needing shortening.
“What were you thinking of doing?” Tess asked.
“Alterations. Some resale. Good pieces that need a little work.”
“Like vintage?”
“Sometimes. More like clothes that still have somewhere to go.”
Tess nodded, though Iris wasn’t sure she understood. It didn’t matter yet. The room seemed to understand perfectly.
She took photographs. The blank wall. The sink. The little back room with its broken blind. On her phone they already looked like something that belonged to her.
“I can email the particulars,” Tess said.
“Please.”
“You’d need to check the use and any work with the landlord before making alterations.”
“I’m not planning to do anything substantial.”
Tess looked at her photographs. “That’s the other thing everybody says.”
Back at the store, Winnie was pressing a trouser seam with the absorbed pleasure of someone engaged in an argument she knew she could win.
Iris showed her the pictures.
“Oh,” Winnie said.
“It’s too much, probably.”
“You haven’t told me what it costs.”
She did. Winnie listened to the rest: the deposit, the term, the utility estimate, the insurance she’d have to arrange, the possibility of a permit for the sign.
“How much have you got?”
“Eighteen thousand in my own savings. There’ll be severance. Eventually my share from the house.”
“And what do you live on while you find customers?”
“That would be the eighteen thousand.”
Winnie took off her glasses.
“It’s a lovely room.”
“Yes.”
“Rooms can be lovely without being yours.”
Iris put the phone away too quickly.
“I know.”
“I didn’t say no.”
“You sounded like no.”
“I sounded like a woman who’s paid rent.”
The iron hissed between them.
Iris could feel the childishness of her disappointment and resented having to be sensible about that as well. She had gone alone. Asked questions. Seen a possible future. It seemed a little early for everybody to start turning off the lights.
“I’ll do the sums,” she said.
“Good.”
Winnie put her glasses back on. “And charge for your time. You always forget the time.”
At lunch Iris took a notebook into the park. No Daniel today. He was in Newport inspecting a collection for a client who, he had told her, described every object as rare whether it was or not.
She wrote down the things she could charge for, then how long they actually took. A plain hem. A lined skirt. A zip. A repair invisible enough to require more care than the original garment had received.
The numbers were less romantic than the photographs.
They were also less terrible than Winnie had made her fear, until she added the cost of living somewhere after the house sold.
A message appeared from Daniel.
Six silver-plated toast racks. All allegedly unique.
She smiled despite herself.
Isn’t that six things that disagree with one another?
Precisely.
She hesitated, then sent him a photograph of the room.
Went exploring this morning.
He replied after a minute.
That window.
Yes.
Can I hear about it tonight?
She put the phone down and looked at the notebook again. The figures had not changed. They seemed less like a verdict now that someone else could see what she liked.
At two, an email arrived from Arthur Mercer’s address.
Dear Ms. Bell,
Thank you for writing. Arthur died in October. We were married before he died, at the hospice, in the clothes we already had. I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you. Everything became difficult for a while.
If his suit is still there, I would like to have it. I don’t know why. I would simply like it.
Yours,
Philip Mercer
Iris read it twice.
Then she stood up and went to the alterations cupboard.
Arthur’s jacket was where it should be, protected by a cotton cover, his name on the tag in Winnie’s writing. Navy wool, narrow lapels, a good weight. Iris unzipped the cover carefully.
The trousers weren’t inside.
She checked the bottom of the bag, though there was nowhere for an entire pair of trousers to hide. Then the neighboring hanger. Then the shelf beneath.
Nothing.
She stood holding the empty space beneath the jacket, ashamed before she knew whether there was anything to be ashamed of.
Winnie came in carrying a mug.
“What’s happened?”
Iris showed her the email.
Winnie read it without speaking. Her face changed, not dramatically, but with a small inward movement that made her look her age.
“I remember him,” she said. “He was so pleased with the lining.”
“The trousers aren’t here.”
“Then they’re somewhere else.”
“I checked the holds.”
“Good. That narrows it down.”
They searched for twenty minutes before Iris had to go downstairs. There was no point in deciding the worst when the building contained more cupboards than anyone could defend.
She wrote to Philip, offering a collection appointment the following week and asking whether Tuesday would suit. She did not say his clothes had gone missing. They had seven days to find a pair of trousers before she needed to add distress to a stranger’s life.
At seven, Daniel called.
Iris had spent the intervening hours both working and being irritated with herself for the amount of attention she paid her phone.
“How many toast racks?” she asked.
“Still six. Their owner hadn’t multiplied them by the time I left.”
“Disappointing.”
“I’ve made peace with it.”
She took her mug to the sofa and tucked her feet under her.
He wanted to know about the studio. She told him about the window first, then the rent, then the notebook. He listened until she’d finished.
“Do you want me to look at the figures?” he asked.
For a moment she did. Let him tell her what was possible. Let somebody competent untangle the terrifying parts and hand them back approved.
“Not yet,” she said.
“All right.”
“What do you think of the room?”
“I think you took six photographs of the window and one of everything else.”
She laughed.
“And I think you should see more than one before you decide.”
“I have walked past empty stores for years.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
There was a stubbornness in the word she recognized from their saucepan argument.
“I know you deal with property,” she said. “But I’m not asking you to choose.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The efficient thing.”
Silence.
Then he exhaled, softly. “Yes. I probably am.”
She felt her grip loosen on the mug.
“I like the window,” he said.
“So do I.”
“Tell me where the sewing machine would go.”
She did. For ten minutes she described a room she might never rent, while a man who knew better than to promise it listened to what she would make of it.
Afterward, he told her about his father refusing to let Grace replace the broken catch on his greenhouse, and about how Daniel had ordered one online anyway.
“Did he ask you to?”
“No.”
“Is he going to fit it?”
“Probably not.”
“Very efficient.”
Daniel laughed. “You’re enjoying this.”
“A little.”
She looked across the room at the bookcase Colin had assembled badly when Beth was six. The middle shelf still sagged beneath cookbooks neither of them had opened in years. There were so many things in the house she had accepted because changing them would have started a conversation.
“Do you have a favorite room?” she asked.
“In my apartment?”
“Anywhere.”
He thought about it.
“My mother’s kitchen. Not the one she had when we were children. The smaller one after they sold the house.”
“Why?”
“She was happy there. Everything was within reach. She stopped cooking things she thought she ought to make and made what she liked.”
Iris waited.
“Sometimes I arrived and there wasn’t any dinner for me. She’d eaten a sandwich. She looked almost guilty the first time.”
“Did you mind?”
“I was thirty-eight. I could find food.”
She laughed softly.
“I think about that kitchen sometimes,” he said. “Not as much as I should.”
They talked until her tea was cold and his kettle had boiled twice. Nothing was solved. She had not secured a lease, found the trousers or learned how to be a woman dating someone after twenty-nine years of not thinking about it.
When she went to bed, she put the notebook beside her phone.
In the morning she would call Tess and ask what other rooms were available.