The house belonged to a woman who had never slept in it. I knew that, had known it since Thomas and I signed the first agreement, yet I was still surprised when Mr Vale asked me to speak to his aunt rather than let him take her answers from one address to the other.
She lived in St John’s Wood behind a door painted a red I would once have thought too emphatic. A maid showed me into a room where there were no ornaments a visitor could easily knock over. Mrs Susan Vale sat at a writing table, finishing a letter. She was older than Ada and me by twenty years, with white hair arranged in firm little waves and a face which had been allowed to keep its opinions.
“Mrs Bellamy. Sit down. I’ll be one moment.”
She finished the sentence, signed her name and put the letter aside before turning to me. I had brought a copy of the programme and a page describing what I meant to do from September. I held both in my lap until she asked for them.
“Frederick says you have made the house into a meeting place.”
“Some evenings.”
“Political?”
“Some. Mostly reading.”
“I don’t mind politics. I mind people discovering they have hired a hall when I have let them a house.”
“It isn’t a hall.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
I gave her the page. A lodging house with a sitting room available at agreed times. No shouting, no crowds waiting on the pavement, no promise to let it every night of the week. I wanted to retain the evenings because the women used them and paid for them, and because I liked the work. I did not tell her my daughter had been made to pay for liking it. That belonged in the accounts I would have to keep honestly, not in a stranger’s decision about her property.
She read without interruption. Then she asked what would happen to the dining room.
“It will remain a dining room. But I don’t mean to promise new lodgers supper every night. Breakfast, and the use of a sitting room when it isn’t hired.”
“What do the old ones say?”
“I have to ask.”
She looked up. “Have you not asked?”
“Not until I knew whether I could stay.”
“They may not wish to.”
“No.”
I had wanted her to decide first, so I could tell the lodgers the arrangement as a completed necessity. It had seemed a way to avoid alarming anyone. In her room it looked more like the familiar wish not to hear an answer before I had prepared what to do with it.
Mrs Vale put the page beside her letter. “The rent will have to rise.”
I had expected that. I had not expected the first figure she named. It was eight pounds more a year than the hundred and four we paid already, not an impossible rise in itself, but enough to use the little margin I had only just begun to see.
“For three years?” I asked.
“That is what Frederick proposed.”
“I would prefer one.”
She leaned back. “You want to spend money on the place and then leave it?”
“I don’t want to spend more. I want to see what can be managed without depending on my daughter to do the work for nothing.”
Mrs Vale’s face did not soften. I was glad she did not choose to find the explanation touching.
“Does she live with you?”
“Until she marries. In September.”
“Then you ought to know what the house earns before she goes.”
“I’m finding out.”
She tapped the paper with one finger. “Find out this as well. An extra room let is not all gain if you begin feeding another person before dawn and waiting up for them at night. You won’t be forty-seven for ever.”
I looked up. She had read my age on some old paper, or Mr Vale had told her; the number felt curiously personal in that impersonal room.
“I don’t mean to wait up,” I said.
“Good.”
We spoke for another half-hour. She was prepared to discuss a year’s term at a smaller increase, provided the particulars were clear and I did not turn private evenings into a public entertainment she had not agreed. She would have Frederick arrange for the loose section of stair rail to be secured and the persistent washstand leak dealt with properly. I would send the plan after speaking to the people who lived in the house.
“Not promises about how many women will come,” she said. “What you will do if they don’t.”
I wrote it down. She watched my hand, then reached for the programme.
“Do they enjoy it?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“Most of it.”
She smiled for the first time. “That’s a more useful answer.”
When I stood she asked whether I wanted tea. I had an omnibus to catch, no appointment which truly required it and a lesson in declining things before they could inconvenience anyone. I said I would like it. We talked about a book she had borrowed and disliked enough to finish. She could not give it up, she said, because she wished to be certain the author had made the mistake she suspected.
I left with the proposed terms still unsettled and a recommendation for something to read. The maid brought my hat, and I stood in the red doorway feeling less like a child asking to remain in a room someone else owned.
At home Mr Leach was eating his supper. I asked if I could sit down and talk to him about the autumn. He looked at the plate, then at me, and put his knife down with a resignation which reminded me how often I had chosen mealtimes for things people preferred not to hear.
“You’re not giving me notice?”
“No. I want to change the arrangements. You may not wish to stay.”
I told him. He listened, asked two questions about the price of the room, then looked at the supper again.
“I come back because this is here.”
“I know.”
“A man can get a bed. Coming back and not having to find somewhere to eat is different.”
I had thought him fussy about cabbage and indifferent to almost everything else. Now I saw how deliberately he had arranged his life round an evening plate which appeared without negotiation. He paid for it. He had not done anything wrong in wanting it.
“I understand if you choose to go.”
He nodded, not angrily. “I’ll think about it.”
I spoke to the others separately, at times they agreed. Miss Pym liked the change because she often ate with her sister and resented paying for meals she missed. Grace wished to stay and could manage her own supper if we agreed what use she might make of the kitchen. Mrs Keene said she was too tired after work to go out looking for food and would need to consider it.
There were no votes, no single happy answer for the household. I took each reply upstairs and put it beside the next. For the first time the proposed house was beginning to resemble the people who would inhabit it, rather than the plan I hoped to put round them.
Nell came into the kitchen after work and found the papers on the table.
“Have you seen Mrs Vale?”
“Yes.”
“What is she like?”
“She finished her letter before speaking to me.”
Nell laughed. “Did you mind?”
“For a moment.”
I showed her the proposed rent and the different arrangements. She read them standing, a habit she had acquired at the shop where there was not always a spare chair. Then she pulled one out.
“Would you like me to check these?”
“I would. But you needn’t do it tonight, or for nothing.”
She looked at the figures again. “An hour. Tomorrow. I can tell you afterwards if I think I can keep doing it.”
I agreed. She picked up the page on which I had written the lodgers’ answers and read the little note beside Mr Leach’s name.
“He likes your supper.”
“Apparently.”
“He’ll miss you.”
I thought of him sitting over his plate, finding something more difficult to say than a complaint about the cabbage. I took the paper from Nell and put it where it would not be lost beneath my other plans.
“I’ll miss him too,” I said.