Dora’s answer came on Thursday, typed on the back of a sheet which began with the price of a shipment of paper. She had crossed out the shipment and written, Dear Mrs Bellamy, I meant it.
Nell read it over my shoulder. “Eight women?”
“Perhaps ten.”
“What will they be doing?”
“Reading a play.”
“All ten of them?”
“I suppose they can take turns.”
There was a faint spot of gravy near the bottom of the letter because I had opened it in the kitchen. I touched it with a cloth and made it larger. In that first week I had thought of writing to Dora at least once a day. Each time there had been a more immediate occupation: Mr Harcourt asking for a box, Mr Leach returning and wanting to know why the furniture had moved, a letter from Ada, a visit from Ada, the washing bill.
She had brought the money herself on Tuesday. Bessie came with her, carrying no bags. I had never seen my sister without one before and noticed, stupidly, that the absence of something to hand over made her uncertain in the hall.
The envelopes were labelled. Mine contained a pound, Bessie’s the remaining wages and expenses. Ada gave them to us without an explanation. Bessie counted hers, which cost my sister a little colour but no protest.
“I am taking Thursday and Friday,” Bessie said. “For my mother. As we agreed.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll be back on Monday.”
Ada looked up then. She had expected, I realised, that Bessie would leave. She had brought the money to the door of my house and been prepared for it to buy no future at all.
“Thank you,” she said.
Neither asked me to witness anything. Afterwards Ada sat beside me for a cup of tea while Bessie went to fetch something from a shop. We talked about the weather, the trouble our father had had with his garden gate, a cousin who had remarried unwisely. My sister did not tell me how she had got the money. I did not ask. When she left she touched the small drawer of the hall table.
“Don’t leave cash in there. The catch is loose.”
“I know.”
She had always known where the money was kept in a house. I wondered, after the door shut, how often she had been unable to open the drawer.
Now, with Dora’s letter on the kitchen table, I had her pound back and a new reason to use it.
“I could get another lamp,” I said.
Nell took up the letter. “We haven’t said yes.”
“We need one anyway.”
“Then say it is for us. Don’t put the cost against a night which might never happen.”
I had wanted her to be pleased. Instead she was being useful, which had been my request in inviting her to think about the plan.
“What would you charge?”
She sat on the edge of the table, drawing her skirt away from the damp patch. “I don’t know what they’re willing to pay. Ask for three shillings for the room, no more than two hours, and tea separately if they want it. We can see whether it’s worth doing again.”
“Three shillings seems a great deal.”
“To ten women?”
“They won’t all come.”
“Then say three shillings for the room. Not for ten women.”
I took the pen and wrote what she suggested. The price looked impolite on the page. I put a sentence of welcome before it, which Nell let stand, and a sentence saying I hoped it would not be inconvenient, which she made me strike out.
“You aren’t charging them for an inconvenience.”
“There might be one. Mr Leach keeps dropping off to sleep on the sofa.”
She laughed. It gave me enough courage to finish the letter.
On Saturday Mr Harcourt left with a trunk and two boxes. He was embarrassed by the finality of the removal and attempted to introduce smaller subjects while the carrier took things downstairs. I answered each one pleasantly. His school had a new master. The mornings were brighter. There was a great deal of work being done on a road near Holborn.
At last he held out his hand.
“I have been comfortable here.”
“I’m glad.”
“No reflection upon your management, you understand.”
I thought of the letter of notice he had left beside my plate. “I hope you are equally comfortable in your new place.”
He shook my hand with surprising warmth. Then he was gone, leaving a pale rectangle on the wall where his father’s photograph had hung.
I opened the window and stood in the room. There was a little ink on the washstand and a hairline crack in the basin, for which I supposed he would be no more willing to pay than Mr Leach. Yet the room smelt of furniture polish and the lavender I put in the linen. The morning sun made the worn part of the rug almost handsome.
Nell came up with a basket. “I thought we might air the sheets.”
“He called this the quietest room he’d ever had.”
“It is a good room.”
“He could have stayed.”
She picked up a pillow, pressed it between her hands and set it in the basket. “I wouldn’t stay somewhere I didn’t like just because I had liked it before.”
I wanted to tell her not to be so ready to leave things. Instead I took the other end of the sheet.
On Tuesday evening, three days after the front room emptied, Dora arrived with nine women, six copies of a play and a packet of sweets. One woman had brought a baby asleep against her shoulder. I had not been consulted about the baby and at once pictured crying, complaints and the hearthrug in need of washing.
“My sister was called out,” the woman said. “If she wakes I’ll take her away.”
“What’s her name?” Nell asked.
“Mabel.”
“Then Mabel can have the chair near the wall, where there’s no draught.”
The woman sat down. I went to get another cushion, relieved to have something to do with the kindness I had been slow to offer.
The three shillings appeared in Dora’s hand before she took off her coat. She paid for tea too, and said if there were fewer cups than women they would manage by drinking at different times. I had enough cups. It was a small triumph to be able to supply something no one expected me to possess.
“Which play?” I asked.
“As You Like It.” She gave me a battered copy. “We have spare parts.”
I took it by the edges. “I’m laying the tea.”
“After that.”
Nell was already carrying the tray. She passed me without rescuing me.
The women were settling themselves around the table. One was a shorthand writer at Dora’s office, another worked in a stationer’s, another had a married sister who had persuaded her that it would do her good to get out. Not all had met before. They inspected one another with a reserve I found reassuring; I had feared they would arrive fully acquainted and begin calling for things in a language I did not know.
“Who’s to be the duke?” one asked.
“Who’s got the best boots?” said Dora.
They began with a confusion about pages. Two books were a different edition and the baby woke before anyone reached the second speech. Her mother stood, apologising, but Mrs Keene, drawn to the sitting-room door by curiosity, said she would walk her for a moment. She took the child with the authority of a woman who had not been asked for the service and had therefore been free to offer it.
I laid down the last spoon. Dora put a finger against a speech in the book I was holding.
“Try that.”
I read the first line too quietly.
“We can’t hear you at the other end,” said a woman with spectacles.
Heat went up my face. “I’m not accustomed—”
“Take it from the beginning. We’re all finding our way.”
She said it without softness or irritation, and that helped. I began again. There was an unfamiliar word halfway through; I said it as I thought it should be said and no one corrected me. When the next person spoke she looked directly at me, not at Dora or at the page. For the length of a few exchanges I was being answered for a purpose which had nothing to do with meals or rooms.
Then someone turned two pages by mistake, and the woman in spectacles began a speech she had been looking forward to but which was not hers. We laughed so much that the baby began again. Mrs Keene came to the door and demanded to know whether we had lost somebody.
“Only a duke,” Dora said.
“Plenty more of those.”
She took the baby away. I sat down.
At nine I began to watch the clock. The women were still at the table, though the books had fallen closed. Their conversation had strayed from the play to holidays, from holidays to money, and from money to a woman who had gone to France alone and come back without appearing in any way damaged by it. I wanted to hear the end. I also wanted them to remember that the room was let until nine.
Nell looked at me from the door. She was carrying the empty tray and waiting.
“I’m afraid that’s our time,” I said.
My voice cut the room too sharply. Two women stood at once; the one in spectacles looked at her watch and said she had missed her omnibus. Dora began gathering books.
“Next time, Mrs Bellamy, give us a warning. We can’t keep a story to the minute.”
“I didn’t like to interrupt.”
“But you have to.”
There was no reproach in it. She put the books under her arm and asked about the same night the following week.
I said yes before I remembered there would be washing to do and the room upstairs still empty. Nell took the pencil from her apron pocket and wrote the date on the back of an envelope. Dora looked at it and nodded.
When the last coat had gone the room looked exhausted. One cushion was on the floor, the lamp chimney needed cleaning and there was a pale ring on the table which I hoped was tea. Mrs Keene had returned the baby to her mother and gone upstairs, saying she would not mind doing it again provided nobody assumed she would.
Nell set the money beside the clock. I put the half-crown Mrs Wetherby had given us next to it, then moved it away again. That was for the piano.
“Did you like it?” she asked.
“Very much.”
“Then the next question is whether you want to run it or belong to it.”
I looked at the chair I had been sitting in. “Must it be one or the other?”
“Someone has to carry the tray.”
The answer brought me back to the cups, but not unhappily. I took one end of the tablecloth and she took the other. As we folded it I tried out a line from the play, one I had not been given to read. Nell turned her head and listened. When I reached the end she waited to see if I meant to go on.
“I could have put them all outside at nine,” I said. “There would have been plenty of room for me.”
She began to laugh. We stood with the tablecloth between us, neither willing to be the one who folded it first.