For the second reading I had meant to be ready early. At a quarter to seven a chair gave way beneath Mr Leach, who had been testing it with the unhelpful confidence of a man who had told me it would give way.
He landed on the rug without injury, one leg of the chair in his hand.
“I said so.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Only my dignity.”
“That should mend.”
He looked at me, then began to laugh. By the time Bessie arrived we were both on our knees trying to work out whether a nail would save it. She set down her parcel, looked at the split wood and said it would not. Mr Leach seemed inclined to argue, but she took the loose piece from him and laid it against the damage. The argument left his face.
“We need another chair,” I said.
“There’s one in my room.” He stood with a little groan he would have denied making. “You can borrow it. If you promise not to sit me on this again.”
Bessie took my place at the hearth while I went upstairs. When I came down the lamps had been lit, the cups set out and the rug straightened. She asked where the tea was, I showed her, and at seven I had nothing left to do but answer the door.
Dora had accepted the increased charge for tea and service without comment beyond saying she would collect it before anyone spent their money on sweets. She brought the same women, minus one, and Ruth Ellis, whom she had invited by letter. Grace followed with another little sketch. It was the baby this time, frowning at Mrs Keene’s spectacles.
I put it on the mantelpiece. Mrs Keene came down to inspect it, said the child had undoubtedly been frowning at something else, and carried the drawing upstairs where she could show it to visitors she had not yet invited.
We began more smoothly. Arthur had moved the table before the women arrived and stayed long enough to see that Nell could receive a man in her mother’s sitting room without forgetting the six shillings she meant to earn. He left her a folded paper beside the clock. When she opened it later it held a list of the measurements of their rooms, not a warning about the neighbours.
I had brought my own copy of the play, borrowed from Mrs Wetherby and kept carefully away from the kitchen. I wanted Rosalind’s speech to Orlando about the impossibility of dying for love. I had marked it with a strip from an old envelope, then taken the strip out because it seemed presumptuous, then put it back.
When we came to the place, Dora looked up.
“Who wants this?”
I put my hand on the page. The woman in spectacles was already beginning, but stopped when she saw me.
“Oh. By all means.”
I could feel my face warming. There had been no contest. She had simply seen that I wanted it and made room.
I began. The words were easier this time, not because I knew what all of them meant but because I had heard the shape of the sentences at home. I knew where I wished to stop. Halfway through I forgot to worry about whether they could hear me. At the end I looked up and found Ruth watching.
“I didn’t know it could sound cross,” she said.
“It can if you’ve had a chair break underneath your lodger.”
Dora, who was reading Orlando, sighed as if I had failed to appreciate how nearly she had expired while waiting for me. It was so extravagantly done that Ruth lost her place laughing.
“He shouldn’t believe her,” Miss Holt said. “She’s in love with him herself.”
“That doesn’t mean she has to put up with his being late,” Dora said.
“Or tell him how much she cares,” Grace added.
I tried the last lines again, with a kinder voice, and discovered that they were funnier if I did not mean to wound him. Dora sat back and looked wounded anyway. Someone said we ought to put her in the chair which had collapsed, then she would have something to sigh about.
Dora asked whether she ought to die before or after the interval, and we had to wait before going on.
During the interval Bessie brought in the tea. I reached for the tray, then remembered I had engaged her to carry it and moved my book instead. She set a cup by my chair. It was a luxury so small I had never thought to want it.
“You’re wanted in the hall,” she said. “Only for a moment.”
Mr Vale stood beside the umbrella stand with his hat in his hands. He was younger than I expected every time I saw him, a long-faced man of perhaps thirty-five who wore the solemn clothes of someone trying to reassure elderly relatives. He had called about a basin in one of the rooms. A plumber could come on Thursday if there were someone to let him in.
“I will be here,” I said.
From the sitting room came a burst of laughter. He looked towards it.
“A party?”
“A reading.”
“I see.”
He did not see, and I could have left it there. Instead I told him about the room hire. We stood beside the stand while someone inside called for the duke, and I explained prices which he had not asked me to explain.
“I don’t expect my aunt will object to an occasional evening,” he said.
“Does she need to be asked?”
“It depends what it becomes. If you are proposing a public hall, that is rather different from a lodging house.”
“Not a public hall.”
“Then say what you do propose when we discuss the renewal.”
He put on his hat and left. I remained by the umbrella stand, hearing a difficulty which had not been in his voice. Bessie came out with the empty tray.
“Something wrong?”
“No. Only the lease.”
“Only?”
I took a breath, went back in and sat down. The woman in spectacles put a finger on the page to show me where we were. For the rest of the evening I let the lease wait outside the door.
On Thursday the plumber failed to come. I waited through the morning, then through the first hour of the afternoon, with a coat on the chair beside me. Mrs Wetherby had asked me to visit. I had said I would, then almost wished she had not asked, because it was easier to remain at home with a good reason than go somewhere for none.
At two Nell came back from Mr Abel’s with an ink spot on her wrist. It was not one of her afternoons, but he had asked whether she could collect a book he needed her to see and she had agreed to do so for the extra time.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
“He could be here any moment.”
“Then I shall let him in any moment.”
I put on my coat before we could find another difficulty.
Mrs Wetherby lived with a niece who received me as if I had come to estimate repairs. She was a tidy woman of forty, with an excellent figure and a mouth which had not been given many opportunities to soften. She took my coat and told me her aunt was in the back room.
“Don’t let her tire herself.”
“I don’t know how I would prevent it.”
The niece looked startled, then laughed. It improved her so considerably that I wondered whether she ever had enough company of her own.
Mrs Wetherby sat beside the window with a game laid out on a little table. She had expected me an hour earlier and made no attempt to conceal it.
“You could have sent word.”
“I was waiting for a plumber.”
“Then you ought to have come tomorrow. Are you any good at draughts?”
“No.”
“Excellent. Neither am I.”
She was lying. Within ten minutes I had lost half my pieces and was defending a corner with the ferocity of a woman who had been promised an equal opponent.
“You could have warned me.”
“You could have looked at the board instead of my age.”
I began to laugh, then had to stop because she had taken another piece.
Her niece brought in tea. Mrs Wetherby asked her to stay, and after a little hesitation she sat beside the window. Her name was Edith. She worked at home on embroidery for a shop, and by the time we had finished the second game I knew what she was paid for a piece which took her most of a week. I had seen similar work in windows and assumed the price went to the woman who made it. Edith smiled at that.
“A little of it.”
“Would you come to a reading?” I asked.
She looked at her aunt.
“Not to accompany me,” Mrs Wetherby said. “She asked you.”
“I haven’t read a play since I was at school.”
“Nor had I,” I said.
She thought about it, not pretending that she didn’t want to. I liked her for taking the invitation seriously.
When she went to fetch fresh water, Mrs Wetherby took her spectacles off.
“Don’t give her an occupation merely because she’s quiet. People have been doing it all her life.”
“I asked her to read.”
“Good. She wants to.”
I looked at the board. One of my pieces had got to the far side while she was speaking. I put another on top of it.
“I’ve managed one.”
“So you have.”
She did not look disappointed to see it. The game changed after that. I still lost, but I lost making her attend.
At home Nell was sewing a ring to the top of one of the blue curtains. The plumber had come at half-past three and gone away for a part. He would return on Monday. There was water beneath the washstand but none through the ceiling, so the matter did not quite qualify as an emergency.
I took off my coat, sat beside my daughter and told her about Edith’s embroidery. She listened, guiding the needle through the cloth.
“Will she come?”
“I think so.”
“You mustn’t make her mend the chair.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I know. I’m teasing.”
She smiled without looking up. There had been a time when I could tell from the sound of a footstep whether Nell was happy or cross. Now she had a shop, a man, a future room, and sometimes I had to wait for her to tell me. I put a hand on the cloth to keep it from slipping off her knee.
“Mr Abel offered another fortnight,” she said. “At the same rate.”
“Already?”
“He says his books are beginning to look as if he owns the shop instead of the other way round.”
“Then you ought to have asked for eight.”
“I shall, when I know where he’s put the missing invoices.”
We finished the curtain together. She threaded the rings onto a piece of cord so they would hang straight, and held it up against my bedroom window. The blue darkened as the evening light passed through it. For a moment I could see the room it would belong to.
“It’s going to be lovely,” I said.
Nell lowered the cloth. “Yes. It is.”
I had heard her say it before. That evening I managed to believe she was not leaving me in order to have it.