The rain kept him company as he poked the round brass bellpush next to the tall front door. There was no longer a button, only a socket harboring a large bedraggled spider that recoiled almost as violently as his finger did. He hadn’t laid hold of the rusty knocker above the neutral grimace of the letter-slot when a woman called a warning or a salutation as she hauled the door open. “Here’s someone now.”
She was in her seventies but wore a dress that failed to cover her mottled toadstools of knees. She stooped as though the weight of her loose throat was bringing her face, which was almost as white as her hair, to meet his. “Are you the entertainment?” she said.
Behind her a hall more than twice his height and darkly papered with a pattern of embossed vines not unlike arteries led to a central staircase that vanished under the next floor up. Beside her a long-legged table was strewn with crumbled brochures for local attractions; above it a pay telephone with no number in the middle of its dial clung to the wall. Shone was trying to decide if this was indeed a hotel when the question caught up with him. “Am I …”
“Don’t worry, there’s a room waiting.” She scowled past him and shook her head like a wet dog. “And there’d be dinner and a breakfast for anyone who settles them down.”
He assumed this referred to the argument that had started or recommenced in the room where the light he’d seen switched off had been relit. Having lost count of the number of arguments he’d dealt with in the Hackney kindergarten where he worked, he didn’t see why this should be any different. “I’ll have a stab,” he said, and marched into the room.
Despite its size, it was full of just two women—of the breaths of one at least as wide as her bright pink dress, who was struggling to lever herself up from an armchair with a knuckly stick and collapsing red-faced, and of the antics of her companion, a lanky woman in the flapping jacket of a dark blue suit and the skirt of a grayer outfit, who’d bustled away from the light switch to flutter the pages of a television listings magazine before scurrying fast as the cartoon squirrel on the television to twitch the cord of the velvet curtains, an activity Shone took to have dislodged whatever notice had been in the window. Both women were at least as old as the person who’d admitted him, but he didn’t let that daunt him. “What seems to be the problem?” he said, and immediately had to say “I can’t hear you if you both talk at once.”
“The light’s in my eyes,” the woman in the chair complained, though of the six bulbs in the chandelier one was dead, another missing. “Unity keeps putting it on when she knows I’m watching.”
“Amelia’s had her cartoons on all afternoon,” Unity said, darting at the television, then drumming her knuckles on top of an armchair instead. “I want to see what’s happening in the world.”
“Shall we let Unity watch the news now, Amelia? If it isn’t something you like watching you won’t mind if the light’s on.”
Amelia glowered before delving into her cleavage for an object that she flung at him. Just in time to field it he identified it as the remote control. Unity ran to snatch it from him, and as a newsreader appeared with a war behind him Shone withdrew. He was lingering over closing the door while he attempted to judge whether the mountainous landscapes on the walls were vague with mist or dust when a man at his back murmured, “Come out, quick, and shut it.”
He was a little too thin for his suit that was gray as his sparse hair. Though his pinkish eyes looked harassed, and he kept shrugging his shoulders as though to displace a shiver, he succeeded in producing enough of a grateful smile to part his teeth. “By gum, Daph said you’d sort them out, and you have. You can stay,” he said.
Among the questions Shone was trying to resolve was why the man seemed familiar, but a gust of rain so fierce it strayed under the front door made the offer irresistible. “Overnight, you mean.” He thought it best to check.
“That’s the least,” the manager presumably only began, and twisted round to find the stooped woman. “Daph will show you up, Mr. …”
“Shone.”
“Who is he?” Daph said as if preparing to announce him.
“Tom Shone,” Shone told her.
“Mr. Thomson?”
“Tom Shone. First name Tom.”
“Mr. Tom Thomson.”
He might have suspected a joke if it hadn’t been for her earnestness, and so he appealed to the manager. “Do you need my signature?”
“Later, don’t you fret,” the manager assured him, receding along the hall.
“And as for payment …”
“Just room and board. That’s always the arrangement.”
“You mean you want me to …”
“Enjoy yourself,” the manager called, and disappeared beyond the stairs into somewhere that smelled of an imminent dinner.
Shone felt his overnight bag leave his shoulder. Daph had relieved him of the burden and was striding upstairs, turning in a crouch to see that he followed. “He’s forever off somewhere, Mr. Snell,” she said, and repeated, “Mr. Snell.”
Shone wondered if he was being invited to reply with a joke until she added, “Don’t worry, we know what it’s like to forget your name.”
She was saying he, not she, had been confused about it. If she hadn’t cantered out of sight his response would have been as sharp as the rebukes he gave his pupils when they were too childish. Above the middle floor the staircase bent towards the front of the house, and he saw how unexpectedly far the place went back. Perhaps nobody was staying in that section, since the corridor was dark and smelled old. He grabbed the banister to speed himself up, only to discover it wasn’t much less sticky than a sucked lollipop. By the time he arrived at the top of the house he was furious to find himself panting.
Daph had halted at the far end of a passage lit, if that was the word, by infrequent bulbs in glass flowers sprouting from the walls. Around them shadows fattened the veins of the paper. “This’ll be you,” Daph said, and pushed open a door.
Beside a small window under a yellowing lightbulb the ceiling angled almost to the carpet, brown as mud. A narrow bed stood in the angle, opposite a wardrobe and dressing table and a sink beneath a dingy mirror. At least there was a phone on a shelf by the sink. Daph passed him his bag as he ventured into the room. “You’ll be fetched when it’s time,” she told him.
“Time? Time …”
“For dinner and all the fun, silly,” she said with a laugh so shrill his ears wanted to flinch.
She was halfway to the stairs when he thought to call after her. “Aren’t I supposed to have a key?”
“Mr. Snell will have it. Mr. Snell,” she reminded him, and was gone.
He had to phone Ruth as soon as he was dry and changed. There must be a bathroom somewhere near. He hooked his bag over his shoulder with a finger and stepped into the twilight of the corridor. He’d advanced only a few paces when Daph’s head poked over the edge of the floor. “You’re never leaving us.”
He felt absurdly guilty. “Just after the bathroom.”
“It’s where you’re going,” she said, firmly enough to be commanding rather than advising him, and vanished down the hole that was the stairs.
She couldn’t have meant the room next to his. When he succeeded in coaxing the sticky plastic knob to turn, using the tips of a finger and thumb, he found a room much like his, except that the window was in the angled roof. Seated on the bed in the dimness on its way to dark was a figure in a toddler’s blue overall—a teddy bear with large black ragged eyes or perhaps none. The bed in the adjacent room was strewn with photographs so blurred that he could distinguish only the grin every one of them bore. Someone had been knitting in the next room, but had apparently lost concentration, since one arm of the mauve sweater was at least twice the size of the other. A knitting needle pinned each arm to the bed. Now Shone was at the stairs, beyond which the rear of the house was as dark as that section of the floor below. Surely Daph would have told him if he was on the wrong side of the corridor, and the area past the stairs wasn’t as abandoned as it looked: he could hear a high-pitched muttering from the dark, a voice gabbling a plea almost too fast for words, praying with such urgency the speaker seemed to have no time to pause for breath. Shone hurried past the banisters that enclosed three sides of the top of the stairs and pushed open the door immediately beyond them. There was the bath, and inside the plastic curtains that someone had left closed would be a shower. He elbowed the door wide, and the shower curtains shifted to acknowledge him.