As you can see, there is nothing I can think of to say about this wall that could lift it out of the commonplace. Yet, standing there and looking at it, or thinking about it while I did other things about the flat, the sense and feel of it always in my mind, was like holding an egg to one's ear that is due to hatch. The warm smooth shape on one's palm is throbbing. Behind the fragile lime which, although it can be crushed between two fingers, is inviolable because of the necessities of the chick's time, the precise and accurate time it needs to get itself out of the dark prison, it is as if a weight redistributes itself, as when a child shifts position in the womb. There is the faintest jar. Another. The chick, head under its wing, is pecking its way out, and already the minutest fragments of lime are collecting on the shell where in a moment the first black starry hole will appear. I even found I was putting my ear to the wall, as one would to a fertile egg, listening, waiting. Not for the sounds of Mrs White's, or the Professor's, movements. They might have just gone out or just come in; the ordinary sounds of the corridor might in fact be there. No, what I was hearing was from somewhere else. Yet they were ordinary sounds in themselves: furniture being shifted: voices, but from very far off; a child crying. Nothing clear. But they were familiar, I had been hearing them all my life.
One morning I stood with my after-breakfast cigarette — I allowed myself this one real cigarette a day — and through clouds of blue coiling smoke looked at how the yellowness of the sun stretched in a foreshortened oblong, making the wall itself seem higher in the middle than at its ends. I looked at the glow and the pulse of the yellow, looked as if I were listening, thinking how, as the seasons changed, so did the shape and extent and position of this patch of morning light — and then I was through the wall and I knew what was there. I did not at that first time achieve much more than that there were a set of rooms. The rooms were disused, had been for some time. Years, perhaps. There was no furniture. Paint had flaked off the wall in places, and lay in tiny shards on the floorboards with scraps of paper and dead flies and dust. I did not go in, but stood there on the margin between the two worlds, my familiar flat and these rooms which had been quietly waiting there all this time. I stood and looked, feeding with my eyes. I felt the most vivid expectancy, a longing: this place held what I needed, knew was there, had been waiting for — oh yes, all my life, all my life. I knew this place, recognised it, and before I had actually absorbed the information through my eyes that the walls were much higher than mine, there were many windows and doors, and that it was a large, light, airy, delightful flat, or house. In a further room I glimpsed a painter's ladder; and then, just as the sunlight faded out on my wall when a cloud absorbed the sun, I saw someone in white painter's overalls lifting a roller to lay white paint over the faded and stained surface.
I forgot this occurrence. I went on with the little routines of my life, conscious of the life behind the wall, but not remembering my visit there. It was not until a few days later that I again stood, cigarette in hand, in the mid-morning hour, looking through drifting smoke at the sunlight laid there on the wall, and I thought: Hello! I've been through there, of course I have. How did I manage to forget? And again the wall dissolved and I was through. There were more rooms than I had suspected the first time. I had a strong sense of that, though I did not see them all. Nor did I, on that occasion, see the man or the woman in overalls. The rooms were empty. To make them habitable, what work needed to be done! Yes, I could see that it would take weeks, months… I stood there marking fallen plaster, the corner of a ceiling stained with damp, dirty or damaged walls. Yet it was on that morning when I was beginning to understand how much work needed to be done that I saw, just for the ghost of a second — well, what? But I can hardly say. Perhaps it was more of a feeling than something seen. There was a sweetness, certainly — a welcome, a reassurance. Perhaps I did see a face, or the shadow of one. The face I saw clearly later was familiar to me, but it is possible that that face, seen as everything ended, appears in my memory in this place, this early second visit: it had reflected itself back, needing no more to use as a host or as a mirror than the emotion of sweet longing, which hunger was its proper air. This was the rightful inhabitant of the rooms behind the wall. I had no doubt of it then or later. The exiled inhabitant; for surely she could not live, never could have lived, in that chill empty shell full of dirty and stale air?
When I again knew myself to be standing in my living-room, the cigarette half-burned down, I was left with the conviction of a promise, which did not leave me no matter how difficult things became later, both in my own life, and in these hidden rooms.
***
The child was left with me in this way. I was in the kitchen, and, hearing a sound, went into the living room, and saw a man and a half-grown girl standing there. I did not know either of them, and advanced with the intention of clearing up a mistake. The thought in my mind was that I must have left my front door open. They turned to face me. I remember how I was even then, and at once, struck by the bright hard nervous smile on the girl's face. The man — middleaged, ordinarily dressed, quite unremarkable in every way — said: 'This is the child.' He was already on the way out. He had laid his hand on her shoulder, had smiled and nodded to her, was turning away.
I said: 'But surely…'
'No, there's no mistake. She's your responsibility.'
He was at the door.
'But wait a minute…'
'She is Emily Cartright. Look after her.' And he had gone.
We stood there, the child and I, looking at each other. I remember the room had a wash of sun: it was still morning. I was wondering how the two had got in, but this already seemed irrelevant, since the man had gone. I now ran to the window: a street with a few trees along the pavement, a bus — stop with its familiar queue of people waiting, waiting; and on the wide pavement opposite, underneath the trees there, some children from the Mehta's flat upstairs playing with a ball — dark-skinned boys and girls, all dazzling white shirts, crisp pink and blue dresses, white teeth, gleaming hair. But the man I was looking for — not a sign.
I turned back to the child; but now I took my time over it, and was wondering what to say, how to present myself, how to handle her — all the pathetic little techniques and tricks of our self-definition. She was watching me, carefully, closely: the thought came into my mind that this was the expert assessment of possibilities by a prisoner observing a new jailer. Already my heart was heavy: anxiety! My intelligence was not yet making much of what was happening.
'Emily?' I said tentatively, hoping that she would choose to answer the questions in my mind.
'Emily Mary Cartright,' she said, in a manner that matched her bright impervious voice and smile. Pert? At any rate a hard, an enamelled presence. I was trying to get past, or around it; I was conscious that I was desperately making signals — my smile, gestures — that might perhaps reach something softer and warmer which must be there behind that cold defence of hers.
'Well, will you sit down? Or can I make you something to eat? Some tea? I do have some real tea, but of course…'
'I'd like to see my room please,' she said. And now her eyes were, quite without her knowing it, an appeal, She needed, she needed very much, to know what walls, what shelter, she was going to be able to pull around her, like a blanket, for comfort.
'Well,' I said, 'I haven't thought yet, I don't quite… I must…' Her face seemed to shrivel. But she preserved her bright desperation. 'You see,' I went on, 'I wasn't expecting… let's see now.' She waited. Stubbornly, she waited. She knew that she was to live with me. She knew that her shelter, her four walls, her den, the little space that was hers and which she could creep into was here somewhere. 'There's the spare room,' I said. 'I call it that. But it isn't very…' But I went, and I remember how helplessly and unhappily I did, into the little front lobby, and through it to the spare room.