The Lodger: A Novel (3 page)

He was walking toward her; he grasped both her hands; his sonorous voice rang out: “Ah, I am glad to see you. How was your weekend?”

Disengaging herself, Dorothy said it had been good. She was stirred, despite herself, by his gentle resolute features: the wide forehead, the kind dark eyes, the lustrous black hair, and neatly pointed beard. She crushed her feelings with urgent resolve. After all her attempts to extricate herself, tenderness would not do.

“What was your friend like?” he asked eagerly. “Still
sympathique
, as she was at school?”

While she described Jane, she wondered if he could sense the change in her. This was the man who knew her thoughts. But her connection with him seemed hollow and treacherous now. “What did you do all weekend?” she asked guiltily.

“I have been resting … the whole day until about an hour ago,” Benjamin said. “I am a little sleepy, but there are many things I want to tell you…”

The thought of having to bend her mind around his thickly accented sentences was exhausting. “It’s late. Can’t we talk tomorrow?”

“But I want to talk to you now. I have been waiting all weekend to see you.”

A fitful night breeze touched the window, making it rattle gently in its frame. Dorothy sighed. “Go on then,” she said.

“With you, I have been perfectly happy. Happier than I’ve ever felt in my life. I don’t want to let go of that; I can’t.” His white eyelids were downcast; the black lashes skimmed his cheek. He raised his eyes again, searching and earnest. “I know now what real love is … I would even give up my Judaism for it…”

“I’d never let you do that. You must keep your religion.”

“You must marry me.” His voice broke pitifully, in expectation of a rebuff … He was falling again into his determined hope. Her heart ached for him. He seemed unable to relinquish the hope of her changing.

She said, “You know I can’t. I’m sorry. Our worlds are too different; the gap is unbridgeable. We’ve been through it countless times and, deep down, you agree.”

“Look, Dorothy, instead of refusing me, why don’t you tell me what you want from marriage? Perhaps we can reach an understanding. I am neither obstinate nor intolerant. I am just trying to grasp what you want—”

“It would never work. As a husband, you’d slide into the role of Jewish patriarch, complete with prayer shawl and traditional views; utterly secure in your store of ordered knowledge and never questioning its value. You have admitted as much yourself. We’d be a disaster together, because I could never be the compliant mate you really want. Anyway, I am quite sure now that I don’t want to marry anyone.”

She walked to the window and stood with her back to him, gazing unseeingly out of it.

He put both hands on her shoulders and turned her around gently to face him. “You think you will never marry, ever? What makes you so certain?”

“It would mean giving up this life…”

“Your independence is precious, yes. But at what cost? A few years from now, you might look back and regret.”

There was silence, except for the traffic rumbling along Euston Road. Benjamin moved away from her and stood in front of the empty fireplace. His lightless eyes scanned the distance unseeingly, as though he was remembering some faraway thing. He radiated European culture and polish. What was he thinking? Was he musing about the distant beauty of Russia; about the expansive life of foreign universities, the study of Continental philosophy and literature, to which he belonged?

He cleared his throat and spat; there was a flabby thwack as his saliva struck the grate. Dorothy stared at him in icy disbelief. His foreignness had at first seemed so rich and compellingly strange, but in the end, it was the thing that drove them apart.

Invigorated by disgust, she found the courage to speak. “There’s no point in carrying on. It will only get more painful.”

“You are right, it will hurt us both.” He exhaled noisily. “Perhaps I should leave this house.”

The pit of her stomach was dropping away. “Do you want to?”

“No, of course not. But it might be easier if we are not under the same roof … Next week, I shall look for new lodgings.”

There was nothing to say. She had never realized how sad it was when love turned to dust. Though she no longer wanted him, she shrank from the thought of letting him go. It was confusing and contradictory. His departure would leave a yawning void; this corner of Bloomsbury would be haunted forever by his gestures and his warm deep voice … Unthinkable that the kind booming voice would no longer be part of daily life. She felt herself recoiling from the loneliness that would sweep in to fill the vacuum.

I shall miss him in so many ways, she mused. His sensitivity; the things he understands without being told. And his absolute sweetness; there is not an ounce of malice in him … the things he does for me. Small tender things, like doing up the buttons of my coat when it’s cold.

She imagined him walking away from her toward a new life, new attachments. Jealousy ripped through her: she would rather see him dead than in love with another woman. Remorse immediately followed: she was self-centred, a monster. I am unworthy of him, she reflected sadly. He would be better off with someone who adores him unconditionally; it’s what he deserves.

It was her fault their attachment had curdled. In the end, she spoilt everything, for reasons only half-understood. It was something in her nature that flailed out and wreaked destruction … I have nothing left now but my pugnacious and agonized self, having violently charged at things and smashed them up, she thought miserably.

Stealing a look at him, she saw an ashen somber face. He was contemplating life without her and resigning himself to it. He had one hand on the doorknob. “Good night, I will let you rest now.”

There was a terrible weariness in his voice. He went out, shutting the door softly behind him.

*   *   *

DOROTHY HURRIED DOWNSTAIRS
the next morning on her way to work. Her eyes were salty and prickly and her chest was tight. It had been a restless night; she felt ill equipped to deal with the week that lay ahead.

Mrs. Baker, the landlady, was standing in the hall. She looked more dingy and decayed than ever, Dorothy thought, taking in the badly dyed hair, half blonde, half grey; the ill-fitting false teeth. Yet Mrs. Baker’s youthful figure and smile managed to transcend everything.

She put a small firm hand on Dorothy’s arm. “Here you are, young lady. Had a good weekend?”

“Yes, thank you. I went to stay with a school friend I hadn’t seen in years and her husband. It was … interesting.”

Mrs. Baker fixed her with a look that seemed to seek out her invisible thoughts. Dorothy colored, wondering what the landlady guessed.

“I see you’re rushing out. Will you at least have a cup of tea before you go?”

“I can’t,” Dorothy said. “I’m late for work as it is.”

Through the half open door of the dining room, she could see the boarders gathered at breakfast. Mrs. Baker’s oldest daughter, Carrie, presided over the tea tray; the younger girl was passing around a plate of bread and butter. The dead fern rested in its usual place at the center of the table. Mr. Cundy was helping himself to jam. The young Canadian doctor sat with his back to the door: a lean dark-grey upright form, long necked and fair haired.

Sunlight was falling onto Mrs. Baker’s faded skirt; she brushed some specks of dust from it impatiently. She seemed to hold the mysteries of the running of the large house in the palm of her hand: the unknown dark caverns of the kitchen and basement, the apathetic smudgy cleaning sessions in the endless rooms, the punctual appearance of daily breakfasts and dinners, the enigma of guests arriving and disappearing at different times. The entire world of the house resided in Mrs. Baker’s radiant, encouraging smile, which was given to every one of her boarders, as if she liked them all equally.

Carrie came out of the dining room. Offering Dorothy a shy good morning, she turned to whisper something in her mother’s ear. Dorothy watched Mrs. Baker’s face darken. There was trouble in the house.

“Is everything all right?” Dorothy asked, anxiously.

For a moment, Mrs. Baker seemed to want to tell her something. Dorothy watched her expression harden and close up; she sighed. “People! You’d have a poor view of human nature, if you had this place to run. It opens your eyes, with one thing and another.”

Dorothy wondered if another boarder had left without paying rent. Her old sense of the house as a refuge disintegrated slightly. To Mrs. Baker, it wasn’t a refuge at all: it was ceaseless demands and anxiety, problems she had to keep to herself, and a sprinkling of decent folk thrown in amongst the riffraff. She would never manage to make it profitable. The house was full of people living on the edge of catastrophe, who didn’t pay their bills. One or two hadn’t paid anything for months; Mrs Baker had even lent them money … Dorothy wondered where they would all go if the boardinghouse failed.

“Off to work with you, young lady. Don’t worry about us, you have enough on your shoulders. It’s not as warm as it looks this morning, so mind you don’t catch a chill.”

“Oh well, I’ll try not to. See you later.”

Dorothy opened the front door and stepped out into the shock of the bright morning.

*   *   *

DURING THE DAYS
that followed, the weather turned unseasonably warm. Dorothy’s attic room was sweltering. When she came home from work, its dense oppressive smell of dust nauseated her.

She shut the door behind her and took off her hat. Pulling a chair as near as she could to the open window, she sat watching low sunlight blazing off the leads sloping down to her parapet. Traffic thundered along Euston Road. The skylight above her head was a brilliant glare. She let her thoughts drift … There had been no word from Jane or Bertie; no invitation to visit them again. By the look of things, they had given up on her already.

In part, it was a relief. She couldn’t banish the uneasy feeling there was something wrong about seeing them, something irregular about the whole setup. It was preferable to keep her distance; their continuing silence was for the best.

She felt curiously flat, dulled and exhausted by the fatigue of a day’s work in the heat. Her heart beat sluggishly, her head throbbed, and her eyes were dry. She should get something to eat, but she was too tired to go out and she couldn’t afford one of Mrs. Baker’s shilling dinners; there was barely enough money for next week’s food. As minutes crept by, hunger and loneliness gripped her. There seemed nothing in her life but bitterness. It was a heatwave in spring and life was passing her by, in a stifling dusty attic.

A sleepless night lay ahead of her; the top floor was a heat trap that refused to cool down, even in the hours before dawn. She crossed the room and washed her hands with the sliver of soap in the dish; it was cracked and darkly veined with grime. The washstand swayed precariously as she splashed her face with lukewarm water. She dried herself with the threadbare face towel and surveyed her room. Everything in it was grubby and decrepit; it was a seedy room in a cheap boardinghouse. Her eyes burned with tears and she sank onto the hot floor.

As she lay there, curled in on herself, a picture came into her mind of the Wells’s sitting room, far from the noise and grime of London: it would be blazing with open-windowed spring sunshine. She imagined the life of the house going on without her … everything revolving around Bertie’s writing, Jane and the servants tiptoeing about so he wouldn’t be disturbed, the nourishing meals, the bright comfortable rooms, the flourishing sea-facing garden.

She thought about the sense of belonging she’d felt in their company, about listening to Bertie’s ideas, torn between infuriation and reluctant admiration. Helplessly, she let her mind flit back to their conversations: “You must come and see us more often, Miss Richardson. Being here evidently agrees with you. And we like having you around, don’t we Jane? We like having you around … like having you around…”

A flicker of feeling tugged at her belly, like electricity.

Later, she dragged herself downstairs to get a bread roll and a bit of cheese for supper. There was a letter for her on the hall stand; she recognized Jane’s hurried yet elegant writing instantly.

She tore it open and devoured the words, fatigue forgotten: “You must come and see us as soon as possible … We have been frightfully dull without you … This weekend? Let me know as soon as you can … sooner…”

Three

On the first evening of her visit, Dorothy came shyly down to dinner to find Bertie and Jane sitting side by side in front of the drawing room fireplace.

“Look at you!” Jane exclaimed, rising to her feet and holding out both hands to Dorothy. “You’ve spent the week toiling in city heat, yet you look as fresh as you did when we were at school.”

Dorothy took her outstretched hands. Bertie stood up, his eyes on Dorothy, taking in the way her hair fell, the creamy lace tie that transformed the old black silkette evening dress she hadn’t the money to have altered. Her clothes had made her sick with their shabbiness when she dressed for dinner, but his eyes and the candlelight seemed to draw them together into a pleasing whole.

“You ought always to go about in a tie; they suit you,” he remarked.

“You wear ties better than anyone I know,” Jane said, adding “I wish I could hang things around my neck and look as nice.”

“Dorothy can hang anything around her neck and look nice.”

“An old shoe lace or a—a—a string of sausages!” he finished triumphantly.

“Idiot!” chided Jane.

Bertie was still looking.

He gave her his arm as they walked into dinner, saying confidentially: “Well, you must tell me everything you’ve been doing. Taking London by storm, I’ll be bound.” The little creak in his voice meant he knew he was about to be entertained.

“Did you have a good week?” Dorothy asked when they sat down.

“It was better than average, thank you,” Bertie said. “After days of sweating blood, my book is finally turning a corner. It’s getting a new lease on life. I managed to get to that elusive state of deep concentration from whence my best work comes.”