Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(39)

“Is she okay with my moving in like this?” Kate thought to ask. (Belatedly, it was true.)

“She is okay. Just worries you will say in a while we must move to place of our own.”

Kate gave a little snort. No doubt Mrs. Murphy was visualizing some wifey type in a ruffled apron.

The front hall was dim and musty-smelling. A giant gilt-framed mirror loomed over a claw-footed mahogany buffet, and the doors on either side were closed tightly, which was reassuring. Kate wouldn’t have to greet the two women every time she went in or out. Also the rest of the house was less dark, she could tell. The stairs in front of her glowed with the late-afternoon sunlight that filtered through a window above them, so that the higher she and Pyotr climbed, the brighter it grew.

The hallway on the next level was carpeted, but the top level—onetime servants’ quarters, Kate surmised—had bare pine floorboards and honey-colored wood trim instead of the somber trim of the rest of the house. Kate found it a relief. No door closed this level off, but it was high enough so she couldn’t hear any sounds from below. She could tell she would feel private here.

Pyotr led the way to the right, toward a room down the hall. “This will be yours,” he told her. He stood back to let her enter and then followed her inside.

It had been serving as his study, clearly. A mammoth desk crowded with computer equipment filled one end of it, and a daybed covered in a garish leopard-print velour stood along the opposite wall. Next to the window was a bureau, antique-looking and small but adequate for Kate’s needs, and in the corner sat a dowdy skirted armchair with an ottoman.

“Desk will go to living room,” Pyotr told her. He heaved the carton onto the bureau and went to the closet to hang the garment bag. “Later we get a smaller desk, for if you become a student.”

Kate said, “Oh! Well. Thank you, Pyotr.”

“Mrs. Murphy thinks maybe she can give us desk. She has many extra furnitures.”

Kate set her suitcases down and went to look out the window. Below her lay the backyard, long and green and framed by shrubbery, some of which she thought might be rosebushes. She had never had enough sun before for roses. At the far end of the yard, just inside the picket fence, she spotted a rectangle of spaded earth that must be Pyotr’s vegetable garden.

“Come see the rest of apartment,” he told her.

He returned to the doorway but then stood aside to let her go first, and as she walked past him she became acutely aware of his physical proximity. For all her thoughts about how this apartment would be just another coed dorm, it occurred to her that in fact, she was going to be living alone with a man; and when he crossed the hall to open another door and say, “My room,” she barely glanced in (double bed, nightstand…) before backing away. Perhaps he sensed her discomfort, because he quickly shut the door again. “Bathroom,” he said, waving toward the half-open door at the end of the hall, but he didn’t suggest she step inside. “Is only the one; I am sorry we must share.”

“Oh, that’s okay; at home I share with two people,” she said, and she gave a little laugh, but he didn’t laugh himself.

He led her next to the living room, which contained only a sagging couch, a fake-woodgrain coffee table, and an old-fashioned tube TV on a wheeled metal cart. “Couch looks old but is soft,” he said. He seemed to be studying the couch intently; there was nothing more to be seen in this room, but he made no move to leave.

“One time in high school,” he said, “I went home with classmate to work on project. I slept the night there. In my bed I heard his parents talk downstairs. See, this classmate was not orphan boy but normal.”

Kate glanced at him curiously.

“I heard just the parents’ voices, not words. Parents sat together in the living room. Wife said, ‘Mumble mumble?’ Husband said, ‘Mumble.’ Wife said, ‘Mumble, mumble, mumble?’ Husband said, ‘Mumble mumble.’?”

Kate couldn’t imagine where Pyotr was heading with this.

He said, “You would maybe sit sometimes in this living room with me? You would say ‘Mumble?’ And I would say ‘Mumble mumble.’?”

“Or you could say ‘Mumble?’ and I could say ‘Mumble mumble,’?” Kate suggested. Meaning that she saw no reason why he couldn’t be the tentative one and she the more definite. But she could tell he didn’t get her point. He looked at her with his forehead crinkling. “Sure,” she said finally. “We could do that sometimes.”

“O-kay!” he said, and he let out an enormous breath and started smiling.

“Kitchen?” she reminded him.

“Kitchen,” he said, and he waved her toward the door.

The kitchen lay at the rear of the house, nearest the top of the stairs. It must once have been a storeroom; the walls were cedar, still faintly aromatic. There was a 1950s look to it that was oddly appealing: rusty white metal cabinets, peeling Formica counters, a thickly painted white wooden table with two red chairs. “Nice,” Kate said.

“You like it?”

“Yup.”

“You like the whole place?”

“Yup.”

“I know it is not fancy.”

“It’s very nice. Very comfortable,” she said, and she meant it.

He let out another breath. “Now we go meet Mrs. Murphy,” he said.