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By Root 2087 0

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