The Road Home by Rose Tremain Page B

waited. He placed his bag on the step beside him. Down the street, he could hear a dog barking and see a child kicking and shrieking in a pram. The berries on the rowans were beginning to turn gold.
    When the door opened, Lev saw a small, elfin kind of man, with pale, nervous eyes and a flare of eczema across his nose. He wore an old white T-shirt and faded jeans too loose for his narrow frame.
    “Mr. Slane?” said Lev.
    “Yes. Christy Slane. Come in, come in. I was expecting you. Your friend Lydia telephoned about the room.”
    In the dark hallway several pairs of sneakers lay in a sprawling heap, under a line of hooks, where anoraks, scarves, backpacks, fleeces, and leather jackets hung.
    “None of this junk is mine,” said Christy Slane. “It belongs to the downstairs people. They don’t want the stink of the shoes inside the flat, so they leave them outside for me to trip over. They’ve no consideration and, of course, no imagination whatsoever.”
    Lev followed Christy Slane up the stairs. He saw that the door to Christy’s flat was painted white and taped to it was a child’s drawing of a house. “My daughter, Frankie, did that,” said Christy. “She doesn’t live here anymore. That’s why I have the room to let. I should take the picture down, but I can’t quite come up to doing it.”
    Christy closed the white door and Lev saw that the flat he was in was also painted bright white and it smelled of this fresh paint and of something else, which Lev hoped he’d recognized as cigarette smoke. He looked round at the doors leading off the small entrance hall they were in. He glimpsed a sitting room with a gas fire and two wicker armchairs and a dining table and a TV. A dented paper lampshade hung from the ceiling. The windows were uncurtained.
    “Bare minimum furniture now,” said Christy. “My wife took her share and then she took
half of my share.
That’s Englishwomen for you. But she wouldn’t take any of the things I’d given her. Nor the things I’d given my daughter. So you’re going to share your room with a Wendy house and a little plastic shop I brought all the way over from Orlando, Florida, and a cuddly toy or two. I hope this is all right. If you get peeved with them, you can help me get them up into the loft.”
    Now Christy opened the door to the child’s room and Lev saw wooden bunk beds and a ladder leading up from one to the other, and bed linen patterned with giraffes. On the window ledge sat a huddle of soft toys. The floor was carpeted green. On it stood a tiny wooden house with red chimney pots and flowers painted over the door. By the bunks there was a multicolored rug, which reminded him of the rag rug in Maya’s room.
    “Is it all right for you?” asked Christy. “It’s been cleaned and aired. Beds look small, but they’re full size. I’ll chuck your laundry in the washer once a week, all included in the ninety quid. You can be comfy here, can’t you? Not so different from my own little room. When I was a boy in Dublin, I had animals on me pillow. But if they bother you, we can get some other covers, cheap, on the Holloway Road. Okay?”
    Lev walked into the room and set down his bag. He hadn’t understood all of what Christy Slane had been saying, except that he knew this had once been Christy’s daughter’s room and now that daughter was gone. He looked round at all the child’s possessions and then out of the window at a sycamore tree, whose wide branches almost touched the glass. Then he looked at Christy, standing in the doorway, as though not wanting to come into the room, his hands held at his sides in a helpless way, and Lev was transfixed for a moment, recognizing something of himself in the other man, some willingness to surrender and not fight, some dangerous longing for everything to be over.
    “The room is very good,” said Lev. “I will take.”
    “Right,” said Christy. “Good. Well, at least Angela left these curtains. And this is the quiet