I do like Joe Dwyer, who works the bottle department at the Piccadilly pub. Tonight I stopped in to buy a quart of three-star for my Sunday afternoon session with Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. He wrapped it in a brown paper bag and handed it over with a big grin. “For the seeing-eye tigress upstairs,” he said.
I remarked that that sounded as if he knew the seeing-eye tigress upstairs extremely well, which made him laugh. “Oh, she’s one of the great Cross characters,” he said. “You might say I’ve known her for at least a couple of lifetimes.”
Something in his voice suggested knowledge in the biblical sense, and I found myself wondering how many of the elderly—and not so elderly—men Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz knows are past lovers. Whenever I see the shy, shadowy Lerner Chusovich, who smokes our eels and sometimes eats with Klaus, he speaks of our landlady with tender yearning. Why ever she might choose a man, it wouldn’t be for anyone else’s reasons. She is a law unto herself.
As the upstairs toilet is in a separate room from the upstairs bathroom, I often use the upstairs bathroom because it has a shower head over the bath, and I prefer a shower to a bath any day. My odd working hours mean that when I need a shower, the rest of The House are either gone or immersed in the evening’s activities, so I don’t inconvenience a soul. Truth to tell, one bathroom isn’t enough for a four-storey house. No one goes down to the laundry.
Get to the point, Harriet! Harold. The upstairs bathroom and toilet lie between Harold’s domain just above my living room and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s bedroom and kitchen, which I’ve never seen because their doors are always closed. He seems to know when I’m coming, though I swear I’m silent-footed, nor do I arrive at the same hour thanks to Cas X-ray’s irregularities. But he’s always there in that hall, which is always plunged into darkness—the bulb seems to blow every day, though when I remarked on it to Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, she looked surprised and said it worked for her. Does that mean that Harold slips it from its bayonet when his antennae tell him I’m coming? It’s possible to see because the toilet light is always on and its door is always ajar, but the hall itself is pitch-black corners, in one of which he’s always standing when I come round the stairs. He never says a word, he just stands fused into the wall and glares his hatred at me, and I confess that I walk warily, ready to elude him if he goes for me with a knife or a bit of washing-line wire.
Why don’t I content myself with a bath downstairs? Because there’s a stubborn streak in me, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m more afraid of cowardice than I am even of Harold. If I give in and don’t have my shower, I’m telling Harold that I’m too frightened of him to invade his territory, and that gives him the advantage over me. It hands my power over to him. That can’t happen, I can’t let it happen. So I go upstairs for my shower, and I pretend that Harold isn’t there in the darkness, that I’m not the only target of the evil in him.