His voice faded.

3

Someone had drawn the ragged curtains in the bathroom to shut out the damp old day, and the bath was half full of water with a rubber duck floating on it. As Polly closed and locked the door birds began to sing.

“It’s only the birds,” she said. She put the key down her dress. “You needn’t be frightened.”

Two cages hung from the ceiling.

But Samuel had looked frightened when she turned the key and put it away where he never wanted to find it, not when the room grew suddenly like a wood in the tangled shadows of the green curtains.

“It’s a funny place to have birds,” he said.

“They’re mine.” Polly let the hot water run and the birds sang more loudly as though they heard a waterfall. “Mr. Allingham comes here for a bath on Wednesdays and he says they sneer at him and blow little raspberries all the time he’s washing. But I don’t think he washes very much. Doesn’t Mr. Allingham make you laugh too?”

He expected her to be smiling when she turned to him, but her face was still and grave, and all at once he saw that she was prettier than any of the girls he had made up in his mind before she opened the door downstairs. He distrusted her prettiness because of the key. He remembered what Mrs. Dacey had said when Mr. Allingham asked where Polly was. “Up to no good.” He did not think she was going to put her arms around him. That would have been different. If she tried to put his head under the water he’d shout for George Ring and up he’d come like a horse, neighing and smelling of scent.

“I only locked the door because I don’t want George Ring to come in. He’s queer. He puts scent all over his underclothes; did you know that? The Passing Cloud, that’s what we call him. The Passing Cloud.”

“You didn’t have to put the key where you put it, though,” Samuel said. “I might push you down and fish for it, I might be that sort.”

“I don’t care.”

If only she would have smiled at him when she said that. But she looked as though she really did not care whether he pushed her down or whether he sat on the edge of the bath and touched the duck with his bottle.

The duck floated in circles on the used, greasy water.

“What’s your name?”

“Sam.”

‘Mine’s Mary. But they call me Polly for short.”

“It isn’t much shorter, is it?”

“No, it’s exactly the same length.”

She sat by his side on the edge of the bath. He could not think of anything to say. Here was the locked door he had often made up in stories and in his head, in bed in Mortimer Street, and the warm, hidden key, and the girl who was willing for anything. The bathroom should be a bedroom and she should not be wearing glasses.