The stairs are covered with an old Moroccan carpet. There are things piled on almost every step, either on their way up or down—it is not quite clear. A collection of pictures line the wall: framed cartoons, postcards, and other larger paintings—a big canvas at the top of the stairs of Lissa as a girl. Hannah stares at it; she recognizes the style—there was one in Lissa’s room in the dorms. She puts her bag down in a narrow room with a single bed, which looks out onto a long garden with a greenhouse at the bottom. The sound of a radio comes from somewhere up above.

She sits on the bed for a while then goes to use the bathroom, which is large and grubby and painted a dark gray-green. Magazines are strewn in haphazard piles on the floor. She picks up a wrinkled copy of the New Yorker, which is open at the fiction page. It is more than four years old.

Downstairs, the living room has been opened up and one whole wall is taken up with bookshelves. The window onto the street is covered in plants and lets in a greenish light; the effect is a little like being underwater. Ashtrays in various states of overflow are set on side tables. There seems to be no order to the books on the shelves: Tolstoy, Eliot, Atwood, Balzac. She takes down one of them, Eliot, Four Quartets. Its margins are filled with writing, a looping scrawl. There is a movement behind her and she jumps.

A woman is standing at the bottom of the stairs. She is tall and wears a long brown apron which is covered in paint, and her long graying hair is caught up on top of her head in two combs. She is arrestingly beautiful.

“Who are you?” the woman asks.

“Hannah,” says Hannah. “Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” says the woman, her head cocked to one side. She looks both curious and dangerous, like a bird of prey. She comes closer, peers at the book in Hannah’s hand.

“Ah. Eliot. Are you a fan?”

Hannah looks down at the text, with its spidery marginalia. What is the right answer?

“I think so. I mean—I did read The Waste Land. I liked that. But . . . wasn’t he horrible to his wife?”

“He was, unfortunately. He was an absolute shit. But he could write.”

“I’m Sarah, by the way,” she says, holding out her hand. “Borrow it. But don’t worry if you don’t enjoy it. Eliot is wasted on the young.”