“I’m sorry, but I’m very ill; I really must get back upstairs,” Sylvia whispers, feeling the blood drain from her face as an ominous percolation starts deep in her intestines. She takes a step forward toward the foot of the staircase.

“May I ask where you moved from?” the man asks with sudden urgency, still standing fully in his doorway, leaving only a matter of impassable inches between himself and the oversized pram.

“Devonshire. Just north of Dartmoor.”

He nods knowingly. “My wife has left me for a man from Cornwall.” He glowers with hostility at the map in his hands. “‘As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.’ So said Holmes. He also said a concentrated atmosphere elicits a concentration of thought, but I disagree.”

Sylvia nods hollowly, single-minded to get back up the stairs. She takes another step toward her neighbor, whose intractable position remains the insurmountable obstacle.

“How much rent are you paying?” he blurts.

Taken aback, her bowels churning, Sylvia stammers again, “I’m not exactly sure—I don’t remember—I made out a check for the full year in advance—”

“Aha,” he says, smiling, looking grim and pleased. His eyes glitter tinnily behind the lenses of his glasses. “No wonder they considered your need to be greater than mine.”

Sylvia stares at him blankly. She would have done anything to get Yeats’s house. She cabled her mother straightaway; she cleared the savings account. No one could have possibly needed this house more than she did.

Her neighbor does not move aside, fixing her instead with his unpleasant smile, relishing this exhumation of diabolical skulduggery, when his face begins to knead into a grimace. “What is that infernal smell?” he asks, sniffing the close hallway air.

Sylvia, her conjested head impenetrable, cannot smell a thing, though she fears the culprit can only be her basket of vomitous trash, or her rotting wet laundry still packed into the pram, or herself. She folds her arms over her chest, furtively ashamed, hugging her flannel nightgown to her skin in the cold.

Her neighbor scowls at the cumbersome pram before him. “Why don’t you move this perambulator into your own flat?” he complains bitterly. “As you can see, it’s blocking the corridor. This isn’t your private storage, you know, this is public space. The lease reads that we are to keep this area clear.”

“But I can’t move it upstairs—it’s too big and heavy,” Sylvia responds, incredulous, hopelessness whinging her voice.

“Then you should get a smaller one.”

“—I have to have it—I need it—” she appeals, “how else can I manage my errands and my shopping with the children?”

“Have your husband help you,” the man pronounces.