Maybe it’s the way this applicant, Assia Gutmann Wevill, looks: like a chic Grimm’s heroine, a fairy tale enchantress. She’s gray-eyed, and her hair falls in a long, gleaming, obsidian sweep. She’s perfumed and lipsticked and polished and dressed in a bright coat stylishly flaring at her knees, a hothouse flower of a coat. Maybe she’s Snow White. Maybe she’s Rose Red. Maybe she’s Gretel, come to the wrong house, and her trail of crumbs is gone, eaten by a bird.

Maybe it’s what she’s said, or how she’s said it. Frankly, that hasn’t been much—a basic conversational wit and humor, an appreciative aesthetic sensitivity, a quick litany of where the Wevills have been and where they’d like to go. Like Sylvia, she’s a foreigner in England, though her pedigree is far more appealingly exotic: German-Russian from Berlin, then Italy, Tel Aviv, Vancouver, and most recently Mandalay. She writes advertising copy; she knows the words that sell. She remarks on Sylvia’s taste, the most interesting Chalk Farm second-hand shops, and the tan that lingers from the Hugheses’ recent holiday to the Normandy coast.

But now the conversation has dwindled to almost nothing. Teacups click on the saucers. It’s clear that both couples want the flat. The room has stilled, quieted; all but the noticeable thrum of Sylvia’s curiosity. The man who is not Assia Wevill’s husband is inspecting the books on either side of Ted: annoyingly snoopy is how Sylvia will later, for a while, think of him. The moment grows heavy. Six adults gaze into their cups, reading their tea leaves, waiting for someone to break the spell.

Abruptly the annoying man speaks up. He pulls out his checkbook, chattering. Everyone looks on politely, sipping their tea or sherry, as if trapped by a boorish conversation at someone else’s dinner party.

*   *   *

So sorry, she’s saying over the telephone, they simply didn’t realize how hard it would be to disengage themselves from their first London home. It’s Sunday night, and Sylvia and Ted have cooked up a plan. Sylvia’s on the phone with the annoying man, and she’s told him they’re ripping up his check. They’ve decided to stay, she lies. The baby born here, and the neighborhood … et cetera. Hope you’ll understand.

“All right,” she says, dropping the phone onto its cradle with a flourish. “One down. Now where’s the other number?” Ted flips a grease-smudged scrap into Sylvia’s long-fingered hand. Frieda’s been put to bed, her cot set up in its space between the sofa and the bookcase. They’ve pulled out the sherry again, congratulating themselves: this feels like the right thing to do. In truth, they are moving eagerly on, their life telescoping out from this claustrophobic walk-up; what does it matter to them who takes their exiguous flat? But surprisingly, it does.