Six Months, Cash

He paid six months up front, in cash, and Rosa would tell people afterward that this had been the warning, the great obvious flare of it, and that she had simply chosen not to read it. That was not quite true. The truth was duller and harder to forgive. At the time, six months in cash had not looked like a warning. It had looked like rent. The basement flat had stood empty for most of a year. It was a decent enough flat — its own door under the front steps, a galley kitchen, a bedroom that got an hour of afternoon light if the season cooperated — but the city was full of decent enough flats, and money was tight in the house above it in the way money is tight when a marriage is also tight and the two things have started, quietly, to feed each other. So when the man telephoned about the advertisement, and came to view it on a Tuesday, and stood in the small bedroom and said, "Yes, this will suit me very well," Rosa had felt mostly relief, and relief is a poor lens. It blurs the edges of things. His name was Mr. Aldous Crane. He was perhaps fifty, perhaps a well-kept sixty; he had the kind of face that declined to commit. He wore a grey coat that was neither new nor shabby, and he carried a single soft leather bag, and he spoke in a low courteous voice with the consonants all finished properly, the voice of a man who had been somewhere expensive to be educated and had not enjoyed it much. He asked sensible questions. He did not haggle. And when Rosa, half apologising, mentioned that she would ordinarily want references, an employer, a previous landlord, that sort of thing, Mr. Crane had smiled — a small, regretful, entirely pleasant smile — and said that he understood completely, that references were a great nuisance, and that perhaps this would be simpler. And he had set the money on the kitchen counter. Six months. In notes. Counted out into a neat squared stack with the unhurried hands of a man who had counted money in front of nervous people before. Rosa had a husband upstairs who was not speaking to her that week, and two children, and a mortgage that arrived every month with the patience of a tide, and on the counter was half a year of breathing room in a currency that asked no questions and left no record. She took it. Of course she took it. She would like to be able to write that she hesitated, and she did hesitate, for about the length of a held breath, and then she took it, and Mr. Aldous Crane moved into the flat beneath her family that same Friday with his one soft bag and, as far as she ever saw, nothing else at all. He was, for a long time, the perfect tenant. That was how she described him to her sister, on the telephone, in those first weeks: perfect, honestly, you'd never know he was there. He kept hours you could set a watch by. He left at eight and returned at six, though Rosa never learned to where or from what. He had no visitors — not one, not in all the months, and she would only understand much later how strange a thing that was, a man living a whole life and never once needing another person to climb down those basement steps. He was unfailingly courteous on the rare mornings their paths crossed by the bins. He called her Mrs. Vane, properly, and asked after the children by name within a fortnight, which she had found charming. She had found it charming. She wrote that sentence down now and made herself look at it. Because the children's names were the start of it, though she had not felt the start of it as a start. He knew that Lily was the elder and Tomas the younger; fine, she had told him that. But by the second month he knew that Tomas would not eat anything orange, and that Lily had a recital coming, and the date of the recital, and that Rosa's husband worked late on Thursdays — and Rosa had not told him those things, she was nearly certain she had not told him those things, and "nearly certain" is a phrase that, once it moves into a house, never again moves out. He was below them. That was the fact she would lie in bed and turn over, in the months when turning things over in bed had become her main occupation. The whole life of her family was conducted on the floorboards above his ceiling — every argument, every footstep, every name called up a staircase — and a quiet, courteous, watchless man had paid six months in cash for the right to lie underneath all of it and listen.