Mrs. Cohen nodded, adjusting the tan feather tucked into the ribbon circling her chocolate-colored velvet hat. (Brown, brown, brown, Rose thought, picturing her mother’s blue linen dress, her purple silk wrapper. Why must everything be brown here?) Mrs. Cohen moved closer, looking down at Rose. “It couldn’t hurt you to come.” Her eyebrows were thinly plucked, sharp like the rest of her.
Rose didn’t answer, her gaze falling on the teacup by her side. She detested the milky tea, but the cup was her favorite. The creamy porcelain was etched with a portrait of the young princess Margaret Rose, a garland of flowers framing her face. The handle was chipped, the princess’s cheek marred by a smattering of cracks, but she held her neck high, her features fine. Rose felt a kinship with the princess, only a few years younger than herself, with whom she shared a name.
Mrs. Cohen leaned down and, clearing her throat, said: “We’re going to the Rosenblatts’ for lunch after shul. I’ll make sure Mary brings you some broth.” The cadence of her voice was uncharacteristically soft, her smell clean and lightly sweet. Rose felt a stab of anxiety. She wriggled down, burrowing farther under the sheets. “Thank you,” she said. But her words were muffled, and Mrs. Cohen, with an aggrieved sigh and a click of her heels, murmured, “You’re a funny one,” and took leave of the room.
Within minutes Rose heard Mr. Cohen bellow, “My overcoat, Aida!” Mrs. Cohen’s high voice cried, “Ah, Mary, Mr. Cohen’s overcoat, please!” She heard the sounds of footsteps in the stone front hall, the creak of the front door opening and closing, and then, finally, mercifully, silence.
She had managed to avoid synagogue for weeks now. The place gave her the creeps, with its dank smells, its gloomy light, and the Hebrew she didn’t understand. From the women’s balcony where they sat, Rose watched the men below, huddling under voluminous prayer shawls, bowing and bending like bugs unused to the light. The last time she’d gone, she sat silently next to Mrs. Cohen, who was sitting next to Mrs. Appelbaum, who was gossiping about someone’s daughter. Mrs. Cohen tittered in response. The very air in the synagogue was so thick and foreign it seemed nearly unbreathable. Rose thought, longingly, about how her family never went to temple in Vienna. And Gerhard didn’t have to go in England either. Once more Rose thought of the unfairness that her brother was lucky enough to live with a boisterous Christian family in Liverpool, while she had been forced to be in Leeds with the Cohens, a childless Orthodox couple who insisted that they wait three hours after beef stew for a slice of buttery cake, who ferreted out any leavened products with a feather before Passover, who swung a chicken over their heads during the Jewish new year, who were the most aggressively un-English family she knew.
Though it was indistinct, Rose thought she could make out the sounds of Mary’s brush attacking the pots in the kitchen sink. Mary took her work seriously, as if she were the true owner of the house and the Cohens long-term tenants whose presence she humored, barely. She wasn’t like Bette; she paid little attention to Rose, and when she did, she was dismissive: yet another decorative, questionably useful object that required dusting. But there was something about this lack of attention that made Rose like her all the more.
Rose heard Mary move into the parlor—there was the creak of the floorboards settling under her formidable weight, there were the pings as she ran her rag over the keys of the grand piano. Rose jumped out of bed, wriggling into her pants, pulling a second jumper over her first. She arranged the flat pillows in the center of the bed, pulled the sheet over them, and made a halfhearted attempt to plump them up. It looked more like a lumpy raincoat than the shape of a girl, but Rose couldn’t afford to waste time. Down the rambling Victorian hall, she passed the lavatory, and Mr. and Mrs. Cohen’s bedroom, Mrs. Cohen’s brown-hued sitting room. (“England is done up in browns,” she had written to Mutti when she first arrived, and was she ever proud of the observation. “It makes me appreciate the colors of your pretty scarf all the more. The birds on it keep me company.”) At the far end, opposite the square window that looked over the garden that had seen better days, Rose pushed open a wooden door without a handle, slipped into the darkness of a tight corridor.
Two baby steps forward, one hand on the dirty brick wall guiding her, reading the mortar like braille. It was cooler in here, the air dank. The steps plunged down. Rose closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and coaxing herself to get moving, faster, faster! She knew the servants’ staircase well. Mary had been the one to show it to her, saying, “I go up the front stairs, and so do you.” But three months ago, after the war began and the char had been dismissed and the cook and gardener too, Rose began to think of the stairs as her own. In this cloistered darkness, everything dropped away: England and Austria, the perplexed looks and sighs of Mrs. Cohen, the letters she received from her parents, and the clamoring silence that took the place of those letters since the war began. Here, as she sank into darkness, the pain in her chest that was her most constant companion—it gave her life contour, even as she tried to ignore it—eased a little. She could be anywhere and everywhere at the same time.
Rose made her way down, her hands scraping against the crumbling wall, skipping the creaky seventh step, knowing to step to the right on the thirteenth to avoid a loose board. At the foot of the stairs, the door leading to the cellar had been propped open, and Rose stooped down to remove the wad of newspaper that she had placed here the day before—she could be a planner, when she needed to be.
She was breathing heavily when she emerged from the cellar to the quiet street, the pavement shiny damp. The sun looked small and discarded, an orangy scrap low on the horizon. But Rose eagerly took it all in. She yanked at a lowlying branch on the giant horse chestnut tree on the corner, making the blossoms dance and shiver, a rain of petals on her skin. She passed the Harveys’ house, their Austin Six on blocks in the front yard. A few houses down was the Convoys’, whose wrought-iron gate had been largely dismantled, only the far two posts remaining, the rest of the metal given over for the war effort. There on the corner Rose spotted the T of Margaret’s back, her shoulders slouching in her dark wool coat, her single fair braid running down her back like a beacon on this gray day.
Rose hurried to her, skipping. “Hallo!” she cried out, expelling the word like a breath.
“Hello.” Margaret turned, far more subdued. Her small blue eyes scanned Rose’s face. “You’re dirty. Look at your hands!”
Rose tried to wipe her palms on her friend’s jumper, but Margaret squealed and pulled back. “I’m early. It was easy.” Rose did a little jig for Margaret, her arms flailing about, compelled to entertain. Around Margaret, her body had a mind of its own. Back at the Cohens’, she would recall her dancing and cringe.
“You’re hopeless,” Margaret said, but she said it companionably, agreeably. “Come along.” Rose was happy to fall in line as Margaret took the lead.