“I’m sorry,” Rose said.
“Oh, it was fine.” Walter waved her off. “The boredom was the worst of it. Such a bloody waste of time. And good thing people are so much clearer now on our loyalties. You know I went for an interview the other day and I was told that I had great ability, but ‘so sorry, the firm already has our fill of foreigners. Cool your heels and maybe a spot for your kind will open up soon.’”
“That’s awful. And I hear it’s gotten worse since last summer.” Lore didn’t have to explain. The troubles had remained mostly up north, but they had all heard. In Cheetham Hill, where Lore’s foster family lived, shop windows were smashed, bricks thrown from cars, the main synagogue vandalized. It was reprisal for the two British sergeants who had been killed in Palestine by Jewish underground fighters. People ascribed the violence in Manchester to a small, bad element—hooligans, they called them. They’re not coming to London, everyone said. But Rose thought: Wasn’t this how it began in Germany?
“It’s not happening here,” Walter said.
“No?” Rose said, alert, eyes on him, not doubting for a moment that he had surmised what she had been thinking.
“No. England is different. And we’re pushy people, or so I’m told.” He gave her a shadow of a smile. “We won’t let it happen again.”
Lore later told Rose: “Walter likes you. He said he wanted to come round again.”
“Really?” Rose said, dubious. Didn’t he like Lore? He seemed far too confident and attractive to be interested in her. Boys made her more anxious than excited. She had never had anything close to a boyfriend. But maybe things were changing, she thought nervously. She had liked talking to him. Maybe Walter would be the one.
He never came around again, and though she was disappointed, Rose never asked Lore why. It confirmed what she already knew. Rose was at a loss around boys. Sometimes she wondered: What would Mutti have told her? Would she have been more assured, growing up under her wing?
But school was something that Rose understood. In her studies, she excelled.
“I’m off,” Rose said now to Eva. She felt droplets collecting on her neck; the drizzle was increasing. The figures hurrying along the paths were no more than smeary dabs. Harriet was nowhere to be found.
“To reread the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ section,” Eva said.
“Yes,” Rose said. Eva might be trying to mock her, but here was the trick: Rose didn’t care. She felt a small but heady rush; Rose knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was tantalizingly, incredibly hers.
After her commute back to South Kensington (two different lines, half a mile’s walk), Rose let herself into Mrs. Deering’s with her own key. She had begged Margaret not to leave London, she thought it was a big mistake to follow her beau back to Leeds. But if Margaret hadn’t left, then Rose would have never ended up at Mrs. Deering’s. Her attic room wasn’t much to look at, but it had a bed and a gas ring on which she made tea, and a washbasin and, if she craned her neck, a slight view of the walled garden below. She shared a bathroom down the hall. Mrs. Deering wasn’t exactly warm, but she was organized and she ran a good house. She rarely saw Mr. Deering, who had been blinded at Dunkirk, and stayed in the two rooms on the parlor floor that he and Mrs. Deering claimed for themselves. Rose liked the seamstress Mrs. Karlkowski on the third floor, who wore bright lipstick and rouge no matter if she didn’t leave the house, and most of all she liked Harriet, a clever broad-shouldered blonde from America who was studying science at university and talked less about her family than Rose did. One night, over gin and lemon, she had mentioned a former husband back home outside of Philadelphia. “Technically, he is still my husband. But the things he did,” Harriet had said, and stopped.
“What?” Rose breathed.
Harriet shook her head. “He is not a man; only a boy would do such things. I am fortunate that my father finally agreed.” She would say no more. “It doesn’t matter,” she told Rose. “It’s in the past. We are very lucky to be on our own.” And they clinked glasses, drinking to it.
Rose entered the carpeted hall and walked past the umbrella stand and coat hooks and small curved table that held the communal telephone. Mr. Lewis from the second floor was polishing the banister with fervor.
“Hello, Mr. Lewis,” Rose said.
“Oh, hello, Miss Zimmer,” he said, and clutched the rag behind his back. “A fine afternoon, isn’t it?” A purplish hue bloomed on his thin cheeks.
“Yes,” she assured him, taking care not to focus her gaze on him, especially not on the rag she could still partially see. “An absolutely fine afternoon.”
Mr. Lewis wasn’t supposed to be cleaning the common areas. This everyone knew. But Mr. Lewis, a timid bookkeeper from Wales who so disliked attention that he blushed whenever spoken to, was a firebrand on the topic of cleanliness. He would tiptoe around the house—collecting towels for washing, wiping down the kitchen counter and the telephone with a heady-smelling concoction of disinfectant that he mixed himself. (“Oh no, you cannot rely on store-bought,” he would say, shaking his head mournfully.) His cleaning enraged Mrs. Deering, who felt that his dusters and disinfectants were not removing contaminants from her house but adding others that marked his territory.
Now Rose heard a creak, and she and Mr. Lewis both glanced up to see Mrs. Deering making her way down from the second landing. A deep pink flamed across Mr. Lewis’s face. “Well, I’m off to the post office,” he announced, and scurried away.
“Miss Zimmer,” Mrs. Deering said before she reached the floor. “Just the person I wanted to speak with. You are a good tenant.”
“And I like living here,” Rose interjected, feeling uncertain, as if this were a test.
“I am glad to hear that. But, as I have already informed the other tenants, there will be an increase in rent as of two months from now.”
“An increase?” Rose repeated. Gerhard had given her a monthly sum for tuition and board after he had calculated her expenses with precision. There was scant extra.
“You are paying thirty-two shillings weekly. It will be increasing to two pounds.”
“Two pounds?” Rose said, aghast. “For my room?”
“Yes, for your room.” Mrs. Deering’s voice rose indignant too. “Ask around. You will find that’s what most rooming houses are charging, or more. What with the housing shortages around here—”