Free The Lodger: A Novel by Louisa Treger Page B

someone sitting close beside him. They remained silent and motionless as she approached; they must be newly arrived boarders, shy of introducing themselves, perhaps. She walked over to the table next to the fireplace and poured a glass of water from the jug standing on it. The jug was almost empty; a thin trickle leaked into her glass, petering out before it was an inch full.
    “Would you like a drink, Miss Richardson?”
    It was Mr. Cundy.
    “Oh yes, I would,” she answered awkwardly, glancing at the woman on the sofa. She found herself gazing into the eyes of Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Baker wearing a low cut silk blouse and a blue velvet choker around her neck!
    Mrs. Baker was neither annoyed nor pleased to see her. She seemed caught up in some private reverie and Mr. Cundy carried on the conversation, telling Dorothy about the benefits of keeping well hydrated. Dorothy thanked him absentmindedly, still focused on Mrs. Baker’s uncharacteristic indifference to her surroundings; her strange air of being utterly absorbed by some internal preoccupation.
    Mr. Cundy fell silent. Dorothy studied them both, surprised by how similar their expressions were as they gazed back at her. They looked benevolent, tolerant, almost patronizing. Flickering behind their eyes was some kind of shared joke, from which she was excluded.
    She had been a bumbling idiot, crashing in, oblivious. They had probably been discussing Mrs. Baker’s struggles with the house. Mrs. Baker had confided in him, and he was advising her on how to make it more profitable. Dorothy had rushed in interrupting them; entirely wrapped up in her own problems. Mrs. Baker had been right not to welcome her. Yet without Mr. Cundy there, Dorothy was sure she would have been her usual warm receptive self.
    Goaded by her thwarted desire for comfort, she hurled herself against the barrier of their unstated alliance. “I see I’ve barged in on a private conversation.”
    “Not at all, young lady,” said Mrs. Baker tartly, sitting very upright on the sofa. “We weren’t talking about anything in particular.”
    “It looks to me like you’re in the middle of something,” insisted Dorothy mulishly.
    Mr. Cundy regarded her with calm satisfaction. There was something different about him, a quiet assurance. “Not at all,” he said mildly. “I was only explaining to Mrs. Baker the theory of natural selection.”
    They wanted her to go away. They wanted to be left alone to continue their discussion without interruption. She lingered for a short while, making graceless small talk. When she couldn’t think of anything else to say, she excused herself and left the room.
    *   *   *
    AFTER THE FIRST shock passed, Dorothy found she couldn’t stand being alone with the shameful echoes of her aborted love affair. As a result, she worked late at the dental practice whenever she could. She welcomed busy days: long sittings, where appointments overran and she had to stay in Mr. Badcock’s room, clearing and cleansing instruments with the patient in the chair, knowing that her other duties were piling up elsewhere.
    She liked the brief moments of forgetfulness that came with throwing herself into her work. She did her best to assist Mr. Badcock as quietly and as expertly as possible, trying to make the patient forget there was a third person in the room.
    It was tedious and slightly repugnant work. She cleared away the soiled instruments and scoured them with a solution so harsh it wrinkled her fingertips and split her skin. Afterward, the instruments had to be polished and repolished, a precise, fiddly, attention-consuming task. Yet the grind of being continually on her feet for the endless clearances and cleansings brought a strange relief. Her sense of her usefulness to Mr. Badcock was balm. She helped him with a new deftness and ease. Even the most difficult of his patients seemed manageable: the lady who vomited if an instrument touched the back of her throat, the retired doctor