“Yes. That would be helpful.”
Emer spoke oddly, but it was mostly what she didn’t say that seemed bizarre. For instance, she did not say, Really, it’s no trouble, or I don’t mind, which you’re supposed to claim even if you mind fantastically—especially then. Despite the palpable awkwardness, she’d still not yakked nervously to bridge a conversational chasm, a refusal to pull her weight altogether of a piece with a refusal to buy her own food. Nor had Emer delivered any of those costless compliments that one contrives in another person’s home—admiration of some trinket, a passing ooh-ah over the expanse of the place for the price—whose sincerity is immaterial. Most strikingly, Emer hadn’t expressed an iota of curiosity about the woman among whose possessions she’d been living for four weeks.
“I noticed—an arrangement, in the bedroom.” Sara might as well have been giving meeting-a-stranger lessons: this is how you show interest in someone else’s life. “The candles, incense, Christmas lights? I wondered, not to pry, but—”
“I’m a Buddhist.”
“Ah, I see.” She didn’t. “Funny, I’d have thought, with your name—”
“My family is Irish Catholic.”
Big surprise. “How long have you—?”
“Since Burma.”
“That’s unusual.” That’s pretentious. “I wouldn’t think you’d find many fellow travelers around here.”
Emer’s stern, uninflected set-piece response finally connected this arch, snobbish woman with the sexless wooly do-gooder who’d spoken on the phone: “There are approximately one hundred Buddhists in Ireland. About forty of them live north of the border. It’s a small but closely knit community. Many Buddhists here find respite in Zen from the demand to choose sides of the sectarian divide. We meet in each other’s houses. If you were interested, I could find you some literature.”
“Thanks, I’d like that,” Sara lied, hastily rewriting Emer’s memoir—The Northern Irish Conflict: A Buddhist Perspective. International bestseller.
Yet Sara felt soiled by the company of her own cattiness, even in her thoughts. The violent black coffee was giving her heartburn; to stay awake, she’d have to go buy some milk. It was possible that this woman was not the most annoying person she had ever met, but if so that happy discovery would have to wait for another day.
“So!” Sara said, getting down to business. “Where have you found to stay while I’m back?”
Emer didn’t flinch. “I haven’t.”
Sara’s anger since arriving home had been sustained at such a draining pitch that she did not grow angrier still; she went blank. “Sorry?”
“I haven’t,” Emer repeated dutifully. She had not understood that Sorry? meant not I didn’t hear you, but I’m going to give you a chance to say something else.
“What went wrong? Did some opportunity fall through at the last minute?” Sara felt her face sting; it must be turning red.
“No,” Emer said lightly. “I made inquiries. Hotels are out of the question. Even a B&B—I can’t afford one.” For once Emer’s usually guileful, opaque expression shone with the translucence of truth. Read: cheap, messy, bonkers, and broke.
“What about youth hostels?”
“They limit length of stay. And I’m thirty-five, top price bracket. IYH is more expensive than you might think. More than here,” Emer noted, “for example.”
“But there are plenty of independent hostels, whose rules are more lax.”
“Too lax,” Emer purred. “I couldn’t leave my computer at such places during the day.”
“Did you ring those accommodations offices, at Queens, Jordanstown, and Stranmillis?” Sara charged hotly. “Did you check the Saturday Telegraph? Or outside the Common Room, where lecturers post lets for their holidays? The term doesn’t begin at Queens until October, and I gave you very detailed directions for finding the notice board.”
“Mm … I don’t remember. In any case, nothing turned up.”
That’s when Sara realized that Emer had made no “inquiries” whatsoever.
“Where are you proposing to stay, then?” Sara asked. Aggressive stupidity can be a serviceable, even inspired tactic, but in this instance it amounted only to delay.
“This is a large flat”—Emer gestured toward the corner—“with a spare bed. And we can split the rent.”
“I’m a little old,” Sara growled, “for a flatmate.”
“What are you, forty-four, forty-five?” Emer chided. “That’s not so old.”
Sara was a petite woman with excitable strawberry blond hair. A persistent pouty petulance gave her what she preferred to think was a childlike aura, as opposed to childish. Over a decade of ghastly Irish weather had protected a creamy, lightly freckled complexion. Thus even when trying for accuracy over flattery, strangers customarily underestimated Sara’s age by six or seven years. Emer, who looked nowhere near thirty-five herself, would be habituated to the same mistake. Notwithstanding her wholesale incuriosity, the subtenant may have understood her landlady ominously well.
Sara tried the sympathy angle, though it was late for that. “I’m leaving a place that means a great deal to me, and heading to a part of the world where I’ve never been. I could use some solitude, some time for meditation, which a Buddhist should appreciate. If I’d wanted to share the flat, wouldn’t I have proposed that you stay on to begin with?”
“That being the simplest solution, I thought it was strange that you didn’t propose it.” Emer punctuated the rebuke with a censorious frown. Though the younger of the two, she had a schoolmarmish side, and delivered this verdict as if administering a hard, disagreeable lesson that Sara was bound to see later was for her own good.
“This isn’t what we planned before you moved in.”
“What you planned was to put me to considerable inconvenience and expense,” Emer said. “It was not practicable.”
“But you agreed to it.”
Tame for most folks in the face of impudence, but for Sara this was holding her own with amazing tenacity. Indeed, she may have been fascinated by conflicts like Northern Ireland’s out of covetousness. Hell-raisers had something Sara wanted. She didn’t think of herself as timid, and her stridency in print had put numerous noses out of joint. But that was on paper about politics, not face-to-face about gooseberry jam. Regarding matters of personal importance, Sara was all too often a doormat. Were she ever to have overcome her fear of duking it out, she might have diminished her coterie of friends, but would assuredly have secured the return of her bone-handled umbrella, the replacement of her blue-and-white platter, and most crucially a reduction of fatiguing resentments on the List, each of which extracted a fractional emotional debit per month, as if she were compelled to rent them storage space in her head.
Sara’s expat-at-home-in-a-rough-town toughness was all surface. In truth, her feelings were readily hurt. Since most opponents struck her at the outset as less bruisable, battle presented itself as synonymous with defeat. Furthermore, while she was a very selfish person, Sara was uneasy about that fact, and consequently uncomfortable with the naked defense of her own interests for the sole reason that they were her interests. She thought it looked bad, which of course it did. But then, wily combatants embraced their own ugliness. To scrap well, you had to give up on getting your antagonists to like you, and get them to bend over instead. Pugilistically, a woman’s classic Achilles’s heel was her horror of appearing unattractive, since you couldn’t come out swinging and seem like a nice person at the same time.
Emer didn’t suffer from this complaint. She wasn’t above endearing herself, but only to a purpose. In Boston, she had sucked up to Sara to get into Sara’s flat. This insinuation accomplished, she dropped the charm. Her chin opposite jutted at the truculent what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it tilt with which a man would project physical threat.
For that matter, Emer’s passive occupation of 19 Notting Hill amounted to physical intimidation of a kind. Her things were installed in the flat. She ha
d a key to the downstairs door. What’s more, she was quiet, or at least she had the presence to make a distinction between what she said and what she felt—a distinction that was oddly un-American, come to think of it—which had provided her ample opportunity to observe her talkative quarry. She would have already concluded that Sara Moseley was not the type to turf silk blouses out an upstairs window or to sling a grown woman over her shoulders and dump the trespasser like a sack of potatoes on the porch.
So the wrap-up was a formality. “What about bulletin boards in the Egg, the Bot, and the Elms?” Sara asked glumly. “Students are always letting an extra room.”
Emer sighed with regret. “A room really wouldn’t do. An artist needs space to dream, don’t you think?” Over the phone in Boston, the assertion would have sounded naff, but in person, with that coy, pressed smile, it came across as mocking.
Standing with her cold black coffee and not looking Emer in the eye, Sara said, “Well, fait accompli, then.” But she meant coup d’état. As she hustled feverishly from her flat like a refugee, Sara had never been more grateful to need milk.
When Sara put the carton away, the green olives, dill pickles, and gooseberry jam were stored once again in the refrigerator door, the jars sweaty from temperature tug-of-war. Sara lifted the jars out, and slid them back in the cabinet.
She went to unpack, only to discover her case zipped up and propped outside the bedroom door, which was shut. A susurrating hum emitted from inside. Sara rapped a perfunctory warning, and walked in.
Emer’s clothes were folded righteously into an open dresser drawer, its previous contents stuffed into a plastic bag alongside. The bed was back blocking the closet. The candles were lit and dribbling, while incense fugged the room with unconvincing gardenia. Mumbling hocus-pocus before her shrine, Emer was pretzeled into a lotus, hands palm-upward on her knees, thumbs and middle fingers pinched, eyes closed, face raised to bask in the sunshine of enlightenment.
For once Sara restrained herself from apologizing. “Emer, this is my bedroom,” she said flatly.
More mumbo-jumbo.
“Emer, not to put too fine a point on it, get out.” Eleven years in Ulster should be good for something; if the woman refused to budge, Sara could always blow her up.
Emer took a deep breath and opened her eyes with a flutter. “Excuse me, what did you say? Because it really would be best if we talked another time.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Were Emer to provide opportunity for much more invigorating practice like this, she might justifiably bill her landlady for assertiveness training.
“What seems to be the trouble now? My dear Sara, I thought you said you were tired!”
“That’s why I want my bedroom back. Please.”
“There’s no cause to be snippy—”
“I did say please.”
“We have a problem, then. This is my bedroom, too.”
“Not anymore it isn’t.” At last Sara clocked why some people not only fought their corner, but sought corners to fight. This joust was exhilarating.
“Let’s discuss this rationally before you get in a twitter,” Emer admonished with a condescension that appeared habitual. “You’re only here for a couple of weeks. Your things are already in a suitcase—”
“My dirty things are in a suitcase.”
“Mine are put away in the dresser—”
“My dresser.”
“And I’ve already set up my altar here—”
“Which you can move.”
Emer clasped her hands and bowed her head. “There’s only one bedroom in this flat. And you will also, I assume, work in the study?”
“In my study.”
Emer shot Sara a reproachful look, as if there were a Buddhist edict against the deployment of possessive pronouns. “Then I should pay less than half the rent.”
If this was victory, Sara didn’t trust it. “Like how much less?” she asked warily.
“I’d be willing to pay fifteen pounds a week.” The figure was prepared.
Sara paused to estimate that a full half share was closer to £28/week. For the next three weeks or so, what mattered was her privacy. “Fine, fifteen quid. Just make like a tree, okay? Please?” This time the imprecation was genuinely pleading.
Emer lifted a foot off each thigh and blew out the candles. Red wax spattered the looking glass. “Sara, you seem like someone who’s done some interesting things in her life, and I’m sure you have a lot to offer. But I do wish you’d make a little more effort to be neighborly. This time will be more enjoyable if we try to get along, don’t you think?”
Repressing the urge to slam it, Sara shut the door behind her subletter and plopped onto the bed, which she couldn’t be bothered to shift again. It had seemed so narcotic at first, standing up for her rights. But she’d just been bamboozled into buying her own bedroom.
The next morning Sara lay abed until she could no longer hear banging and footsteps. Before making coffee, she padded trepidatiously about the flat, confirming that Emer was out. In the kitchen, the empty muesli bag garnished the rubbish, along with the empty carton of Sara’s milk. Another dirty bowl, slopped with excess milk, crested the dishes in the sink.
Sara couldn’t stand the mess, and did the dishes. Subsequently, she scavenged the flat for anything belonging to Emer Branagh, and deposited the lot on the sitting room’s now-unmade spare bed. In gleeful acceptance of her own immaturity, Sara tacked her most bellicose paramilitary posters back on the landing’s wall. She’d planned to ring some bucket shops in London to track down a cheap ticket to Bangkok, but by the time she remembered, the day had been swallowed by household restoration, and the bucket shops would be closed. It was Saturday; that meant an extra day’s delay.
Emer returned around dinnertime flashing a perky Father Knows Best hello and no groceries. Putting the kettle on, she reached blithely for the SDLP mug, which had magically cleaned itself for all the mention the washing up appeared to merit. Idly dunking the last Earl Grey tea bag, she inquired by the by, “Don’t you find that some of your guests are offended by those posters? Or maybe you don’t have visitors much.”
“I have any number of friends,” Sara said, pouring herself a sherry. “But they can all take a joke.”
Leaving the used tea bag to leak on the counter, Emer turned to face Sara for emphasis. “Thousands of innocents have died in this country. Many more thousands have been injured—maimed, crippled, blinded. Children have been orphaned, families often multiply bereaved. It dismays me how you could regard so much anguish as funny.”
“That so?” Sara said. “Your loss.” She scooped up her sherry and strode to the sitting room, where she applied herself to the Tele. For as long as she could engross herself in the opposite page, Sara held the paper with “Yankee Doodles”—filed minutes before her ride to Logan Airport—facing out, byline bold.
But Emer didn’t drift in for another half an hour, at which time she assumed what was now her chair with a pair of chopsticks and a huge bowl of pasta. Sara recognized a potpourri of shells, rotelli, and elbows as the bag dregs in the cabinet. The sauce, oily and pale, smelled distinctly like Sara’s last jar of marinated artichoke hearts.
“Would you like some?” offered Miss Hospitality 1998. “There’s more in the pot.”
“Yes, I bet there is,” Sara said tightly. “But my appetite has gone off the boil.”
“Must be jet lag.”
“You like sherry with pasta? I wouldn’t think they’d quite go.”
“They do,” Emer said. “You should try it.”
Sara couldn’t contain herself, and muttered over an Irish News op-ed urging contributions to the Omagh bombing fund, “In that case, I’d have to buy more pasta.”
“Yes, I meant to mention,” said Emer. “You’re almost out.”
Emer was gone most of the following Sunday and Monday. While Sara was relieved, she was also jealous. Since the subletter was not forthcoming about what she got up to, Sara supposed
that Emer’s schedule was filled with the offbeat excursions Sara herself had contrived on arrival in Belfast, when the province was still otherworldly, even a little frightening—when keeping her conversational head above water in pubs was an athletic feat, and from context she’d strain to infer the meanings of own goal, Stickie, or gob. That was 1987–88—not an era about which she was strictly nostalgic. She’d often felt out of her depth, self-conscious about being “the wee Yank,” famously easy pickings for hard-up Lotharios at last call. The rhythms of banter were rapid; while every self-appointed wag wasn’t clever, they were all fast. Groping for words in the skirling back and forth, Sara was often slagged off within her hearing as “a dose” who wasn’t even sure whose side she was on. Why, these days political uncertainty was the least of her problems—closed-mindedness and sanctimony more like it, just like her neighbors—and she gave pubs like Lavery’s a miss most weekends for sherry and films on TV. Anything but sip glaze-eyed through one more poleaxed account of Bloody Sunday from a student who’d been four years old at the time.
For in one respect Sara had gone native. Locals didn’t attend prolix lectures comparing Northern Ireland to South Africa at the Europa, and they’d eagerly pay the entry fee of three quid not to sit through a daylong conference on “Protestant identity.” No one from outside cliquish West Belfast attended IRA funerals, black flags flapping on lampposts in the churn of low-flying army choppers. Solid citizens of the unionist community, of which Sara now counted as an honorary member, wouldn’t be caught dead browsing the Republican Press Centre bookshop on the Falls Road (though it sold the best selection of Troubles coffee mugs in town). Rubbernecking blackened bombsites was frowned upon as ghoulish, and the middle class of both stripes universally regarded the Orange Order’s marching season as the time to book for Majorca. So Sara no longer partook of Ulster’s demented Disney World, either.
Property Page 31
