The Room Behind the Glass

At half past three, Hollowpine had already begun turning on its lamps.

The one above the bakery came on first, throwing a yellow rectangle across the pavement. A moment later the windows of Café Vesper brightened, and someone inside reached up to lower a blind halfway. On the hill beyond the station, the pines were becoming a single dark shape against the snow.

Marta saw all this in pieces as she moved between the kitchen window and the stove. She had put the leeks on too high and was trying to persuade them that nothing unfortunate had happened.

The back door opened.

“You need a new door,” Emil said, bringing a considerable quantity of cold air into the kitchen.

“I need you to shut this one properly.”

He pushed it with his heel. The latch caught.

“There,” said Marta. “Restored.”

Emil put a paper bag on the counter and unwound his scarf. There was flour on the cuff of his coat. There was usually flour somewhere on Emil, even on days when the bakery was closed. Marta had once found it on the back of his ear and decided that asking would only lengthen the visit.

“Two rolls,” he said.

She looked in the bag. “Three.”

“One's small.”

They were the same size.

Marta turned down the heat and added the potatoes. On the windowsill, her recipe notebook lay open beneath a teaspoon. The original quantities were in neat blue writing; a more recent hand had crossed out half the salt and added *mustard at the end*. Both hands were hers. She preferred the less tidy one. It seemed to have a more realistic understanding of dinner.

“Soup?” Emil asked.

“Eventually.”

He looked towards the little table in the kitchen. It held a stack of clean tea towels, the pension's accounts and a lampshade she had been meaning to mend since Tuesday.

“Where are we eating?”

Marta glanced at him. She hadn't invited him to stay. Equally, there were three rolls, and he had removed his scarf.

Beyond the kitchen was a glass door. Through it she could see the winter geraniums lined along the sill, the folded tablecloth and the backs of six chairs. A narrow strip of snow rested on the outside ledge. Beneath the windows, the radiator made the quiet ticking sound it always made when the afternoon heating came on.

She paid to heat that room every day. She went into it to water the plants.

“In there,” she said.

“With the geraniums?”

“They haven't complained about your bread yet.”

The winter garden smelled faintly of damp earth and warm wood. It was a modest room, added to Pension Linden long before Marta had become its owner, with glass on two sides and a view of the garden rising towards the trees. In summer, guests took their coffee there. Since October it had gradually become a place where things were put until somebody decided what to do with them.

Marta removed a basket of folded curtains from the table.

“That's where those went,” she said.

Emil lifted a cardboard box from a chair. “Christmas?”

“Spare light bulbs.”

“A less demanding celebration.”

On the velvet chair beside the radiator, Otto opened one eye.

He was a substantial grey cat with a white chest and the air of an elderly hotel inspector who had decided to stay. A single paw rested over the edge of the cushion.

“That one's taken,” Emil said.

“He's not allowed on there.”

Neither man nor cat appeared persuaded.

Marta spread the cloth. When Emil set down the bread, the table moved slightly.

“That still rocks.”

“Only if you touch it.”

“An unfortunate quality in a table.”

She fetched a folded card and pushed it under the offending leg. Emil pressed the tabletop with one finger. Marta watched him do it.

“Are you planning to eat or inspect the building?”

“I like to know what sort of establishment I've entered.”

While the soup finished, he cut the rolls and she found two bowls. There was a larger matching set in the cupboard, reserved for breakfast service, but she took the deep cream ones she liked instead. One had a slightly crooked blue line around the rim. She always chose it when nobody else was there.

She stirred mustard into the soup and scattered a little crisp leek over the bowls. Emil carried the bread through. For once, there was nothing else to bring.

Marta sat down.

At first she noticed everything that needed doing. A dead leaf beneath a geranium. A curtain hook missing at the far end. The lampshade, which remained broken in the kitchen despite her having moved to another room.

Then Emil passed the bread, and she tasted the soup, and the room began to feel different.

The garden had nearly disappeared. Her reflection floated in the glass with the small lamp behind it. Beyond the window, a bird landed on the fence, shook itself and flew away again. Marta could see the kitchen through the open door, but from here it looked like somebody else's responsibility.

“This is good,” Emil said.

“The room or the soup?”

He considered. “Both, fortunately.”

They ate for a while without talking. From the street came the soft scrape of a shovel. The station clock sounded, and Emil looked at his watch as though checking which of them was right.

“I used to eat in here,” Marta said.

“You are eating in here.”

“Before. Often.”

There hadn't been a decision to stop. The kitchen table had simply been nearer. On busy days she ate standing up, and on quiet days she stayed upstairs because there seemed little point in bringing a tray down. The room had become useful for everything except the thing she liked most about it.

Emil wiped his bowl with the last piece of his roll.

“You could have people in.”

“People are regularly in. It's a pension.”

“People you don't have to ask about their departure time.”

Marta looked around the table. Six places, including her own. Enough room for a dish in the middle and elbows that didn't have to apologise.

“A few Saturdays,” she said.

Emil reached for the third roll. “How many?”

“Six.”

“Why six?”

“Because if I say a few, you'll still be coming in June.”

He broke the roll in half and gave her the larger piece.

“You'd need a menu.”

“I'd need dinner.”

“I could do a starter.”

“You could come and eat.”

“And something sweet.”

Marta put down her spoon. “Emil.”

He smiled into his bowl. She knew that smile. It meant he had heard her and was reserving the right to interpret her later.

After he left, she washed the two bowls and put the remaining soup away. The kitchen table still held the accounts and the lampshade. Nothing had been miraculously dealt with during lunch.

From the drawer she took a plain cream card. On one side she wrote six Saturdays, leaving a little space beside each. On the other she wrote four names: Emil, Ruth, Felix, Lena.

She considered adding *if you're free*, then decided to ask them properly instead.

In the winter garden, the bowls had left two warm circles on the cloth. Marta smoothed them with her palms. Otto stepped down from the velvet chair, stretched with tremendous deliberation and inspected the seat she had just vacated.

“I'm coming back,” she told him.

He settled into it anyway.