Stranger Things Happen

"We do have a room," said Lily. "But I don't know that you'll want it. We try to be nice here, but you look like you might be accustomed to better."

The woman sighed. "I am getting a divorce from my husband," she said. "He has been unfaithful. I don't want him to find me, so I will stay here where he would not think to look. You were recommended to me."

"Really?" said Lily, looking pleased. "By who?"

But the woman couldn't remember. She signed her name, Mrs. Vera Ambrosia, in a thick slant of ink, and produced Ј40, and another Ј40 as a deposit. When June showed her up to Room Five, her nostrils flared, but she said nothing. She had with her one small suitcase, and a covered box. Out of the box she took a birdcage on a collapsible stand. There was nothing in the birdcage but dust.

When June left, she was standing at the window looking out. She was smiling at something.

13. A game of golf.

June tried not to think about Humphrey. It was a silly name anyway. She went out with her friends and she never mentioned his name. They would have laughed at his name. It was probably made up.

She thought of describing how his eyebrows met, in a straight bar across his face. She decided that it should repulse her. It did. And he was a liar too. Not even a good liar.

All the same, she rented old movies, Key Largo and Casablanca, and watched them with Walter and Lily. And sometimes she wondered if he had been telling the truth. Her period came and so she didn't have to worry about that; she worried anyway, and she began to notice the way that birds watched from telephone lines as she walked past them. She counted them, trying to remember how they added up for joy, how for sorrow.

She asked Walter who said, "Sweetheart, for you they mean joy. You're a good girl and you deserve to be happy." He was touching up the red trim around the front door. June sat hunched on the step beside him, swirling the paint around in the canister.

"Didn't my mother deserve to be happy?" she said sharply.

"Well, she's got me, hasn't she?" Walter said, his eyebrows shooting up. He pretended to be wounded. "Oh, I see. Sweetheart, you've got to be patient. Plenty of time to fall in love when you're a bit older."

"She was my age when she had me!" June said. "And where were you then? And where is he now?" She got up awkwardly and ran inside, past a pair of startled guests, past Lily who stood in the narrow hall and watched her pass, no expression at all on her mother's face.

That night June had a dream. She stood in her nightgown, an old one that had belonged to her mother, her bare feet resting on cold silky grass. The wind went through the holes in the fla

"Fore!" someone called. She realized she was standing barefoot and nearly naked on the St. Andrews golf course. "Why hello, little thief," someone said.

June pinched herself, and it hurt just a little, and she didn't wake up. Rose Read still stood in front of her, dressed all in white: white cashmere sweater; white wool trousers; spotless white leather shoes and gloves. "You look positively frostbitten, darling child," Rose Read said.

She leaned towards June and pressed her soft, warm mouth against June's mouth. June opened her mouth to protest, and Rose Read breathed down her throat. It was delicious, like drinking fire. She felt Rose Read's kiss rushing out towards her ten fingers, her icy feet, pooling somewhere down below her stomach. She felt like a June-shaped bowl brimming over with warmth and radiance.

Rose Read removed her mouth. "There," she said.

"I want to kiss her too," said a querulous voice. "It's my turn, Rosy."

There were two other women standing on the green. The one who had spoken was tall and gaunt and brittle as sticks, her dark, staring eyes fixing June like two straight pins.

"June, you remember Di, don't you, Humphrey's other aunt?" Rose said.

"She was different," June said, remembering the giantess in the bakery, whose voice had reflected off the walls like light.

"Want a kiss," Humphrey's aunt Di said again.

"Don't mind her," Rose Read said. "It's that time of the month. Humphrey's minding the bakery: it helps her to be outside. Let her kiss your cheek, she won't hurt you."

June closed her eyes, lightly brushed her cheek against the old woman's lips. It was like being kissed by a faint and hungry ghost. Humphrey's aunt stepped back sighing.

"That's a good girl," Rose said. "And this is another aunt, Mi

"Hello, June," the woman said, inclining her head. She looked like the headmistress of June's comprehensive – so old that Lily had once been her student – who had called June into her office two years ago, when June's O-level results had come back.

It's a pity, the headmistress had said, because you seem to have a brain in your head. But if you are determined to make yourself into nothing at all, then I can't stop you. Your mother was the same sort, smart enough but willful – oh yes, I remember her quite well. It was a pity. It's always a pity.

"I'm dreaming," June said.

"It would be a mistake to believe that," said Rose Read. "An utter failure of the imagination. In any case, while you're here, you might as well solve a little argument for us. As you can see, here are two golf balls sitting nice and pretty on the green at your feet. And here is the third" – she pointed at the cup – "only we can't agree which of us it was that put it there."

The moon went behind a wisp of cloud, but the two golf balls still shone like two white stones. Light spilled out of the cup and beaded on the short blades of grayish grass. "How do I know whose ball that is?" June said. "I didn't see anything, I wasn't here until now – I mean – "

Rose Read cut her off. "It doesn't really matter whose ball it is, little thief, just whose ball you say it is."

"But I don't know!" June protested.

"You people are always so greedy," Rose Read said. "Very well: say it belongs to Mi

June took a deep breath. Suddenly she was afraid that she would wake up before she had a chance to answer. "I want Humphrey," she said.

"My game, ladies," Rose Read said, and the moon came out again.

June woke up. The moon was bright and small in the dormer window above her, and she could hear the pigeons' feet chiming against the leaded glass.

14. The view from the window.

Before Humphrey came to see June, the woman in Room Five had paid for her third week in advance, and June found the perfume she had given her mother in the rubbish bin. She took it up to her room, put a dab on her wrist.

He was sitting on the front steps when she swept the dust out of the door. "I lost your address," he said.

"Oh?" she said coolly, folding her arms the way Lily did.

"I did," he said. "But I found it again yesterday."

His eyebrows didn't repulse her as much as she had hoped they would. His sweater was blue like his eyes. "You're lying," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I didn't come to see you because I thought maybe Aunt Rose tricked you into liking me. I thought maybe you wouldn't like me anymore. Do you?"

She looked at him. "Maybe," she said. "How was your flying lesson?"

"I've been up in the plane twice. It's a Piper Cub, just one engine and you can feel the whole sky rushing around you when you're up there. The last time we went up, Tiny – he's the instructor – let me take the controls. It was like nothing I've ever done before – that is," he said warily, "it was quite nice. You look lovely, June. Have you missed me too?"