She was hot and beginning to feel tired and hungry. She looked at the paper again. Only three ringed notices left, the next one advertising a room to let somewhere called Article Row, Holborn.
Well, she was in Holborn. She saw a couple of children playing hopscotch out in the street and called out to them, ‘Article Row, where is it?’
‘Right behind you, miss,’ one of them answered her, pointing to the narrow entrance almost hidden by the shadows thrown by the surrounding buildings.
Cautiously Dulcie approached it, stepping into the shadows and then out of them again as Article Row opened out ahead of her, her spirits lifting as she realised how much better the houses were here than in the other streets she had visited. Number 13, the paper said. Determinedly she started to walk down the narrow street of uniformly neat tall houses, with their shining windows and painted front doors. Here and there she noticed a lace curtain move slightly.
‘The orphan girl is very late – it’s gone five o’clock now – do you think that she’s changed her mind or found somewhere else?’ Tilly asked her mother as they sat together in the kitchen, listening for the sound of anyone knocking on the front door. The kitchen door was open to the warm summer air, and Tilly’s faint sigh as she looked towards it had Olive saying lovingly, ‘You go out and enjoy the sunshine, Tilly love, I’ll hang on here a bit longer just in case she does turn up. Oh!’ They both looked towards the door into the hall as they heard the knock on the front door.
‘That must be her. Now you stay here because I want you to meet her. From what Mrs Windle said, she’s a bit on the shy side and I think she’ll probably welcome seeing someone of her own age.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Tilly agreed. Pulling open the front door, Olive stared in bemusement at the appearance of the young woman who was standing on her doorstep. A quiet shy orphan was how the vicar’s wife had described Olive’s prospective lodger, but this young woman looked anything but quiet or shy, and she was dolled up to the nines, wearing clothes that were just a bit too stylish and attention-attracting for Olive’s taste.
‘I’ve come about the room you’ve got to let,’ Dulcie announced without preamble, stepping forward so that Olive was forced to move back and admit her into the hall.
‘Well, yes . . .’ Olive began, taken aback by both her prospective lodger’s appearance and her manner.
‘It’s this way, I suppose?’ Dulcie continued, heading for the stairs without waiting for Olive to invite her to do so.
From the kitchen Tilly goggled at the passing vision, taking in the close fit of Dulcie’s silk dress and the stylish brim of her hat with a tinge of envy laced with excitement. Tilly was a dutiful daughter and she understood that her mother’s protective attitude towards her was for her own benefit, but sometimes she did yearn for a bit more excitement in her life. The girl whose heels she could now hear on the stairs was, Tilly knew immediately, someone who knew how to have fun, the kind of girl that secretly she half envied and would like to have as a friend even though she suspected that her mother would not be too keen on their friendship.
‘These rooms are on the top floor, are they?’ Dulcie demanded on the first landing. ‘That will play hell with my feet, especially with me standing on them all day.’
Standing on them all day and wearing such high heels, Olive thought wryly, but all she said was, ‘Actually, there is only one room now; the other has been taken.’
It had, had it? Well, Dulcie thought that was probably a good sign, although she certainly wasn’t going to be fobbed off with the second-best room. She’d insist on seeing them both, she decided as they reached the top landing.
‘This is the room that’s left,’ Olive told her.
As she stepped into number 13’s back bedroom, for once Dulcie had nothing sharp to say. The room was easily half as big again as the one she shared with her sister. It had a double bed that she would have all to herself, a large wardrobe for her clothes, a dressing table, the glass top of which was shiny and clean and empty of the clutter that Edith spread all over their own small chest with a mirror stuck on the wall above it. There was even a chair, and a sort of shelf thing.
Dulcie walked over to the window, barely glancing into the garden below, her mind racing, calculating. If this was the room the other lodger hadn’t chosen then what must that room be like?
‘I’d like to see the other room before I make up my mind,’ she told Olive firmly.
‘That room’s already been taken,’ Olive repeated.
‘I’d still like to see it,’ Dulcie insisted, pushing past her to go and open the other bedroom door, and then frown as she looked inside and saw that whilst it was the same size as the back bedroom, its décor was nothing like as good. Fancy anyone deliberately choosing all that dull beige and brown over the lemon and daisy-patterned wallpaper of ‘her’ room. Her room and she was determined to have it, but Dulcie wasn’t going to let anyone know that and give them the upper hand.
‘Somewhere a bit better than what’s normally on offer is what I’m looking for,’ she announced. ‘I work at Selfridges, see, and Mr Selfridge, he likes them as works for him to keep up their standards,’ she told Olive, stepping back onto the landing.
The mention of the well-known and very smart Oxford Street store and the information that Dulcie worked there would normally have pleased Olive and been a point in Dulcie’s favour, but on this occasion Olive felt dismayed, and not just because she didn’t think that Dulcie was the kind of young woman she wanted under her roof.
‘You are Agnes Wilson, aren’t you?’ she asked her. ‘Only the vicar’s wife told me that you were going to be working at Chancery Lane underground station, when she said that you were looking for a room.’
Someone else was after ‘her room’? Dulcie wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
‘No, I’m not Agnes Wilson. My name’s Dulcie Simmonds,’ she told Olive. ‘I saw the advertisement for this room in the paper.’
‘Oh!’ Olive felt both relieved and uncomfortable. ‘In that case, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t let the room to you. I’ve as good as promised it to Agnes. In fact, I was expecting her to come round this afternoon, that’s why I thought you were her.’
The very thought that she might lose the room to someone else was enough to make Dulcie, used to having to compete with her younger sibling, all the more determined to have it.
‘Well, you might have been expecting her but she hasn’t turned up, has she? And even if she did, there’s no saying that she would want the room,’ Dulcie pointed out, adding acutely, ‘I can’t see a landlady wanting to let out a room to someone who isn’t reliable. It’s all very well her not turning up to view the room when she was supposed to, but what if her rent started not turning up when it was due?’
Dulcie had a point, Olive was forced to admit. Even so, she wasn’t keen on letting the room to someone she suspected could be a disruptive influence on the household.
‘It should be first come, first served,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘I am here first, and I’ve got the money to pay my rent.’
As she reached down to open her bag, Olive recognised that Dulcie wasn’t going to be dissuaded and that she was going to have to give in.
‘Very well,’ she agreed, against her better judgement. ‘It will be a week’s rent of ten shillings, including breakfast and an evening meal, in advance, payable the day you move in. I don’t allow gentleman callers to visit my lodgers in their rooms, so if that’s a problem . . . ?’
She was half hoping that Dulcie would say that it was, but Dulcie merely shrugged her shoulders and told her, ‘That suits me.