“I left a note for him to put the light out when he leaves the room. Smart alec young bastard is making a joke of it. I’ll fix him, you see!” She switched the light off and relocked the door.
She came and stood in his doorway while Walter backed up and sat down in his chair. Grace seemed in no hurry to leave, so he jumped up from the chair and invited her to sit down. She did as she was asked, while Walter sat down on the bed.
“That magazine you work for is all about real estate?” Grace asked.
“Yes.”
“Maybe you could give me some advice?”
“I’ll try,” he said.
Grace walked to the door, shut it, and returned to her chair. “I don’t want to tell everybody my business,” she explained.
She shifted her hips on the chair before she began. “There’s a syndicate going to buy all the houses on this side of Adford, from Berther to Lownard, and on the east side of Bemiral too,” she said, pointing through the window at the houses across the yards. “To build apartment houses.”
He nodded.
“They haven’t come here yet, but they’ve already bought some houses up the street. What I want to know is what to do when they come here to buy this house?”
“If they offer you a fair price, take it,” he said.
Grace smiled craftily, and Walter knew she had been giving a lot of thought to the question. Like many homeowners she had an exaggerated idea of her property rights, and was determined to hold out against the buyers until she could wring every cent she could from the sale.
“Do you own this house outright?” he asked her.
“Yes. Since last December,” she said triumphantly.
“They’ll probably be a pretty powerful bunch,” he said. “There’s ways they can force you to sell, you know.”
She laughed, slapping her hand on her knee. “How? You tell me how they can force a woman to sell her paid property! They can’t make me!”
“They might have the house condemned, or stop you from renting rooms through a change in the city by-laws. There’s plenty of ways that a rich corporation can squeeze the little person,” he said. “Those are only two ways, and God knows how many others they could think up.”
She was suddenly sober. “They can do that?”
“It’s possible. When and if they make you an offer, get a good lawyer,” he said.
She sat in deflated silence.
To cheer her up he asked, “What do you intend to do if they buy your house?”
“I’ll go back to the old country for a visit. I won’t stay there though.”
“You’ll come back here?”
“Why, sure. I won’t stay in Europe. I’ve been a citizen here for —” she bent her head and figured the years on her fingers. “For twenty-four years.”
“Will you buy another rooming house?”
“Who, me!” She laughed, destroying with her scorn the memories of the times she had fought with roomers, over the lights, over the hot water, bringing girls into the house, giving her bum cheques for the rent. “Ha! Never will I own another rooming house. Never!”
“What will you do?”
She clasped her hands on her belly and squeezed a delicious thought. “I’m going to buy some land outside the city and start a nature farm,” she said.
He entertained a picture of several old people sitting on a veranda eating raw carrots and yogurt, with Grace in the background driving them to take exercise, wheedling them to eat their salads, pushing them into silly forms of entertainment. He glanced at her, seeing her metamorphosis from city landlady to tanned Teutonic keeper of a group of elderly nuts.
“That will be pretty tame after this, won’t it?”
She stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“I mean, after all, running a farm for old nature-lovers is not like running a rooming house. I don’t think you’d really like a job like that.”
She got up and walked to the door. Then she turned around, her hand on the knob. “I won’t have old people,” she said. “It will be a regular nature farm, like the Sun Lovers Club I belong to.”
“Oh.” The picture of the old people faded from his mind and was replaced by a photograph of a pair of youthful running nudes, their genitals removed by a retoucher’s brush, the girl’s hair blowing in the wind and her perfect breasts swinging in mid-step.
“You mean a nudist camp?” he asked.
“Sure. Like the Sun Lovers Club.”
He had heard of these places, and had leafed through magazines which catered to such people. He had always felt, while staring at the almost sexless photographs of naked “sun lovers,” that the sun and fresh air were secondary considerations to them. Despite their hysterical claims of cleanliness and purity, the nudists probably enjoyed the sexual side of their exhibitionism almost as much as did the furtive little people who bought the magazines.
He had to smile as he asked her, “And you belong to a nudist colony?”
“Sure. I belonged to one in the old country too. I am going down on Saturday for the weekend. You want to come, Mr. Fowler?”
“Not this week,” he answered, laughing.
“I’ll see you later.”
After she had gone he tried to picture Mrs. Hill gambolling naked down a grassy slope. The mental image made him laugh.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After eating her lunch in the non-medical staff’s dining room, Sophia Karpluk walked into the small garden between the administrative and laundry buildings and sat down on the grass. She pulled a paper-covered book from a pocket of her light blue smock. Its title was English — The Easy Way; she studied the lessons during noon hour, and read it in conjunction with her Polish-English dictionary in the evenings.
Against the open-windowed wall of the laundry building a young Italian, Giuseppe Mantia, was fooling around with a couple of the girl laundry employees. He was pawing them, despite their pretended protests and giggles. Sophia turned her back on them, glad that she could separate herself from her fellow employees during the lunch hour, even though she was one of them in the eyes of the others employed by the West End Hospital. Her blue smock marked her as a “laundry immigrant,” as she had once heard herself called by a girl from the office.
She glanced at the book and repeated to herself, “I shall. I shall not. I shan’t. I will. I will not. I won’t.” What was the difference between the words? She tried both of them in sentences. “I shan’t go with you. I won’t go with you.” Why have both words if one of them sufficed? There were times when she grew sick of trying to learn English at her age. It was too difficult,
