Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Guest Room That Airs Itself
A landlady keeps a room ready for a brother who never comes, and the window does the airing without her.
- dated: "the letting months"
- narrator: "Rita Salter, landlady"
3rd of April. I let the two front rooms of this house, and the back room over the scullery I keep for my brother, who has not slept under this roof since he went up the coast thirty-one years ago. A guest room is not charity, whatever they say over the counter of the post office. It is part of how a house is kept. My mother kept one for her sisters through the war and long after, and the habit came to me with the crockery: bed squared at the corners, towel folded in thirds over the rail, kettle through before ten so the room smells of use and not of shut-up. Every morning I put the window up one inch. Not a hand's width, not a crack: one inch, measured against a postcard stood on its long edge, then down to the latch at dusk. My brother likes a room with weather in it, or he did once. That is all I know of his likings now, and I keep to it.
19th of April. The bookings book stands on the hall stand the way the council man likes it: one line to a guest, signed on arrival, struck through on leaving, nothing blotted. He initialled the flyleaf in January and told me good habits are what he inspects for, more than he inspects for damp. So on the first Monday of each letting month I rule a line and write W. SALTER, EXPECTED, and on the Sunday I strike it off and carry the loss as hospitality. My brother has never once come to sign his line. Eleven months he has been expected and eleven times struck off, and the book balances, which is what a book is kept for.
6th of May. The window. I came down on the Thursday to the room already open, and not shifted at the latch the way my own hand leaves it, but up exactly the one inch, the wedge I keep for it lying whole and unsplit on the sill. I measured with the postcard. The gap took the card's edge to the very card, no slack either way. I have kept a small study since. Friday, the same inch. Saturday, shut by my own hand with the latch turned, the same inch again by morning, the latch lying turned back. For eight days I left the latch alone altogether. Eight mornings, the one inch, no more, no less. The sheets stay cold — nobody is warming that bed — but the airing is in the room the way it is after both sashes have stood open at noon, and the towel on the rail has that stiff, outdoor dryness that a rack will never give a thing. The room is kept aired. I write it plainly because keeping is being done, and I am not the one doing it.
28th of May. I ruled the June line two days early, out of a want I won't itemise, and the pen put W. SALTER, EXPECTED down twice. I struck the second and tidied it back to sense. Then, because the window has made me careful, I turned back to the November page and laid my thumb flat under my own red strike. There is a second strike under it, in pencil, faint and even as a ruled line — and the same again under every month I turned. Somebody crosses my brother off at the one inch, the night before I do, and in eleven months has never torn a page. If it is not Wilf keeping the booking, who else was ever taught my mother's airing?