Ward whistled slowly. "So they will revalue. What to? Three and a half?"
"Three. From the first of next year."
"Three square metres? Ward sat up and looked around him. "It's unbelievable! The world's going insane, Rossiter. For God's sake, when are they going to do something about it? Do you realize there soon won't be room enough to sit down, let alone lie down?"
Exasperated, he punched the wall beside him, on the second blow knocked in one of the small wooden panels that had been lightly papered over.
"Hey!" Rossiter yelled. "You're breaking the place down." He dived across the bed to retrieve the panel, which hung downwards supported by a strip of paper. Ward slipped his hand into the dark interval, carefully drew the panel back on to the bed.
"Who's on the other side?" Rossiter whispered. "Did they hear?"
Ward peered through the interval, eyes searching the dim light. Suddenly he dropped the panel and seized Rossiter's shoulder, pulled him down on to the bed.
"Henry! Look!"
Directly in front of them, faintly illuminated by a grimy skylight, was a medium-sized room some fifteen feet square, empty except for the dust silted up against the skirting boards. The floor was bare, a few strips of frayed linoleum running across it, the walls covered with a drab floral design. Here and there patches of the paper peeled off and segments of the picture rail had rotted away, but otherwise the room was in habitable condition.
Breathing slowly, Ward closed the open door of the cubicle with his foot, then turned to Rossiter.
"Henry, do you realize what we've found? Do you realize it, man?"
"Shut up. For Pete's sake keep your voice down." Rossiter examined the room carefully. "It's fantastic. I'm trying to see whether anyone's used it rectly."
"Of course they haven't," Ward pointed out. "It's obvious. There's no door into the room. We're looking through it now. They must have panelled over this door years ago and forgotten about it. Look at that filth everywhere."
Rossiter was staring into the room, his mind staggered by its vastness.
"You're right," he murmured. "Now, when do we move in?"
Panel by panel, they pried away the lower half of the door and nailed it on to a wooden frame, so that the dummy section could be replaced instantly.
Then, picking an afternoon when the house was half empty and the manager asleep in his basement office, they made their first foray into the room, Ward going in alone while Rossiter kept guard in the cubicle.
For an hour they exchanged places, wandering silently around the dusty room, stretching their arms out to feel its unconfined emptiness, grasping at the sensation of absolute spatial freedom. Although smaller than many of the subdivided rooms in which they had lived, this room seemed infinitely larger, its walls huge cliffs that soared upward to the skylight.
Finally, two or three days later, they moved in.
For the first week Rossiter slept alone in the room, Ward in the cubicle outside, both there together during the day. Gradually they smuggled in a few items of furniture: two armchairs, a table, a lamp fed from the socket in the cubicle. The furniture was heavy and victorian; the cheapest available, its size emphasized the emptiness of the room. Pride of place was taken by an enormous mahogany wardrobe, fitted with carved angels and castellated mirrors, which they were forced to dismantle and carry into the house in their suitcases. Towering over them, it reminded Ward of the micro-films of gothic cathedrals with their massive organ lofts crossing vast naves.
After three weeks they both slept in the room, finding the cubicle unbearably cramped. An imitation japanese screen divided the room adequately and did nothing to diminish its size. Sitting there in the evenings, surrounded by his books and albums, Ward steadily forgot the city outside. Luckily he reached the library by a back alley and avoided the crowded streets. Rossiter and himself began to seem the only real inhabitants of the world, everyone else a meaningless byproduct of their own existence, a random replication of identity which had run out of control.
It was Rossiter who suggested that they ask the two girls to share the room with them.
"They've been kicked out again and may have to split up," he told Ward, obviously worried that Judith might fall into bad company. "There's always a rent freeze after a revaluation but all the landlords know about it so they're not re-letting. It's damned difficult to find anywhere."
Ward nodded, relaxing back around the circular redwood table. He played with the tassel of the arsenic-green lamp shade, for a moment felt like a Victorian man of letters, leading a spacious, leisurely life among overstuffed furnishings.
"I'm all for it," he agreed, indicating the empty corners. "There's plenty of room here. But we'll have to make Sure they don't gossip about it."
After due precautions, they let the two girls into the secret, enjoying their astonishment at finding this private universe.
"We'll put a partition across the middle," Rossiter explained, "then take it down each morning. You'll be able to move in within a couple of days. How do you feel?"
"Wonderful!" They goggled at the wardrobe, squinting at the endless reflections in the mirrors.
There was no difficulty getting them in and out of the house. The turnover of tenants was continuous and bills were placed in the mail rack. No one eared who the girls were or noticed their regular calls at the cubicle.
However, half an hour after they arrived neither of them had unpacked her suitcase.
"What's up, Judith?" Ward asked, edging past the girls' beds into the narrow interval between the table and wardrobe.
Judith hesitated, looking from Ward to Rossiter, who sat on the bed, finishing off the plywood partition. "John, it's just that . . ."
Helen Waring, More matter-of-fact, took over, her fingers straightening the bed-spread. "What Judith's trying to say is that our position here is a little embarrassing. The partition is—"
Rossiter stood up. "For heaven's sake, don't worry, Helen," he assured her, speaking in the loud whisper they had all involuntarily cultivated. "No funny business, you can trust us. This partition is as solid as a rock."
The two girls nodded. "It's not that," Helen explained, "but it isn't up all the time. We thought that if an older person were here, say Judith's aunt—she wouldn't take up much room and be no trouble, she's really awfully sweet—we wouldn't need to bother about the partition—except at night," she added quickly.
Ward glanced at Rossiter, who shrugged and began to scan the floor.