1
Voices raised in anger: in the quiet when the clacking of the typewriter keys ceased, as Daisy reached the bottom of a page, the muffled sound came through the wall from the room next door.
It was not the first time. Apparently her neighbour was not of a conciliatory nature. This time there were two men and a woman, Daisy was pretty sure, but try as she might, she could not make out the words. None of her business, she told herself firmly, and turned her attention back to her work.
Squealing, the Remington reluctantly released the two sheets of paper and the carbon between. Daisy used them to fan herself. Not yet accustomed to the indoor temperature preferred by New Yorkers, and bred as she was to an age-old tradition of roaring fires tempered by icy draughts, she found the hotel room stifling. Her battle with the balky radiator had been less successful than that with the typewriter provided by the management.
She looked longingly at the French windows, surrounded by elaborate rosewood carvings, then scowled atthe typewriter. The Hotel Chelsea was a noted haven for writers and catered to their needs, but the Remington was on its last legs. Daisy suspected it had stood on this very desk for forty years, ever since the place was built in 1883, pounded daily by fingers expert and inexpert. It creaked and groaned at every touch and strongly objected to demands for capital letters. The prospect of resuming her battle with the beastly machine made her feel hotter than ever.
Beside the typewriter, the piles of paper were growing. Mr. Thorwald had requested few changes in her article about the transatlantic voyage. It was all typed, ready to be delivered tomorrow. The article on her first impressions of America was coming along nicely. She had time to spare.
Stepping out onto the balcony, she shivered in the biting chill of a wintry breeze. The yellow-grey sky threatened rain, or even snow, though it was not quite November yet. Petrol—gasoline—fumes drifted up from West Twenty-third Street, mingled with dust, but the tang of sooty coal-smoke was not as predominent as in faraway London.
Daisy leant on the flowery wrought-iron rail to watch a tram rattle and clang past seven stories below. Not a tram, a streetcar. She wondered why Americans insisted that they spoke English, when they might just as well call their language American. The oddest thing was that people kept telling her, an Englishwoman speaking the King’s English, that she had a quaint accent!
An unmistakably American voice interrupted Daisy’s musing. The window of the next room was open a few inches. The woman whom Daisy had heard indistinctly before was now clear as a bell—no mellow church bell, notinkling harness bell, but the shrillest of shrill electric bells.
“You bastard!” she cried venomously. “I wouldn’t come back to you for a million dollars.”
“If I had a million dollars,” retorted a biting male voice, more sarcastic than irate, “you still wouldn’t squeeze one red cent out of me.”
A different man said something indistinguishable in a soothing, rather nervous tone. A moment later a door slammed.
Guiltily aware that curiosity as much as overheating had driven her outside, Daisy ducked back into her room. She hoped she had not been spotted eavesdropping on the balcony. Rather than sit there awaiting an indignant knock on her door, she decided to go in search of a cup of tea.
It was, after all, past four o’clock. Prohibition had led some Americans to rethink the Boston Tea Party and agree that the British custom of afternoon tea was worth adopting. True, other Americans appeared to obtain alcoholic drinks without the least difficulty. Despite its bohemian clientele, however, the Chelsea was a respectable hostelry, not to be compared to a speakeasy. With any luck, a pot of tea and perhaps even a few biscuits—cookies—might be available below.
Why on earthspeakeasy? Daisy wondered, making for the lifts. No one she had asked had the foggiest.
As she approached the nearer lift, the outer gate of the farther one clanked shut. She hurried, but when she arrived, the inner gate had also closed and the lift was already moving down the shaft with a rattle and whine of aged machinery. It left behind a whiff of mingled bay rum, expensive cigars, and still more expensive perfume. Daisycaught a glimpse of the top of the lift boy’s livery cap, and beyond him a man’s head, thin on top, and a scarlet cloche hat with a spray of white egret feathers.
“Missed it!” she exclaimed. “Blast!” On the other hand, if that was the couple who had been quarrelling in the room next door to hers, she was quite glad not to be boxed in with them.
She walked back to the other lift and pushed the button to summon it.
A young chambermaid popped out of a linen room just down the passage, her arms full of towels. “’Tis a long wait ye’ll be having of it, I’m thinkin’, miss,” she remarked in an Irish brogue thick enough to spread on soda-bread. Her carroty hair and freckled face reminded Daisy of her stepdaughter, Belinda. A pang of homesickness struck, unexpectedly strong.
She smiled at the girl, who was probably just as homesick, with far more reason. “Is this one out of order?” she asked.
“The elevator boy’s a bold young limb o’ Satan, ma‘am. This time o’ day he’ll likely be off creating ‘stead o’ minding his duties.”
“I dare say this is a slack time and it must be frightfully boring going up and down in a cage all day.”
The girl beamed at her. “’Tis me little brother, ma’am. He’s been on since six this morning. Sure, ’tis hard on a lively lad, but he’s his bread to earn and lucky to have a job.”
“I shan’t tell tales,” Daisy promised. “I’m in no hurry. I suppose I could always take the stairs, at that.”
“Oh no, ma‘am, ’tis a desp’rate long way down. Theother elevator’ll be back in a minute, if our Kevin don’t come.”
In fact, the groan and clatter of cables and ratchets announced the imminent arrival of the maligned Kevin. Daisy had only to wait while his lift made its laborious way aloft, but during that interval a man came along the passage to join her.
At the sight of him, the chambermaid turned pink and ducked hurriedly back into her linen room.
He didn’t look at all bohemian—in his forties at a guess, dressed in a medium grey tweed suit, with a black homburg and tan leather gloves in one hand, an attaché case in the other. Stocky, slightly bowlegged, he walked with a swagger. His jaw had an aggressive thrust, and his nose was long and inquisitive above a narrow moustache. His glance at Daisy was bold, impertinent even, with a sort of cynical dismissiveness which at once raised her hackles.
At the same time, she wondered if he was the man next door, if he had seen her on the balcony, and whether she was blushing like the Irish girl. She hoped not. She despised blushing as too, too Victorian. She gave him a haughty, withering look worthy of her mother, the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple, but the bounder had already turned away.
He punched the call button, quite unnecessarily as the cage’s rackety approach was obvious. Impatiently he opened the gate onto the empty shaft, where loops of cable performed their mysterious trigonometrical functions. Unless it was calculus Daisy was thinking of—her girls’ school had not plumbed such mathematical depths, but she remembered looking over Gervaise’s shoulder while he groaned over holiday cramming.
