Read The Room Beyond for Free Online

behind me. She was curled up quite contentedly on my bed. It
was good to see that she already felt so comfortable in my company.
    I gazed across the higgledy landscape of roofs and foliage and a
warm smile filled my face. The distance buzz of the city beyond rang gently in
my ears. To my right I could see the blunt corner of where the house finished;
the final frontier of Marguerite Avenue. To my left I could see two or three
similar balconies to my own on other houses belonging to the terrace, but the
majority had clearly been removed to make way for decades of alterations and
modernizations to the grand homes.
    There was no balcony on the back of the house next door. I could
still see the mark on the wall where it had once been right next to mine, but
it must have been taken away to make way for a flat roofed extension that
jutted out just below. I turned away but then something instinctively made me
look back again. It was a feeling more than anything, a strange sort of
hollowness that made me peer through the still empty air. I grasped the railing
and swallowed. Funny, but I’d never suffered from heights before and this
certainly wasn’t the place to start.
    Back in the room Gladys had gone and my bags had miraculously
arrived.
    ‘Would you like to meet Eva, she’s downstairs in the drawing room,’
said Beth, tilting her small face up at me from the bed. ‘With Seb,’ she
murmured, as if it was a sort of afterthought.
    We floated down through the house; past a thousand paintings,
photographs, rustic looking jars of flowers on antique kidney-shaped tables. In
the hallway at the bottom the door to the room with the piano in it was half
open again. I craned my neck to see inside but no one was there this time.
    ‘That’s the library,’ Beth said, catching my glance. ‘But it doesn’t
have any books in it and no one ever reads in there. Robert uses it more than
anyone.’
    ‘Robert?’
    ‘My younger uncle. He’s a musical genius you know.’
    ‘Is he indeed? Actually, I think it must have been him playing here
last time I came.’
    ‘Yes probably. He plays the piano mostly, but he also has an
outstanding flair for the flute, violin and harp.’
    ‘Did you hear someone say that once?’
    ‘No. Come on, this is the drawing room over here.’
    Beth grasped my hand, pulling me across the hallway through a door
with a bulbous doorknob like a paperweight. The drawing room was expansive and
high-ceilinged and was the perfect realization of warm wallowing comfort that I
must have craved for at a thousand dreary bus stops. It had the exact chair I’d
always wanted to curl up and hide in and the sort of all-encompassing sofas for
which most people would trade in their beds.
    The room ran along the full depth of the house, with a bay window
looking out over the street in the front and an ornate raised conservatory at
the back. It had wooden panelling on the walls and a Turkish carpet on the
floor. In the middle two huge sofas sat opposite each other like basking
hippos, with a table between them and piles of books, newspapers and magazines
all around. I watched Beth walk over to the sofas and then realized that two
heads were lolling and half buried in the cushions there. One of them rested
against the back of the sofa facing away from me and revealed nothing more than
a mop of dark blonde hair. The other, which belonged to a woman on the sofa
opposite, was only just discernible from the nose up.
    Both figures were slumped so low that there was something almost
secretive about their intimacy. It felt as if we’d caught them in the act of
disclosing confidences across the coffee table between them and I immediately
felt awkward. An instinctive urge made me pull back, but Beth grabbed me by the
hand and drew me further into the room.
    As we came closer I caught sight of her properly, the woman in the
sofa opposite. She had an attractive, doe-eyed sort of face, but it was so cold
and so thin. The corners of her mouth