Read Wendy Perriam for Free Online Page B

your co-operation. The new gentleman is decidedly artistic and requires a room with good light. I also took the opportunity of replenishing your Airwick and have added the £1.20 to your rent.”
    “Thank you, Miss Lineham.” He hardly heard her close the door. He was smiling at two flirtatious silver veil-tails rubbing noses on the ceiling. Their spiky backbones gleamed alluringly through the diaphanous silk of their flesh. He sank smiling on to the bed.
    Two hours later, Doncaster was fading. Supper had been sausages - the cheaper beef variety with a high percentage of rusk - and mortar-mix potatoes. Mr Chivers discarded a lump in his custard, swilled down the jam-less jam tart with tea, then returned upstairs to the beige disapproval of his new backroom.
    Silver fins and shot-silk tails had vanished, blue water leaked away, leaving only sludge-coloured lino, and purple crocheted water-lily leaves stranded on bare wood. All his possessions had been lined up in rows like orphans awaiting transport to an institution. His chewing-gum was confiscated, his thirteen books (eleven of them on fish) banished to a damp cardboard box marked “‘No Deposit, No Return. Lemon Barley Water.”
    He changed into his pyjamas and sat staring at his bunions. Miss Lineham would have thrown his feet away if he had been rash enough to leave them in his room. Miss Lineham liked things straight. In his jacket pocket was the crumpled entrance ticket to the festival. He dropped it in the waste-bin.
    Nothing left but bed. He slunk into the bathroom to clean his teeth; stopped dead in his tracks. Something was dangerously different - the toilet seat was up! In all his years at Miss Lineham’s he had never seen it left up. If some new inmate in his foolishness forgot to replace the cover, Miss Lineham would dart into the bathroom after him and snap it severely shut. Four or five repeats and the tenant was completely cured. Candlewick became part of defecation.
    The same with toiletries. An untrained lodger’s first few breakfasts were often egg-and-flannel or sausage-and-loofah; the table littered with hang-dog razors and confiscated shaving sticks. Cure was always swift, or had been up till now. Mr New-Boy Gordon had been in residence a week, so what was his orange flannel doing draped across the bath - flagrant, dripping, not even folded? Miss Lineham was at home, so why had she not removed this blushing flag of revolution? Why had no contemptuous note been pushed beneath the offender’s door? As far as he could ascertain, she was still in her right mind, watching him at supper with her usual gimlet eye.
    “Since you appear to be having so much difficulty, Mr Chivers, in disposing of your second sausage, I shall apportion it to Mr Gordon in future.”
    He saw the offending sausage, wreathed in Colman’s mustard and Miss Lineham’s smiles. She never smiled. Mr Chivers clutched at the basin for support. How could he have been so blind? The new Artistic Gentleman had changed her, found the flinty remnants of her heart and swathed them in his shameless orange flannel. A raw recruit, an upstart, stinking out the house with aftershave, taking artistic licence with the purple candlewick . . .
    Mr Chivers strode back to his room and stared in fury at the Stag at Bay. One picture per room. ‘Nothing, I repeat nothing, is to be stuck or pinned on to lodgers’ bedroom walls.’ He hated stags: all that vaunting headgear. It had been a Victorian flower-girl in his previous room - tiro Gordon’s room - with nothing on her head but blonde curls and a circlet of roses; a froth of white pantalettes cascading beneath her skirt.
    Opening the wardrobe, he surveyed his row of ties, all limp, all drably coloured. He took out a bar of Cadbury’s Wholenut chocolate, hidden in a slipper; put it back again. Wholenut was the riskiest confection on the market. If you bit into a hazelnut, it made a crack to wake the dead. And Miss Lineham was very much alive. He had