A Simple Scale by David Llewellyn

Author:David Llewellyn [Llewellyn, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781724712
Publisher: Seren

Chapter 12:

MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 2001

Pavel stepped into the house and scraped his shoes against the frayed doormat. He took a look around, his mouth gaping, as if he was standing in a cathedral or a vast cave.

“This place. Incredible.”

She knew exactly how he felt. There couldn’t be many houses still like this on the Upper East Side. Hallways and staircases lined with mahogany; heavy, brass-handled doors as old as the house itself. Most of these places had been swept through by interior decorators in the ’80s and ’90s. All that dark, old stuff torn out and walls and even floors knocked through to make them feel like warehouses. Sol’s was certainly the only old-fashioned brownstone Natalie had ever set foot in. But there was so much space for one person; too much even when you factored in each day’s visitors. There were rooms he used solely for storage and other, sparsely decorated rooms he didn’t use at all.

When she began making plans to study at NYU, Natalie pictured herself living in a place like this. Not even a whole house, just an apartment, but one which looked exactly the same. She envisioned autumn leaves falling in the street outside. Walking down the stoop in a matching hat, gloves and scarf. A brisk morning trip to the Met to spend a moment looking at the Caillebotte painting of Paris in the rain. Good grief, it was all so much bullshit; a fantasy cobbled together from TV shows and fashion spreads. Yet still, a part of her held on to it, because in this house she saw that it was still possible, that New York could still be the place she imagined it might be. She held on to the hope that Sol would one day ask her to move in.

At the top of the house was a roof terrace with mossy furniture and fading pots of dry earth and dead twigs. Natalie and Sol had spent some time up there over the summer. Even though it was only a few storeys up, the view was magnificent. Rooftops and water towers. In the south, beyond the park’s green wedge, the skyscrapers of Midtown. She hadn’t gone up there in over a month. Not that you could see Lower Manhattan from there, but the skyline still had a hazy, smoky quality, and just sitting beneath a wide open sky was suddenly oppressive.

Sol once told her that he’d passed this house many times as a boy. His father had customers who lived nearby, a well-to-do doctor and his wife, who wouldn’t dream of sending even a servant down to Houston Street to collect. Each Friday, before Shabbat, his father would drive up to make the delivery, and during school breaks he would take Sol with him.

“And these streets,” Sol said. “They seemed so much wider, so much cleaner than ours. On our street, there were crates and wagons and even horses – people still had horses in those days – which meant horse-crap everywhere. But

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