The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky

Author:Ellen Umansky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

After her commute back to South Kensington (two different lines, half a mile’s walk), Rose let herself into Mrs. Deering’s with her own key. She had begged Margaret not to leave London, she thought it was a big mistake to follow her beau back to Leeds. But if Margaret hadn’t left, then Rose would have never ended up at Mrs. Deering’s. Her attic room wasn’t much to look at, but it had a bed and a gas ring on which she made tea, and a washbasin and, if she craned her neck, a slight view of the walled garden below. She shared a bathroom down the hall. Mrs. Deering wasn’t exactly warm, but she was organized and she ran a good house. She rarely saw Mr. Deering, who had been blinded at Dunkirk, and stayed in the two rooms on the parlor floor that he and Mrs. Deering claimed for themselves. Rose liked the seamstress Mrs. Karlkowski on the third floor, who wore bright lipstick and rouge no matter if she didn’t leave the house, and most of all she liked Harriet, a clever broad-shouldered blonde from America who was studying science at university and talked less about her family than Rose did. One night, over gin and lemon, she had mentioned a former husband back home outside of Philadelphia. “Technically, he is still my husband. But the things he did,” Harriet had said, and stopped.

“What?” Rose breathed.

Harriet shook her head. “He is not a man; only a boy would do such things. I am fortunate that my father finally agreed.” She would say no more. “It doesn’t matter,” she told Rose. “It’s in the past. We are very lucky to be on our own.” And they clinked glasses, drinking to it.

Rose entered the carpeted hall and walked past the umbrella stand and coat hooks and small curved table that held the communal telephone. Mr. Lewis from the second floor was polishing the banister with fervor.

“Hello, Mr. Lewis,” Rose said.

“Oh, hello, Miss Zimmer,” he said, and clutched the rag behind his back. “A fine afternoon, isn’t it?” A purplish hue bloomed on his thin cheeks.

“Yes,” she assured him, taking care not to focus her gaze on him, especially not on the rag she could still partially see. “An absolutely fine afternoon.”

Mr. Lewis wasn’t supposed to be cleaning the common areas. This everyone knew. But Mr. Lewis, a timid bookkeeper from Wales who so disliked attention that he blushed whenever spoken to, was a firebrand on the topic of cleanliness. He would tiptoe around the house—collecting towels for washing, wiping down the kitchen counter and the telephone with a heady-smelling concoction of disinfectant that he mixed himself. (“Oh no, you cannot rely on store-bought,” he would say, shaking his head mournfully.) His cleaning enraged Mrs. Deering, who felt that his dusters and disinfectants were not removing contaminants from her house but adding others that marked his territory.

Now Rose heard a creak, and she and Mr. Lewis both glanced up to see Mrs.

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