Rain in Room Forty-Two

Room Forty-Two was at the end of a corridor where the carpet had faded more on one side than the other. The key was heavy, the door opened inward with a soft catch, and the room smelled faintly of cedar drawers.

The corridor had been long enough for Nell to notice the hotel settling around her. A radiator ticked. Behind one door a tap was turned off. The wallpaper had a pattern of small leaves that had been green once and were now the colour of tea, and someone had hung, between every second door, a small framed print of a harbour that might have been anywhere. She had passed nine of them. The night porter had offered to carry her suitcase and she had said no, thank you, and then wished halfway along that she had said yes, not because it was heavy but because it would have been pleasant to be accompanied.

There was a bed, a writing desk, and a chair beside a window overlooking roofs washed dark by rain. On the desk, the hotel had placed a small glass and a carafe of water beneath a round paper cover.

The bed had been turned down at one corner, exactly one, as though the person who did it had wanted to make the offer without insisting on it. There was a lamp with a shade the colour of weak honey, and when Nell switched it on the room became smaller and kinder and the window became a mirror in which the rain was moving. She switched it off again for a moment to see the roofs. They went away down the hill in steps, slate and lead and one round skylight glowing like a coin, and beyond them the town had folded itself into a few wet lights and a church tower that had not yet been told it was night.

Nell opened her suitcase but took nothing out. The rain changed its sound as it moved from the window glass to the copper gutter, then from the gutter to a lower roof. She sat in the chair and listened to each surface in turn.

There was a great deal to listen to once she began. The glass took the rain lightly, a scattering of taps that gathered and slid. The copper gutter took it with a low, rounded sound, like a spoon in a bowl. Below that a flat lead roof received it in a steady wash, and somewhere farther down a drain accepted all of it together and made of it a single unhurried note that went on beneath everything else. The wind moved the rain from one surface to another and back, so that the whole side of the hotel seemed to be playing itself, slowly, for no one in particular.

Across the street, a baker switched off the front room and left one light in the kitchen. Somewhere below, a lift settled at the ground floor. Nothing else announced itself.

She poured a little water from the carafe and drank it, and it tasted of the glass and of the cold, which was exactly right. The suitcase sat open on the luggage stand with its contents folded and waiting, and she found that she felt toward it the way one feels toward a letter that can be answered tomorrow. In the kitchen across the street a shape moved past the light, then back, then the light went lower still. The baker, she supposed, setting something to rise. It was pleasant to think of the bread beginning while the rain went on and the town slept above it.

Nell drew the curtains only halfway. She liked knowing the rain was still there, carrying on with the roofs and gutters after she had stopped following it. The suitcase could wait until morning. So could everything that had come with her.

She lay down on the turned-down side of the bed with the lamp still on, meaning to read, and did not read. The rain moved from the glass to the gutter to the lower roof and down into its long single note, and each time she nearly followed it she found she had already let it go. The honey-coloured shade made a small warm place on the ceiling. Outside, the baker’s light and the coin of the skylight kept the town company. Nell reached out and turned the lamp down, not off, and let Room Forty-Two hold her the way it had evidently held many people before, without asking anything, all the way into the night.