The Linen Room at Hollin House

Hollin House had six bedrooms, a dining room with a fire, and a narrow back stair that led to the warmest room in the building. The guests never saw it. It was where Agnes ended every evening, after the last coffee cups had been washed and the front door had been bolted, and she climbed to it now with her shoes in one hand so that the stair would not complain.

The linen room was hardly larger than a cupboard, though it had a window, a single bulb under a glass shade, and the great white bulk of the hot-water tank humming to itself in the corner. Slatted shelves ran from floor to ceiling on three sides. The air smelled of clean cotton and warm wood and, faintly, of the lavender bags that hung from a hook by the door, which Agnes renewed every September from the bushes along the front path.

On the table under the window lay the last of the day’s sheets, still warm from the press downstairs. She shook out the first one, caught its corners, and folded it in half and in half again, walking her hands down its length, the cotton giving off a gentle heat against her wrists. Folding a sheet alone was a small dance that she had learned so long ago she no longer remembered learning it. It came out square every time, and she laid it on the shelf marked DOUBLES in her own neat capitals, on a card that had been tucked into the slats for eleven years.

Every shelf had its card. SINGLES. DOUBLES. BOLSTERS. TABLECLOTHS, LARGE. TABLECLOTHS, ROUND, ROOM SIX, because Room Six had a round table by its window and nothing else in the house did. There was one card that said ODD AND INTERESTING, which held a pillowcase with a monogram nobody could identify, a christening shawl that had been left behind in 1998 and never collected, and a tea towel printed with a map of a seaside town that no guest had ever admitted to visiting.

She counted the pillowcases, as she always did, by tens. Ten, twenty, thirty, and then seven more, which was one fewer than yesterday. Agnes did not mind. A pillowcase went missing now and then and nearly always turned up a week later, folded inside a duvet cover or tucked into the airing basket, looking as though it had simply wanted a little time to itself. She wrote thirty-seven on the slate by the door and drew a small question mark beside it, which was as close as Hollin House came to worry.

Below her the house was settling. A radiator ticked as it cooled. In Room Two someone turned over and the old bed spoke briefly about it. Rain had begun on the skylight above the landing, not heavily, only a soft early-October patter that came and went as the wind decided. Somewhere out in the dark a tawny owl called from the beeches, and from the far end of the house the clock in the hall cleared its throat and struck the half hour.

Agnes folded the last pillowcase and laid it on the pile. She straightened a stack of hand towels that did not need straightening and took down one lavender bag to press it between her fingers, so that the room filled for a moment with the smell of summer. Then she hung it back on its hook. The shelves were full and even, every edge facing outward, and the whole small room had the look of something finished properly.

Six rooms of guests were asleep under sheets she had folded on other nights, and in the morning there would be breakfast to lay, and beds to strip, and the press to warm again. None of it needed thinking about now. The tank went on humming in its corner, keeping the water warm for everybody’s baths, and would go on humming all night without being asked.

Agnes picked up her shoes. At the door she reached for the switch, and the airing cupboard light went out with a soft click, leaving only the faint grey square of the window and the warmth of the folded linen in the dark. She went down the back stair in her stockinged feet, and behind her the little room kept its heat, and the shelves held their white stacks, and Hollin House slept on in the rain.