The Accidental Woman by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online Page B

from her low armchair.
    ‘When one has been at Oxford for as long as I have, teaching, working for the university, and when one is married to a man who has also taught, and worked for the university, for a long while, then one is bound to have accumulated a certain amount of – how shall I put it? – money. Now one doesn’t want one’s money to lie around idle, not doing anything, so one tends to invest it. My husband and I have chosen to invest our money in property. We own a small property, on the Iffley Road, which we rent out to students.’
    A pause was left, in which Maria suspected that she was meant to manifest comprehension. This she did, by nodding.
    ‘Naturally, we like to choose our tenants carefully. We like to take our pick of the students. My husband teaches at St John’s, of course, but one of the first things we decided, was that we would prefer to let the rooms to girls, and to girls alone. And naturally, we look for certain … qualities, in a girl, before we make her an offer of rooms.’
    ‘What qualities?’ asked Maria eventually.
    ‘We look, above all, for quietness of disposition. We look for girls who would benefit from being removed from the pell-mell of college life. We look for the withdrawing type.’
    Maria, who was tired, very tired, of living in college, accepted her tutor’s offer. Thus it was that she found herself living in Cribbage House, an establishment set up by the college authorities some four years previously as a means of farming out those students whose presence, for various reasons, they felt to be detrimental to the health of community life within college itself. It was a large house, comprising eight rooms, a shared kitchen, and two shared bathrooms. Structurally it was in need of repair. Most of the walls needed re-papering, or repainting, or re-plastering, and most of the floors needed re-carpeting, except for those which had no carpets, which simply needed carpeting. There was rising damp, and dry rot, and woodworm. On the top floor, in the attic, colonies of fungi sprung forth from the walls. Downstairs, in the cellar, tribes of slugs and spiders flourished, sometimes making sorties to the upper floors in search of food, or perhaps just for the hell of it. The furniture was spare, to say the least, and fragile, to put it mildly. The whole house was supposed to be heated by a huge gas boiler which none of them knew how to operate.
    Maria decided that it wasn’t such a bad place.
    She set about making her room more comfortable. First she bought herself a small electric fire, to go in the empty fireplace. It was on the mantelpiece above this fireplace that she arranged her books. Maria owned only one picture, a cheap framed print of Goeneutte’s ‘Boulevard de Clichy sous la neige’, which she had bought some years ago, in a second-hand shop not far from St Jude’s. She hung it on the wall opposite the fireplace. Her room was on the first floor, overlooking the road. There was a table, near the window, and a chair, near the door. She put the table near the door and the chair near the window. Once she had made these adjustments, she felt quite satisfied.
    There was something about Maria’s room which invariably led visitors, of whom there were very few, to remark, that although it was adequately, even ideally, suited to meet the basic contingencies of daily living, it was less than adequate, and much less than ideal, as a place in which to pass the night. This was that it contained no bed. Maria too had noticed this almost as soon as she had first entered it. There was a mattress on the floor, but nothing more. A thorough search led to the discovery of sheets and blankets in a cupboard in a disused room on the second floor. Maria complained to her landlady at once, and elicited the promise that a bed would be delivered as soon as possible. Two weeks passed, and still no bed arrived, but Maria did not renew her request because by now she had decided that she did