“Do you think you’ll be staying long?” she inquired.
Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.
“No. No. I’m really very glad to let them. You’ll find it nice and quiet here. There’s only Miss Carlyle, who’s in the profession and comes in sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of course he hasn’t got his own shop now.”
She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comment on Mr. Murdoch’s loss of independence; so he said, “Of course not,” nodding wisely.
“There was a bit of trouble through his being too kind-hearted to a servant-girl,” said Mrs. Murdoch, looking quickly at the door and shaking her curl-papers. “Yes. Though I don’t know why I’m telling you straight off as you might say. But there, I’m funny sometimes. If I take to anybody, there’s nothing I won’t do for them. Alf—that is my old man—he gets quite aggravated with me over it. So if you happen to get into conversation with him, you’d better not let on you know he used to have a shop of his own.”
Michael, wondering how far off were these foreshadowed intimacies with his landlord, promised he would be very discreet, and asked where Mr. Murdoch was working now.
“In a chemist’s shop. Just off of the Euston Road. You know,” she said, beaming archly. “It’s what you might call rather a funny place. Only he gets good money, because the boss knows he can trust him.”
Michael nodded his head in solemn comprehension of Mr. Murdoch’s reputation, and asked his landlady if she had such a thing as a postcard.
“Well, there. I wonder if I have. If I have, it’s in the kitchen dresser, that’s a sure thing. Perhaps you’d like to come down and see the kitchen?”
Michael followed her downstairs. There were no basements in Neptune Crescent, and he was glad to think his bedroom was above his sitting-room and on the top floor. It would have been hot just above the kitchen.