Chapter One #2
“Yes, all right, my apologies,” said David in the most placating tone he could muster.
He had witnessed enough impending departures to recognize the signs, and this time he aimed to prevent it, if possible.
Brian was a tolerable housemate: he was quiet in his comings and goings, adhered to an adequate standard of cleanliness, and for the most part kept to himself (although, as it turned out, to a lesser extent than ideal).
David would much prefer convincing him to stay over taking a gamble on a new, unknown housemate.
“Have you spoken with him?” he asked.
“What good will that do?” Brian scooped up a handful of waffle bits, rose from his chair, and pitched them into the trash can. “He has betrayed me, David.”
David turned over the newspaper, which he’d long since abandoned any hope of reading.
“Does he know that? I mean, he’s…” He made an inarticulate gesture that encompassed the utter futility of attempting to explain Meredith to the uninitiated.
“I expect he did give you his speech? No plans to fall in love, et cetera?”
The color drained from Brian’s face. “How do you,” he said through gritted teeth, “know about the speech? Don’t tell me you—”
“What?” David stared across the table in disbelief at the very suggestion.
“Good God, no.” He’d had to overhear Meredith’s little recitation in bars and in clubs and, on occasion, in the living room of Midnight Cottage so many times he knew it verbatim.
It was what Meredith told everybody who succumbed to his charms, earnestly explaining the parameters of a potential encounter to the interested party or parties.
“I know it because we’ve lived together so long, nothing more. ”
Brian planted both hands on the table and leaned forward, attempting to loom over David. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”
Then again, David decided, all things must come to an end. Perhaps Brian’s tenure at Midnight Cottage had, regrettably, run its course.
David pushed back his chair and rose to his full height. He stood six foot three with the muscle to back it up (even if he had put on a few extra pounds after the past few years at a desk job) and could out-loom Brian—and most people, for that matter—by sheer natural aptitude.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.” In fact, he was far less offended by the accusation of lying than he was by the very idea that he would ever so much as consider going to bed with Meredith.
For a long moment, the two of them glared at each other over the breakfast table.
It was Brian who looked away.
“Fine,” he snapped. “You know what? I don’t care. You can have him.”
“I don’t want him,” protested David, but Brian had already stormed out of the kitchen. David made a half-hearted effort to follow.
By the time he rounded the corner into the living room, Brian had already ascended the stairs, and stopped at the top to call down, “I won’t be sticking around here any longer, I can tell you that much. And!” he added with indignation. “We’re out of bread.”
He turned his back and vanished from the landing; a moment later, an upstairs door slammed.
“Right,” said David to the empty room.
Under ordinary circumstances, the interior of Midnight Cottage was a pleasant, cozy space.
Its hardwood surfaces had become polished with age and acquired a warm, honeyed patina, and the wide bay window let in both sunlight and the ever-present view of the adjacent forest. In combination, it gave the effect of bathing the living room in a faintly yellow-greenish light, a comforting hue that put David in mind of green glass bottles and the pages of old books and sunlight filtering through foliage on a summer’s day.
A large potted fern hung from the rafters of the sloping ceiling, overfilled bookcases flanked the window seat on either side, and the sofa’s slipcover bore a sensible yet subtle herringbone pattern of David’s choosing, though the effect was somewhat ruined by the atrocious color-wheel throw pillows Meredith had brought home one day, insisting they were vintage.
Right now, however, the palpable resentment radiating from behind Brian’s closed door seemed to permeate the entire cottage.
David retreated to the back deck, closed the door behind him, and lowered himself into a weathered Adirondack chair that creaked in distress at the addition of his weight.
That was an improvement—nothing to disturb him out here, no sound apart from the distant twitter of birds in the early-spring chill.
At last he could enjoy the remainder of his tea in peace.
He took a drink and found it had gone quite cold.
David set his half-full teacup on the deck rail, leaned back in his chair, and pressed his hands over his eyes. All he wanted, really, was to wake up in a house—in a world—blissfully devoid of Meredith Schwarzwelder and the chaos he left in his wake.
#9: Living with him makes any semblance of a normal, quiet life impossible.
Housemates fled in the night. Dates and boyfriends—David’s, not Meredith’s—were tempted astray. The sum total of his actions, direct or indirect, intentional or not, made day-to-day life a parade of indignities and irritations that, while individually minor, were cumulatively unbearable.
Perhaps Brian wouldn’t be the only one to leave Midnight Cottage this spring.
As it happened, David had been saving up for a down payment on a house of his own for some time.
Over the past few years, he’d watched the number in his bank account steadily increase, yet he’d stayed on at Midnight Cottage, for a number of perfectly sensible reasons.
The rent was low. His first-floor room afforded both space and privacy.
Aside from its proximity to the Midnight Wood, the location was ideal, just on the outskirts of Bingham Junction.
The nearer side of the city was accessible both by bicycle and on foot, which appealed to David’s athletic inclinations, and Cleveland lay only a short drive to the northwest. And, he reminded himself doggedly, in spite of the perpetual problem of retaining a third housemate, in spite of everything, Meredith did pay the rent on time.
In actuality, the time of anyone living at Midnight Cottage might be drawing to a close; David had grown increasingly suspicious of late that Mr. Bednarek intended to sell the property.
Over the past month, the landlord had undertaken a number of long-overdue repairs and renovations—reshingling the roof, evicting a nest of treacle wasps from the rain gutters, taking away the remains of the trellis where the writhing jasmine had once grown after vines and frame both had been gnawed to bits by a passing herd of satyrs.
Then, of course, there was the ongoing debacle of the upstairs bath, which joined both the linen cupboard and the hallway ceiling on the list of things David was not going to spend time thinking about.
Well, he’d given it a fair shot. He’d stayed longer than he’d meant to, he’d put up with a great deal more than could be fairly expected of him, and if he’d been looking for a sign, this was it: the injustice of cold tea.
If David was honest with himself, he might admit, too, that he had not been able to dispel the new and as-yet-nebulous discontent that had lately begun to surface in the back of his mind.
Leaving aside the continual thorn in his side that was his housemate, David felt no great unhappiness in his day-to-day life.
His work as an accountant paid well enough and did not require him to spend an undue amount of time speaking with other people.
He took vacation once or twice a year to visit family back in Wales or old university friends now spread across the country.
He had a modest yet promising stock portfolio.
Yet he was nearing thirty, and beginning to feel as though he didn’t have all that much to show for it.
At that age, his father had already completed his PhD, married, and had a child on the way.
David himself was no academic, and tended to regard children as a rather noisy and troublesome variety of pet, though he was fond, in an abstract way, of his two small nephews.
And while he’d prefer being single over clinging to an unsuitable match, still he had the vague feeling that there ought to be something or someone more in the picture.
Even his best friend, Harriet, who’d persistently sworn off relationships, had a few months ago joined a dating app and consulted him for advice on composing her profile.
Inside the house, a door slammed, startling the sparrows from a nearby dogwood tree and bringing David back to the reality of the present situation.
He might as well go and get bread, he supposed, if it kept him occupied and out of Brian’s way for a time.
Rising from his chair, he stretched and, with a last uneasy glance back at the house, started off.
He followed the footpath down the hill and to the west, past Mrs. Jupiter’s cottage and toward town.
A few patches of snow remained in the shade at the edge of the Wood, where the trees towered dark and foreboding.
In the sunny spots nearer the path, crocuses and snowdrops had already begun to bloom.
David had reached the second bend in the lane when, over the crest of the next low hill, there came into view the distressingly familiar figure of the person responsible for all of the morning’s trouble: Meredith Schwarzwelder.