NO BATH FOR THE BROWNS
by Margot Bennet

Copyright © 1944 by Margot Bennet
Reprinted in Stories Not For the Nervous,
Dell Publishing, 1965

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-28-02 [v1.0]

Before the real estate agent had time to shut his eyes and stick a pin into the waiting list, he found he had rented the house to Mrs. Brown. She took it, unseen, on a ten years' lease, and on her way back to the basement room she and her husband now lived in, she dropped a pound in a pavement artist's hat. The pound marked, for her, the end of a year's exercise in concealing furious despair behind a facade of untroubled, almost aristocratic, courtesy. Now, at last, she had found a house.
When she unlocked the front door she felt like Robinson Crusoe surveying, for the first time, what was to be his kingdom. The grim mosaic of the hall floor would have been naked to the sunshine if it had not been for the porch, a kind of sun baffle-wall in coarsely stained glass. The floor of the porch was also tiled, making it suitable for potted plants.
"A dear little house," Charles said to her, with just a hint of a question in his voice.
Her mind was wandering on. "If we bought a carpet— secondhand, of course—we could cover those tiles."
"And how are we to conceal the railway line which passes under the bedroom window?" Charles asked.
She opened a buff-colored door and peered down the stairs. "Charles," she said in excitement. "There's a bath!"
They looked at the bath. "It isn't very handy." she admitted.
"No," Charles said. "But I suppose you can dive in from the top step and dry in the hall when you come out."
Greta ran upstairs. "Look!" she called. "Here's a room that isn't really good for anything. Don't you think we could move the bath up to this floor?"
"We'd never get anyone to do it inside of six months."
"Nonsense!" she said briskly. "We can do it ourselves.
Cut off the water, move the bath, phone the water and the gas company and say our bath's been connected. Then we'd be priority; We can do it with ropes."
"I begin to see why this house was to let," Charles said.
Greta said she'd meant to tell him about that. It belonged, she said, to a man called Smith whose wife had left him for another man, at least that was what the neighbors said; anyway, she'd disappeared, and he was so heartbroken, the neighbors said, that he couldn't bear to live there any more.
"I'm surprised he ever bore it. Do you think it has a queerish smell?"
"It's probably only rats," Greta said, with a flash of her old spirit. "Now, I'll begin to scrub the floors tomorrow. We must buy some paint for those awful walls. You must get in touch with the storage people and the gas and electricity and water. There's the food office, and we must find a coal merchant who'll have us. Do you think we can get that broken window mended? Do try and eat well through the day—there'll be nothing but bread and margarine in the evenings. And buy some rat poison."
Their lives for the next month might have been planned by some lunatic master mind. One part of the day was spent in making pathetic appeals to gas, electricity, telephone, food, and fuel functionaries; the other in trying to buy things that could not be bought. In the evenings they scrubbed the floors, painted the walls, and ate bread and margarine. All their friends told them how lucky they were, and asked if they had any rooms to spare.
The faintly distressing smell they had rented with the house did not diminish. Charles said Mrs. Smith had run away, not to find romance, but to escape the smell.
Charles found it was impossible to turn on the bath faucets without taking off his shoes and standing in the bath. When he had done this he found that the pipes had been disconnected. He agreed that the bath must be moved.
It took them four hours to haul the bathtub upstairs: some of that time was spent in offering each other conflicting advice at the corners, but there was enough hard work to make Charles feel that his heart was affected. He sat trembling on the edge of the bathtub, while Greta went to make some tea.
She came upstairs without the tea and stood silent for so long that her husband began to feel nervous.
"I think you should have a look at the bathroom, not this bathroom, the other one," she said in a thin voice. His smothered thoughts leaped to the surface as he stared at her. She nodded.
"The tiles underneath the bath," she said. "I noticed they were loose, now that we'd moved it. I picked one out— you'd better come see."
He went downstairs. Greta led him to the spot where the bathtub had been. Yes, the tiles underneath it had been taken up and relaid. Clumsily.
"That's why the pipes were disconnected," Greta said behind him. "The bath had already been moved once before and put back. Lift up that loose tile and look."
He did so. His face was a bit green as he backed out and he and Greta went upstairs again. Neither of them spoke for some minutes. They were thinking of real estate agents, furniture stores, gas and electricity men, food and fuel offices, carpenters, builders, pots of paint, stacks of bread and margarine. They were thinking of the quiet and orderly lives they had once led, and of how they had never done anyone any harm. They were thinking of how impossible it would be to find another house in London as it was today.
Charles sat stiff and still. He hoped he would never be asked to get up, to speak, to act. Unpleasant as this moment was, he wanted it to last as long as his life and not be succeeded by any kind of future.
"Do you think the shops are shut?" Greta asked. "We could get some cement from the builder's," she said. "Or something airtight. I think jobs like that should be done properly." She smoothed her hair and hummed a little. "I'll make some tea while you go for the cement."
That night, when the rest of the work was over, they moved the bath downstairs again. The neighbors were curious about the noise, but they never learned what had caused it. This was just as well, for if any rumors had reached the ears of Mr. Smith, he would have been most upset.
Mrs. Smith was past caring.

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