Lucie Elven
Such Shaping Fantasies
Years after I moved out, I heard that Tatiana had burst into the unheated upstairs bathroom, while the landlord Peter was in the bath, to tell him off. This was the last straw for Peter, and he decided to evict her. Tatiana was always trying to improve people. She gave us instructions. “If we are clever,” she would say, “we can live like kings.”
Once, she told me to put a photo of myself on my CV to improve my chances of getting a job. Another time, when I was heating chicken goujons in the kitchen, she said I should cook proper meals, even when my boyfriend Marcello wasn’t around. Or she’d leave the door to her room open and talk loudly to Peter about how disappointed she was in the standard of my English, the language of Shakespeare.
Tatiana and I moved in on the same day, and perhaps, like me, she saw our home as a reward for sheer stubbornness. It’d taken effort to find the announcement, effort to get to where the house squatted on a hill, at the top of a flight of steps, its front door framed by stained glass stars and crowned by a grand balcony, used for storage. I’d been interviewed by Peter in the garden—he’d walked me past discarded white goods and wires, down a path that led through a clearing of holly trees, and I’d sat with him at a table on the wide grass near a pile of branches prepared to be set alight. He’d told me about his paintings of Beethoven’s death mask, how this series had displaced his fixation on the flaying of Marsyas, evidence of which hung about the corridors.
There were seven of us. My bedroom had curtains the colour of apples going soft on the ground. One side was composed mostly of windows, which dominated the cold oval table made of glass, the yellow porcelain lamp with its tasselled shade, the broad mahogany fireplace, the hard carpets, and the armchair in the corner—looking out into the trees. Tatiana’s room was an exact replica of mine, one floor higher. She’d suffered from rheumatism as a child, moved over from Russia decades ago to work in IT, and now spent her days revising for exams and teaching Qigong.
Peter lived in Wales with a wife we never saw, but he would visit every month and stay in the room next to Tatiana’s, above his long thin studio. He collected our rent in cash. Sometimes he threw parties and invited his haunted artist friends, their lips stained with red wine.
As Peter didn’t have a car in London, when they went out together, he’d tell Tatiana what roads to drive him down for a more lovely route. One evening, they arrived late to a party. Tatiana said Peter had asked her, “Do you mind if we take a detour?” and directed her into the countryside. They’d dropped down into a village, then into some woods, then along a river to a bridge Peter said he’d used hundreds of times—but when they got there, it wasn’t sturdy enough to go over again.
Then Tatiana carried into the room a soup from her “cold country.” I think she expected to marry him.
When Marcello moved out of his place, we spent two months living together in my room in that castle, because we knew I was going abroad.
Marcello took over replying to Tatiana’s emails—about whether we were wiping our feet before stepping on the bath mat, about cleaning the hoover after using it, and about the mystery of why we weren’t ashamed to live in the dirtiest house on the street.
When I left, Marcello moved into his parents’ flat, but he kept our room. Rent was cheap and sometimes he would go and visit, stay the night, help Tatiana move a mattress or with her English. He still had the room when I returned. Another year passed, and I needed the room again, just for the summer. Marcello hadn’t let anyone else stay in it—even when, for a while, some friends had been forced to sleep in Peter’s studio with his paintings—even when a woman took refuge from a boyfriend in a small, sad bedroom with windows low enough to be knocked on from outside.
I wasn’t able to stop time for him. In a tower block, years later, my new housemate and I would sit before a square window on the fifth floor and speculate as to who the neighbors had been in a past life: Marco Polo, an informant, a star of the silent screen.
In a past life, Tatiana would have been the lady of the house.
I imagine Peter at sunset, lying back in the upstairs bathroom, its windows modestly covered by short voile curtains. At the other end of the long corridor, Tatiana is coming to find him. The balcony is a golden diadem.
When Peter evicted Tatiana, she chose to stay. The two-month notice period passed, and I hear nothing changed. There wasn’t anything Peter could really do. Eventually, she won him over again and they drank wine in her room together as they had before when he visited once a month to collect the rent. Then, one day, she found another place nearby, and moved out of the house of her own accord.