“Room to Let. Inquire within. Writers only please,” Mr. Periwinkle read one bleak midwinter morning, from a hand-lettered sign in the lace-curtained window of Poppycock Enterprises, Ltd. He shook his head in confusion, dropping a large, heavy box from a descendant of Leo Tolstoy on his foot in the process. This had the effect of making him temporarily forget the question he had for the professors when he first entered the office. In fact, he didn’t bring it up until several hours and half a bottle of gin later, by which time the lovely scythe-shaped marble bookends (inscription: “Thank you for making Anna Karenina a much better book by removing Anna Karenina entirely”) were propping up a number of books in Poppycock’s home library. Ensconced in a large, comfortably battered leather chair, Mr. Periwinkle was enjoying a fairly dull game of pinochle with Maude when Professor De Busque was heard to remark to Professor P’ohlig,
“You see, if Helen Graham had been unattractive, there would have been no scandalous rumours about her at all. No one would have cared! And that’s the fatal flaw of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Emily sat back in her chair, looking very satisfied indeed.
“Really?” Molly sniffed, tucking her feet up under her. “I thought the fatal flaw was how deadly boring it was.”
“Girls!” Mr. Periwinkle shouted, upsetting the card table and making Maude look terribly cross (she’d been on the verge of winning). “I’ve forgotten to ask - what’s all this about a room to let? You aren’t in trouble....financially, are you?” (Mr. Periwinkle had a horror of all things financial, and often made Mr. Denning promise not to mention the word in the Poppycock offices.)
Emily smoothed out a pretty damask skirt over her pretty knees. “Of course not, dear Periwinkle. We’re doing it as sort of an experiment, you see. Sometimes things can get the slightest bit dull around here, and we’re always looking for new ideas. We would like to help a fledgling writer, you know, a genteel sort of girl that we can help along.”
Maude looked up from collecting the cards. “And if she’s any good, she can work on things the professors would, ahem, prefer not to deal with.”
The two chief members of Poppycock studiously avoided each others eyes. Neither of them were particularly fond of doing the dishes.
“It’s that, it’s that we just like helping people, Mr. Periwinkle,” Molly said, not sounding all that sure. “Anyways, Maude has taken ever so many calls, and we’ve got appointments set up tomorrow.”
Mr. Periwinkle raised a ginny eyebrow, but remained silent. Any interference into Poppycockian experiments generally turned out even worse than the experiments themselves, if that was possible.
***
“Yes, thank you, Miss Pringle, we’ll certainly keep you in mind,” Maude said, squeezing the effusive Miss Pringle back out the door. “Oof. I didn’t think we’d ever get rid of her!”
“Preposterous!” Molly shouted, handing Miss Pringle’s giant sheaf of papers over to Emily. “She writes romantic nursery rhymes, who ever heard of such a thing?”
Emily drooped. They had seen ten prospective tenants so far, each more unsuitable than the last. One wrote Star Trek fan fiction (Mr. Perwinkle had seen her to the door with nary a word), one wrote limericks. One had been working, for the last 25 years, on a new interpretation of Ulysses. From a female perspective. The main character was named Leah Poled.
“Girls, I’m just not sure we’re going to find anyone up to your standards,” Mr. Periwinkle said tentatively, knowing that if the girls thought they’d come to such a conclusion on their own, there would likely follow a very tipsy afternoon while the professors ranted about the state of serious literature, and Maude and Mr. Periwinkle could get in a game of Parchesi and then a nap.
“Oh, maybe you’re right, Periwinkle,” Molly sighed, crunching one of Miss Pringle’s dreadful rhymes (“Jack and Jill, They split the bill, Since Jack was such a bounder. Jill met a man whose name was Stan, Their love would never flounder.”) into the trash as Maude wearily went to answer yet another knock on the door. “Maybe--”
Mr. Periwinkle’s tipsy afternoon was not to be. Maude, who had a funny look on her face, was followed back into the room by what could only be described as a tall, handsome, young blond man. Maude gave a little giggle and said, “Everyone, may I introduce Eilert.”
“Yes you may,” Emily sighed, not quite under her breath, as she shook his hand. Eilert had the good breeding to pretend not to notice. Molly jumped up from her chair so quickly that she banged her head on a dangling lamp from the set of an old Tennessee Williams film that very few people had actually seen. Once again, Eilert smiled and shook hands as if nothing had happened.
“Eilert,” Mr. Periwinkle said, wrinkling his nose. “What kind of a name is that?”
“It is Scandinavian,” Eilert said, with a lovely accent and a smile just full of straight white teeth. He fumbled (if something so elegant could be called fumbling) in his leather satchel for a slim folder. “I brought my work, liked you asked.
“May I ask...what is it that you write?” Maude said, experimentally batting her eyelashes, which just looked like she had a cinder in her eye.
“Poetry, Miss Maude. In the style of Rilke.”
Needless to say, Poppycock had found their tenant.
***
To say it was a disaster from the start would be uncharitable. It wasn’t that Poppycock didn’t try hard to make young Eilert at home, but that they tried far too hard.
It began the day he moved in. Emily, Molly, and Maude escorted Eilert to his new room, which looked much different than it had the day they’d shown it to him: simple, but with the usual feminine frills. In short, it had been a tastefully decorated and cozy room, in muted shades of yellow and gray. In the two weeks since they’d seen Eilert last, however, the room had been made unrecognizable. The walls were a very dark red, and nearly every item of furniture was leather (including Mr. Periwinkle’s leather chair, the removal of which had miffed him to no end). The still-life paintings of flowers and ladies’ gloves had been replaced by hunting scenes. Lying on the bed, which was covered with a giant cowhide, was a silk paisley smoking jacket. And a mahogany pipe. And a pair of slippers.
They looked at him expectantly. He took it with remarkable good grace. “Ah yes, this looks...this looks just how I imagined a real English home.” The girls relaxed, smiling at each other, and left the room to prepare dinner.
“Don’t forget to put on your dinner clothes!” shouted Molly over her shoulder, “They’re in the closet!”
Most young men, upon finding a rather ill-fitting and certainly well-worn tuxedo waiting for them in the closet, would turn tail and run. But not our Eilert. He appeared on the dot of eight, where the girls were nervously fidgeting in newly-bought finery, trying not to bump into the copious amount of candles threatening to set fire to every surface.
“Emily made the venison stew,” Maude said, appearing at his left elbow.
“Maude made the oxtail soup,” Emily said, showing up at his right.
“Rum and coke?” Molly said, holding one under his nose.
“Why, yes, lovely, those are all my favorites,” Eilert said.
Dinner was survived, just, with the girls changing subjects as fast as possible, from polo to water polo to water guns to hunting rifles to the Raj to cricket to what exactly happens when you cut an earthworm in half. Each had spent several days cramming in a variety of typically male topics, but unfortunately, not much had stuck, so they had to skip around quite a bit.
After dinner, they poured him a massive tumbler of port and left him in front of a roaring fire in the library. Touching up their makeup in the powder room, giggling hysterically and elbowing each other for the best angles, they were startled by a knock on the door. A collective breath was held, stray tendrils of hair were patted down and slips were tugged, and Maude opened the door. The collective breath was let out.
“Mr. Periwinkle, whatever is it?” Emily said, hands on hips.
“My dears,” he looked uneasily from one of them to another, “Just don’t forget, you’ve asked him here to help him with his writing.”
“Well of course, we have!” Molly hissed. “Whatever would make you think anything else?”
And the three flounced off to find the dance cards they’d had specially made for the occasion.
***
(The following morning.)
“Not so much as a goodbye!” moaned Emily, thinking how very Wuthering Heights the whole thing was.
“Not even a note!” groaned Molly, who was still looking for one, although all she could find were endless reminders from Mr. Denning about the cost of coal.
“We’re the worst landladies ever,” proclaimed Maude.
“Now now,” Mr. Periwinkle said, and the girls realized with a slight brightening of their spirits that he was bearing a tray of egg flips for Emily and Molly, and hot cider for Maude. “I’m sure that’s not the difficulty.”
“Well why else would he have packed up so suddenly? In the very middle of the night?” asked Emily, perplexity adding a sweet sad look about her eyes.
“He didn’t even take the tie I knitted for him. Knitted especially, Mr. Periwinkle,” Molly said hopelessly, stroking said tie and vaguely wondering if such a thing would be beneath Mr. Denning.
“We tried so hard to be manly,” Maude mumbled, tiny tear rolling down her cheek and landing with a desultory splash in her cider.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Periwinkle. “He obviously just didn’t have the imagination necessary to see the romance of the situation. I’m sure he’ll never amount to anything. I mean, Rilke, I say, that’s a bit rich, isn’t it?”
Mr. Periwinkle kept making chummy little jokes all through the day, and soon the girls were right as rain. And Mr. Periwinkle’s prediction came true, and Eilert Gustaffson was never heard of again.
