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followed to this house?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

Miss McAdam sipped her tea while looking at Eilis sharply all the time.

“Who followed her?”

“A man.”

As Eilis put milk and sugar into her tea, she remembered something that her mother always said.

“But sure if a man ran off with Miss Keegan, he’d drop her the minute he got to the first lamp-post and he could see her clearly.”

“But it wasn’t an ordinary man.”

“What do you mean?”

“The last time he followed her he exposed himself to her. He was that sort of man.”

“Who told you this?”

“Miss Keegan spoke to Miss Heffernan and myself privately before she left. She was followed to the very door of this house. And as she walked down the steps, the man exposed himself.”

“Did she call the police?”

“She certainly did, and then she packed her bags. She thinks she knows where the man lives. And he followed her before.”

“Did she tell the police all of this?”

“Yes, but there is nothing they can do unless she is ready to identify him and she isn’t ready to do that. So she packed her bags. And she’s moved in with her brother and his wife in Long Island. And then, to make matters worse, the Kehoe woman wanted to move me down to Miss Keegan’s room. She went on about it being the best room in the house. I put her in her place. And Miss Heffernan is in a terrible state. And Diana has refused to stay in the basement on her own. So she put you down there because none of the others would go.”

Eilis noticed how pleased with herself Miss McAdam seemed. As she watched the older woman sipping her tea, it occurred to Eilis that this could easily be her revenge on Eilis and Mrs. Kehoe over the room. On the other hand, she reckoned, it could be true. Mrs. Kehoe could have used her, the only lodger who did not seem to know why Miss Keegan had left. But then she thought that Mrs. Kehoe could not have been sure in the days before she moved her to the basement that Eilis would not find out. The more she watched Miss McAdam, the more she was convinced that if she was not inventing the story of the man who exposed himself, then she was exaggerating it. She wondered if Miss McAdam had been encouraged to do this by the other lodgers or if she were doing it alone.

“It’s a lovely room,” Eilis said.

“Lovely it may be,” Miss McAdam replied. “And you know we all wanted that room when Miss Keegan got it, all the better to stop that Kehoe woman snooping around you every time you came in the door. But I wouldn’t want to be down there now with the light on for all to see. Maybe I shouldn’t say any more.”

“Say what you like.”

“Well, for someone who walks home alone at night, you seem very calm.”

“If anyone exposes himself to me, you’ll be the first to know.”

“If I am still here,” Miss McAdam said. “It might be Long Island for us all.”

In the days that followed, Eilis could not make her mind up about what Miss McAdam had told her. At meals in the kitchen with the rest of the lodgers she veered from believing that all of them had conspired to frighten her in revenge for her being installed in Miss Keegan’s room to believing that Mrs. Kehoe had placed her there not because she favoured her but because she thought she was the least likely to protest. She studied their faces as they addressed her, but nothing became clear. She wanted to allow for the possibility that everyone’s motives were good, but it was unlikely, she thought, unlikely that Mrs. Kehoe had genuinely given her the room out of pure generosity and unlikely also that Miss McAdam and the others really did not mind this and had merely wanted to warn her about the man who had followed Miss Keegan so that she would be careful. She wished she had a real friend among the lodgers whom she could consult. And she wondered then if she herself were the problem, reading malice into motives when there was none intended. If she woke in the night, or found time going slowly at work, she went over it all again, blaming Mrs. Kehoe one moment, Miss McAdam and her fellow lodgers the next, and then blaming herself, eventually coming to no conclusion except that it would