Chapter Text
At first glance Molesley thinks the parcel outside his front door must be the books he ordered earlier in the week. The damp, battered brown box is about the right size, and with his arms full of food shopping and his reading specs in his shirt pocket, he can’t very well bend down to read the label. He can’t pick the box up either, so after he’s juggled bags and keys and wrested the door open, he boots it through the gap like a football, just to get it inside. It already looks as if it’s been through a war zone on its journey from some distant warehouse; a few more scuffs can’t do it any harm.
Once his shopping is sorted out on the kitchen table to put away later, and his shoes have been pulled off and set aside to dry, he finally turns his attention to the parcel and discovers that not only does it not contain his books, it doesn’t belong to him at all. It’s too light by half, for one thing, and it’s also addressed to a Phyllis Baxter, who appears to live above him, on the topmost floor.
Interesting, Molesley thinks. He’s noticed the neatly printed P Baxter tag on the corresponding bell downstairs, but in his three weeks of living here, has never laid eyes on P Baxter in the flesh. He’s met many of the other denizens of number 39, Downton Road—ancient Mrs Crawley on the ground floor, who watches people passing by her bay window as if it’s her job; the Amin family’s twins, Zara and Mohammed, who have nearly run him down more than once on their matching bright red scooters—but until this moment he hasn’t known whether P Baxter was a Phyllis or a Percival, just that they were very, very quiet. Except for the occasional faint sound of water running or a door being closed, there might not have been anyone living upstairs at all.
Molesley holds Phyllis Baxter’s surprisingly lightweight parcel (the sender is a company called Stitchcraft, he notes) and thinks about just leaving it outside her door for her to find, the same way he found it outside his own. He isn’t the best at introducing himself to strangers, and especially not to lady strangers, unless they’re as old as Mrs Crawley; he has a tendency to ramble on and then feel awkward and embarrassed about it later. But no, he thinks, he ought to make an effort and be neighbourly. He’ll give a quick tap, and if she doesn’t answer, he’ll deposit his burden and be on his way.
With his mind made up, he mounts the stairs, knocks at the door, which is painted a matte racing green like all the others in the building, and waits with his heart beating a little too fast. There’s a window to his left, and through it he can see the tops of autumn trees rippling in a stiff breeze, their bright russet and gold dulled by the wet, gloomy day. He’s just decided that Phyllis isn’t in when he hears a muffled voice just at the other side of the door.
“Yes?”
Molesley clears his throat. “Er, hello. We haven’t met—I mean not until now—but my name's Joseph Molesley. I live underneath you and I seem to have taken a delivery of yours by accident. I’ve brought it up if you’d like to have it?”
There’s a pause, as if the unseen Phyllis is considering whether to open up, or perhaps fetching a large butcher knife from her kitchen in case he turns out to be a murderer. Then he hears a deadbolt being undone from the inside, and the door opens a crack. It’s just enough for him to see that Phyllis isn’t a Crawley-esque dowager, but a woman his own age or a little younger, with wide, worried brown eyes and dark hair that falls forward across a pale face. She’s pretty enough that under other circumstances he might have been temporarily tongue-tied, but she looks so nervous herself that he can’t help feeling sympathetic towards her.
Phyllis glances from his face to the box tucked under his arm, and he presents it to her with as much of a flourish as he can manage.
“I haven’t opened it,” he assures her, and she gives him a small but genuine smile in return and inches the door a bit wider.
“I didn’t think you would have, Mr Molesley. You don’t look the type. It wouldn’t have done you much good anyway, unless you can sew.”
“Not likely,” Molesley says. “Though I’d like to be able to sew children’s mouths shut, sometimes.” He realises this probably makes him sound like a murderer after all and hastily adds, “I’m a teacher. I’ve got a class of seven- and eight-year-olds this year, and they’re as noisy as magpies.”
He wonders if Phyllis will snatch her parcel and slam her door over this, but she barely seems to notice, looking past his shoulder as if she expects to see wolves lying in wait behind him. Her hands are delicate and long-fingered and as pale as her cheeks. He sees them tremble a little as she takes the box from him and offers up another smile.
“Thank you very much, Mr Molesley. I’m sorry to rush you, after you’ve been so kind, but I really ought to be getting back to my work.”
“Are you a seamstress?” Molesley’s sweating now, wanting to prolong the conversation he’d hoped to avoid, and also wondering what Phyllis is so afraid of. Apart from the possibility of an Amin twin suddenly zooming past, there doesn’t seem to be much threatening in a deserted upstairs corridor on a rainy afternoon.
“Yes,” Phyllis says. “Thank you again.”
Gently but firmly, she closes Molesley out, leaving him to descend the stairs again in bewilderment.
After his swift and strange meeting with his upstairs neighbour, Molesley finds it more difficult than expected to get back to his usual routine. At school, the children are doing projects on the ancient Romans; his classroom is drowning in laurel wreaths and mosaics heavy with paste, and there’s not much time to dwell on Phyllis Baxter.
But once they’ve gone for the day, and he’s straightening the rows of desks and sweeping up thousands of snipped paper bits, he finds his thoughts drifting in that direction more often than seems quite appropriate. What is the mysterious Miss Baxter doing up there above his head all day and night? (Is she even a Miss Baxter? He doesn’t remember seeing rings on those long, elegant fingers when she took her parcel from him, not that that means anything in this day and age.) Why hasn’t he bumped into her on his way in or out of the building, for that matter? She obviously works at home, but even so, she must need to run an errand or just step out for a breath of air now and then, mustn’t she?
Molesley often goes for a late-night walk himself, head down and hands stuffed in his pockets against the chill, and he’s taken to stopping and looking up at the line of lamplight round her curtains, just to reassure himself that she’s still there and he hasn’t imagined her. He’s thought he heard a whisper of music filtering through a cracked-open window a few times, something soft and sweet and sad, but no more. He wants to ask Mrs Crawley, that canny observer, if she knows anything, but he also doesn’t want Phyllis to find out he’s been asking about her. So he marks spelling homework and explains how to subtract three-digit numbers and starts planning the transition from Romans to Vikings, and he’s almost successful in forgetting about Miss Baxter altogether, until the Saturday morning when he’s woken up by a splash of cold water on his face.
It’s a tiny splash, right on the bridge of his nose. At first he thinks it’s part of a dream—he built a model aqueduct out of Lego with the kids yesterday, and probably still has water on the brain—but then another one comes, and another, and he groans and rolls over to find that his pillow is clammy and wet under his cheek. There’s a leak in the ceiling, slow but persistent, and given the layout of the building, only one place it’s likely to be coming from.
Molesley fetches a big enamelled bowl (it says POPCORN in bright circus-style lettering on the side, though he can’t recall ever using it to hold popcorn in actuality) and sets it on his mattress to catch the drops. With that sorted, he considers how much effort he should put into making himself presentable for a trip to chez Baxter. He doesn’t want to look as if he’s tried too hard, but he also doesn’t want to repulse her with his scruffy weekend clothes and overnight stubble.
At last he decides to split the difference and go without shaving, but wear one of the smart button-up shirts his dad gave him last Christmas. Feeling as good about himself as he’s likely to feel at quarter to nine in the morning, he makes the trek up the stairs again and knocks at the door.
A pause, then the muffled voice he remembers from before: “Yes?”
“It’s Joe. Joseph Molesley, from downstairs. Look, I know it’s still early and I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but there’s a drip coming from my ceiling.”
“A what?”
“A drip.” He doesn’t mean to shout the word, but it comes out that way anyhow, and the timing couldn’t be worse, because Phyllis opens the door at the same moment and now he’s bellowing directly into her face. She’s done something different with her hair since their last encounter—added a few lighter strands to it, and pulled the sides back—so he has a clear view of the shock in her eyes. She doesn’t shut the door on him again, though, and he takes that as a blessing.
“A drip,” he repeats at a more normal volume. “I think there’s a leak up here, and it’s coming out through my bedroom ceiling. Would you mind looking to see what it is? You might be able to tighten something and stop it without too much trouble. I could help you look if you like.” He realises that he’s essentially inviting himself into her home and backtracks. “Or, er, I could just wait here. Or go away. Whatever you want me to do. It’s only my bed’s getting wet and—”
He can see Phyllis’s surprise starting to melt into amusement, which is not quite the reaction he’d like to provoke from her, but under the circumstances it seems the better alternative. She steps back and to one side, and behind her he sees not the shadowy bolthole he’s anticipating, but white walls lit by a dazzling spill of unexpected morning sunshine.
“You can come in,” she says, “but be quick.”
While she’s doing up the deadbolt, he looks around and sees at once that the sun is pouring through a pair of flat glass rooflights that have to be recent additions to this old building. They flood the airy space with light despite the drawn curtains, and provide an excellent view of what appears to be Phyllis’s combination sitting room and workspace. One half of it is taken up with the standard sofa-and-chairs sort of furnishings, and in the other half there’s a professional-looking sewing machine, a long table topped with a heavy mat for cutting things out, and an entire wall of see-through plastic drawers filled with fabrics and buttons and embroidery thread.
In the corner stands a dressmaker’s dummy, decked out in a black 1920s-style evening gown hung all over with jet beads and silk fringe. It gives the impression of glowering at him, even without a head. He stares at it, fascinated, until Phyllis touches his sleeve.
“The drip, Mr Molesley.”
“Oh! Of course. Er, we should probably check the bathroom first.”
“Is my bathroom above your bedroom, though?” Phyllis frowns. “How can it be? The pipes—”
“Water runs down to the lowest available point.” Molesley feels a fully formed lecture on aqueducts threatening to escape from his mouth and holds it back with an effort. “Once it gets into the space under the floor, it might go anywhere.”
Phyllis looks sceptical, but she leads the way to the bathroom, which is small with elderly plumbing, and stands just outside it as if she would rather not be in such an enclosed space with him. One of her hands is clenched round something in her pocket, and he deduces from the size and shape of its outline that it’s a mobile phone. She's ready to summon help if he behaves badly, which he supposes is only fair. They don’t really know each other, after all.
As he goes down on his knees in front of the sink cupboard, it occurs to him belatedly that he might be about to come face to face with her private things, but there’s no turning back now. Luckily—or perhaps unluckily—it doesn’t take more than a glance to see the water dribbling down from a join in the pipe and pooling at the back of the cupboard, then disappearing into a crack to wend its way towards his bedroom ceiling.
“Have you found anything?” Phyllis has sidled into the bathroom and is behind him, looking over his shoulder. She smells of something sweet and a little old-fashioned, like orange blossoms or rosewater. It’s a pleasant experience, but he’s not sure he wants her to have such a good look at the thinning top of his hair. He gets up quickly and closes the cupboard.
“It’s a leak, all right,” he says. “But not a very bad one. You can buy a roll of sealing tape and stop it for a day or two, until a plumber can come. There’s a hardware store—”
Phyllis is shaking her head. “I’ll find someone who will come today. Everything’s on the internet if you know where to look.”
“On a Saturday, at short notice? It’ll cost you a fortune.”
“That’s all right.”
“Honestly, it’s a five-minute walk to the shop.” Molesley gazes down at her, perplexed. “I’ll go for you if you like.”
“Would you really?” Phyllis looks as relieved as if he’s offered to hike across a desert or climb a mountain for her, leaving him more baffled than ever. “I’ll give you the money, of course. And if anything of yours has been damaged, I’ll be glad to replace that as well.”
“Nothing but a soggy pillow,” Molesley assures her. “It’ll be dry by tonight. I don’t think the leak’s been there long enough to spoil the plaster, but if it has, I’ll worry about that later.”
“If it’s no trouble….”
“Not a bit,” Molesley says. “I’ll be back before you know it.”