Read Online Fair Play by Tove Jansson - Free Book Online

“Was it good?”
    â€œNo. But I’m saving it anyway.”
    â€œStill, I liked ‘My Darling Clementine,’” Mari said. “They use that same song every time, but somehow it’s right.”
    Jonna got up and closed the window because the snow had begun to blow in. The room was very peaceful.
    Before Mari fell asleep, she asked if they could watch this same B-Western some other evening, and Jonna said yes, she supposed they could.

In the Great City of Phoenix
    A FTER a long bus trip through Arizona, Jonna and Mari came late in the evening to the great city of Phoenix and checked into the first hotel they could find near the bus station.
    It was called the Majestic, a heavy building from the 1910s with an air of shabby pretension. The lobby with its long mahogany counters beneath dusty potted palms, the broad staircase up to the gloom of the upper floors, the row of stiff, velvet sofas—everything was too grand, everything except the desk clerk, who was tiny under his wreath of white hair. He gave them their room key and a form to fill out and said, “The elevator closes in twenty minutes.”
    The elevator operator was asleep. He was even older than the desk clerk. He pushed the button for the third floor and sat back down on his velvet chair. The elevator was a huge ornamented bronze cage and it rattled upward very slowly.
    Jonna and Mari entered a static, desolate room with way too much furniture and went to bed without unpacking. But they couldn’t sleep. They relived the bus trip again and again, through shifting landscapes of desert and snowy mountains, cities without names, white salt lakes, and brief pauses in little towns they knew nothing about and to which they would never return. The trip went on and on, leaving everything behind, hour after hour, a long, long day in a silver-blue Greyhound bus.
    â€œAre you asleep?” Jonna asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWe can get our films developed here. I’ve been filming blind for a month and haven’t any idea what I’ve got.”
    â€œAre you sure it was a good idea to shoot through the bus window? I think we were going too fast.”
    â€œI know,” Jonna said. And, after a while, “But it was so pretty.”
    They left the films to be developed, which would take a couple of days.
    â€œWhy is the city so empty?” Mari asked.
    â€œEmpty?” repeated the man behind the camera counter. “I never thought about it. But I suppose it’s because most people live outside of town and drive in to work and then back home.”
    When Jonna and Mari came back to their room, they noticed a change, a small but sweeping change. It was their first encounter with the invisible chambermaid, Verity. Verity’s presence in the hotel room was powerful. It was everywhere. She had reorganized their travelers’ lives in her own way. This Verity was an obvious perfectionist and at the same time a conspicuous free spirit. She had laid out Jonna’s and Mari’s belongings symmetrically but with a certain humor; had unpacked their travel mementos and arranged them on the dresser in a caravan whose placement did not lack irony; had placed their slippers with the noses touching and spread out their nightgowns so the sleeves were holding hands. On their pillows she’d put books she’d found and liked—or perhaps disliked—using their stones from Death Valley as bookmarks. Those ugly stones must have amused her greatly. She had given the room a face.
    Jonna said, “Someone’s having fun with us.”
    The next evening, the mirror was decorated with their Indian souvenirs. Verity had washed and ironed everything she thought needed washing and ironing and placed it in symmetrical piles, and in the middle of the table was a large bunch of artificial flowers, which, if they remembered correctly, had previously adorned the lobby.
    â€œI wonder,” Mari said. “I wonder