English H

Nadia's grandmother had been a tea-taster, and the room at the back of the house still smelled of it forty years on: a dry, layered scent of leaf and dust and something faintly metallic, like coins held too long in a warm hand. The brass scales stood on the workbench exactly where her grandmother had left them, polished by use to the colour of old butter, and beside them a row of small white cups, each one chipped in the same place, as though a single careless thumbnail had visited them all in turn. When Nadia was a child, the weighing room had been forbidden, which was the surest way to make it the centre of the house. She had crept in once, aged seven, and stood very still in the brown light, afraid that the scales themselves were watching her. Her grandmother had found her there and, instead of scolding, had lifted her onto the high stool and shown her how to cup a sample, how to breathe the leaf, how to tell a Darjeeling that had travelled badly from one that had merely aged. 'The nose forgets nothing,' her grandmother had said. 'It is the only honest part of you.' Now her grandmother was three weeks dead, and Nadia had come back to clear the house, which everyone agreed must be sold. She had begun, sensibly, with the kitchen, then the front rooms, then the bedrooms, working inward, leaving the weighing room until last because she had told herself it would be the easiest. There was nothing in it of value. The scales were worth a little; the cups were worth nothing; the tins along the wall held leaf so old it had surrendered every property except its smell. She was wrong about it being easiest. She stood in the doorway for a long time without entering, and when she finally crossed the threshold the smell met her like a person, and she understood that she had not come to clear the room at all. She had come to be in it one more time before it stopped existing. She lifted one of the white cups and turned it in the light. The chip was there, identical to all the others, and she found she could not remember whether the cups had come chipped or whether her grandmother had chipped them herself, year by year, with the small repeated violence of a life's work. A buyer was coming on Thursday. He dealt in 'reclaimed industrial fittings', the advertisement said, and would take the scales and the bench and the tins for a single sum that was, Nadia thought, almost insulting and almost fair. She had agreed to it on the telephone in a brisk voice she did not recognise as her own. Now, standing in the brown light with the cup in her hand, she rehearsed the sentence she would say to him on Thursday, and could not make it come. 'These were my grandmother's.' It was true and it explained nothing. The buyer would nod, and load the van, and the room would be only a room, and the smell would go out into the street and be lost among the ordinary smells of the world, which forget everything, and are honest about nothing at all.