The Landlady

“There were no shops in this wide street that he was walking along, only a line of tall houses on each side, all of them identical. They had only porches and pillars and four or five steps going up to their front doors, and it was obvious that once upon a time they had been very swanky residences.” 

This passage establishes Bath as a very different city from London, the latter being the city where Billy is based. It also shows, once again, Billy’s limited ability to interpret his surroundings. To the reader, a quiet residential street of ruined, elegant old houses at night time might seem sinister and threatening. However, Billy’s jaunty, shrugging way of describing these houses shows that he himself is no more than mildly bemused.

“And now a queer thing happened to him. He was in the act of stepping back and turning away from the window when all at once his eye was caught and held in the most peculiar manner by the small notice that was there. BED AND BREAKFAST, it said. BED AND BREAKFAST. BED AND BREAKFAST. BED AND BREAKFAST.”

Billy is clearly transfixed by the sign in the landlady’s window; however, the story leaves it ambiguous as to whether these feelings are natural, induced by hypnosis, or both. It is true that the landlady is a seasoned predator, with everything in her house seemingly designed to lure in gullible young men like Billy. Yet it is also true that Billy is a character so cut off from his own deep feelings and longings that he might be especially susceptible to the landlady’s subtle manipulations. 

“Normally you ring the bell and you have at least a half-minute’s wait before the door opens. But this dame was like a jack-in-the-box. He pressed the bell–and out she popped! It made him jump.”

This passage is an example of how the landlady arouses alarm in Billy, and how he then immediately minimizes this alarm to himself, not only by comparing her to a jack-in-box but by describing her as a “dame.” There is the notion, too, that gender roles affect this situation, with the younger, male Billy not viewing an older female as a threat.

“She seemed terribly nice. She looked exactly like the mother of one’s best school-friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holidays.” 

The use of the pronoun “one” in this passage, while classically British, is also telling. Billy does not say that the landlady reminds him of the mother of his best high-school friend; rather, he uses the evasive “one” in place of “his.” This makes it ambiguous as to whether the landlady actually reminds him of someone real, or only of some anonymous, idealized mother whom he has perhaps seen in the movies or on television commercials. The passage shows Billy’s vagueness and loneliness, on which the landlady preys.  

“The old girl is slightly dotty, Billy told himself. But at five and sixpence a night, who gives a damn about that?” 

This passage is an example of ironic understatement, since the landlady is certainly more than slightly “dotty.” It also shows Billy’s own brand of hardness and cynicism, and illustrates how these qualities can exist alongside innocence and gullibility. Billy may be an innocent, but this does not mean that he is necessarily very nice. 

“He guessed that she had probably lost a son in the war, or something like that, and had never gotten over it.”

Billy believes that he reminds the landlady of a long-lost son, and that this is why she is paying such a strange amount of attention to him. The “or something like that” shows his own attitude towards her, a combination of indulgence and dismissiveness. 

“‘Famous,’ she said, setting the tea-tray down on the low table in front of the sofa. ‘Oh no, I don’t think they were famous. But they were extraordinarily handsome, both of them, I can promise you that. They were tall and young and handsome, just exactly like you.”

While the landlady evades Billy’s questions about the previous two boarders, she still manages to give herself away, at least to the reader. Her obsessive focus on the previous boarders’ youth and handsomeness is disturbing, reading as cold and fetishistic, rather than warm and maternal. However, Billy ignores this strangeness, partly because he has already filed it away in his mind as harmless “dottiness,” and perhaps also because he is flattered by the landlady’s attentions.  

“He noticed that she had small, white, quickly moving hands, and red finger-nails.”

This is one of the quieter examples of foreshadowing in the story, an incidental detail that still induces a feeling of dread. The landlady’s hands seem disembodied from the rest of her, and hint at what she may be hiding. Her hands’ whiteness suggests something cold and remote in her nature, and imply death in their bloodlessness. Their quickness suggests that she is more agile and competent than she seems. The red fingernails, meanwhile, invoke both sexuality and violence. 

“‘Mr. Mulholland was a great one for his tea,’ she said at length. ‘Never in my life have I seen anyone drink as much tea as dear, sweet Mr. Mulholland.’”

The landlady is speaking of one of her former boarders elegiacally, as if he were something more than a boarder, and also as if he has departed in a rather more final way than simply leaving the boarding house. This quotation suggests that the landlady murders her boarders partly so that she has an opportunity to mourn and remember them. 

“‘Left?’ she said, arching her brows. ‘But my dear boy, he never left. He’s still here. Mr. Temple is also here. They’re on the third floor, both of them together.’”

To the reader, this is one of the landlady’s broader hints. She seems to be practically directing Billy to go upstairs and see what he is in for. It is unclear whether she is so deranged that she is unaware of how obvious she is–and perhaps even believes that what she is doing is acceptable and normal–or whether she simply understands, rightly, that nothing that she says to Billy will scare him off.   

“‘They’re not as good as they look,’ Billy said. ‘They’ve got simply masses of fillings in them at the back.’

“‘Mr. Temple, of course, was a little older,’ she said, ignoring his remark. ‘He was actually twenty-eight.’”

In this exchange, Billy is trying to show his flawed individuality to the landlady, which she is resolutely ignoring. He is telling her that his teeth are not actually perfect, but only look that way. She is refusing to hear this, because it does not fit in with the image that she has in her head of the beautiful young man: an image that is more real to her than reality. The exchange shows the sort of selective blindness on which objectification depends. 

“He waited for her to say something else, but she seemed to have lapsed into another one of her silences. He sat there staring straight ahead of him into the far corner of the room, biting his lower lip.” 

Billy mistakes his unease with the landlady for mere social awkwardness, rather than fear; he believes that he is “biting his lower lip” simply because he is unsure of how to fill an awkward silence. (Eventually, he decides to ask the landlady about the taxidermied parrot.) This passage shows how much Billy is a creature of British social conventions, to the point where he ignores his own instincts. 

“He put out a hand and touched it gently on the top of its back. The back was hard and cold, and when he pushed the hair to one side with his fingers, he could see the skin underneath, greyish-black and dry and perfectly preserved.”

Billy registers that the dachshund by the fireplace is dead and stuffed, rather than alive and sleeping. His initial reaction seems to be one of idle scientific curiosity, more than horror. The way that the dog is described, however, is stark and disturbing, and contrasts sharply with the tender and rhapsodic way in which the landlady has been speaking of her former boarders. There is nothing warm or gentle about the dog’s “hard and cold” back and his “greyish-black and dry and perfectly preserved” skin. The description evokes not only the coldness and finality of death, but also the coldness that is at the heart of the landlady’s nature.