The Boy in the Green Suit by Robert Hillman

Author:Robert Hillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO026000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2008-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

A hotel of astonishing luxury once stood on a street teeming with people buying and selling from market stalls. My father spent two nights in one of its elegant bedrooms during the war. The hotel had been taken over by the Australian army. That stay was my father’s only experience of luxury in his life, although he does not use the word ‘luxury’ in describing the hotel’s splendours. He speaks of it as ‘posh, like a palace’. He normally uses ‘posh’ as a term of mild disdain or contempt, referring to affectation (Nigel Harrison’s letterbox, for instance, which, alone of all letterboxes in Eildon is adorned with big, brass numerals). But when he says that the fabulous hotel was ‘posh’, he is simply trying to do it justice. Its reception desk was carved marble; its staircase was made from a similar stone, only pink, or pinkish. The carpets were a thick, red plush. Framed paintings were everywhere, even in the bedrooms where they could easily have been stolen.

In my father’s bedroom, which he shared with five comrades, a huge painting of a ruined castle hung above the bed. The painting wasn’t a copy or anything like that; it was an original. You could feel the paint with your fingers. The bathroom was enormous, almost as big as the bedroom, all tiled in designs that included what Dad at first took to be swastikas but which turned out only to be swastika-like symbols of a sort found all over the country. And in the enormous bathroom, what do you think? A bed! The idea was, apparently, that you would take a bath, hop out, dry yourself, then stretch out on the bed while a servant brought you tea and biscuits. You pulled a long sash thing to call the servant, not that there were any servants when my father was there. You open the window and the shutters, and what do you see? A million people, blacks, scurrying about in the street below, and a bay as blue as the sky, incredible. You wouldn’t find anything as posh as that hotel in Australia, not Sydney, not Melbourne, nowhere. Do I know why, my father asks; and when I don’t know, he explains. ‘No coolies in Australia. For a hotel like that, you need coolies, cheap labour. White people won’t do it.’

But posh. Really posh.

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