The Promise of Light by Paul Watkins

Author:Paul Watkins
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466887664
Publisher: Picador

CHAPTER 9

“Tuppence!” Mrs. Gisby barked in my face. Then she squinted, stretching her neck across the copper-plated bar top. “Oh, sorry, dear. I didn’t recognize you. I can’t see without my glasses and they always steam up when I’m working.”

She talked for a while longer about her glasses, how they slipped off and broke at least once a month. Then she demonstrated, putting on the glasses and waggling her head until they slid down to the end of her push-button nose.

I watched the khaki foam settle on my beer.

* * *

I had been here a week, working alongside Crow at the Dunraven Hotel, which was run by Mrs. Gisby and called Gisby’s Hotel by everyone except the soldiers. Most nights, the British officers ate dinner there, in the main dining room, which had salmon-pink walls and white curtains and silver candlesticks. There was a pub at the back entrance to the hotel. The locals all piled in there after sundown.

Crow and I washed dishes from a quarter to seven in the morning until eight o’clock at night. We had a spot in the corner of the kitchen, where two huge metal sinks were bolted to the wall. There were rest times, after the breakfast rush and from two until six in the afternoon, when Crow and I lay down on the floor of the kitchen and slept with our aprons rolled up as pillows. But for the remainder of the day, I hardly ever looked up from the grey water in my sink, seeing the same pots and pans disappear hissing into the water as the chef threw them over my shoulder. I watched the sweat bead up on Crow’s bald head and drip into the washing water.

I didn’t ask questions because questions were dangerous here. If I asked the wrong person, or if the wrong person overheard, the Tans would come for me. I kept telling myself to be patient. I didn’t say much about myself, but sometimes I talked about America, which seemed to the people around me to be a place more lodged in dreams than in the real world. They didn’t seem impressed that there was no war in America. They convinced themselves that America was so violent even in peacetime that it made no difference. But you could get rich in America, they said, and you could own huge tracts of land in places with names like Nebraska and Colorado. I watched Crow and Tarbox as they pronounced these words, as if they were part of a spell. They said you couldn’t get rich here and I looked around and believed them. They said you couldn’t own much land, either, because it had all been parceled out to the British and the people who worked with them. I told about Harley and Newport and the huge iron gate at Belmar and I tried to explain how hard it was to make the kind of wealth that Crow and Tarbox talked about, but they didn’t care. What mattered to them was that the possibility was there.

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