she has very long fingers, with nails as pale as cuttlefish bones. Her watch is the size and shape of a lemon half.
Eloni pours the water over the tea bag. ‘Yes, totally, totally,’ the actress answers, making her eyes big, like a young girl’s. She pulls at the hem of her tiny skirt and the man looks at her legs, which are shapely and bare and very smooth. The actress puts her fingertips on her face. ‘I was like, I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ she says, shaking her head in bewilderment, and then she laughs, and the man and the woman both laugh with her.
‘I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ Eloni mimics, buttering her toast. From her window she looks down into the back yard, at the rusting drums of cooking oil and the bin of meat wrappers and the mound of squashed cardboard boxes, on which the pictures of tomatoes have been turned milky by the sunlight. Even with the window shut the room smells bad, because of the blood on the wrappers and the bucket of bones in the corner of the yard, which the cats get into every night, knocking the lid off. And there are big patches of trodden food on the tarmac, a stinking grey mud of vegetable leaves and peel and scraps of rind that never gets scraped away. She would complain, but that might get her into trouble, or she could offer to clean the place, but that might be the same as complaining. She takes the air freshener from under the sink and shoots a cloud of sugary rose scent into all four corners of her room.
Before leaving for work at the Oak she irons her best blouse and the overall she wears at Burgerz. She opens her purse. It contains only coins, so she takes a £10 note from one of the plastic wallets she keeps underneath the mattress at night. She wraps the wallet tightly again, binding it with rubber bands, then extracts the other one and takes them both to the sink, and there she stuffs them into the tin of tea bags, where no thief would think of looking. On the television an expert in something to do with families is frowning deeply as he listens to a phone call from a woman in Liverpool, who has some problem with her husband. The blouse has cooled enough to put it on. She turns back the bed sheets, then switches the television off. At the door she stops to kiss the photograph of her parents, and picks up the sheaf of keys.
This is her favourite time of the day, when the air still has a taste of dew and the whole of the High Street lies in a deep, moist shadow. Up on the highest roofs there are patches of buttery sunlight and the pale blue sky above them is as pure a colour as any precious stone. It is cool in the shadow, but the cloudless sky and the sunlit roofs are promises of the warmth of the approaching day. Singly, at an easy speed, the cars pass by, slipping between the buildings at the end of the street like fish between boulders. She walks up the High Street, looking in the windows, at washing machines and cameras and clothes she cannot afford, but today is one of the days she feels the beginnings of happiness as she looks at these things, because each of them seems to reveal a life that might be hers. Be patient, the shops seem to say to her: be patient, and work hard, and this life will be yours, in time. Resting her forehead on the cold glass, she stares into the delicatessen. On a small white table bulbous jars of fruits preserved in syrup glisten in the light from the street. Shelves recede into darkness, laden with plaques of Swiss chocolate, spices in bottles, dozens of different pots of honey and mustard, deep tins with labels that seem to have been drawn by hand. Stepping back, she looks up and down the street, to make sure that nobody has noticed her. The hands and numerals of the church clock are glowing bronze against the golden stone of the tower. A morning like this is almost enough to make her forget everything, she thinks, staring into the dazzle of the clock, then she sees the time that the hands are showing, and resumes her walk, taking her usual detour to avoid the police station.
She strides up the hill towards the gateway of the Oak, walking in the middle of the empty narrow road, in a tunnel of leaves, on a long avenue of leaf shadows. She passes through the gate, onto the shining white drive, where she stops by the big stone flowerpot in the shape of a lion. The sun is lifting off the horizon and some bits of mist remain in the lower part of the valley, clinging like cotton to the grass where the slopes are in the shade. Above the mist, dozens of cars are on the move, up and down the long line of the road. Nose to tail, two lorries climb the incline, slowly as a caterpillar. She surveys the ranks of roses in the flower beds, these English flower beds that meet the grass at borders as straight as the edges of a carpet. She looks at the hotel, at the place she has worked for so many weeks. The stone of the façade has been turned a sweet hay-like yellow by the early sun and the windows shine like little waterfalls. On the garden side the shaggy coat of ivy that hangs from the gutter to the ground is the black-green of river moss. She looks at the stone and at the ivy, and the beautiful colours seem to soothe the sadness that is falling over her, a sadness that is for herself but also a bit for Mr Caldecott. But she must get to work, she tells herself, counting the windows in which the curtains are closed, each of which is the sign of a job to be done.
Three cars are parked beyond the ivy, deep in the shadow of the building. Close to the wall at the far end is Mr Gillies’s handsome old car, with its thick chrome bumpers and wrinkled leather seats. On the other side of the bay, under the honeysuckle, sits Mr Harbison’s BMW. Beside it is a silver sports car, as slender as a speedboat, with a back window that’s the size of the slit of a letter box. Curious, she walks up to it, treading in the channels that its tyres have ploughed in the gravel. The windscreen is as big as a bath towel and is almost flat. It must cost more than she would earn in two years, or three years, she guesses, then she sees that a man is crouching in the passenger seat, bent double as he reaches for something in the glove compartment, which is nothing but a plain steel shelf. He sits up, holding a map, and notices her. He gets out of the car and leans on the low roof, his hands wide apart and arms locked. ‘Hi. How’s it going?’ he says, ruffling his uncombed hair. His voice is pleasing, like a newsreader’s, and he is handsome in the way that young American lawyers on TV are handsome, with a small straight nose and long jaw, and a brow that’s all straight lines. His white shirt, heavily creased and half tucked into the waistband of his vivid blue trousers, is unbuttoned to the breastbone, showing skin as smooth as a boy’s and the colour of her own skin, a colour that only rich people have in England.
‘Good, yes,’ she replies.
Glints come off the face and bracelet of his watch as he raises a hand to screen the glare of the sun. ‘Beautiful morning,’ he comments, blinking at the sky. ‘Real summer.’
‘It’s nice,’ she agrees.
They regard the unclouded sky for a moment. The man scrubs a hand across his hair again, making it even messier. ‘You work here?’ he casually asks.
‘Yes.’
He rubs his unshaven chin, seeming to consider an idea that has occurred to him. ‘It’s quiet,’ he adds, in a tone that could mean that quietness is good, or could mean that it’s bad.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Very quiet.’
‘Very quiet,’ she replies, and the man looks at her with narrowed eyes, as though she had said something unusual. Beginning to feel embarrassed, she is relieved to hear the clang of the hotel’s glass door. Mr Caldecott appears under the porch but, seeing her talking, at once withdraws with a backwards step. She points towards the building. ‘I have to –’ she apologises to the young man.
He looks at her and smiles again, and opens the door of the car. ‘Sure,’ he says, then lowers himself into the passenger seat and ducks down to attend to something on the floor.
Touching for luck the coin-shaped fossil embedded in the left-hand column of the porch, as she has done every morning, she goes into the hotel. There is no one at the desk, but a note from Mr Caldecott is lying on the register. A printing machine could not make writing as fine as Mr Caldecott’s: you could lay a ruler across the tops of his capital letters, and every loop is identical, like the eyes of large needles laid in a row. She scans Mr Caldecott’s handwriting, then reads what it says and goes to the storeroom for her overall and pinafore. In the kitchen she turns
