piece a shine before setting it down on the large metal tray, which she then takes through.
In a corner of the dining room Mr Caldecott is sitting beside Mr Harbison, studying a sheet of paper that covers most of the table. Mr Harbison is looking out of the window, pursing his lips and grimacing, while with the fingers of his right hand he twists the too-tight ring that he wears on his left little finger. ‘Video games?’ she overhears Mr Caldecott ask sarcastically, at which Mr Harbison stops turning the ring and gives Mr Caldecott a look of glum sympathy, as if they had suffered a setback together. Pinning a finger to the sheet of paper, Mr Caldecott makes a remark she cannot hear. With one hand Mr Harbison makes a gesture of giving something away without a thought, then a frenzy of beeps starts inside his jacket. Rolling his eyes in exasperation, he gets up from the table, plunging his hand into his inner pocket. He turns away, hunching over his phone like a man trying to light a cigarette in a gale. ‘Yes,’ he says, annoyed. ‘Yes. Yes. Good. Goodgood. Yes. Right. Good. Yes.’
Mr Caldecott signals to her, and orders a full English breakfast for both of them. Noticing her glance at the building plan, he raises an eyebrow, smiling resignedly.
‘And a bottle of mineral water,’ Mr Harbison whispers loudly, smothering the phone. ‘Still. Not fizzy. Thanks, Eleanor,’ he says, and then he does a peculiar wave, which she realises a second later is meant for the owner of the silver car, who is coming towards them and looking past her as if she is not there.
Annie has turned up now, and together they prepare the breakfast for Mr Caldecott and Mr Harbison, which Annie serves, leaving Eloni to set the tray for Mr Gillies and carry it upstairs. She returns through the dining room, expecting to see Mr and Mrs Sampson, who usually come downstairs at exactly half past seven, but instead she sees, by an opened window, the man who arrived yesterday – Mr Morton, says Mr Caldecott’s note. Tying the loose belt of her pinafore as she hurries to his table, she apologises for keeping him waiting.
‘Not to worry,’ says the man, directing a smile to the side of her face. He gives his order, blinking slowly at the table, as if he has not woken up properly, while his fingers stroke the folded napkin. Moving around the juice glass, his hand knocks it a tiny distance from its place, and it is then that she knows that he cannot see. ‘Pardon me for asking,’ he says, as she finishes writing, ‘but was it you upstairs when I arrived?’
‘I am sorry?’
His eyes flicker at her. They are very dark and not clouded at all, but the skin around them seems shrunken and lifeless, like a fruit that has begun to dry out. ‘When I was standing at the desk,’ he says, ‘before Mr Caldecott came, there was someone on the gallery, a woman. Up above,’ he gestures, pointing over his shoulder. ‘She spoke to me. “Hello.” I was wondering if it was you.’
‘Yes,’ she replies.
‘I thought I recognised you. My name’s Edward,’ he announces, pushing a hand towards her, for her to take.
‘Mr Morton,’ she says, as if his name were hers. Confused by herself, she backs away.
Through the window in the kitchen door she spies on Mr Morton as he eats his breakfast. His head never stops moving: he turns his face to the garden, to the room, to his food, to the ceiling, as if he did not know what to do with his eyes. Like crabs nibbling at seaweed on a rock, his fingers scurry over the basket of croissants, barely touching it. The sight of him gives her a feeling of unease, not just because of his strangeness, but because he brings to her mind the blind man at Sarandë, and now she can think of nothing except the blind man at his table. All day long he sat there, outside the café, drinking cup after cup of coffee, gulping the soup that the owner’s wife brought him, smoking his American cigarettes without a break. From the start of the day to sunset the blind man sat staring at the sea with his dead white eyes, as if plotting the most complicated plan that anybody had ever thought of. His jaws were moving all the time, clenching with anger, and nobody spoke to him, other than the owner’s wife, and she seemed scared of him too. All day he was there, staring into the sun, with the evil dog at his feet. The animal stooped under the weight of its greasy black fur and a wide scar of bald skin ran across the dog’s shoulder. Its ragged mouth, always grinning, swung back and forth like a scythe when the animal walked. Leaving the blind man at his table, the dog would swagger down to the beach, to root through the rubbish on the sand, and in the middle of the day it took shelter from the sun inside the boat that was stranded on the beach, creeping up the ramp of reddening sand to the breach in the hull. Like a drop of black oil falling into a pool of oil it disappeared into the shadows, and sometimes you would hear it barking at a rat in there, a horrible sound, booming out of the wreck. One day she sat on a chair she had found in the water, a cracked red chair. She was so near the wreck she could hear the scratching of the dog’s claws on the steel as it prowled through the hold. Pushing her feet into the hot sand, she looked out to sea, despairing of her life. She could see a brightly coloured sail against the hills of Corfu. She looked around her, at the tidemark of bottles and rope and seaweed and tins, at the miserable café where the blind man sat. Inside the café, Italian music was playing loudly on the radio. She watched the small waves gnawing at the rusty hull. The blind man’s dog began barking in the hull while she gazed with longing at the coast of the Greek island, thinking of life in Greece, in Italy, in England.
As soon as Mr Morton has gone out of the room she clears his table. He has left everything very tidy: the napkin folded to the side of the plate, no crumbs on the tablecloth, no drips of coffee either. It is odd that Mr Caldecott did not write in his note that Mr Morton is a blind man, she thinks; it is possible he did not realise that he is blind, but it is not very likely. Impossible, of course, because he spoke to him. Noticing that the window has been closed, she unfastens the catch and sees Mr Morton out in the garden, standing halfway down the drive, with his hand on one of the stone dogs.
Edward bends to touch the object that his cane has struck and his hand comes into contact with a steeply curved brow and high ears, above a long pointed muzzle that must be the mouth of a greyhound. Lilies are growing nearby. He walks towards the scent, crossing turf until his shins press against a chain barrier, where the smell of bare soil now mingles with the perfume of the lilies. He turns back to the path and follows it to the iron gate, where he turns right, along the perimeter wall. There is indeed a narrow road here, but a road of tarmac rather than the scrubby track he walked with Charlotte. On the opposite side of the road there is a stand of trees which may be the wood through which they climbed. Standing in their shade, he turns his face into a billow of soft warm air and thinks about where he is. What are the contours, the colours of this terrain? How far is the horizon? He extends a hand to the trunk of a tree. His fingers ruffle a ragged patch of bark, like a piece of frayed satin. It is a silver birch: Betula pendula. He repeats the name, Betula pendula, a name that has given him pleasure since he was a boy, for the melody of it and for its assertiveness and silvery delicacy, a combination perfectly befitting this obdurate wood and its clothing of feathery bark. And there was always pleasure in the sight of the birch, however obscurely he might have seen it. Amid a vagueness of greenery, in the sea-grey twilight that his eyes put over everything, the monochrome birches, the black gashes against the bright white trunks, stood distinct almost to the end. He cannot recall, though, if he saw silver birches on that afternoon with Charlotte.
Excited by the slightest of breezes, the birch leaves sweep themselves. A car horn blares on a road below, the road his taxi must have taken from the station; and farther away there is a continuous low noise of traffic, so low that the leaves erase it with their whispering when the air moves. It is an English sound, this mingling of trees and distant traffic. In England there are cars within hearing wherever you are, and this diffident breeze, carrying a modest scent of grass, is English too. He hears a tractor’s growl, far off; in the trees there is a fluttering of wings – pigeon’s wings, they would be. This is England, he tells himself; this is the voice and the air of England. But then the breeze expires
