England Made Me [antikvár]

PART I 1 She might have been waiting for her lover. For three quarters of an hour she had sat on the same high stool, half turned from the counter, watching the swing door. Behind her the ham sandwiches were piled under a glass dome, the urns gently steamed. As the door swung open, the smoke of engines silted in, grit on the skin and like copper on the tongue. 'Another gin.' It was her third. Damn him, she thought with tenderness, I'm hungry. She swallowed it at a draught, as she was used to drinking schnaps; skal, skal, but there was no one to skal. The man in the bowler hat put his foot on the brass rail, leant his elbow on the counter, drank his bitter, talked, drank his bitter, wiped his moustache, talked, kept his eye on her. She stared out past the dusty door pane into the noisy dark. Sparks leapt in the thick enclosed air and went out, sparks from engines, sparks from cigarettes, sparks from the trolley wheels beating on the asphalt. An old tired woman swung the door and peered in; she was looking for someone who was not there. She moved from her stool; the man in the bowler hat watched her, the waitresses paused in their drying and watched her. Their thoughts drummed on her back: Is she giving him up? What's he like, I wonder? Jilted? She stood in the doorway and let them think: the deep silence of their concentration amused her. She watched the blue empty rails in front of her, looked up the platform to the lights and the bookstalls, .then she turned and went back to her stool and was aware of their thoughts wilting again in the steaming air round the urns; the waitresses dried glasses, the man in the bowler hat drank his bitter. 'It never rains but it pours. Take silk stockings for example.' 'Another gin.' But she left the glass on the counter, after barely touching it this time with her lips, and began hurriedly 7