The Typewriter Girl by Alison Atlee Page B

here.”
    “Sarah’s held a room. You’re lucky to—”
    “I want to stay at the hotel, in the staff quarters.”
    He was shaking his head as she spoke.
    “Why not?”
    “Tobias would never approve, not if you’re a manager. And it isn’t right—we’ve people leaving their families, counting on those quarters so they can have wages to take home at the end of the season.”
    “It’s too far—I’ll have to pay for the tram every day, to say nothing of the price of the room—it’s just too dear, I’m sure, too—it’s too good.”
    Her voice cracked over that last word. Mr. Jones’s impatience fell away, as palpably as if he’d dropped her valise, picked up a book, and begun leafing through the pages to the one he wanted. Her composure would be a damn bloody stump by the end of the day, the way she’d sunk her teeth into it and held, but she wouldn’t let go now. She would not be the object of this curious, perceptive sympathy. She met his eye.
    “It won’t do, Mr. Jones.”
    He didn’t stop it, that reading. After a moment, Betsey realized the proprietress had come.
    “Sarah,” he greeted her, “Here’s Miss Dobson. She may stay, I don’t know. I do know where she’ll not stay, but the rest I leave to her. You and Charlie still for tea?”
    She would not miss it, the proprietress said, and swore to be quite prompt. Mr. Jones put on his hat and took his leave, his guardianship concluded.
    “Well.” Mrs. Elliot smiled and nervously passed both hands down the blond hair over her shoulder, a thick, rough braid of curls threatening to explode. She wore widow’s blacks but could not have been much more than forty. “You don’t have to stay on, naturally you don’t. But the holiday, you see. You may find it difficult just now to find something else. As for . . . Well, I don’t think my rates are— Mr. Jones helped me set them, and no one’s complained . . .”
    Landlords and landladies, in Betsey’s experience, never shied of speaking of money, but Mrs. Elliot’s embarrassment prompted Betsey to be blunt. “I haven’t a thing to pay you, Mrs. Elliot.”
    “Oh!” She laughed with relief. “That! That is quite all right. I mean, you must have wages first, mustn’t you? You’ll be paid soon enough, and then we will—ah! May I see your bird? He must need water, and you? An easy journey, I hope. But your cloak all wet . . .”
    Hot tea, a bite to eat, a look around the house, introductions to other boarders along the way. Betsey treated it all as she would a pretty flowerbed marked off with round stones.
    She was shown a room on the third story. Mrs. Elliot’s son, Charlie, had already brought up Thief and the valise. Betsey turned the mended part of Thief’s cage to the wall. The valise, sitting on the white coverlet of the bed, looked dark and shabby, and when she unwound the twine and opened it, London and Avery and the tiny flat rushed out to her in scent. Betsey moved it to the floor.
    The picture rails were intact. They’d been stripped in her other place, used for fuel by some previous tenant. Botanical prints hung from these, and the room held other superfluous items, a wool rug beside the bed, a rocking chair with a needlepoint pillow. As she walked to the windows, she dragged a fingertip along the curve of the iron bed frame. Cool, smooth, never chipped and repainted.
    The windows looked down on the front garden and hedgerow lane before the house. Below, left and right, were the wide canopies of the bow windows, connected by the roof of an upper-story porch—almost a private balcony, if one was willing to brave climbing out the windows. The rain had stopped, and over rooftops and hills knobby with yellow furze, she had a view of the pleasure pier and sea. From here, the waves were only long rents in the water’s fabric, and it all looked . . . yes, majestic and grand and all that, but manageable was what Betsey thought. Manageable, comprehensible.
    A flowerbed,