Come Back to Port Brokeferry

(With so much snow outside and the schools closed, I have the time to edit this flash from Port Brokeferry and to post it. Remember Sharon - she is the maid at the Victoria Hotel.)

MR STRUAN COURTALD DOES NOT CALL

It is warm in the kitchen. The air all steam and oven breath and the radio playing. Sharon nurses a cup of tea in her hands. She looks up at the clock on the wall. It is past the time that he normally calls. She does not know why he has not called today, to see her in her black skirt and her white blouse. Her hair held back from her face and no jewellery, except the watch that he bought her. Her mother let it slip, Mr Struan Courtald’s buying of the watch. For Sharon’s birthday when she was sixteen. It came in a long slim box, like it was a pen. Inside, the box was lined with velvet so she knew it was expensive. At the time she’d thought it was more than her mother could afford and said as much. Now she knows it was not from her mother.

Sharon watches Dugald McVey. He is busy. He checks things off on his list, dancing around the kitchen, his face all pink and his hair poking out from under a limp white cloth hat. He is talking to himself. Never to Sharon, except to pass on the message that Mr Struan Courtald wishes to see her. But today he has not even done that.

‘Has he called?’ she asks him.

Dugald McVey does not hear, not above the noise of the music playing and his own humming along with song, not over the clatter of pot lids shifted and spoons dropped onto the metal surfaces and the dishwasher grumbling through a wash in the far corner.

‘Dugald, has Mr Courtald called down yet?’

He looks up then, still not knowing what Sharon has said.

‘Has he called? Mr Courtald?’

Dugald McVey shakes his head and turns his attention back to his work.

Sharon has another message to deliver. From her mother. She is to ask Mr Struan Courtald to drop by again. If he has the time. Just for a bit. If he can manage it. Something her mother forgot to tell him yesterday.

Every week for the past six months the same message, or something close to being the same. Two or three times a week. Sharon wants to ask. But she doesn’t. After all it was with his help that she had got this job, she was sure of that. And didn’t he see that she was well turned out and that she knew the rules? Didn’t Mr Struan Courtald take the time in the first weeks of her working at the Victoria Hotel to rehearse her through every step till she got it right?

Maybe she should just go. Upstairs. To deliver her mother’s message. It would be frowned upon, of course, being upstairs without a summons. What if a guest was to catch her in the wrong place? That wouldn’t do. Maybe she should write it down on a piece of paper and have it delivered to him. She looks at the watch on her wrist. Soon be too late to do anything, she thinks. Once the breakfast room is open then there will be no time for thinking about her mother’s message and Mr Struan Courtald invited to the house again.

Sharon sips at her tea.