The Anchor had changed its name on one side of the building and left the old one on the other. Anna stood beneath a sign for The Anchor Kitchen and looked through the window at three men drinking pints at eleven in the morning.
The kitchen hadn't made them different.
A woman behind the bar was pulling labels from cardboard boxes. Anna waited until she looked up.
“Food doesn't start till twelve.”
“I'm asking about work.”
The woman looked at her shoes, then her face.
“What sort?”
“Bar. I used to do it.”
“Here?”
“At the Crown. Before it closed.”
“How long ago?”
Anna had known the question would come and still wanted to answer it badly.
“A while.”
The woman left the box.
“I'm Dee.”
“Anna.”
“I know.”
A man at the end of the bar turned. He looked away when Anna saw him do it.
“You'll want to ask questions,” she said.
“Do you know how to change a barrel?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind cleaning toilets?”
“Yes, but I do it.”
Dee smiled.
“What hours?”
“Whatever you have.”
“People say that until you give them the hours you have.”
“Try me.”
Dee folded a piece of cardboard and put it flat on the floor. Her hands were broad and reddened at the knuckles. Anna could see the tiredness in the way she straightened.
“Leah's off today. We don't know whether she's coming back.”
“Off sick?”
“Off with a man. Could be worse.”
“It could.”
“Can you stay for a bit?”
Anna looked toward the windows, where two little tables had been set with menus. She had come expecting to be sent somewhere else to fill in something. Now she had to stop preparing for a refusal and be useful.
“Yes.”
“We'll do a paid trial. I'll show you the till. If it doesn't suit either of us, we say so.”
“All right.”
“I don't want a story about it.”
Anna couldn't tell which story she meant. Before she could ask, Dee took her coat and hung it on a peg beside the back door.
The till was a screen. It wanted a choice for everything: drink, size, glass, something about food which Dee said to leave alone until she understood the kitchen.
“What if they pay cash?”
“They still do.”
“I'm checking.”
Dee showed her how to open the drawer.
The first order came from one of the men who'd been drinking when she entered. Half of something pale, then an apology because he wasn't drinking it himself.
Anna looked at the pump.
“Are you allowed to buy your friend half a pint?”
“I am,” he said, uncertainly.
“Then don't apologize. He can have the other half later if he wants.”
The man laughed. Anna poured it. She was slower than she remembered but the glass remained where her hand expected it to be. She put it down without foam running over her fingers and felt a private satisfaction which was absurdly large.
By twelve thirty she'd found how the work moved. Clean glasses here, used glasses there, the stools which needed shifting before someone tripped, the woman at the third table who wanted another knife but was too polite to ask across the room. Anna brought her one.
“Thank you.”
“Is something wrong with the first?”
“It's got something on it.”
Anna looked. A little smear from washing, perhaps. She took it away.
At the kitchen door a young man wearing an apron said, “Dee says you're doing the bar.”
“I am.”
“Then why are you in here?”
“Knife's dirty.”
“So put it there.”
He pointed with a spoon.
“Thank you for the full tour,” she said.
He looked at her, then laughed. She was relieved. There were jokes which had lived so long among the same women they no longer sounded like jokes to anybody else.
The man at the end of the bar kept looking. He had a newspaper folded beside his pint, an actual newspaper, which annoyed Anna for existing on this particular morning.
Finally he said, “It's you, isn't it?”
She turned from the glass rack.
“Depends.”
“The Bell woman.”
“Anna.”
“Yes.”
Dee was taking an order. She heard enough to look across.
The man tapped the newspaper.
“I saw about the appeal.”
Anna waited.
“Bit of a business.”
“Yes.”
“Fourteen years.”
“Something like that.”
He nodded as though she'd confirmed a piece of local weather.
“We never thought—”
A younger man beside him looked down at his glass.
Anna set the cloth on the bar.
“You never thought what?”
The older man shifted.
“I meant it's terrible. If it wasn't you.”
Dee came back.
“Another half, Keith?”
“I've still got this.”
“Then you must have everything you came for.”
She turned to Anna.
“Table four needs clearing.”
Anna went to the table. Her face burned. She collected a plate, two glasses and a little bowl full of used sugar packets somebody hadn't wanted to leave anywhere untidy. She would have preferred Keith shouting. She knew how to tell a man to stop shouting.
The plates rattled when she set them down. Dee was beside her.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because three people have just ordered things the kitchen can't do.”
Anna looked at her. Dee lifted the menus.
“I told him to change these. He thinks writing 'subject to availability' covers being unavailable forever.”
The laugh came out before Anna could control it. She wanted to keep laughing, too hard, at something which deserved less of her than the man with the newspaper.
“Which things?”
“Soup. Pie. The vegetarian thing.”
“What is the vegetarian thing?”
“Nobody knows. Go and find out.”
Anna went through the kitchen door. The young man looked up, ready to defend something.
“Are you the cook?”
“One of them.”
“Where's the other?”
“At the wholesaler.”
“Buying the vegetarian thing?”
He grinned.
“No chance.”
She discovered they could do a jacket potato, explained this to a woman who seemed genuinely delighted by the alternative, and returned to the bar without giving Keith another conversation.
For the next hour she had too much to do to arrange her face for him.
At two thirty Dee let her stop. They worked out the trial hours at the table near the back, over a plate of chips Dee said would otherwise be thrown away. Anna ate one and asked why every pleasure this week had come with a potato.
“We're an English pub.”
“I noticed.”
“Would you want tomorrow? Evening. Four till ten.”
“Yes.”
“And Sunday lunch, if today hasn't put you off.”
“Yes.”
Dee tapped the table.
“You can think about it before you say yes to everything.”
“I'd rather think about it while doing it.”
“All right.”
Anna took her coat from the peg. A little hook was bent sideways; she bent it back without thinking.
Dee watched.
“Who taught you to change barrels?”
“My old manager.”
“He must have liked you.”
“He liked having somebody else do it.”
“That can be liking.”
At the front door Anna turned.
“Would you have asked me to stay if you weren't short?”
Dee considered the question.
“Probably not today.”
“Right.”
“I am short.”
“I know.”
“Come tomorrow.”
Anna went out.
She could smell the pub on her clothes: vinegar, beer, the sweet dampness of drying cloth. Her back hurt from standing. She had missed a call from Lorna and two messages asking whether she'd found work or just a man with work painted on him.
Anna rang while walking.
“Look who it is,” Lorna said.
“I've got shifts.”
“What shifts?”
“A pub.”
“Dangerous. You'll start enjoying yourself.”
“I've already eaten free chips.”
“Never mind. Tell me when they give you a pension.”
Anna stopped near the crossing.
“How's your job?”
“Still there.”
“That sounded ominous.”
“It's bins. We talk about them a lot. We order them, we send them, we argue about people ordering the wrong bin. Yesterday a bloke rang because his was green.”
“What colour did he want?”
“Green. Different green.”
Anna laughed. Lorna was laughing, too, from a different ordinary world, and the distance between them briefly became something pleasant.
“How was your girl?”
Anna looked at the traffic.
“I saw her.”
“And?”
“She's taller than me.”
“Most things are taller than you.”
“She's not my girl. That's what I mean. She's a whole person doing things I didn't know.”
Lorna was quiet for a moment.
“Of course she is.”
“I know of course she is.”
“I'm not telling you off.”
“I know.”
She watched a woman on the other side of the crossing take a child's hand. The boy was protesting because she held it too tightly. Anna couldn't hear the words, only the sound.
“She showed me music,” she said.
“Music?”
“A band. She's playing drums.”
“I thought you said violin.”
“That was somebody else's girl. Years ago.”
“Right. Well, drums is better. Harder to ignore.”
Anna smiled.
“She looked happy. In a picture.”
“Was she happy with you?”
“I think there was a bit.”
“Good.”
Anna wanted to describe the whole meeting, bottle and photograph and Rachel's third chair. She looked at the time. A message had come in from the bank, the amount Paula took for the room. Seeing it beside the small pub payment made next week something she needed to think about.
“I have to go.”
“All right.”
“I'll ring properly.”
“This is properly.”
“I mean later.”
Lorna said okay in a way which made Anna hear she'd done what people did: called to deliver the part about herself, then prepared to leave.
“Wait,” she said.
“What?”
“The green bin. Did he return it?”
Lorna laughed again, surprised.
“No. He wanted to speak to somebody more qualified to look at green. That's where I come in.”
Anna crossed when the light changed and kept listening. They talked until she reached the guesthouse. Lorna described a supervisor who placed pens diagonally on her desk and then accused everyone of moving them.
“I might come down,” she said eventually.
“To Merehaven?”
“It's got the sea. You said that was the good bit.”
“It is.”
“And chips. Unusual, by the sound of it.”
“Come down.”
“When?”
Anna considered the days she was keeping empty because Tess might decide to want her.
“I don't know.”
“Another time,” Lorna said.
“Let me get the work times.”
“All right.”
They ended the call. Anna felt the familiar irritation of failing to say something which would have been easy if she didn't want something else more.
In her room she took off the pub shirt, hung it near the window and sat on the bed. The spring made its noise. She kicked the base, as instructed.
Nothing improved.
She washed in the bathroom along the landing. The lock turned cleanly. A little packet of somebody else's hair ties lay on the shelf. Anna left it, put her own clothes over the chair and looked at herself in the mirror.
Her face was the face in the news photograph. It was also red from work, a little shiny at the forehead, the face of a woman who needed a better shirt.
She put the new one on again, thought better of it, and dressed in the old T-shirt she'd brought from London. She could wear whatever she wanted for the rest of the day.
Outside there was still light. Anna walked to a chemist and bought lipstick.
The assistant offered to show her different colours. Anna said she'd choose, then immediately chose one she didn't like on her hand. The assistant waited without doing anything helpful, which Anna appreciated.
She tried another.
“That,” she said.
Back at the guesthouse, Paula looked up from a box of clean linen.
“You've eaten?”
“At work.”
“Already?”
“Apparently they needed me.”
Paula nodded.
“That's a nice colour.”
Anna touched her mouth, startled.
“Thank you.”
Upstairs, she put the lipstick on the chest beside the card envelope she'd kept for practising. Tess had the finished one. Somewhere in Leonard's house or the bag she carried or a pocket where she might find it later.
Anna opened Tess's number. She wanted to say she'd got a job. Wanted Tess to see her as a woman whose day had gone somewhere, somebody worth telling another thing to.
She wrote: I'm working at the Anchor tomorrow.
Then she deleted tomorrow. There was nothing in the message to suggest Tess should come.
She sent it, put the phone down and went to the window to see how much of the sky remained over the washing.