Page 8 of Hazard a Guest
It was too dark to really take in the place once the door swung open. But it hit him with a swell of anxious release, of pure relief.
His flat, he realized, still smelled right.
He was careful, picking his way through the little receiving room and around the kitchen. His sitting room was tucked into the rear corner, with a corner of glass panes looking down over the sidewalk.
He slipped the jacket from his shoulders and hung it on the peg he’d put there himself, without even being able to see it properly. He stripped off his boots, his socks, his ascot, all the damp and icy pieces that had been weighing him down on the walk home.
There was nothing to be done for pajamas. Not in this light.
Mercifully, though, he thought it would be all right anyway. His bones were starting to complain with a loudness they’d had the sympathy to keep quiet on the ship. His body wanted nothing of contemplation anymore, not with the sleet out there and the warmth in here.
And so he crawled onto the couch, dragging a blanket from the armrest over his tired body.
And he slept.
Freddydidwakehim up in the end, but not with his voice.
It was morning, an overcast, silver sort of morning, and Joe found himself pulled from his slumber by the sounds and smells of a coffee roast.
There, in the distance, was the sizzle of butter on a pan, of a whisk scraping a bowl. It was all playing out on the conscious edges of a dream that did not want to let go, letting Joe believe he was here and on the ship and in Lisbon and at his mother’s hearth all at once, in the way only partial consciousness can.
And then there was a gentle clack of ceramic on wood, and his eyes finally opened.
Freddy Hightower, peer of the realm, was serving him breakfast.
Butter-soaked oatcakes sat on a dollop of apple butter. A softly boiled egg was cracked open, its golden yolk leaking onto the plate. The bread was toasted on each side, with the same burnished gilt from the butter on the oatcakes. And, above all, there was the coffee.
Cresson pulled himself up with some effort, his body creaking in protest as he rubbed the silt of sleep, crystalized with ocean salt, from his eyes.
He yawned, stretching his arms over his head as Freddy bustled back into the room, carrying a second plate for himself.
He froze in the archway, blue eyes widening as he took in his unwitting landlord, fresh from the seafoam.
“Good Lord, Cresson,” he said by way of greeting. “What happened to you?”
“So much,” Joe rasped, already grasping for the mug of steaming relief in front of him.
Freddy pulled a footstool over for his own perch, setting his plate opposite Joe’s with a little too much pleasure at his own culinary outcome.
Joe suspected that if he’d been permitted, Freddy would have halted any actual eating until an artist could be summoned to capture the effect in oils first. And perhaps most irritatingly of all, it did taste just as good as it looked.
“I got in early,” Joe began, knowing it was unnecessary to say. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Yes, fine,” said Freddy, still staring at him over the rim of his own mug as though he’d grown a horn. “Your hair got long.”
“Did it?” Joe reached up without thinking to touch one of the dark ringlets sitting on his forehead. “Oh, I suppose it is a bit longer.”
“A bit,” Freddy repeated back with the dry irritation of someone whose observation was not being given his due. “You’ve gone brown, too. Very brown.”
“It was the sun.”
“Hmm,” said Freddy, as though such things were suspicious, his eyes still scanning Joe as though looking for more evidence that he’d gone and changed too much.
It made Joe sigh. “Once I’ve had a bath and a shave and changed into proper clothes, I’ll look just the same.”
“No,” said Freddy. “I don’t think you will.”
Instead of humoring this nonsensical line of conversation, Joe took a moment to sit back and look around his sitting room, at the little reading nook he’d carved out here over the years.
