Angel of Brooklyn Read Free

present. And here’s a foot for luck.’
    She nodded her thanks quickly, as he slammed down the knife. The foot felt warm and bony in her hand.
    Back upstairs, Madge and Lizzie had gone.
    ‘Didn’t you want an onion?’ said Ada. ‘You can’t make a good rabbit stew without an onion.’
    Later, sorting through her wardrobe, Beatrice stopped to press her cheeks against the collars of her dresses. She put her shoes and boots in pairs, slipping her hand inside, feeling the ridges her toes had made, examining the soles, wondering if a little piece of Coney might have made it over here. She found the menu from Franny’s Oyster Bar and, lying across the bed, she started reading it out to the wall.
    ‘“Open all year round! Walk right in and get yourself a real fresh taste of the ocean! We have the biggest juiciest clams. We have oysters with pepper sauce, oysters with lemon zest, West Coast octopus, sea urchin eggs, blowfish tails, crawfish, winkles, ink squid, barn-door skates, salmon cheeks, cod cheeks, cod tongues, sturgeon liver, blue-shark steak, squid stew, clam chowder, lobster tails.”’ She threw the menu down. ‘Franny Nolan was my friend and she’d have done potted shrimp if I’d asked her.’
    Anglezarke stretched out into moorland, scrubby hills, grey, violet, black-brown in the distance. Its water sat brooding, waiting for the light to start bouncing off those small choppy waves, bringing it to life.
    Liverpool felt as far away as America, with its docks, and the movement, that thick bitter brine, and the fumes that settled in the air, hanging like a stained piece of cloth, in yards where she’d seen couples kissing behind Costa Rican crates and off-duty sailors queuing for new tattoos . Of course, she’d heard all the screaming, the belly-laughing, two boys fighting, then four, crashing, dark faces, men snapping braces, and women with too much rouge and feathers in their hair, weaving arm in arm, like showgirls after the show.
    ‘I thought that was England,’ she told Jonathan, who’d finally arrived home in the car, his face burning red from the cold.
    ‘Liverpool? What do you mean? Of course that was England.’
    ‘It looked interesting.’
    ‘What, that filthy place? No one goes to Liverpool, unless they’re on their way to somewhere else.’
    ‘We could travel? You have all those little guidebooks just sitting on your shelf.’
    ‘But we’ve only just got here, my darling. You’ll get used to Anglezarke eventually. Come now, hop in and I’ll show you some of the countryside in this beautiful motor car – my father gave it to me, you know, said I should enjoy it.’
    Beatrice stepped into the passenger side, slamming the door behind her.
    ‘Forget the damn countryside. I want to see some buildings.’
    ‘Fuel isn’t cheap. We can’t go too far.’
    ‘All right, OK, any building will do, just so long as it’s not in a field.’
    The thin gravel road circled the reservoir, winding into town, where the buildings were small, crouching against the road with all their shutters closed.
    ‘Look at them,’ she sighed. ‘They hardly scratch the sky.’
    He showed her his office, above the printing shop, with its thick frosted glass and the painted gold scroll saying
Bonds
. A shop selling neckties promised credit, value for money and real silk linings. A closed cafeteria had its board still up, with a chalked
High Teas, Bean Soup and Freshly Cut Sandwiches
.
    At the edge of the pavement, boys folded their arms and squealed at the sight of the motor.
    ‘Are they loons?’ she asked.
    ‘Just boys.’
    ‘Could have fooled me.’
    ‘Boys in New York are the same.’
    ‘In New York,’ she told him, ‘it takes more than an automobile to get them so excited.’
    *
    She wrote a letter home. She didn’t like the paper she found in Jonathan’s desk, it was far too thick and yellow; the ink smudged.
    January 18, 1914
    Dear Nancy,
    England is empty. I am always hungry. I miss the little