What Was Promised by Tobias Hill

home, and they put his back out for days, but the story got around.
    It’s not a bad part of town, Camden, with the narrowboats in their company colours, bright diamondbacks and gaudery out of another time. Clarence has looked into settling here, but Inverness Street is too small, pitches are hard to get, and the place has its own banana king. Bernie isn’t keen, besides. She likes the Columbia Buildings, which are grand old things, alright. And Neville vexes her.
    Quarter past one by the timber yard clock. That’s a good time for Neville. He worries over numbers, now. The big ones trouble him.
    Clarence cuts back through Inverness and on, southwest to St Mark’s Square. He rings and leans by Neville’s bell. An Indian child on roller skates labours past the steps, alone. Two men move among the ruins of St Mark’s. They are tearing down burned stones, leaving of the bombed church only that which remains sound. Clarence looks beyond them and for a moment his spirit fails. Despair fills him.
    The sky is dull as a dead hearth. The sun is desolate. It gives nothing away: no light, no heat, no strength or comfort. Clarence’s boy knows, by heart, the true distance of the sun, its tens of millions of miles. In England that’s how it feels. And the people, too, they feel the same.
    They come on him sometimes, these moments. Moments are all they are. Clarence has learned to live with them. He has the measure of them. Look: he rolls his shoulders – on he goes. A man should have pride in himself. It’s what Bernie expects of him. It’s what she looks to him for.
    Clarence is her sun.
    The door opens behind him.
    ‘What time is it?’ Neville asks, dustily, and Clarence smiles and turns.
    ‘One and some.’
    ‘Fine, then,’ Neville says, ‘come on up. Come in, come in.’
    *
    On Neville’s dining table sit:
    An open tin of Kiwi black;
    A Tate and Lyle treacle tin with one last scrape still left in it;
    A pair of shining, shoehorned Oxfords;
    A wrapped nub of Nutter fat;
    A jelly the colour of cement;
    Three yellowed stacks of cuttings, one taken only from The Times, one from the picture magazines, and the last – yellowest of all – from The Jamaica Gleaner and The Barbados Advocate .
    Clarence stands over the table, looking down at everything.
    ‘Neville? You making jelly?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘What’s this jelly here?’
    ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Neville calls through. ‘That’s what folks call donkey.’
    Clarence pokes the donkey. ‘You eat any of this thing yet?’
    ‘What does it look like to you?’
    ‘Looks like you went and made the worst jelly I ever saw.’
    Neville comes stalking in. He’s better when he’s worked up. He looks more himself again. Besides, Clarence has been working him up for thirty years, and he isn’t finished yet.
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ Neville snaps. ‘It’s donkey , it’s not required to win any beauty contests.’
    ‘Good thing too. So, when did you start on all this cooking?’
    ‘I get hungry, I cook just fine. Any tomfool can follow a recipe.’
    ‘Looks like you put grout in it.’
    ‘That’s oats – don’t poke it, man. My God. Why don’t you go make some tea?’
    ‘Who, me? You’re the chef.’
    Neville makes the tea. Clarence pulls out the dining chair – there’s only one: Neville’s rooms are furnished with one of each necessity – and leafs through the cuttings, listening to the intimate succession of water, kettle, match and flame.
    ‘Are those bananas I see in that bag there?’
    ‘Dumplings from Bernie. Might be a banana too, if you got coupons for it.’
    ‘I have coupons for teaching little brothers manners.’
    ‘Not so little.’
    ‘Coupons! How’s that boy of yours?’
    ‘Not so little neither.’
    ‘Still reading, still growing?’
    ‘That’s all he does.’
    ‘Working hard? He better be ready for that examination. Any nephew of mine has the mind for grammar school.’
    ‘Let him be, he’s got a year still.