The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [233]
“At least you’d have a roof over your head and be regularly fed,” his mother said.
“Bet they don’t cook as well as you, Mom,” said Mark as he placed the sliced potatoes on the top of the Lancashire hotpot. “Still, it’s only a year.”
During the next month Mark attended several interviews at hotels around the country without success. It was then that his father discovered that his old company sergeant was head porter at the Savoy: Immediately Arthur started to pull a few strings.
“If the boy’s any good,” Arthur’s old comrade-in-arms assured him over a pint, “he could end up as a head porter, even a hotel manager.” Arthur seemed well satisfied, even though Mark was still assuring his friends that he would be joining them in a year to the day.
On September 1, 1959, Arthur and Mark Hapgood traveled together by bus to Coventry station. Arthur shook hands with the boy and promised him, “Your mother and I will make sure it’s a special Christmas this year when they give you your first leave. And don’t worry—you’ll be in good hands with ‘Sarge.’ He’ll teach you a thing or two. Just remember to keep your nose clean.”
Mark said nothing and returned a thin smile as he boarded the train. “You’ll never regret it …” were the last words Mark heard his father say as the train pulled out of the station.
Mark regretted it from the moment he set foot in the hotel.
As a junior porter he started his day at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening. He was entitled to a fifteen-minute midmorning break, a forty-five-minute lunch break, and another fifteen-minute break around midafternoon. After the first month had passed he could not recall when he had been granted all three breaks on the same day, and he quickly learned that there was no one to whom he could protest. His duties consisted of carrying guests’ suitcases up to their rooms, then lugging them back down again the moment they wanted to leave. With an average of three hundred people staying in the hotel each night, the process was endless. The pay turned out to be half what his friends were getting back home, and, since he had to hand over all his tips to the head porter, however much overtime Mark put in, he never saw an extra penny. On the only occasion he dared to mention it to the head porter, he was met with the words, “Your time will come, lad.”
It did not worry Mark that his uniform didn’t fit or that his room was six feet by six feet and overlooked Charing Cross Station, or even that he didn’t get a share of the tips; but it did worry him that there was nothing he could do to please the head porter—however clean he kept his nose.
Sergeant Crann, who considered the Savoy nothing more than an extension of his old platoon, didn’t have a lot of time for young men under his command who hadn’t done their national service.
“But I wasn’t eligible to do national service,” insisted Mark. “No one born after 1939 was called up.”
“Don’t make excuses, lad.”
“It’s not an excuse, Sarge. It’s the truth.”
“And don’t call me ‘Sarge.’ I’m ‘Sergeant Crann’ to you, and don’t you forget it.”
“Yes, Sergeant Crann.”
At the end of each day Mark would return to his little box-room with its small bed, small chair, and tiny chest of drawers, and collapse exhausted. The only picture in the room—Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier—was on the calendar that hung above Mark’s bed. The date of September 1, 1960, was circled in red to remind him when he would be allowed to rejoin his friends at the factory back home. Each night before falling asleep he would cross out the offending day like a prisoner making scratch marks on a wall.
At Christmas, Mark returned home for a four-day break, and when his mother saw the general state of the boy she tried to talk his father into allowing Mark to give up the job early, but Arthur remained implacable.
“We made an agreement. I can’t be expected to get him a job at the factory if he isn’t responsible enough to keep to his part