As a rule his wife served in the shop leading into the café, but she had chosen the quiet season to have a baby, and, a big woman at the best of times, she had grown so enormous in the process that her husband told her she looked unappetising, and had better remain upstairs and sew.
Sabina took on the extra work without any thought of extra pay. She loved to stand behind the counter, cutting up slices of Anna’s marvellous chocolate-spotted confections, or doing up packets of sugar almonds in pink and blue striped bags.
“You’ll get varicose veins, like me,” said Anna. “That’s what the Frau’s got, too. No wonder the baby doesn’t come! All her swelling’s got into her legs.” And Hans was immensely interested.
During the morning business was comparatively slack. Sabina answered the shop bell, attended to a few customers who drank a liqueur to warm their stomachs before the midday meal, and ran upstairs now and again to ask the Frau if she wanted anything. But in the afternoon six or seven choice spirits played cards, and everybody who was anybody drank tea or coffee.
“Sabina... Sabina....”
She flew from one table to the other, counting out handfuls of small change, giving orders to Anna through the “slide,” helping the men with their heavy coats, always with that magical child air about her, that delightful sense of perpetually attending a party.
“How is the Frau Lehmann?” the women would whisper.
“She feels rather low, but as well as can be expected,” Sabina would answer, nodding confidentially.
Frau Lehmann’s bad time was approaching. Anna and her friends referred to it as her “journey to Rome,” and Sabina longed to ask questions, yet, being ashamed of her ignorance, was silent, trying to puzzle it out for herself. She knew practically nothing except that the Frau had a baby inside her, which had to come out—very painful indeed. One could not have one without a husband—that she also realised. But what had the man got to do with it? So she wondered as she sat mending tea towels in the evening, head bent over her work, light shining on her brown curls. Birth—what was it? wondered Sabina. Death—such a simple thing. She had a little picture of her dead grandmother dressed in a black silk frock, tired hands clasping the crucifix that dragged between her flattened breasts, mouth curiously tight, yet almost secretly smiling. But the grandmother had been born once—that was the important fact.
As she sat there one evening, thinking, the Young Man entered the café, and called for a glass of port wine. Sabina rose slowly. The long day and the hot room made her feel a little languid, but as she poured out the wine she felt the Young Man’s eyes fixed on her, looked down at him and dimpled.