Selling time

Selling time names the exchange that organizes much of the novel’s social world: people give up hours of their lives in return for money. The phrase is also a measure of what that exchange costs. Against wage-earners, the tramps keep their time but lack money; as Mary Lamb / Amy Hide encounters work, poverty, and later a household with money to spend, she discovers that neither possession guarantees freedom from want.

The Exchange and Its Refusal

The expression is introduced through a distinction between tramps and nearly everyone else. The tramps have no money because they will not sell what other people sell: their time. They retain their hours, but this refusal does not make them indifferent to money; they think about it constantly. The narrator presents their way of life as both an alternative to ordinary exchange and an odd, increasingly popular choice, while also acknowledging that dealing with them consumes the narrator’s own time.

For wage-earners, time is not the only thing being exchanged. Mary Lamb / Amy Hide considers the grocer, whose work involves arranging and selling food as well as serving customers, and the bus conductor, whose labor is bound up with the bus and the travel it provides. Roadsweepers, dustmen, and policemen likewise have recognizable work for which someone pays them. These examples make selling time less an abstract slogan than a social arrangement: hours acquire a price through particular tasks, goods, and services.

Mary Learns the Price of Time

When Mary Lamb / Amy Hide looks for a job, the expression becomes personal. She has time to sell but does not know where jobs can be found or who will buy it. The work she observes appears to require specialized skills and equipment, not merely willingness to spend hours. Meanwhile, being out on the streets from nine until noon makes time feel especially slow when she has no money. She watches children playing, housewives carrying purchases, men lingering outside betting shops and closed pubs, and the small movements of a dog and ants along the pavement. The contrast makes time feel unevenly occupied: other people seem absorbed in activity or goods, while hers stretches without a buyer.

The books available in the common room offer another version of the same exchange. Mary Lamb / Amy Hide reads them all, but their conventional plots, with their courtships and happy endings, do not persuade her to care. Their stories seem to her to have been imagined for money, with time itself sold in the making. The phrase therefore reaches beyond paid work: it also describes a culture in which time and attention become part of what is produced for sale.

Her later experience of employment changes the weight of the hours. Mary Lamb / Amy Hide loves her job not simply for the work, but for the familiar acknowledgments between people at the beginning and end of the day and the feeling of inclusion they bring. In that setting, time feels lighter. Work remains an exchange of hours, yet its daily rhythms also create recognition and company; the value of the time is not exhausted by its wage.

Money, Choice, and the Time Left Over

The novel gives money different meanings in different relationships. During an early outing, Sharon considers what the scraps of paper she has found might obtain, weighing several drinks before choosing spirits as a morning refreshment. Later, Mary Lamb / Amy Hide finds that money is discussed everywhere in shops, but responds to it differently from Mrs Botham. Mary privately approves of money, enjoys finding bargains, and takes satisfaction in saving money while spending it. Mrs Botham, by contrast, repeatedly condemns it, even as Mary’s purchases save her money. Money is at once a means of exchange, a source of domestic argument, and something that can make ordinary choices feel newly possible.

Mary Lamb / Amy Hide’s understanding of poverty also develops. She had thought life itself was poor; seeing people who are better provided for teaches her that it need not be poor in that same way. She does not want their money so much as their time. The distinction complicates the original formula: money can buy goods and relieve some forms of deprivation, but it cannot simply stand in for the unhurried life she longs to share.

When Jamie and Mary Lamb / Amy Hide are left alone for Christmas, money appears as both practical support and a condition of their isolation. Jamie gives her the crushed notes in his pockets and stresses how fortunate they are to have money, while anticipating the drinking that Christmas will bring. In the days that follow, they arrange their lives around drinking, meals, sleep, and nights awake, trying to abolish the ordinary division between day and night. The passage turns the sale of time inside out: their hours are no longer organized by a job, but are still consumed by a repeated routine. Across these contrasts, the expression measures not only what people exchange for money, but what money, work, poverty, and intimacy allow them to do with the time that remains.