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finds two remaining ina crushed packet of Silk Cut and lights one. ‘I thought I got it, but I didn’t.’
    She was dragged all the way out there, but in the end they didn’t offer her the job. Quincunx House the place is called, and when Albert asks how they’re spelling that she tells him. She tells him which train station she got out at, and how there was a bus journey after that and how she walked up through a village street, not that you could call it a village, with only a shop and a public house and a petrol pump that wasn’t working. The other girls were on the train and the bus, three in all. Two of them went into the graveyard by the church, putting in time, and when they finished there she went in herself because she was more than an hour too soon. A grave was new, flowers on the dry earth, but she didn’t guess then whose it was. She sat on a railing going round another grave; she read the inscriptions on the stones, the sun beating down on her. Then she went out into the country, along a lane. Miles away, in Essex.
    ‘They didn’t take to you, Pettie?’
    ‘They didn’t say.’
    It could be that they noticed the certificate, but if they did they didn’t comment. Years ago, when Pettie first decided to go for child-minding, she borrowed Cassie May’s certificate and had it photocopied in a Kall-Kwik with a tab over Cassie May’s name. When the tab was peeled off Cassie May didn’t know a thing, not even that the certificate had been borrowed.
    ‘No reason why they wouldn’t take to you, Pettie.’
    ‘They didn’t give no reason.’
    Pettie is small, just into her twenties but seeming younger, seeming to be hardly passed out of her childhood. Hershoulders and elbows are sharp, a boniness that’s noticeable in her hands and feet. Her face is sharpish also, economically made, without waste. Beneath a narrow forehead trimmed with a sandy fringe, pale-lashed eyes are steady behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, and sometimes taken to be hostile. She could do with a fuller mouth, Pettie considers, and an ounce or two more flesh about the chin, but generally she is content enough: when she makes herself up she considers she can challenge other girls of her age and stature.
    ‘You upset then, Pettie?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    She used the typewriter at the Dowlers’ to type the reference, scrawling
M.J. Dowler
at the bottom, the backhand slope of Mrs Dowler’s signature reproduced as near’s no matter. Not that she knew how to type but she did the best she could; she had to because she knew the Dowlers wouldn’t be able to compose a reference, not being the kind of people who know what a reference is. She wasn’t asked for one when she started there, which was just as well because the one she got out of the Fennertys wasn’t much good, and the people before that refused to give her one because of the necklace business.
    ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says, lingering on the syllables. ‘The name of that Essex man.’
    He gave the full name when she rang up. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he added, and didn’t say then there was no mother. Nor did he mention the grandmother who was hanging about, who did the talking at the interview.
    ‘I’m sorry you’re upset, Pettie.’ Obscuring the brand name of a lager, Albert’s chunky hands encircle one of the glass mugs in which tea or coffee is served in the Soft RockCafé. He smiles again, lending emphasis to this expression of sympathy, and when there’s no response he doesn’t take offence. He looks around the Soft Rock Café, at its pine tabletops charred here and there where a cigarette has slipped from the edge of an ashtray, its grey metal chairs and unlit juke-box, the two similar posters of a bull and matador, two fruit machines. The red hair of the café’s proprietor falls in greasy strands on to the newspaper he is hunched over at the counter. A middle-aged couple do not converse at a table by the door. The deaf and dumb man who spends the greater