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wasn’t a pet shop, nothing needed feeding. He said that he’d need her for the mornings only. He had a room upstairs where he lived and sometimes slept, and when he did, he liked a lie-in. She had nodded and glanced nervously up the stairs. He had ignored the glance and asked her name. Jo Price. She had said that she had three children and that she might have to bring the youngest with her. He’d said that was fine – he liked kids. She had agreed to the job. She had stayed and talked to him for a while, accepting his offer of a glass of red. He hadn’t shown her the accounts.
    Jo told him that she remembered Lois, but not well. When Ella and Rob were younger she used to walk aimlessly round the town with them. She said she liked walking by the sea but Ella and Rob jumped off the breakwaters or threw pebbles at targets. Neither of them feared water and they would chase each other in and out of the sea while Jo shouted at them to come back. She wasn’t a strong swimmer. They had looked in windows instead. Front rooms with glass ornaments and wheelbarrows made of shells on the sills. Shops selling multi-coloured chakra charts, crystals and incense sticks. Lois Lucas & Son had been like a peculiar house on display – cosy even in summer. They had always wanted to go in, Jo said.
    Trevor was glad that he had taken her on. She smoothed out the days for him; opening on time, dealing with envelopes he didn’t like the look of. In return he paid her small sums of money from the tin box. She lit the paraffin stove in the winter and opened the back window in the summer. She made herself a cup of coffee, having sniffed the milk to see if it was off. Lois had assembled a makeshift kitchen in the lean-to at the back and had had it properly wired for the sake of the electric kettle. The electrics in the main part of the shop were dicey, but there had never been the money to put them right, nor the incentive, given the chaos that would have been caused by moving everything to lift the floorboards. The lamps with the two-pin, brown Bakelite plugs at the end worked well enough. They were switched on early when the mornings were dark. Having done the washing up from the day before, Jo settled down with the newspaper in one of the tip-up theatre seats that he had taken advantage of when the Winter Garden at Ramsgate had closed. His mother had had something grander, with a good sweep to the legs, but he had sold it as soon as Probate came through and settled his bill at The Dog. This had mounted up to a sum even more staggering than usual, because he had doubled his intake at the time of her stroke and hadn’t subsequently got his average down. He had been fond of his mother. She had been a fighter. Almost to the end she had presided – clamped to her surroundings, short of breath but very much alive – a large woman sliding among teapots, picking up strings of amber beads with delicate stubby fingers, rearranging silver on the yellowish chenille cloth that reminded him of his childhood. He never thought about his father.
    Trevor drove home and parked outside the shop. Back at Five, the sign said. Well, it wasn’t much past. The three chairs and the old trestle table were still outside. He and Jo and Jo’s boyfriendo had sat there the other evening, watching the world go by. He hadn’t bothered to take the furniture indoors, nor the tatty books stacked on the window ledge. The weather encouraged indolence. He left Ena’s boxes in the boot. There would be time for them later. He’d have to clear a space inside first. He unlocked the shop door and propped it open with a brick in a knitted cover. Then he went back out and settled in one of the chairs. Real heat. He let it spread through him. He could be in a Mediterranean backwater. Some hot arcaded empty square. The cars bearing English number-plates rushed past him – the British chart songs and the smell of British American