‘Love you lots,’ said Saskia, who then broke the connection. Arabella moved back to her computer and started to fill out the hotel booking form. From downstairs she could just hear the sound of three voices, in three familiar tones: Conrad was making an accusation, Joshua was raising his voice to drown him out, and Pilar was interceding between them. But it was not a ‘go to’ noise and Arabella had no difficulty in ignoring it. Then Arabella heard something which got her full attention: the flap of the letter box opening and closing, and a thump of mail landing on the doormat. It sounded as if there were some catalogues there; and Arabella loved her catalogues. She opened the door of her dressing room and came down the stairs as quietly as she could, making a mental note to have Bogdan look and see if there was a way to make it less creaky. Catalogues! Arabella bent and picked up brochures from two different travel companies – that was in case she finally got her husband to agree to go to Kenya for February half-term. There were a couple of uninteresting-looking letters for him, a credit-card bill for her, and a postcard with no addressee other than their house number. Her first thought was that this was an unsolicited offer from an estate agent: these came through at the rate of two a week and she enjoyed being irritated by them and the compliment they paid to the desirability of her house. Arabella noticed the postcard carried a second-class stamp; no one she knew used second-class stamps. The printed text on the card said ‘We Want What You Have’. The postcard was a photograph of their front door. It must be a viral ad thing. There would be a follow-up and then another card finally revealing the point of the exercise as some semi-criminal estate agent finally confessed to a wish to sell her home for her. Arabella took the catalogues and the card upstairs, the catalogues to read and the card to keep for the rainy day when they decided to sell up and get somewhere bigger.
7
At ten o’clock Shahid was stacking unsold men’s magazines behind the counter, prior to returning them to the wholesaler, when the only customer in the shop fainted. She was a little old lady who had come in and was looking at the dairy products in the fridge. Or at least that’s what she was doing one moment. The next thing Shahid knew, there was a thumping sound and she had fallen sideways in the right-hand aisle. It was not a loud noise but it was an unnatural one – the unmistakable noise of a body falling over. Ahmed, who had been in the kitchen doing paperwork, came running through and joined him as he lifted the counter flap and hurried to her.
The old lady was already stirring where she lay; she couldn’t have been out for long. Perhaps she hadn’t even lost consciousness. Shahid didn’t think he’d ever seen her before, but he had the young man’s obliviousness to the old – to him, everyone over the age of sixty looked the same. Ahmed on the other hand did seem to know her, because as he bent down to help, he said, ‘Mrs Howe!’
‘I’m all right, dear,’ said the old lady, not sounding the least bit all right. She was doing that thing people do when they have accidents, of pretending nothing had happened and that they were completely fine. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. Wobbly for a second but I’m fine. Right as rain!’
‘Take your time,’ said Ahmed. ‘Sit for a moment.’ He sat beside her with his arm on her shoulder, looking a little uncomfortable at the intimacy he had offered. Shahid went behind the counter. On the CCTV camera underneath the till, Ahmed and Mrs Howe looked strange, like something out of a Crimewatch reconstruction: the Asian man crouched on the floor next to the old white lady, neither of them moving. If it had been a film you would have soon tired of it. For the next quarter of an hour Ahmed sat talking to the old lady while Shahid served three customers with a Daily Mirror, an Oyster top-up, and five scratchcards respectively. It was a strange lull, Shahid carrying on normally while his brother squatted beside the ill woman like a paramedic. Ahmed was a pompous dickhead in many respects, but Shahid had to admit, it was his brother’s good side that he knew who the woman was and didn’t treat her just as a nuisance to be cleared up as briskly as possible.
‘I’m going to help Mrs Howe home,’ said Ahmed, coming behind the counter to pick up his jacket. ‘She’s just around the corner. Back in five.’
‘I’ll hold the fort,’ said Shahid, saluting. Ahmed didn’t seem to think that was funny.
Ahmed gave Mrs Howe his arm and helped her lever herself up off the floor. Old people were right to dread falls. His first thought when he saw that she had fallen was that she must have broken something, a leg or a hip, which at that age could be the beginning of the end, but she seemed to be physically intact. Ahmed picked up her bag and, with Mrs Howe still holding on to his arm, the two of them headed for the door. Ahmed knew that Mrs Howe lived in Pepys Road but didn’t know in which house.
‘I’m about halfway down the road,’ Petunia said. A couple of hundred yards. At the rate they were travelling, that was going to take a while. ‘I’m so grateful and so very very sorry.’
‘It is me who should be grateful. If I weren’t with you I would have to be doing my accounts. I hate doing my accounts.’
‘I don’t know what came over me. Everything just started whirling. Next thing you know I was on the floor. Do you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever fainted. Managed to get to eighty-two without doing it. Bad luck for you, eh?’
‘I won’t hear of it,’ said Ahmed.
The day was clear and cold. The light was so bright that Ahmed had to hold up his hand to block it out when they crossed the road. He could feel Mrs Howe’s thinness; he could feel her trembling, either with cold or shock or fatigue or a little of all three. Petunia knew that he could feel her shaking and was also conscious that this was the first time she had touched a man other than her son-in-law and grandsons since Albert died.
For Ahmed, who felt that he was always in a rush, that any given day was at its heart an equation with too many tasks and too few minutes, the list of things to do never shrinking while the time in which to do things constantly contracted, there was something very strange about moving so slowly. It was like one of those exercises where they make people walk backwards, or wear blindfolds in their own houses, to make the familiar feel different. He could feel – he couldn’t help himself – a wave of the irritation he so often felt, at so many different things, in the course of an ordinary day. At the same time he managed to slow himself down and check the irritation, by telling himself that there was no point in doing a good deed if all it made you do was feel bad-tempered.
‘Just suddenly everything was going round,’ said Petunia, still on the subject of her first-ever faint. Then she said, ‘Here we are,’ and opened the gate of number 42. The window had some old-fashioned coloured glass in it, an abstract circular pattern. Ahmed – he couldn’t help himself – wondered for a moment what the house was worth. If it was tatty on the inside but structurally sound, which would be his best guess, one and a half million.