Free Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 by Isobelle Carmody Page A

business and winding up the new one overlapped and almost made her ill with exhaustion. There was consternation in the publishing world when word got out that she was giving up, and offers came in that she found all but impossible to refuse. A film star she had worshipped since she was a child was bringing out an autobiography. A writer of comic fiction whom she loved touring with was launching a new series.
    Jobs like that might well have elevated her to another level of prestige and income. She wavered, but although he had laughed at No Sandwiches, he was backing her up now. It wasn’t only about providing this new option for the office crowd and, hopefully, making a shed-load of money out of it. It was about her and her life; about stepping off the superstar merry-go-round and freeing up some time to get to know herself. So she resisted the irresistible and forged ahead with the new project.
    She had never learned to cook and knew nothing about food, so she consulted those who had and did. With painstaking determination, she tracked down the people who could produce what she wanted. No food was to be prepared on the premises, but neither was it to be delivered in tubs or buckets. There was no plastic allowed, because she knew what happened to the taste of any food that came into prolonged contact with it. The only exception was the takeaway cutlery, for which she could find no affordable alternative. The food was stored and displayed in glass and pottery and kept there until it was sold on plates or in cardboard containers. He said she ought to call it No Plastic and compromise on the sandwich ban. He couldn’t see what was wrong with sandwiches anyway. He liked them. But he supported her wholeheartedly, and when she was run off her feet he took over some of the donkey work, like supervising the decorators and trudging through the endless volumes of health and safety regulations.
    The first few weeks were touch and go. There were teething problems with some of the suppliers and a couple of the young people she employed were all fingers and thumbs and would have been better suited to working on a construction site. Another one couldn’t grasp the concept of lunch-sized portions and created havoc with both the balance of quantities and with the future expectations of customers. Of which, initially at least, there weren’t very many. No Sandwiches was, as he had pointed out, based on nothing more scientific than her own personal tastes, and for a while it looked as though she might have made a dreadful error of judgement. She was alone in her eccentric preferences. Everyone else was clearly quite happy with sandwiches, and her attempt to rock the boat was a disastrous waste of money and effort.
    It was her old industry that came to her rescue. Twenty years’ worth of business acquaintances don’t go away over- night, and she was still getting dozens of calls and emails every day. She told them all what she was doing now, and some of them came to check it out and found that they liked it. There was no problem getting a table whenever they came in. The food was excellent and the place was quiet, and this was a combination that people in publishing valued. Soon the customers were arriving, and not just any customers, but the right kind of customers. Word began to get around. No Sandwiches was the new ‘in’ place to eat lunch. She was up and running again, and what’s more, it was just the beginning.
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    After that warning from the doctor he took to cycling, and over the summer he came up this road nearly every day on his way to Parliament Fields and the Heath. But he has never walked these streets at night before. Not any further than that Japanese restaurant. He has the sense again of going home, and of home being an uncomfortable and challenging place, but one, nevertheless, where he must go. But it isn’t easy. All his senses are on red-raw alert, and he knows that in some way he