Free Treasures of Time by Penelope Lively

given a toy shop. It had a wooden counter, and wooden shelves and drawers behind. There were tiny packets (empty) of tea and sugar, with proper writing – Lyons, Tate and Lyle – and packets of semolina and sultanas and candied peel and biscuits and little blue paper bags for rice and flour. And a real pair of scales. And pretend fruit, made of plaster: oranges and lemons and bananas. And cardboard money. And a pad of paper headed Toytown Stores to write bills on.
    Laura was nearly always the shopkeeper, because of being the youngest and because the shop was for some reason more hers than mine, though given to us jointly I think by an aunt. Laura was five or six, as pretty as a picture or so everyone said, her hair so fair as to be almost white, as it will be again one day, around a face that is not so very different, that is recognizably the Laura of today.
    She weighs and counts and arranges, and I buy and order and pay. We both love the shop, it is fantasy made manifest; perhaps Laura loves it slightly more, and I get irritated because I am so seldom the shopkeeper, and after a while I refuse to play any more.
    Later, when Laura is somewhere else, I play with the shop by myself. I arrange it with great care, to my liking, and I do very complicated sums, I present myself with bills and pay them and take real flour and sugar from the kitchen and weigh it and put it in the blue bags. I have a whale of a time.
    And suddenly there is Laura, standing over me. She is so enraged she is speechless, her face is quite scarlet, she looks as though she might explode. And she does: she flies not at me but at the shop; she hurls herself at it and the wooden counter splinters and the shelves and the drawers, the cardboard packets are squashed, the money sent flying in all directions, the imitation fruit pulped to white powder under her shoes.
    The shop is ruined. We stare in horror at the ruins. Laura tramps through it, tears streaming down her face, and says, ‘I didn’t want it anyway, it wasn’t real. I don’t care.’

    Nellie ate her breakfast alone in the kitchen, Laura having gone to Marlborough. She made tea, and toast, and achieved with the help of a walking stick handle the packet of cornflakes in the corner cupboard that had hitherto eluded her, and enjoyed that small triumph. She read The Times from front to back, sat thinking for a while about what she had read, trundled back to her room to fetch the handy bag in which she kept her immediate needs – books, notepad and pen – and then wheeled herself through the drawing room window and onto the terrace, it being a nice day.
    A lovely day, indeed. Ten o’clock, and the sun lying warmly on face and arms and hands, the birds clamorous, the garden crackling with spring growth. And, sitting there, abandoning for the moment the matter in hand of writing to an old colleague, she was filled with pleasure, all else for the moment driven out: time and fate and what might come. Pleasure in the senses, in what lay before her eyes, simply in being. She had always liked to be out of doors, had resented the incarceration of the winter, had been thankful for work that was carried on as much in the open air as out of it. So that, although in all her life there can hardly have been a day when she would not have been at work by ten o’clock in the morning, there had been many days when she had been, as now, outside.
    She would have worked, if she had been permitted, until there was nothing she could usefully do. Inactivity had always annoyed her. When, from time to time, she had had jobs that seemed to her inadequate in their requirements, she had found herself more to do. She had never had high aspirations – Directorships, Chairs, were not for her. She had taken what was offered, been out of a job quite often, given her services on many digs for nothing, worked on necessary projects for a pittance. The small capital sum left her by her parents had made this possible; that, and the