Free The Echoing Stones by Celia Fremlin

it, but Norris wasn’t to know that, was he?
    As it happened, the problem didn’t arise. Norris was nowhere to be seen. Well, he wouldn’t be, would he, it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, and so Arnold was able to take down the notice unobserved and hide it away beneath the counter all ready for some future unfortunate occasion. After this he set in place the tables, all fifteen of them, for the expected visitors. Slightly inexpertly, he spread the blue-and-white check cloths and set out the crockery, and the silly little vases of articificial flowers. He’d never liked them and neither had Mildred, but fresh flowers were out of the question, pressed for time as they always were.
    It seemed to be Arnold’s lucky day. Pauline and Tracey turned up, both of them, right on time, and the two guides from the Magic and Witchcraft place also turned up; ladies far from young, but effervescing with good will and energy, though one of them had left her handbag on the bus. Neither Magic nor Witchcraft were much help here and she couldn’t work the payphones either, so Arnold had to ring up the bus station for her, which took up quite a bit of his precious time.
    Still, it all worked out in the end, and though the information purveyed by the Witchcraft ladies couldn’t,in Arnold’s opinion, stand up to even the most cursory of historical scrutiny, it was nevertheless inordinately popular and drew the crowds in a most satisfactory way. This left Arnold free to supervise the opening of the Tea Room, and in particular to unwrap and put on display the supermarket cakes and biscuits which he had dashed into town to buy that same morning. This had been his habit ever since Mildred, and with her the option of home-made scones, had disappeared. It had seemed to him the only possible solution to his problem, though an extravagant one, leaving no profit margin at all. Sometimes, too, as he clawed and tore and wrenched at the plastic packaging, he wondered whether the system saved any time, either? These Chocolate-Coconut Fancies, for example, each of them done up in a tight little plastic parcel which itself nested in its own personalised compartment of a hermetically-sealed plastic container of savage toughness and impenetrability. It was like a fortress specially designed by the military to withstand assualt by scissors, penknife or carving-knife; and as he jabbed and wrenched, Arnold found himself indulging in a time-and-motion vision of Mildred and her mixing-bowl. All she’d seemed to need was a big wooden spoon with which she effortlessly stirred everything around, and, hey presto, there were four dozen freshly-baked scones, all ready to serve. And she hadn’t had to drive into town first and find somewhere to park. Women had it easy …
    However, with the help of Pauline and Tracey, who were young enough never to have known any other way of getting at food, and whose nimble fingers were therefore totally adapted to the task, the job did get done.
    By opening-time too; and so Arnold was free to wander out into the sushine with no future duties for the time being. No specific duties, that is. Naturally he had to keep an eye on things, see that nothing went spectacularly wrong, and that the visitors who seemed unable to readsigns like EXIT and TOILETS and DO NOT FEED THE FISH were correctly guided and admonished. And then there were the lost children, of course. The matching-up of parents with children trying not to be found was only a little more difficult that the matching-up of lost and crying toddlers with parents already too hysterical to think straight. If the worst came to the worst, he dumped the tinies on Joyce, who sat them behind the counter and let them play with the ticket-dispenser during the slack times when it wasn’t dispensing.
    *
    The success of the Magic and Witchcraft ladies was really most gratifying. Watching the crowds surging up, bemused and happy, from the dungeon, which was where the standard tour ended,