Free The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

listened to the drumming of tap water, followed by a metallic note as the red Coronation tin containing biscuits was banged down on the dresser.
    ‘We’ve got a blue one at ours. It’s Westminster Abbeythe same, but the procession goes all the way round the tin.’
    ‘I’ll light the heater,’ said Florence, unused to idleness.
    ‘My mam doesn’t think those paraffin heaters are safe.’
    ‘There’s no danger as long as you’re careful to clean them properly and don’t allow a draught from two different sides at once,’ Florence replied, screwing the cap of the container hard down. She must be allowed to be in the right sometimes.
    The heater did not seem to be quite itself that evening. There was no draught, as far as that could ever be said in Hardborough; and yet the blue flame shot up for a moment, as though reaching for something, and sank back lower than before. It went by the perhaps extravagant brand name of Nevercold. She had only just managed to get it adjusted when Christine came in seriously with the tea-things, arranged on a large black and gold tray.
    ‘I like this old tray,’ she said. ‘You can put that down for me in your will.’
    ‘I don’t know that I want to think about my will yet, Christine. I’m a business woman in middle life.’
    ‘Did that come from Japan?’
    The tray represented two old men, fishing peaceably by moonlight.
    ‘No, it’s Chinese lacquer. My grandfather brought itback from Nanking. He was a great traveller. I’m not sure that they know how to make lacquer like this in China any more.’
    By now the Nevercold was burning rather more steadily. The teapot basked in front of it, the room grew close, and the difference in age between Christine and Florence seemed less, as though they were no more than two stages of the same woman’s life. In Hardborough an evening like this, when the sea could only just be heard, counted as silence. They had, therefore, warmth and quiet; and yet gradually Christine, who had been sitting back, as totally at ease as a rag doll, began to stiffen and fidget. Of course, a child of her age could hardly be expected to sit still for long.
    After a while she got up and went into the backhouse – to make sure of the back door, she said. Florence had an impulse to stop her going out of the room, which was proved to be ridiculous when she came back almost immediately. A faint whispering, scratching and tapping could now be heard from the upstairs passage, and something appeared to be dragged hither and thither, like a heavy kitten’s toy on a string. Florence did not pretend to herself, any more than she had ever done, that nothing was wrong.
    ‘You’re quite comfortable, aren’t you, Christine?’
    The little girl replied that she was. Unaccountably, she used her ‘best’ voice, the one urged by her class teacheron those who had to play Florence Nightingale, or the Virgin Mary. She was listening painfully, as though her ears were stretched or pricked.
    ‘I’ve been wondering if I could help you at all with your eleven plus,’ said Florence conversationally. ‘Something towards it – I mean, we might read something together.’
    ‘There’s no reading to do. They give you some pictures, and you have to say which is the odd one out. Or they give you numbers, like 8, 5, 12, 9, 22, 16 and you have to say which number comes next.’
    Just as she had failed to understand Milo, so Florence was unable to tell which number came next. She had been born too long ago. In spite of the Nevercold, the temperature seemed to have dropped perceptibly. She turned the heater up to its highest register.
    ‘You’re not cold, are you?’
    ‘I’m always pale,’ Christine replied loftily. ‘There is no need to turn that thing up for me.’ She was trembling. ‘My little brother is pale as well. He and I are supposed to be quite alike.’
    Neither of them was prepared to say that they wished to protect the other. That would have been to admit fear