“It came with instructions. The point is to scrape it against someone’s nose, well, the bit between their nostrils. Apparently it makes murderers go away.”

“If they keep still while you get your comb out. This is pretty, though.” She was looking at a dainty silver locket on a thin chain. “It looks like it might be valuable.”

“If you open it up, there’s a piece of hair inside as well.”

“Who sent it?”

“Dunno. It arrived wrapped in a newspaper article about have-a-go heroes. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“And these are exciting.” She was looking at a pack of pornographic playing cards. She inspected the picture of a woman cupping her pneumatic breasts. “Men,” she said.

I shivered in the heat.

Nick Shale arrived just after nine, by which time I had had a bath and changed into jeans and a yellow cotton shirt. I wanted to look neat and clean, to go with my flat. I piled my hair on top of my head and dabbed perfume behind my ears.

He was wearing running shorts, and when he took off his canvas backpack, I saw there was a dark V of sweat down the back of his jersey.

“Here we are-I bought you these.” He handed me a brown paper bag. “Apricots from the stall down the road. I couldn’t resist them.”

I flushed. It was like giving me flowers. I didn’t think prospective flat buyers were meant to give presents to the owner. The apricots were golden and downy, almost luminous.

“Thank you,” I said self-consciously.

“Aren’t you going to offer me one?”

So we ate them, standing in the narrow kitchen, and he said he’d bring me strawberries next time. I pretended not to notice the bit about next time.

“Don’t you want to look round the flat again?”

“Sure.”

He wandered from room to room, staring up at ceilings as if he could see interesting patterns on their surfaces. There were several cobwebs that Louise and I hadn’t noticed drifting in the corners. In the bedroom, he opened the fitted wardrobe and gazed for a moment into my laundry basket, a funny little smile on his face. Then he straightened up and looked at me.

“I could do with a glass of wine.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then it’s lucky I brought my own.”

He stooped down and opened the backpack, bringing out a slim green bottle. I touched it: It was still cold, dribbles of moisture running down its neck.

“Do you have a corkscrew?”

I wasn’t feeling especially pleased about this, but I gave him one. He turned his back to me to open it. I handed him a glass and a tumbler and he poured the wine into both, with a very slow and steady hand so that none spilled. He told me he lived in Norfolk but needed to buy a flat in London because he often stayed for two or three nights during the week.

“So my flat could become a pied-à-terre,” I said. “What an honor.”

“Cheers.”

“I’ve got to go out now,” I said, lying of course. My weekend appointment book was empty.

“It’s a bit late, isn’t it?” he said, draining his glass.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t see why I needed an excuse for a man I didn’t know.

“You should take your bottle,” I said.

“No, you keep it,” he said, turning to leave.

“What about the flat?”

“I like it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

I heard the door close downstairs. I liked him well enough. I wondered what his handwriting looked like.

TEN

The next day I felt like a robot in class. I was doing a pretty reasonable impersonation of a primary school teacher. The robot got on with a whole-class lesson on letter formation while somewhere inside I was going over things in my mind. I needed to get rid of the flat. That came back and back the way a tune does, nagging at you. I had the tantalizing sense that if I could close the door on that unlovable bit of living space hacked out of an unpleasant house on a noisy road, then I would be able to close the door on other things as well. What I really ought to do was make the flat more secure, but that seemed wrong, like washing a broken bottle. The way to make that flat better and safer was to leave it. Nothing else would do. Starting next weekend I would start seriously looking at other flats.

I’d been too young when I’d bought this one. The money I’d been left by Dad when he died had felt like Monopoly money. There was too much of it to be real. He had said to me to buy somewhere to live; it was almost like a dying command. He was a man who thought that if you owned your own property, then you were safe; the world couldn’t touch you, no matter what happened. So I was a good daughter-although of course I wasn’t a daughter at all anymore, since I had no parents left; I was just me and very lonely and scared-and I did as he had told me. Very quickly. And since I’d moved to London from a quiet village, my only impulse had been to buy something that was in the real city, where things were happening, where there were shops, markets, people, noise. I’d certainly found that.

“Zoe?”

I was woken up out of what felt to me like sleep, and what to an observer would have looked like feverish activity (I was almost surprised to look at my hand and see a piece of chalk and at the blackboard to see a large b and p that I had carefully and unconsciously traced). I looked round. It was Christine, one of our special-needs teachers. The needs in our school were very special. You would see Christine sitting at improvised desks in the corridor with children suffering from an educational disability: abuse, malnutrition, having recently arrived from a war zone in eastern Europe or central Africa, that sort of thing.

“Pauline asked to see you,” she said. “It’s urgent. I’ll take over here.”

“Why?”

“There’s a mother with her. I think she’s very upset about something.”

“Oh.”

I felt a dull ache in my stomach, that sense of an imminent blow. I looked at the class. What could it be? The turnover in our class was amazing. People moved their children away, sometimes out of the country, often without a word of warning. Other troubled children quickly took their place. We had children under court orders, with social service files. I made a quick count. Thirty-one. They were all here. No toddler had wandered off home without my noticing. There was no medication I should have administered. Nobody was foaming at the mouth. I felt better. How bad could it be?

As I walked the short distance to Pauline’s office, I thought how, if I hated my flat, at least I loved the school. In the small vestibule there was a pool of water made out of bricks with big fat fish in it. I dipped my fingers in it for luck, as I always did when I passed. The school was by the side of another of London’s arterial roads. It was shaken all day by lorries making their way up toward East Anglia or down across the river to Kent and the south coast. To get to the nearest bit of scrubby park, you had to lead a crocodile of children along the road and across two dangerous junctions. But that was what I loved about it. It was something from another world, like a monastery, in the middle of the noise and dust. Even when the children were running around screaming it felt like a refuge.

Maybe it was just those stupid fish that made me feel like that, and I’d probably got it all wrong anyway. I remembered some book of facts I’d read as a child on how water conducted sound better than air. The fish probably spent their entire lives moaning about the noise of the traffic and wishing they were somewhere more desirable. I tried to remember what it was like when I lay submerged in the bath rinsing my hair. Could I hear the lorries hurtling past outside? I didn’t remember.

Pauline was standing by the half-open door with a woman I recognized. They weren’t speaking or doing anything. They had obviously just been waiting in silence for me to arrive. I saw the woman every day at the end of school, hovering at the door of the class. Elinor’s mother. I nodded a greeting at her, but she didn’t catch my eye. I tried to picture Elinor this morning. Had she been upset? I didn’t think so. I tried to picture the girl in the class I had just left behind. Nothing unusual occurred to me.