Saturday

      The rug was exactly the right red – not too orange and not too purple, but that lovely glowing shade between the two which was so difficult to find. It would look marvellous in the dining room.

      “I’d like it, please,” said Anna. Clearly it was her lucky day.

      She glanced at her reflection in a glass-fronted showcase full of table linen as the assistant led her to his desk. Her green coat – not passed on to her by friends but bought by herself – hung easily from her shoulders. The printed silk scarf, the well-cut dark hair and the reasonably confident expression were all in keeping with the status of the store around her. A well-heeled young Englishwoman out shopping. Well, she thought, nowadays I suppose that’s what I am.

      While she wrote out a cheque and the assistant copied her name and address for the rug’s delivery, she imagined telling Richard about it. It would make their flat almost complete. All that was needed now were little things like cushions and lampshades, and perhaps, if Richard finished his script soon, they would be able to choose those together.

      She became aware of the assistant hesitating over her name on the cheque.

      “Excuse me asking, madam,” he said, “but is that any relation to the gentleman who writes for television?”

      “My husband,” she said and felt the usual fatuous, self-congratulatory grin spread over her face as she said it. Ridiculous, she thought. I should be used to it by now.

      “Really?” The assistant’s face was pink with pleasure. “I must tell the wife. We watch all his plays, you know. Wherever does he get his ideas from, madam? Do you help him at all with his writing?”

      Anna laughed. “No,” she said. “He helps me.”

      “Really? Do you write as well then?”

      Why did I ever start on this? she thought. “I work in television,” she said. “But mostly I just rewrite little bits of other people’s plays. And if I get stuck, I ask my husband when I get home.”

      The assistant, after considering this, rightly dismissed it. “When that big serial of his was on last year,” he said, “the wife and I stayed home for it every Saturday night. So did just about everyone else our way. It was so exciting – not like anything we’d ever seen.”

      Anna nodded and smiled. It had been Richard’s first great success.

      “We got married on the strength of that,” she said.

      She remembered the register office in Chelsea, next to the foot clinic. Richard’s parents down from the north of England, Mama over from Berlin, their own friends from the BBC, cousin Otto passing out at the reception and saying it was the heat, but it had really been the champagne. And the taxi coming and Richard and herself driving off and leaving them all behind.

      “It was quite exciting for us too,” she said.

      When she walked out of the store into Tottenham Court Road, the world exploded into noise and light. A new building was going up next door and the sunshine trembled with the din of pneumatic drills. One of the workmen had taken off his shirt in spite of the October chill and winked at her as she passed. Behind him the last remains of a bombed building, scraps of wallpaper still adhering to the bricks and plaster, crumbled to a bulldozer. Soon there would be no bomb damage at all left visible in London. And about time too, she thought, eleven years after the war.

      She crossed the road to get away from the noise. Here the shops were more or less unchanged – shabby and haphazard, selling things you could not imagine anyone wanting to buy. The Woolworth’s, too, was much as she remembered it. She had come here