6

      Oswald and Son, greengrocers, began trading in 1947, from a shop on the outskirts of Exeter. Forty years later, the business having been left high and dry by the opening of a supermarket half a mile away, James Oswald, son of the son, was forced to shut down. Not long after, a new traffic system narrowed the pavement outside what had once been the Oswalds’ shop and clogged the road with cars and lorries from rush hour to rush hour. Marooned in what had become a moribund location, the former Oswald premises were left untenanted for years. The windows disappeared under billboards; the roof began to disintegrate. Then, one Sunday afternoon in November, while stuck in a traffic jam, Alice noticed the derelict shop.

      At this point Alice had been working with Katharine Giles for no more than a couple of months. The operation was being run from the kitchen of Katharine’s house and a lock-up garage near Katharine’s house, an unsatisfactory arrangement but one to which there seemed to be no affordable alternative. Until, that is, Alice saw the shop and decided, feeling the seed of an idea instantly taking root, to take a closer look. She picked off a corner of a poster to peer through the sooty glass; she went round the back and found a small yard and a loading bay. The building had been neglected for so long there wasn’t even an agent’s board on it, but Alice soon tracked them down and made them an offer: she and her partner would refurbish the shop and pay the rates on it, but would pay no rent; they would have a lease for a year and after that they would be on one month’s notice to quit, should a long-term tenant come along. This offer, submitted in writing, was unacceptable. A second letter, elaborating on the humanitarian nature of their enterprise, and for good measure reiterating that the restoration of these dilapidated premises could only be of benefit to the landlords, who at present were lumbered with an asset of negligible commercial value, was likewise rebutted in the fewest possible words.

      Then Alice went directly, in person, to the owners of the property, and that was that, because no one, however obtuse or tightfisted he may be, can resist the ardent goodness of Alice. Confronted with Alice, when Alice’s mind is made up, no man could argue for long. When she sits down and looks at you with those unwavering deep green eyes, you know that here is a woman who is sincere and highly principled and absolutely intent on achieving her purpose. And, of course, she’s attractive, too, very attractive, which helps in the disarming process. To refuse her would be ungracious. You’d feel that you’d behaved unworthily in taking issue with her, and the landlords duly, rapidly, acceded to her request. It’s the same when she’s drumming up donations and sponsorship. Nobody ever says ‘No’ when Alice visits in person. They must dread her visitations, the lovely and implacable spirit of charity.

      Before the year’s end Alice and Katharine took over the shop, and at the time of Henry’s death that’s where they were, flanked on one side by a hairdresser who somehow stayed solvent on the revenue from three customers per day and on the other by a boarded-up betting shop. Every morning Alice would set off in their resprayed post-office van to drive around the county or even further afield, gathering discarded books from libraries and colleges and anywhere else that had surplus printed matter to offload. In the afternoon, if she hadn’t returned too late, she helped Katharine to sort the haul into packages for dispersal to various wretched zones of the earth, where kids who owned nothing would learn about the world and the English language from out-of-date guidebooks and novels with pages missing, and battered old dictionaries and atlases held together with tape and glue applied by Alice and Katharine and their ever-changing crew of volunteers. It was also Alice’s job to phone the regular donors, to cold-call the potential benefactors. Above the desk – a castoff from the insurance broker in the next street – was stuck a picture of a wizened woman sitting on an oil drum in front of a shack of corrugated iron. The bags under her eyes were like tiny leather purses, but she was only forty years old, said Katharine. She lived in Mozambique and at the time the picture was taken she was learning to read, helped by the books that Alice and Katharine had sent. Now she was running a mobile library, taking books to her neighbours on a donkey-drawn cart. All round the walls there were photographs like this one, displayed like images of the saints. By the door there was one of a pretty eight-year-old. Before school she had to work on her parents’ scrap of land; when school was finished she picked up the hoe and the spade again. Of an evening, when the outdoors work was done, she had chores to do in the house, and then her homework, but when the homework was completed she sat down at the table and read to her parents by the light of a kerosene lamp. Her name was Josephine. In the photograph she was sitting at the table, the household’s one table, with the unlit lamp beside her, grinning over a ragged copy of Tarka the Otter. It came from a man in Appledore, Katharine explained, delighted at the extraordinariness of the book’s destiny.

      Thousands of books passed through her warehouse every year, and Katharine seemed to know the destination of each one. She was in her mid-fifties then. Her son was a layabout junkie and she was cursed with sciatica, but Katharine’s enthusiasm could not be dimmed. Each donation of books was received as a kid would receive a Christmas present, and she packed them up as if the books were as precious as barrels of water. Katharine believed that the day was coming in which everyone would have access to the books they need for their education. What’s more, the inequality of men and women would soon be eliminated, all over the world, if not in her lifetime, then within the lifetime of her son’s generation. She really did believe this would happen, and to play her part in the realisation of this vision she worked like a demon, earning barely enough to pay the mortgage, with a small surplus for handouts to the freeloading son. We read about gold-diggers: the lusty young girlfriend of the rich and ailing dotard; the errant wife with an eye for the life insurance and a violent boyfriend in tow; the high-maintenance flint-heart, siphoning hubby’s bank account until the well runs dry, whereupon it’ll be time to snare another sap. These women exist. But a pathological love of cash is predominantly a male vice. For most women, life is not about money. What tends to be important with women is value of a different kind, the value of life itself.

      After we married, we lived modestly: small house, boring car, two weeks’ holiday a year. As long as we had sufficient cash to cover the outgoings and save a little, Alice was content with that. We were both content with it. And when we began to consider changing our lives, we did the sums and decided together that it was the right thing to do: we could afford it, we should take the chance. And so, in perfect agreement, we determinedly took a wrong turn. Had Alice shown the slightest misgiving about the dip in household income, we wouldn’t have done it – and then, two or three years down the line, perhaps we’d have taken a different wrong turn.

      One day, in a queue at the supermarket checkout, Alice got talking to Margaret Whittam, and a month later, such is Alice’s charm, we were guests at the Whittams’ house-warming party. As the party was breaking up, we stood with George at the door of the conservatory, looking out at the garden. ‘The job might not be great but it’s tolerable, yes? You don’t look like a man at his wits’ end.’

      ‘It could be better.’

      ‘For ninety-five per cent of people it could be better,’ George countered, raising a hand to stay Alice’s objection. ‘But the time has come to make a change. You feel that. I understand.’

      ‘We both feel it,’ Alice interjected.

      ‘Fine, fine. But the job is bearable, for the time being. So my advice would be: don’t rush. Think carefully.’

      ‘We have,’ said Alice.

      ‘You must see a lot of unhappy people in your line of work,’ he remarked, emanating the wisdom of the life-seasoned policeman, though he’d yet to touch forty.

      ‘Nothing but, most days.’

      ‘Well, you’d get a lot more of that.’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘That’s