“Think you might take the place?” he asked, his mouth full.

“We are seriously considering it,” she said. “Would the desks inside be part of the price?”

“Desks?” he replied in puzzlement.

“There were a pair of desks still there,” she said nonchalantly, not wanting him to investigate it any further. “We thought we could take them over with the office. It would save us some bother.”

“Oh, those bloody things,” he said, remembering. “Makes no difference to me. They were more trouble to move than to leave, so we left them. They’re not moveables if you can’t move them.”

“Did you know the previous tenants?” asked Gwen.

“I’ve been in this building thirty-five years,” said Mr. MacPherson, taking a sip from his thermos and exhaling in satisfaction. “I knew them.”

“How long have they been gone?”

“Ah, that would be end of thirty-two, wouldn’t it? Or maybe thirty-three. Or thirty-one.”

“And no one has occupied it since?”

Mr. MacPherson shrugged.

“Well, then I would think that Mr. Maxwell would be glad to have us in there,” said Gwen.

“Mr. Maxwell will barely even notice as long as the rent gets paid on time,” said Mr. MacPherson. “Let me know if you’re moving in, and I’ll have some more keys made up.”

“Will do,” said Gwen.

She walked up to Oxford Street and purchased a sandwich and a plum from a tea shop. It was abysmally hot, and she could feel the sun burning into her fair skin. She walked quickly back to the office, put her lunch on her desk, and heated up the tea kettle on the hot plate on top of the old filing cabinet.

It was churlish of her to whine about her lack of education when she had so much of everything else, she realised. She had been so accustomed to the aristocratic life that it never occurred to her that she was missing anything of importance. The whirlwind of the seasons, the thrill of romance—and then the bloody war had to come and destroy everything.

Could she go back to school now? Did people do that?

Did women do that?

Could Gwen herself do that, tied up as she was with running a struggling business while fighting to regain full custody of her son?

No, she thought. There isn’t enough time. She’d have to settle for holding Iris to her offer of informal tutelage.

Library skills and martial arts, the beginnings to a proper education for every postwar widowed mum in her late twenties.

She would start a movement once she had Little Ronnie’s status secured, she decided. She’d round up all the girls who had found new purpose during the war and then were kicked out once the men got demobbed and came back to their old jobs.

Yes, and she was exactly what they would not be looking for in a leader, having spent her war either in her titled in-laws’ country estate or the sanatorium.

She finished her sandwich, then bit slowly into the plum, tilting her head back to let the juices flow across her tongue. It was her first of the summer, and between rationing and her time in treatment, there hadn’t been many over the previous six years. She ate it slowly, concentrating her entire being on each bite, making them small so that the simple experience of eating a plum would last as long as it could.