Mrs. East slid the pack of cards out of the drawer. Usually, we played chase the ace, trumps, or gin rummy. Mrs. East liked to win too. “Before the war the manor took a lot of staff from Marlborough and villages, maids, gardeners, all that.”

I dabbed the last crust in the puddle of bacon grease while she shuffled, the cards making ripping noises between her hands, which were all knuckle and vein and gleaming ring. I slid a B&H from the pack, lit it, and passed it to her, and then lit one for myself.

“Poacher.”

I had a look at my hand. It was not bad, not bad at all. Mrs. East ran her tongue over her teeth and exhaled smoke out of her nose in two plumes, like a dragon. She fanned the cards and studied her hand, looked up.

“Maybe you’ll find the diamonds, Andy.”

CHAPTER 7

TELEPHONE BOX

Peter was fine, Peter was almost definitely fine. I swept my trolley down the frozen aisle under the neon strip lights. Peter was having a small existential collapse, an episode, hopefully somewhere warm where it wasn’t pissing down.

After work I had gone home, and then, unable to settle, I had come here. The supermarket was open till midnight. I liked it best near closing time. Without the hordes, it was a soothing place to wander, a hypnotic dreamscape, a place I felt myself largely absent, as though crowded out by the spirits of my ancestors, the thousands of generations who had starved in winter and tottered about in rags and watched their children die of scurvy, who knew that the moment I was living was an anomaly—a brief comfort-saturated flaring in which the human race burnt through everything it had, like a wild sailor on shore leave—and who wanted to enjoy the moment, to roam the aisles of the supermarket and choose between thirty-three types of bread.

The past, what I had escaped, what I had lost, were not what I wanted to think about. Peter could have any number of reasons for going AWOL. Instead, I lingered over toiletries and cleaning products and condiments, hand hovering as I selected and rejected. Teams of people had spent many hours ensuring each item was as convincing as possible. I let the waterfall of words—jalapeño, Californian, corn-fed—wash over me, maneuvering my little trolley, comforted by the anonymous presence of others. Was I close to running out of Worcestershire sauce? How were stocks of dried goods? These were questions I could answer.