She shaved her legs, as she did every third day, and the slender under-pits of her arms. She washed her hair, as every third day she washed it, and left it to dry in the artificial Africa of two electric bars. These habits were her own. As a child, her mother had washed her hair every fortnight.

Outside a fine drizzle penetrated the yellow fog.

She had a lamb chop for dinner and thought as she ate it of the beautiful white curled creature it had been. This did not sicken her, only made her sorrowful. She enjoyed the meat of the lamb even in some way more because she liked what it had been and pitied it.

She had once in her teens tried to become a vegetarian, but she had vomited and bent double with terrible pains in her stomach for weeks. She gave it up.

Her mother had mocked both her attempt and its failure. She had dragged Rachaela to a dish of burnt fish fingers. ‘Stop all this bloody nonsense.’

Her mother had had to bring her up alone.

She was thinking of her mother too much.

It did not hurt, but it unsettled her.

She had never said goodbye to her mother, that was the difficulty, perhaps. The freedom had only been spontaneous. Perhaps she should have kissed the embalmed corpse farewell, on the brow, as in one of the more sensitive old-fashioned horror films. The embalming had not looked like her mother. Something had gone wrong and they had pushed her mother’s rather large stomach up into the chest so that she appeared stout and matronly in a way that, in life, she never had. The rouge on her cheeks was patchy. Not dead but sleeping—no: decidedly dead.

She missed the cat, which had been used to sitting on the edge of Rachaela’s bath, sometimes pawing the water in surprise. Or on the table, decorous, begging for nothing.

Perhaps she should find a more lucrative job. Where? Who would take her on? She had no experience. She was twenty-nine. Should she work in a wine bar now? She thought of the noise and the hustling, the broken glasses and drunks. No, the bookshop was safe. It had paid for the chop.

Rachaela sighed.

Beyond the curtains the fog was giving way. She could see across the green to a gaudy Sunday bus moving sluggishly westward.

On Monday morning Rachaela walked down a clear grey Lizard Street and up to the black lions. She entered the building and went to the reception desk. Three minutes later she was in the efficient lift which tore her up into the building’s cranium.

Without the fog, it was possible to see, from a window, the bookshop cowering under its dirty roof five storeys down. It was dwarfed.

Mr Soames’s secretary greeted her brightly and took her at once into the office, like a valued client.