The work was easy but dull, unpacking boxes of chocolate and crisps, counting coins into small plastic bags for the bank, sorting through things in the fridge which had gone over their Best Before, then moving them into the freezer section with a reduced price scrawled on their label in marker pen.

‘How about Monday, ten until four, and Wednesday mornings, and starting back with your Saturdays now exams are done with.’

‘Sounds good.’ I didn’t push for more. I had Edie and the Davenports now and the last thing I wanted was to be cooped up here arranging bags of Wotsits and Discos when I could be at The Cliff House eating slices of apple and lying by the pool.

‘Right, I should be getting to the club now, but I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll look forward to it. It’ll be good to have company again.’

‘Tomorrow?’ A mild panic took hold of me. I was supposed to be going up to The Cliff House. ‘Would it be okay if I started on Monday? I’ve got something on tomorrow which I can’t really get out of.’

‘Something exciting?’

I shrugged.

He dropped the filthy cloth into the bucket beside him and the sudsy grey water slopped up the sides and splashed on to the discoloured vinyl floor. ‘I heard your mother’s got more hours at the white house?’

I nodded.

‘London folk,’ he said, then wrinkled his nose as if he’d smelt something nasty. ‘Licence to print money where they come from.’

‘Do you know them?’

‘She comes in here for cigarettes and a bottle of something every now and then. The cigarettes I have to order in specially. Coloured like a box of felt tips and wrapped in gold. Normal fags too common. More money than sense some people. He came in with her once. Didn’t want to talk. Cock-of-the-walk type. I borrowed one of his books from the library a while back.’ Ted picked up the bucket and pushed through the fringe of red and white plastic strips that marked the doorway into the back room. ‘You know,’ he called back. ‘To see what all the fuss is about.’

He tipped the bucket down the sink and it glugged loudly as it went down the plug. I imagined the particles of dirt collecting on the stained porcelain and silting up the U-bend.

‘The Bird Sang Twice in Winter or something. Or maybe it was Cried Twice in Summer. Some noise made by birds and a season. Anyways,’ he said, as he walked back through the plastic strips, ‘doesn’t matter what the damn thing was called because it was a load of stuff and nonsense.’

Ted walked past me and went behind the counter. I absentmindedly straightened the chocolate bars on the shelf nearest me so their edges were perfectly in line.

‘Her heart wept for the relentless march of time,’ he said with all the melodrama of a village pantomime. ‘A race to nothing. The continuous desire to freeze fractured moments of grabbed perfection. Stepping stones to eventual non-existence.’ He looked at me with a knotted brow. ‘Who has time to sit and read rubbish like that? Page two, that was. Nearly three hundred pages all like that and not a story to speak of.’ He shook his head. ‘Give me a Dick Francis or a Harold Robbins any day. Books without a story aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.’