“It’s sort of tall and pointed,” said Lulu, “and quite sort of scholarly and stern. You want to watch your grammar when you’re around a thinking cap.”

“I had thought so.” Mr. Goncharoff nodded. “I shall miss you, Miss Atwater. Take today off. There will not be so much for you to do before the end of the month, so I hope you are able to use your thinking cap to good effect.”

Lulu left the shop and walked up the hill and around the corner to her house. It was all very well, she thought, for Mr. Goncharoff to make jokes about thinking caps and decisions; Mr. Goncharoff had already made most of the big decisions of his life, and made them, on the whole, successfully. He had decided to move away from his city on the Volga in the southwest of Russia, and go first to Paris, and then to the northwest of London; he had decided to mix his knowledge of art and history, which was extensive, with his business acumen, which was adequate, to pursue a career in antiques, which had kept him interested and supported his family for the last three decades; today he had decided to sell his shop on the side street off Haverstock Hill, and retire to a place where his only decisions from now on would be whether to sit in the sun or the shade for his morning coffee or whether to dine at home on the calamares that Irena would buy from the market or to walk to the restaurant in town for paella. For Lulu, it was more complicated. She was sure that she did not—as Mr. Goncharoff had hinted and as her parents would doubtless begin once again to suggest—want to go back to university. But if not university, what then? Lulu’s big decisions in life lay ahead of her; and the harder she tried to make them, the more, it seemed, her brain froze in confusion.

It was not until she had reached her house and was standing outside the front door that she realized she did not want to go in. Sophie was there, awaiting a call from her agent—or, worse, having already received a call from her agent and being either ecstatic or heartbroken at the result—and Lulu had not the energy for Sophie right now. She sat herself down on the low stone wall outside the house, and squinted into the summer sun, trying to decide just where it was she did want to go on this disconcerting morning of sudden and unfestive freedom. A park or coffee shop, she thought, would be too public; a library too redolent of the academic world into which she knew her parents would now try to urge her. Borough Market, on the other side of London, its stalls heaped with vegetables and spices, a luxury for days of leisure, was only worth going to during the weekend. After a while, she realized that in this instance if in no other she knew exactly where it was that she wanted to go and what she wanted to do, and a moment’s calculation told her that the coast was clear: her mother, she knew, would be safely ensconced in Sophie’s old room seeing clients for most of the day, and her father was at his office in Russell Square. She stood up, stretched in the sun, and began to unchain her bicycle from the railing.