‘I am afraid you will have to take your breakfast tea without milk, Mamma,’ Agnes sighs. Her mother raises an ear trumpet to catch her words. ‘I shall have to go and fetch some more later …’

‘Oh, Agnes. Do you never keep your wits about you, dear?’

‘I did not forget,’ she explains irritably. ‘I used it all making Cedric—’

‘We won’t be able to afford milk or anything else, will we, if you carry on ignoring customers like that?’

‘Ignoring … ?’

Mamma jerks her head in the direction of the window.

Peering through the thicket of silhouettes tacked to the glass are the startlingly bright eyes of a young man.

‘He’s been there for at least five minutes, knocking.’

Agnes is aghast. Today is market day. The sound of his banging must have been swallowed by the general bustle from outside. ‘Why did you not call me?’ she demands as she dashes to the door.

Mamma does not reply, but drops her ear trumpet and picks up last week’s newspaper.

Agnes is old enough to be this young man’s mother.

She feels antiquated, foolish, sat before him in her studio with her spare pair of scissors. Will he go to a coffee house with his friends after this, and joke about the old maid in Orange Grove?

She can almost picture them: their checked waistcoats and greased hair. Laughing. Laughing like the magpies outside.

But she is spoiling the experience for herself. This is her first chance to do a real piece of work since Mr Boyle’s appointment, and she should relish it. The youth has an attractive profile, worthy of a place in her duplicate book. She glances from the paper to his face, enjoying as she always does the crisp sound of that first cut.

‘You seem rather a young man, to be having your shade cut,’ she ventures. ‘I thought it was all daguerreotypes with your generation.’

‘Well—’ He turns to face her. Remembers, too late, that he isn’t meant to move. ‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘Never mind. Just look to the side again if you would, sir.’

‘Ned, please. No need to stand upon ceremony with me.’

How strangely the young conduct themselves nowadays! He is asking her, a woman he has just met, to call him by his Christian name. Not even that, an abbreviation of the name. She pulls the paper towards the jaws of her scissors and works on his lips. It is a shame that she cannot capture the tentative beginnings of a moustache that sprout beneath his nose.

‘Ned, then. What prompted you to come to me for a shade?’

‘It’s my gran. She has a whole wall full of silhouettes. Every family member you can think of. I did give her my photograph, but the old dear wasn’t pleased with it.’ He laughs. ‘Bit of a blow to my pride, eh? She said it looked odd amongst all those shadows.’