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signed snapshot of two Brylcreem boys with their underpants outside their trousers?”
    “A great deal more than fifteen pounds,” I said, heart lifting. Maybe this was a sign? Maybe it was like my dad used to tell me – that luck came in streaks? Run of bad, a run of good.
    I caught a glimpse of the yellow plumber’s invoice atop my in-tray . Further down the pile, two matching yellow demands and a Beevers & Boatman letterhead peeked out a little.
    Christ, let my luck be changing.
     
    “Fur-mur fob-mim oof ,” Jane said later that evening, to which I replied “Beg pardon?” for the obvious reason. “You robbed him?” she said, lifting her mouth up from the pillow a bit, and then added another small oof noise.
    “ Robbed – I didn’t rob him,” I said. “It’s not like he – whoopsie – like he came in and I clunked him over the head with a cardboard Chewbacca and nicked his suitcase.”
    The whoopsie was because the essential oils I was massaging into Jane’s shoulders had got a bit runny and began getting under my watch-strap. I warmed up a spot more liquid between my palms with a noisy rubbing motion and resumed the long broad strokes along Jane’s pale shoulders. “I offered him fifteen pounds and he took it,” I went on. “Fair and square.”
    “ Fair ?” Jane said, twisting to look up at me. I shushed her back into position. “Well then I hope you never get old and have to sell any of your –”
    “Oh c’mon, shush shush, this is meant to be relaxing.”
    The lounge dropped into quiet once again, just Michael Nyman’s score to The Piano tinkling softly from the ( £ 10 o.n.o.) stereo. Lana was asleep in her cot next door, a chunky baby monitor propped up by Jane’s pillow crackling murmurs and sighs. The flat smelled of our weekly date night. Baby poo smothered with oils, candles and clean towels. Propped up behind her, straddling the small of Jane’s back, I rubbed and smoothed her soft bathtime skin and tried to enjoy the moment.
    Jane shifted a little, brushing bath-wet hair from her face.
    “ How is it fair?” she said. “ Fair , surely, would have been tellinghim what a picture like that was worth and offering him two hundred pounds? Or a hundred at least? That would have been fair . Do you know where he got it? Maybe they’re his wife’s collection .”
    “Wasn’t very ladylike stuff.”
    “Right, we going to have that conversation again? When we met, I had more copies of 2000AD than –”
    “All right, shush shush, you –”
    “Your team all cocky at the Freshers’ Week quiz. Playing the girls …”
    “You win, you win,” and I gave her a soft kiss between her shoulder blades, inhaling her bathtime scent.
    “All I’m saying is, maybe they were her pride and joy? Down a bit.”
    “Then why is he selling them door to door out of a suitcase? There?”
    “Maybe she died? Right there.”
    “Yes maybe ,” I said. “But it looked more like he was about to spend the money on booze.”
    “Naturally. Drowning his – ooh , that’s good, a bit more there,” Jane said. “Drowning his sorrows. Married thirty years. She has a heart attack, he’s left alone. Forced to sell her rare collections to meet the funeral expenses?”
    “You wouldn’t be saying this if you’d met him.”
    “Poor old chap.”
    I thumbed the dip beneath her left shoulder silently for a moment.
    Did I want to tell her that I didn’t have a hundred to give him? That apart from a listless Kerplunk and Cheng coming back in for another peer at Robert Redford at ten past four, I didn’t have another customer and spent the rest of the day knee-deep in antique papier-mâché? No, I thought. Best not.
    I moved across to Jane’s right shoulder, gazing over the pale violin of her back. Swallowing hard I tried to concentrate. My wife. My perfect angel. But even there, hands kneading gently her velvet curves, guilt stared back. Plain guilt. The word stared up at me from her shoulders like Jane was a