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when we had to bring our own towels?’
    Alice smiled. ‘And we made shampoo by grating soap and boiling it in water. I was reduced to using Lux soap flakes on the customers once.’
    ‘I remember you setting me hair with sugar and water when you’d run out of setting lotion. Myrtle used to open dead early or dead late, even on Sundays, to accommodate the women working in factories, otherwise there’d never have been time for them to get theirhair done. She never charged extra.’ The woman sighed. ‘We all pulled together then. I wouldn’t want the war back, not for anything, but there was a nice friendly spirit around. People put themselves out, like Myrtle.’ She jerked her head towards the stairs. ‘Is anyone seeing to her, like?’
    ‘I usually make her a bite to eat for breakfast and dinner, and her friend, Mrs Glaister, comes round every day to make her tea and put her to bed. She’s written to Myrtle’s daughter in Southampton to say she needs looking after permanent.’
    ‘You’ll soon be out of a job, then?’
    ‘Looks like it.’
    Olive Cousins, Myrtle’s daughter, took her time coming from Southampton. It was over four weeks later, at the beginning of February, that she turned up; a sharp-faced woman in her fifties, wearing too much pink face powder and a beaver lamb coat that smelt of mothballs. Even then, she didn’t go straight upstairs. Alice was in the middle of a perm and was forced to listen while she explained in a dead posh voice, that occasionally lapsed into broad Scouse, that Christmas had been so hectic she was fair worn out and had needed time to recuperate. Her son had been home from university, her daughter had not long married a doctor and his parents had come to stay – she emphasised ‘university’ and ‘doctor’, in the obvious hope Alice would be impressed. Alice was, but decided not to show it. She disliked Olive Cousins on the spot.
    ‘Where is mother?’ Olive enquired, glancing around the salon as if expecting mother to pop up from beneath a chair.
    ‘Upstairs, in bed,’ Alice replied briefly.
    ‘Well, I don’t like the look of
her
,’ the recipient of theperm announced as Olive Cousins’s high heels clattered up the lino-covered stairs.
    She stayed for three days, eating and sleeping in a bed and breakfast place on Marsh Lane, not that anyone blamed her for that, considering the state of upstairs. On the second day she came into the salon and announced that next morning she was taking mother back with her to Southampton.
    ‘That’s nice of you,’ Alice remarked, revising her opinion of the woman, but not for long. Myrtle would be going into an old people’s home in a strange part of the country where none of her friends and neighbours could visit. It was, however, more convenient for her daughter.
    ‘She couldn’t possibly live with us, there isn’t the room, and I can’t be doing with travelling halfway across the country every time something goes wrong.’
    ‘You’ll let us have the address, won’t you? Of the home, that is, so we can write to her.’
    ‘Of course. It’ll be nice for her to get letters, but I doubt if she’ll be up to reading them,’ Olive said brightly, as if they were discussing the weather not her mother’s health. ‘Now, about the salon. I’d been expecting to sell it as a going concern, but’ – her lip curled – ‘no one would give tuppence for a dump like this, so I’ve written to the company that owns the premises. The salon will close today.’
    ‘Today!’ Alice’s mouth dropped open. She probably looked dead stupid. The thing was, the appointment book was full for weeks ahead, and quite a few women had booked months in advance for weddings and the like. There was a sinking feeling in her belly. She’d have to put a notice on the door.
    ‘Today,’ Olive Cousins repeated firmly. ‘I don’t doubtyou’d have liked more notice, but you must have seen this coming for a long time.’
    ‘I suppose I