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had
to be counted amongst mankind’s darkest hours. Troy found them to be hopeless bores.
    Cockerell’s badge had no inscription, but from the coils of rope twisted around what might be an anchor, Troy deduced that he had whiled away the apocalypse in the Royal Navy. Clerk in
charge of stores, perhaps? Mess waiter? He looked at the weaselly face opposite him. A narrow skull, a pointy jaw and a pencil-thin moustache. A familiar enough face. A face to be seen in a
thousand pubs anywhere in the British Isles. One to be avoided like the plague. Troy put him down as a former petty officer, shore-based, whisky drinker, Senior Service smoker, and probably wearer
of suede shoes. He was almost tempted to risk a dropped table napkin to confirm the latter point when it dawned on him that Cockerell was looking at him in a manner that indicated he was waiting
for Troy to speak. If he’d asked a question, Troy hadn’t heard him.
    ‘Tell me,’ Troy fudged. ‘What exactly is it that you sell?’
    The man beamed. Troy had just pulled the cracker for him. He paused in his kedgeree, wiped a fleck of boiled egg yolk from his bottom lip, rested an elbow on the table, and shone with pride and
self-esteem.
    ‘Modern furniture,’ he said, so softly as to be almost reverential. ‘Tomorrow’s look. The settee of Mrs 1960 in your lounge today.’
    Good grief Troy thought. What hath God wrought?
    ‘We’re a stuffy old country,’ Cockerell was saying. ‘We do so like to cling to the past. Do you know most families in England today have never bought a three-piece suite?
Never! We all live with the junk our parents hand down. Most homes you go into are still using furniture bought in 1925 at a tanner a week on the knock. We’re living in the past.
Europe’s leaving us standing. I mean, is this what we won the war for?’
    Troy had no idea why we had won the war. At the time it had seemed to him a marvellous stroke of good fortune. All the same, he was damn certain it wasn’t won simply to facilitate the
purveying of second-rate tat in the dubious name of modernity. He knew what Cockerell meant by ‘modern’—coffee tables on black tapered legs, sticking out at odd angles, and
hideous carpets with patterns looking like Jackson Pollock’s rejects. But then, he had never bought an item of furniture in his life. His mother had furnished his house, entirely with odds
and sods from her own. He was, he supposed, part of what Cockerell was getting at. What he called antique, Cockerell called second-hand. It cut both ways. During his brother Rod’s last
campaign, the General Election of 1955, one old trout in Hertfordshire had buttonholed Troy and informed him of her intention of voting Liberal. She could not vote for Rod—such a nice man,
but a Socialist—and she could no longer vote for the Conservative. Why? Troy had asked. He invited us in for tea, the trout had replied, and do you know he had shop-bought furniture! In her
book, one closed to such as Cockerell Troy suspected, the only way to acquire furniture was to inherit it.
    ‘Do you know what England is?’ Cockerell blathered on. ‘The land of the forgotten parlour, the last bastion of the antimacassar.’
    Silently, wishing him no encouragement, Troy concurred entirely with Cockerell’s opinion. It summed England up very well.
    ‘My old dad kept the key to the front parlour on his watch chain. He’d open it once a week for my mother to do the cleaning, and the rest of the week it was locked to keep us kids
out. Fifty-one weeks a year this rigmarole went on. We used the blasted room on Boxing Day, and then we shut it up again, with its immaculate suite, scarcely dented by a human backside, its
antimacassars and its sea-shell ashtrays, until next Christmas. By the time I inherited, the furniture was hopelessly out of date. About as fashionable as spats, and looking as new as it did the
day the horse and cart delivered it in 1908. I’d’ve given it to a museum