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the telephone if everyone was busy. In the afternoon Mr Mower and I went out again to two more properties, one to measure it up for sale with the owners, counting the rooms and asking about the boiler and whether curtains would be included in the price. Mr Mower filled out a form as he talked. He introduced me to clients as ‘young William’.
    By the end of that day I knew there was no way I would go back to school; that my life must begin anew here in this leafy,bustling town, as Mower & Mower’s sales literature called it, only forty-eight minutes by fast train from the centre of London. I instantly became the keenest, hardest-working employee the firm had ever had, and by the end of the summer Mr Mower was delighted, though taken aback, at my wish to stay on. Aunt Lillian, grateful for any result that kept me a hundred miles away from her, agreed to send me a monthly allowance, which I calculated would more than cover my meagre living expenses and allow my modest wages to mount up in the bank. ‘And do you know what you need?’ said Mr Mower, beaming. ‘Driving lessons.’
    Although he had two sales consultants, Guy and Stella, I was the one Mr Mower took under his wing. Guy, who was probably in his late twenties, glowered, and would invent menial tasks for me to do, or send me to the café to queue for his lunchtime sandwich and various unhealthy snacks. He took pills for a mood-altering stomach ulcer. But I brought out the mothering instinct in Stella, the senior of the two, who occasionally brought me in a baked edible from home and twinkled with quiet amusement as I followed Mr Mower hither and thither, carrying his bag, but also internalizing the nuanced lessons of mortgaging, conveyancing and consumer law, or helping him dream up new marketing strategies and ads for the paper. He taught me how to read detailed blueprints and always to look a man in the eye. On my nineteenth birthday, in front of the whole staff, he presented me with a pair of opera glasses. (‘For roof inspections,’ he explained. ‘A crucial part of the agent’s armoury.’) He decided that I had a creative bent and had me accompany Cliff, the photographer, to clients’ houses as artistic director. Perhaps he feared that I would get bored. Perhaps he thought, as a young man who had forfeited the chance of university – renounced, as Mr Mower saw it, the life of the mind – that I required every last intellectualstimulus that selling houses could offer. In fact it was all the stimulation I needed.
    It was months, however, before I found myself alone with a house to plunder. Rita tended to arrange visits when the client was at home; Cliff would pick me up at the office in his van and then after the job would drop me back there. It was a while before I realized that Cliff, who worked at a photographic supplies shop in town, could simply be sent on his way once we’d done the job. So, when Rita announced one day that I would have to let myself into a property with a set of keys, it was as if I had spent my life preparing for it. I worked with Cliff as usual, pointing up the most saleable aspects of the house, taking the dustbins out of shot and so on. Afterwards I told him I had other errands, and would walk back to the office.
    ‘Ah, I get it,’ he chuckled, in his Welsh accent. ‘A bit of time off, is it? A bit of truanting? Well, don’t worry, I won’t tell.’ He winked.
    How perfect. Perhaps he had errands too.
    Once he was out of the way I doubled back and let myself into the house again. I didn’t have much time and I didn’t know much about the couple who lived there, but I’d been round the house once with Cliff and knew which cupboards and drawers I needed to get into. I sat on the sofa in the front room and popped grapes from the fruit bowl into my mouth while I leafed through photographs and bills and letters. They had a piano, and a son not much younger than me to play it. I imagined they were nice parents. And I