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loft.
    ‘You don’t get to the shore if you walk through the warehouse,’ she pointed out. ‘You get to the gasmanager’s office. Nothing can be dried there anyway – the walls are running with condensation. The loft has fallen to pieces, and none of the longshore fishermen go out under sail. Surely that question won’t take long to settle.’
    The solicitor explained that rights were in no way affected by the impossibility of putting them into practice. Conveyancing, he added, was not as simple as the general public imagined. ‘I’m pleased that you called in today,as a matter of fact, Mrs Green. Something that I heard, quite by chance, made me wonder whether you were thinking better of the whole transaction.’ He appeared to be trembling with curiosity.
    ‘By thinking better you mean thinking worse, of course,’ she said.
    ‘Having second thoughts, dear lady. It’s always sad to think of losing a member of a small community like Hardborough, but if there are greater opportunities elsewhere, one can only applaud and understand.’
    ‘You mean you thought I might want to change my mind and go somewhere else?’ She wished that she could grow much taller, if only for half an hour, so that she could look down, rather than up, during interviews like these. ‘You mean you thought I wanted to get out of the Old House – which, by the way, is my only home – while you’re still dithering about the fishermen’s right of way?’
    ‘There are many other empty properties in Hardborough, and, as it happens, I have a list of some other ones farther afield – Flintmarket, and even Ipswich. I don’t know whether you’ve considered …’
    It was May, and flocks of terns had arrived, rising and falling with every wingbeat, and settling by the hundred on the sandy patches towards the shore. The stock from Müller’s came down in two Carter Paterson vans,followed a week later by orders from the book wholesalers. For the rest, for the new titles, she would have to wait for the salesmen, if they would venture so far across the marshes to a completely unknown point of sale. Since the warehouse had proved unusable, everything had to be piled into the spacious cupboard under the stairs while Florence pondered the arrangement.
    She drove back one morning from Flintmarket to find the premises full of twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys in blue jerseys. They were Sea Scouts, they told her.
    ‘How did you get in?’
    ‘Mr Raven got the key from the plumber,’ said one of the children, square and reliable as a straw-bale.
    ‘He’s not your skipper, is he?’
    ‘No, but he told us to come over to yours. What do you want doing?’
    ‘I want all the shelves put up,’ she said, with equal directness. ‘Can you do that?’
    ‘How many hand-drills can you get us, miss?’
    She went out and bought hand-drills, and screws by the pound. The scouts worked for two hours, went home for their dinners, and then knocked on again. By the time the shelves were up, the whole floor, and most of the books, were covered with a quarter-inch layer of sawdust.
    ‘We could make it good later, and clear up this lot,’ Wally said.
    ‘I shall clear up myself,’ she said. She felt overwhelmed with love for them. ‘I’d like to give you something for your headquarters.’ Scout Headquarters was the wreck of an old three-masted schooner, beached on the estuary.
    ‘Have you got any morse codes, or Pears Medical Dictionary ?’
    ‘I’m afraid not.’ They were both at a loss. ‘I tell you what, Wally. I want you to take these hand-drills. They’re no use to me, I don’t know how to use them properly. If I want a hole made in anything, I shall have to send you a signal.’
    ‘Thank you. I daresay we could make use of those,’ said Wally, ‘but with every job we undertake we’re obliged to contribute the value of twelve bricks to the new Baden-Powell House that they’re building up in South Kensington.’
    She gave him five pounds, and