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to select. I even allowed myself very agreeable visions of her as a pretty and intelligent young woman whom it would be a pleasure to instruct. I visualised myself laying down the laws of the Magids to her. I saw her hanging on my every word. I looked forward to meeting her.
    I couldn’t find her either.
    She had a slightly complex family history. The address I had for her proved to be that of an aunt, her father’s sister, in Bristol where Maree Mallory seemed to be a student. I stood on the aunt’s doorstep in Bristol, in the pouring rain, while damp children pushed in and out of the house around me. Before long, the children formed a yelling, fighting heap behind the aunt. She shouted at me above the din that poor Maree had gone back to her mother in London, didn’t I know? Parents divorced. Sad case. I bellowed to be told whereabouts in London. She screamed that she couldn’t remember, but if I didn’t mind waiting she’d ask her sister-in-law. So I stood for a further five minutes in the rain watching the aunt across the fighting heap of children while she telephoned further down the hall. Eventually she came back and screamed an inaccurate address at me. I wrote it down, with further inaccuracies caused by damp paper and blotches of rain, and went to London the next day. It rained that day too.
    The address was in South London. That part I got right. But when at last I found it, it proved not to be called Rain Kitten as I had written down, but Grain Kitchen. It was a healthfood shop. The lady standing behind a glassed-in display of more kinds of beans than I knew existed was tall and slender in her white overall. The white cloth round her head revealed youthful fair hair. She was so young-looking and comely that, for a moment, I had hopes that she was Maree Mallory herself. But when I came nearer, she looked older, possibly even over forty. She could have been Maree’s mother. My blotched notes said that in this case she would be a Mrs Buttle; but the sign over the door had read PROPRIETORS L . & M . N UTTALL. I decided not to risk names. I told her politely that I was looking for Maree Mallory.
    She stared at me with her head on one side, in a summing-up way I found slightly ominous. “I’m not helping you,” she announced at length.
    “Can you tell me why not?” I asked.
    “You think too well of yourself,” she said. “Posh accent, shiny shoes, expensive raincoat, not a hair out of place – oh, I can see well enough why you let her down like that. You thought she wasn’t good enough for the likes of you, didn’t you? Or didn’t she iron your shirts to your liking?”
    I know I was speechless for a moment. I could feel my face flooding red. I do, certainly, like to be well dressed, but I found myself wanting to protest that I always iron my own shirts. It was too ridiculous. I pulled myself together enough to say, “Mrs – er Buttle – Nuttall? – I assure you I have not let your daughter down in any way.”
    “Then why is she so upset and saying you have ?” the lady demanded. “Maree’s not one to lie. And why have you come crawling to me ? Realised you let a good girl slip between your nicely clipped fingernails, have you?”
    “Mrs Buttle—” I said.
    “Nuttall,” said she. “I never did like men who wear cravats. What’s wrong with an honest tie? Let me tell you, if I’d seen you when she first took up with you, I’d have warned her. Never trust a cravat, I’d have told her. Nor a mac with lots of little straps and buttons. Clothes always tell.”
    “Mrs Nuttall !” I more or less howled. “ I have never met your daughter in my life!”
    She looked at me disbelievingly. “Then what are you here for, dripping all over my shop floor?”
    “I came,” I said, “because I am trying to trace your daughter, Maree Mallory, in connection with – with a legacy which may come her way.” The idea of a legacy was perhaps a poor one, but I was too flustered to remember all the