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mother’s eyes were bright, too bright.
    ‘Yes, it’s a surprise for me too. I don’t know Anna very well, we just talk when I go to the bookshop. I invited her for a drink this evening and as it was one of her evenings for coming to Pinner it seemed like a good chance of a drive and a chat.’
    Ken Green was a salesman, Anna remembered. He earned his living selling books, getting bigger orders than booksellers wanted to give, forcing them to do window displays, encouraging them to take large cardboard presentation packs. Naturally he would be able to sell himself as well.
    Her father liked him too.
    Ken managed to ask the right questions, not the wrong ones. He asked easily what line of business Mr Doyle was in. Her father’s usual mulish defensive look came on his face. His voice took on the familiar pitch he had when he spoke of work, and rationalization.
    Most people shuffled and sort of sympathized, mixed with jollying Desmond Doyle along when he began the tale of woe, the company that had been going along very nicely thank you until in the cause of rationalization a lot of jobs, perfectly sound secure jobs, went. Desmond Doyle’s job had got changed, he told Ken Green. Changed utterly. It wasn’t the same breed of men in business these days.
    Anna felt weary. It was always the same, Father’s version of the story. The truth was that Father had been sacked over what Mother called a personality conflict. But it was a secret. A great secret nobody was to know. At school it was never to be mentioned. Anna’s first great habits of secrecy must have begun then, she realized. Perhaps that was when the secrecy all began. Because a year later Father was employed again by the same firm. And that was never explained either.
    Ken Green didn’t mutter agreement about the world in general and the ways of businessmen in particular.
    ‘How did you manage to survive the rationalization? Were you in some essential post?’
    Anna’s hand flew to her mouth. No one had been as direct as this before in this household. Anna’s mother looked with alarmed glances from one face to another. There was a short pause.
    ‘I didn’t survive it; as it happens,’ Desmond Doyle said. ‘I was out for a year. But they brought me back, when there was a change of personnel along the line, when some personality differences had been ironed out.’
    Anna’s hand remained at her mouth. This was the first time that Father had
ever
acknowledged that he had been a year unemployed. She was almost afraid to see how her mother had taken it.
    Ken was nodding in agreement. ‘That often happens, it’s something like putting all the pieces into a paper bag and shaking a few of them back on to the board. Though the pieces aren’t always put back in the right holes?’ He smiled encouragingly.
    Anna looked at Ken Green as if she had never seen him before. What was he doing, sitting in this room interrogating her father about forbidden subjects? Was there the remotest possibility that Mother and Father would think she had discussed private business with him?
    Mercifully, Father hadn’t taken it at all badly; he was busy explaining to Ken that people had indeed been relocated into the wrong positions. He himself who should have Operations Manager was in fact Special Projects. Special Projects meant as little or as much as anyone wanted it to mean. It was a non-job.
    ‘Still, that leaves it up to you to make what you will of it, that’s the thing with non-jobs. I have one, Anna has one, and we try in our different ways to make something of them.’
    ‘I have
not
a non-job!’ Anna cried.
    ‘It could be called that, couldn’t it? There’s no real ceiling, no proper ranking or way of getting recognition, you make it a good job because you’re interested in publishing, you read the catalogues, you understand why books appear and who buys them. You could stand filing your nails like that colleague of yours with the purple hair.’
    Anna’s mother