Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Page B

more lest it provoke more conversation. He needed the man to go.
    â€˜Yes. Yes, because you see, if you don’t mind, Jeff, it’s odd you’re not aware. Trivial thing, of course, but if nobody’s pointed it out to you . . . we never say Crockford
’s,
do you see. It’s Crockford, not Crockford’s. You just don’t say Crockford
’zzzz,
except when you’re saying the whole name, as in
“Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy”.
Hope you don’t mind my mentioning it.’
    Michael fixed a look of polite amusement on his face and turned.
    â€˜Oh? Well! Well, my goodness. I, er . . .’
    â€˜It’s odd you’ve not picked that up so far.’
    It was too late for Michael to pretend he was hard of hearing, had to lip-read and sometimes made mistakes. His mouth was dry. Gordon Brookes was about to say that he knew perfectly well that Michael was a fraud. But Michael knew, just as perfectly, that he needed the alabaster figures to get himself afloat again; he needed them so badly that he felt a rush of fury at the thought that Gordon Brookes might stop him. Just as he was thinking that the only course open to him now was physical assault, he wondered. Dare he try it again? He had done it once before with a punter who’d come back to the stall complaining that Michael had sold him some dud Cornish ware the week before.
’1930s you said and when I get it home I turn it upside down an’ it says fucking dishwasherproof on the bottom.’
The punter had not been in the right frame of mind to be convinced that dishwashers had been around for a lot longer than people realised. Michael had had to think fast. It had worked then, and it had to work now.
    He pretended to turn his attention back to the figures, but stirred, then coughed, started rigidly in his chair and sucked up a noisy breath. He swung back in his chair and pulled in another breath with a sound like air being blown into a balloon. He struggled to say, ‘Asthma. Be all right . . . in a minute.’ And then he took another, even more shallow, pained and laborious breath to show that he would not be all right at all.
    â€˜Oh good heavens—have you got something to take for it? An inhaler or something? Don’t you carry an inhaler?’
    Michael shook his head and lurched in his chair, sucking and heaving. ‘Glass of water. Pills. Need water. Glass of water.’ He now brought fear into his eyes, which swivelled wildly round the room in search of the sink and tap, which he had already established were not there.
    â€˜Oh! Oh right, I see,
right
. Hang on. I’ll just have to . . . er, look, will you be all right for a minute? I’ll get one from the vicarage. I’ll be back in a second, can you, are you sure you, er . . .’
    Michael nodded. ‘Please! Please, water.’
    When the vestry outside door had closed behind Gordon, Michael waited for a moment, got up, wrapped each figure quickly in the magazine on which it stood and placed them both in his backpack. Then he dashed back into the church, crossed it swiftly, let himself out and raced down through the churchyard, keeping off the path, which he knew could be seen from the vicarage. By the time the van started on the third attempt Michael was half-dead with terror, but with the pulse of fear came also a quickening surge of relief because he was, after all, alive.

    My mood changed. Something happened to remove any last trace of uncertainty. Two people turned up on bicycles—imagine, in February! They were Dutch, and I believe they did say that they had hired the bicycles for the day as it was fine and they wanted to see something of the countryside outside Bath. They had all that strange clothing that people wear on bicycles. I’ve never had the slightest idea where such clothing is even to be bought or what it is called, let alone what particular purpose it might serve, and it took me a moment to