The Backward Shadow by Lynne Reid Banks

this very briskly and authoritatively and then looked from one to the other of us expectantly. A long silence followed.
    â€˜I’d like to look at the—er—premises,’ said Henry at last. ‘In the morning, I mean, of course.’
    â€˜Of course,’ said Dottie. ‘We can get the key from the agent, he’s sure not to mind, even if it is Sunday. And then we’ll start negotiations right away. I’ll go back to town with you tomorrow, Henry, and we’ll finalise everything. Then I’ll drive back, Jane, and while you earn our bread and butter in the pub, I’ll drive round the countryside tracking down sources.’
    â€˜Er,’ said Henry tentatively.
    â€˜What?’ asked Dottie, raising her eyebrows in surprise that even such a timid hesitation should be shown.
    â€˜Well, only—I mean—you want to finalise everything
tomorrow
?’
    â€˜What’s the point of waiting?’
    â€˜Of course I don’t know a great deal about business, but isn’t that a bit …I mean, wouldn’t that be pushing it a bit?’ He spoke with a fairly marked Cockney accent—not gorblimey, but quite noticeable. It made him more interesting, because his clothes were so tweedy and Austin Reed—he even had a matching waistcoat on, and very conservative shoes that looked as if he’d had them for years and polished them every night.It was hard to place him—town or country, posh or com, rich/idle/shrewd/thrifty/Lib/Lab/Tory, or permutations of the same, it was impossible to tell. He didn’t, for instance, look the type who would hurry home from a business meeting to have Sunday tea with his mum. I found myself watching him closely for clues, at the same time thinking how Toby would have enjoyed doing the same from a writer’s viewpoint.
    Dottie looked jarred, like someone whizzing blithely downhill on a toboggan and hitting a submerged stump.
    â€˜Look,’ she said, with half-concealed impatience. ‘This whole thing is such a wonderful idea—and everything is falling into place so perfectly—it’s obviously destined to be
on
. Can’t you see that?’ She looked from one to the other of us. I tried to look encouraging but at the same time not wholly committed. Henry looked worried and rather mentally windblown. ‘I can’t see the point of delays!’ Dottie exclaimed, stubbing out her cigarette. I saw Henry look along the length of her straight, tense, slender arm and stop at the thick silver bracelet on the wrist. There was a faint, puzzled frown on his face; it could have been simply unease at the way Dottie was pushing him into something he wasn’t sure of, but to me it looked like the frown of a man who is beginning to feel something that he never wanted or expected to feel and doesn’t know how to cope with it. He suddenly got a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses out of his top pocket and put them on, then leaned back with an air of greater assurance as if wearing them made him invisible and he were now free to observe us and the situation from a position of immunity. The glasses became him; I suddenly saw that for all his stockiness and lack of expression, he was not unattractive—he looked like a nice cuddly koala bear in his hairy brown tweeds, and his rather large ears added not unpleasingly to the likeness.
    â€˜I think,’ I said, ‘that we shouldn’t plan too far or too definitely ahead. Let’s look over the shop tomorrow and then see.’
    â€˜I agree,’ said Henry. ‘After all, it’s no use worrying about “sources” until we’re sure we’ll have a market. It’s only alittle village, after all. Who’s going to buy the stuff?’
    â€˜Oh, nobody around here, probably,’ said Dottie airily. ‘Not at first, anyway. But look at Tenterden.’ She grinned at us triumphantly, like a child who has done its