SAFE HARBOUR At lunch time, Ray would leave her in charge of things and have a pint of Broadside and something to eat at the Lord Nelson. Although she had warmed to him quickly, Sarah was glad to have these few hours to herself. Claire seemed happy to sit in the deep leather armchair in the office, warming herself by the three-bar electric fire, drinking raspberry leaf tea, flicking through ancient copies of Chat and Take a Break. She found them hilarious. It cheered Sarah almost to tears to hear her daughter in another room chortling over the knitting patterns, or the letters pages (Top Tip: Clean dusty Venetian blinds with L-shaped pieces of crusty bread), or the true-life stories (Love Me, Love My Piles). The work itself was really anything but. All she had to do was make sure no kids came in to shoplift the comics. Every now and then there would be a couple, obviously tourists, come in for a mooch of the paperbacks and the Wade Whimsies. They'd shell out twenty pence for a William Trevor or a John Braine or a Len Deighton, giggle over the handwritten lines on the old postcards, and that would be it.
