Nell found the shop on a Tuesday, occupying the doorway of a public lavatory that had been boarded up since the council discovered its plumbing went nowhere.
A woman in a velvet waistcoat was polishing a teaspoon. Behind her stood a grandfather clock with the hands drawn in chalk.
“I need something for my brother,” Nell said.
“Has he asked you to buy it?”
“No.”
“Then you need something for yourself.”
Nell nearly left. She had a florist’s van double-parked outside and a bucket of lilies taking on the personality of the van’s previous cargo, a sack of onions. But her brother had called her six times that morning about selling the shop, and she had answered six times because their father had always answered.
“What have you got for an argument?”
The woman opened a drawer. Inside lay a brass bead, a folded napkin and a feather that stood upright without a base.
“The napkin removes every stain you mention,” she said. “People tend to overestimate their tact.”
“The bead?”
“One last word. Touch the bead as you say a sentence, and everyone present accepts it. That argument ends.”
“For ever?”
“That argument. You can make another offer tomorrow. The bead won’t make anyone want it, or do the work. It ends an argument; it doesn’t run your life.”
Nell rubbed the bead between finger and thumb. It was warm, though the shop was cold.
“What’s the catch?”
“I’ve just told you what it does.”
She bought it for the seventeen pounds she had meant to spend on lunch.
Outside, she tried it on the traffic warden.
“I was loading flowers,” she said, touching the bead through her coat.
“Yes,” he said, and attached the ticket to her windscreen.
They looked at each other. Nell found she had nothing further to say on the subject. The warden went to the next van.
She ate a packet of crackers in the driver’s seat. On the ticket, she could still read the amount.
Sol arrived for Sunday lunch with a folder beneath his arm. He set it on Aunt Vivian’s sideboard, between a porcelain dog and a photo of the family at a beach no one had enjoyed.
“If that’s about the shop,” Vivian said, “put it behind the dog. I’m serving gravy.”
Nell moved the folder to her end of the table.
“There’s an offer,” Sol said. “The buyer will keep the refrigeration unit and take over the lease.”
“They’ll make it a takeaway.”
“They might.”
“They certainly will. Nobody wants a refrigeration unit to sell jumpers.”
Vivian passed the potatoes. “The unit in my old office stored blood. For a while, anyway.”
“What happened after a while?” Sol asked.
“I moved offices.”
Nell had rehearsed this lunch for three nights. She would explain that their mother had worked in the shop until her knees failed; that their father had painted its shutters every spring, even when nobody could see a difference; that she had spent twenty-three years learning exactly what customers meant when they asked for something cheerful but not too cheerful.
Sol had rehearsed too. She recognized it in the way he straightened his knife before speaking.
“I want my share out, Nell. I’ve found a flat near the theatre. The deposit isn’t small.”
“You have a flat.”
“I have a room over your stock cupboard.”
“Our stock cupboard.”
“And I take deliveries every morning I’m not at work. I want to wake up without a lorry driver ringing me.”
She could feel the bead against the seam of her pocket. She could also feel their old pattern gathering: Sol would make a joke, she would treat it as proof that he wasn’t serious, and Vivian would find a reason to bring out pudding early.
“We are keeping the shop,” Nell said, her fingers closing around the brass.
Sol sat back.
“All right.”
Vivian looked up. “That was remarkably quick.”
“Yes,” Nell said.
Sol ate his potatoes. He asked Vivian whether she had seen the play he was lighting, and Vivian said she preferred things in which the actors had jobs. They discussed a detective drama she had seen forty years earlier. Nell waited for Sol to bring up the shop again.
He didn’t.
At the door he took his folder. She offered to drive him home.
“I’ll walk.”
“It’ll rain.”
“I brought a coat.”
On Wednesday the early delivery came at six. Nell went downstairs in slippers to receive it. At eight she asked Sol why he hadn’t answered the bell.
“I moved out yesterday.”
“What?”
“I’m staying with Pete until the flat’s available.”
“The stock cupboard—”
“You can put stock in it.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Could be.”
He was speaking to her from a café; she could hear someone calling for a large tea. He said he had to go.
The shop stayed open. Sol neither suggested selling it nor replied to her explanations of why keeping it was right.
He did answer practical questions. His half of the rates payment arrived on time. He emailed the accountant. When she asked who would guarantee the rent on his new flat, he said Pete had agreed to do it.
Nell worked the mornings alone. She had expected to feel virtuous. Instead she felt furious whenever she had to leave a funeral wreath unfinished to lug boxes through the back door.
On Friday she left the bead in a saucer at home and called Vivian.
“I can’t talk to him.”
“You’re talking to him constantly.”
“He won’t argue.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Nell stared at a rose whose outer petals needed removing. She removed three, then four, and was left holding something too small for the arrangement.
“I didn’t mean he should leave.”
“I know,” Vivian said. “You wanted him to stay and understand.”
There was a brief noise at Vivian’s end.
“What’s that?”
“The dog fell over. I’m looking for a bus timetable.”
The shop had vanished from the old lavatory. Nell found it two weeks later inside a doorway at the theatre, while delivering a bouquet for a retiring wardrobe mistress.
“An argument has ended,” she told the woman.
“Congratulations.”
“My brother’s angry.”
“Probably.”
“Can you undo it?”
“The bead hasn’t changed his wants. Ask about those.”
“He won’t discuss the shop.”
“Then stop trying to discuss the sentence.”
Nell set the bead on the counter.
The woman nudged it back with her spoon. “Keep it. You might need to establish that a chair is a chair. People argue about extraordinary things.”
Nell put it in the bottom of the flower bucket and took the bouquet upstairs.
She found Sol at the lighting desk, holding an apple in one hand and adjusting a slider with the other. Onstage, the wardrobe mistress stood in a patch of warm light, listening to someone thank her.
Nell watched Sol make the patch slightly wider when the woman moved. She had never seen him work before.
After the speech, he came down to the stage door.
“I can’t buy you out all at once,” Nell said. “I could sell the van and price hired deliveries. I could pay you the rest over eighteen months. You’d need proper advice before agreeing. I’d need to hire someone for mornings.”
He took another bite of the apple.
“And if I say no?”
She looked through the glass into the theatre. A porter was carrying the bouquet in its bucket. The brass bead must still be beneath the water.
“I’ll need another plan.”
“I want the flat,” Sol said. “I don’t want to lend you the money for it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to put Mum and Dad on the repayment schedule.”
Nell opened her mouth. She shut it again. She had been about to tell him what their mother would have wanted.
“Bring the figures to my adviser,” he said, giving her a day and a time. “That isn’t a yes.”
“I know.”
When he asked whether she would be at the play on Saturday, she said yes before remembering Saturday was her busiest day.
“I’ll close early.”
“Your choice.”
He went inside to answer someone calling his name. Nell checked her diary and crossed out the late-afternoon delivery slot. Then she called the customer who had booked it, explained the change, and waited for his answer.
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