“Thank you, Polly,” Sukey said, the way she always did if I made tea.

“Shall I make your bed up now?”

“Never mind, Mopps,” she said, her voice low. “I’ll have to think about it first.”

I poured the tea, feeling like I’d missed something. Dad arrived and we laid the hot fish and chips out on plates, the stinging smell of vinegar rising on the steam. Sukey seemed calmer now, but she dropped her teaspoon when Ma asked how Frank was.

“Well enough,” she said. “He’s going away this evening, taking a load up to London. They’re packing the van up now, which is why he couldn’t come. All these people moving back home.”

Sukey’s husband had inherited his parents’ furniture-removal business and spent the war helping people move out of bombed buildings into new lodgings. Now he was helping them to go back where they’d come from.

“Perhaps you can come over for your dinner while he’s away?” Dad said. “Be nice to see you more often.”

“Yeah, I could. Just while Frank’s gone. It’s such a big house, and it seems silly to eat on your own, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does,” Douglas called as he came into the kitchen. He collected American phrases from the films and used them as often as possible. It was irritating, but both Ma and Sukey had told me I mustn’t mind, because of him losing his mother in a night raid. “How you doing, Sukey?” he said as he took his place at the table and began on his dinner.

“Fine, thanks, Doug.”

We ate quickly, not wanting our chips to get cold. Dad told us about a change in his rounds since another worker had come home from the army, comparing his new postal routes with Douglas’s milk rounds, and Ma complained about the queue at the butcher’s. I only half listened, distracted by Sukey, and then by Douglas. I couldn’t help trying to anticipate where he would put in the next bit of American slang. It tended to come out strangely twisted by his Hampshire accent.

“I was thinking of going down to Tub Street, to the movies,” he said, when he’d finished eating. He was looking at Sukey, and the last of the light showed the places on his face where his stubble didn’t yet join. There was a C-shaped patch of smooth pink skin on his cheek, and another under his chin.

“Bye, then,” Sukey said, opening her compact and pressing the puff to her nose.

She swiped it expertly across her forehead, reminding me of her promise to teach me how to use make-up, and Douglas watched her for a moment before going off to get his coat from the hall. If only there was a kind of make-up for Douglas, I thought, a compact with powder to fill in his beard.

When Ma got up to clear the dishes and Dad went to put the greasy newspaper in the outside bin I leant towards Sukey. “Are you going to stay tonight?” I asked her. I’d been thinking during dinner and had come up with several possible explanations. “Has something happened between you and Frank?”

She shook her head. “I told you, Mopps, I need to think. In fact, I’d better be getting back now. Bye, Ma, Dad. See you.” She was nearly at the door before I remembered.

“I got you a gift, Sukey.”

She smiled, properly, genuinely, for the first time.

“It’s for your hair,” I said, spoiling the surprise slightly. I’d bought two matching combs on Saturday at Woolworth’s, one for her, one for me. They were fake tortoiseshell and covered with crudely moulded birds, but when I’d held them up to the light the wings had almost seemed to flutter.

“It’s beautiful. Thank you, darling,” she said, opening the tissue paper and sliding the comb into a wave of hair above her ear.

She kissed me before she slipped out the door, and I still had her lipstick on my forehead when Douglas came back from the pictures. He laughed as he smudged it off with his thumb. I remember thinking it was funny, because when he teased me about it he mentioned the exact shade: Victory Red.

“Can I help?”

The girl at the make-up counter is dull against the lit-up glass, dressed in white, her face various shades of beige. All around her are gold and see-through powder compacts, open like clams. What I need is the bottom half of a blue and silver one, but I won’t find it here. “I want some lipstick,” I tell the girl.

She nods and waves limply at a plastic display.

“Victory Red,” I say.

“I’m sorry?”

“I wanted Victory Red.” The sweet wet smell in these places is overwhelming. I feel like I’m breathing through molasses. Helen and Katy are trying on various perfumes a few feet away, making faces and coughing. They are looking for a gift for Carla, because she did something, or didn’t do something, or because I did something.

The girl looks at the stand, pulling out several little tubes and replacing them roughly. They clack against the plastic. “I don’t think we do that one,” she says. “How about this?” She holds up a shiny, squarish cylinder. The sticker on it says “Seductive Scarlet.” Sounds promising. I take it from her and draw a streak over my hand, the colour seeping into the wrinkles.

“Yes, that’s nice,” I say, handing it back. “But I’d prefer Victory Red. Do you have that?”

“Sorry we don’t do that one.” She smiles and slouches against the counter. There’s a sour smell under the perfume that makes me think the shop uniforms are all nylon.

“Really? What a nuisance. Why’s that?”

“It’s just a bit old-fashioned. Why not have this one instead?”

I want to ask Katy’s opinion, but I can’t see her. Or Helen. I walk past the other shining counters. No sign of them. The light drops as I move into another department, full of glistening leather bags and cheap jewellery. The racks are over twice my height and crowded with goods which reflect the spot lighting into my eyes. Music is blaring out, the words seem to tumble from the singer’s mouth chaotically, and I feel as if my balance is going.

Somehow, I get tangled with a display of long bead necklaces. One strand round my coat button, another attached to my glasses’ chain. My hands aren’t steady enough to undo the clasps, and the more I pull the worse it gets. I start to think I’ll be trapped here for ever. Sweat collects along my spine. A girl comes towards me, not Katy, and a sudden sense of panic makes me rip the button from my coat. I leave my glasses, still attached to the beads, dangling sadly against the rack, and I back away on to the escalator, teetering at the edge of a step and gripping the handrail for support. There’s a stripe of lipstick on my hand, suffocating my skin, and I rub my other hand over it, suppressing the ghost of a shudder. I’ve always hated how the stuff smudges.

The department I arrive in is cookware and glass. The music, bouncing off the hard surfaces, is so loud I can hardly think. My specs are gone and I search in my bag for the pale silk case. These second-best glasses feel funny on my face, and I have to keep adjusting them as I wander amongst the shelves of crockery. I can’t think what I’m here for, and no inspiration comes. The cut-glass vases and stoneware lasagne dishes give me no clues. I stand and read out the cleaning instructions on a metal wok: “Remove stubborn residues with a sponge scourer or nylon cleaning pad only. Do not use metal scourers or any abrasive cleaners.”

A woman with orange fluffed-up hair gives me an odd look as she walks past. How long have I been here? I can’t see the time. I might have been standing next to this shelf for hours. If I could just find a member of staff . . . I hear a shop assistant ask someone if they need help, but I can’t see over the stands and I can’t tell which side the voice is coming from.

“That is the last one, but my manager might give you a discount, as it was on display.”

I rush one way, but there is no one there, so I hurry in the opposite direction. As I turn a corner, my bag catches something on the edge of a shelf. There is a smash. I freeze. “Waterford Crystal,” I read from the display. There’s a couple of seconds’ silence. No one comes. I start to move away.

“Oh!” A woman in the dark-blue shop uniform hurries to my side. “You’ve broken this vase. Look, it’s smashed to bits. You might have to pay for that,” she says. “It’s a hundred and twenty pounds.”

I begin to shake. A hundred and twenty pounds. That’s a fortune. I feel tears come into my eyes.

“I’ll have to find my manager. Will you wait here?”

I nod and take out my purse. I have two five-pound notes and one twenty, as well as a bit of change. I can’t work out what it all comes to, but I can see that it’s not nearly enough.

“What should I do? Take her address?” the woman says, coming back. She looks over the shelves at someone I can’t see and then asks for my address.

I can’t remember it. She thinks I’m lying, but I’m not lying. I can’t remember my address. I can’t remember my address. “It’s something Street,” I say. “Or something Road.”

The woman looks at me with disbelief. “Did you come here with someone?” she asks. “Who was it? We can page them.”

I open my mouth, but I can’t remember that, either.

“Okay. Come with me,” she says.

She puts her hand on the back of my arm and guides me across the shop. I can’t think where we’re going. We walk through a department full of those beds for sitting on, comfy, bouncy sitting beds, and I long to collapse into one. Finally we come to a high desk.

“Can you remember who you came with now?” she shouts, as though I’m deaf.

I tell her I can’t, and my stomach closes in on itself.

“You need to give me a name so I can page someone.”

She is still shouting. I can’t think with her shouting. A man in an overall, wheeling a trolley of strange mutilated-looking dolls, stops. “Bloody hell, Grace,” he says, “what are you doing?”

“We’ve got a vase smashed in Glass, and this lady’s lost and I don’t know who to page to come and get her,” she says, not lowering her voice much.

We’re standing near a bank of TVs. The flickering screens, like a thousand birds flapping their wings, make me feel dizzy. They make me think of Sukey sliding the comb into her hair, and of the hedge next to our house, and of the woman in the foliage turning to run from Douglas’s gaze.

“Just page her name and say she’s here,” the man says. He turns to me. “What’s your name, love?”

For an instant I think I have forgotten that, too. But then it comes to me, and the next moment I hear the woman’s voice pronounce it over the loudspeaker. We wait. I don’t know how long. The woman goes off to talk to someone and I can see those sitting beds in the distance. Surely no one would mind if I went for a rest.

The first one I come to is a “Prima Sudeley Sofa, large, in mushroom chenille.” It’s lovely, and cosy. I sink into it. It’s such a relief to be sitting that I’m in danger of nodding off.

A sudden loud announcement wakes me. Something about discounts on bath mats. I lever myself up from the sofa and stand for a minute.

“Oh, Mum. Where on earth have you been?” Helen says, coming out of a lift. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

She takes my arm and we go back down in the lift; she will hold my arm but won’t catch my eye in any of the mirrored walls. The brown-tinted glass deepens her frown. She is cross with me. I worried her, wandering off like that, she says. Funny how things are reversed. Helen was always running away when she was a child. I’d find her school satchel half packed with spare sweaters, bruised apples, and favourite shells, or, if I missed that sign, I’d be forced to go looking for her across the heath. When Patrick was back from the Middle East I left him to deal with it, not bothering to unpack the bag or chase off after her. She knew it, too, knew I’d ignored her one repeated act of rebellion. And I paid for that when she was a teenager. Strange now to think that she’s the child who stayed here, and my son, Tom, who hated to spend a night away from home, has made his life in another country.

We find Katy when the lift doors open, a security guard watching her paint each of her nails with a different-coloured polish from the set of testers on a counter. He looks at me as I walk past and seems about to speak. I feel a sudden jolt of memory, though I can’t quite place it.

“I think I might have broken something,” I say, as we walk through the doors, into the street.

“No, Mum, your arm’s just bruised, remember?”