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‘Who knows indeed,’ I said warmly. ‘But I tell you what, Phoebe, in case you change your mind, I wouldn't let on to Mum yet. She'll be so thrilled you'll never hear the last of it, and then you really will have to have it.’

She laughed, and then slid back to join the gang behind the trestle table; still a bit flushed, and just briefly catching my eye again as she picked up her drink, secretly delighted.

It was warm in the room, and I threaded my way through the noisy, baying throng to the front to open a window. I propped open the double doors too, hooking them both back on the wall, then wandered outside. The sausages could wait a minute. I wanted to see something first. Out on the pavement, a few people had overflowed to stand with their drinks, one or two smokers amongst them, laughing and chatting, blowing their smoke in thin blue lines up into the dusty sky. They smiled and raised their glasses when they saw me.

‘Cheers! Well done!’

I smiled and raised my glass back. ‘Thanks.’

But I didn't stop. I wanted to cross the street; to be at a vantage point where I could look back and see it all properly. I strayed across to the other side of the road, weaving around a lone cyclist. The tourists were leaving now, and with the students yet to arrive, there was an exhausted feel to the city: a brief hiatus. The distant hum of traffic from the city centre was audible, and the subtle September breeze, warmed by its journey across hot pavements, scented by various bars and restaurants, filled my senses. As I turned on the opposite pavement to look back at the shop, my heart contracted a moment, then kicked in.

Brightly lit and buzzing, juxtaposed by its darkened, quiet neighbours, it looked quite the place to be this Friday night: quite the party of the moment. In fact, it verily hummed. Voices sang into the night, and now and again, the occasional shout of laughter broke out like a spark from a fire, cracking right down the street to the Bodleian Head, or up into the skyline of treacle-coloured Cotswold stone. My eyes roved critically over the shop front. Two shop fronts originally, of course, one Malcolm's and one Ludo's, with separate entrances, but now seamlessly merged by a set of double French doors. All the panelling, the woodwork, some of it carved and intricate, especially around the bay windows, had been painted off-white, the detail picked out in the same duck-egg blue as the interior. Quite a lot of discussion had gone into that blue. Quite a lot of colour charts spread on the kitchen table with plenty of opinionated teenage voices. The doorframes had been painted off-white too, and either side of them, on the pavement, sat two lemon trees in round, leaded pots.

‘They'll get nicked,’ Malcolm had warned, the moment he saw them.

‘I'll bring them in at night.’ I'd retorted.

‘You'll get lazy, you'll leave them, they'll get nicked,’ he'd repeated.

‘We'll see,’ I'd smiled, and he had too, at my enthusiasm. Naivety, perhaps.

Behind the lemon trees the window displays continued what I felt to be a vaguely Tuscan theme: in each of the bays was a long, rather beautiful, bleached oak refectory table, a matching pair I'd found at a local auction and snapped up in triumph. Both were covered in books: some were propped up, some just lying flat, some in piles, and one or two were open as if still being read. On one table, atop a tome about Impressionist painters, was a Panama hat – I know, I know – and on the other, a large ceramic bowl of china oranges. Malcolm had smiled at these last two, muttering something about a cuddly toy, and then about dust, but I hadn't been able to resist. My eye travelled up now above the windows, to something that, as Ted had so rightly observed earlier, I hadn't been able to resist either. Across the hoarding, in pale lemon scroll – another colour that had been the subject of hot debate amongst the females of the family – the name of the shop had been picked out in bold, swirling letters:

Hamilton and Daughters

I smiled. Raised my glass. ‘Here's to us,’ I said