Chapter 6 Postern of Fate

Mr Durrance’s shop was half-way up the village. It was on a corner site,had a few photographs displayed in the window; a couple of marriagegroups, a kicking baby in a nudist condition on a rug, one or two beardedyoung men taken with their girls. None of the photographs were verygood, some of them already displayed signs of age. There were also post-cards in large numbers; birthday cards and a few special shelves arrangedin order of relationships. To my Husband. To my Wife. One or two bathinggroups. There were a few pocket-books and wallets of rather poor qualityand a certain amount of stationery¹ and envelopes bearing² floral designs.
Boxes of small notepaper decorated with flowers and labelled For Notes.
Tuppence wandered about a little, picking up various specimens³ of themerchandise and waiting whilst⁴ a discussion about the results obtainedfrom a certain camera were criticized, and advice was asked.
An elderly woman with grey hair and rather lack-lustre eyes attended toa good deal of the more ordinary requests. A rather tall young man withlong flaxen hair and a budding beard seemed to be the principal attend-ant. He came along the counter towards Tuppence, looking at her ques-tioningly.
‘Can I help you in any way?’
‘Really,’ said Tuppence, ‘I wanted to ask about albums. You know, photo-graph albums.’
‘Ah, things to stick your photos in, you mean? Well, we’ve got one or twoof those but you don’t get so much of them nowadays, I mean, people govery largely for transparencies, of course.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ said Tuppence, ‘but I collect them, you know. I col-lect old albums. Ones like this.’
She produced, with the air of a conjurer, the album she’d been sent.
‘Ah, that goes back a long time, doesn’t it?’ said Mr Durrance. ‘Ah, wellnow, over fifty years old, I should say. Of course, they did do a lot of thosethings around then, didn’t they? Everyone had an album.’
‘They had birthday books, too,’ said Tuppence.
‘Birthday books– yes, I remember something about them. My grand-mother had a birthday book, I remember. Lots of people had to write theirname in it. We’ve got birthday cards here still, but people don’t buy themmuch nowadays. It’s more Valentines, you know, and Happy Christmases,of course.’

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