No Obligation

Number forty-three Windermere Road did not look a very promising location for business. It was the third in a row of postwar family houses punctuated with alleys leading to dingy side entrances and small, scrubby gardens beyond. The brickwork was dull: not light enough to call beige, not warm enough to call red. In the middle there was the extraordinary frontage of a house purchased privately and now clad in stone of lobster pink. This was the only house in which the original, rotten, wooden windows had been replaced with modern plastic ones. The lawns that made up the front gardens of the properties had been communalised by the collapse or, perhaps, removal, of several rickety picket fences that once had divided them. As I watched, a group of nearly-pubescent boys were making use of it as a football pitch. I sighed and leaned over to the passenger seat for my briefcase, dragging it awkwardly over the gearstick as I stood up.
The front door contained a square of nine small windowpanes, one of which had been replaced in clear glass and afforded a view of a swirly patterned carpet in brown and orange littered with newspapers and unfashionable shoes........