The girl at Wendy's Teashop

George Bowling, who narrates Coming Up for Air, was born above a corn and seed merchant's shop in the High Street of Lower Binfield, the invented Oxfordshire market town of his boyhood. His father, Samuel Bowling, ran it until the business was killed off by a chain of retail seedsmen. In June 1938, at forty-five, Bowling drives down from London for a few days without telling his wife where he is going, and on his first afternoon in the town he walks up to look at the shop. An arty-looking sign now hangs out over the pavement: WENDY'S TEASHOP, MORNING COFFEE, HOME-MADE CAKES. There are blue curtains in the window and a cake or two on show, the kind covered in chocolate with a single walnut stuck on top.

He does not want any tea. He goes in to see the inside. The shop and what used to be the family parlour have both been turned into tea-rooms and done up in an antique style, with gateleg tables, a hammered-iron chandelier and pewter plates on the wall. The yard at the back, where the dustbin stood and his father grew a patch of weeds, has been paved over and fitted out with rustic tables and hydrangeas.

The person serving is a young woman in a kind of print wrapper, a loose printed overall, rather than the ordinary waitress's uniform he was expecting. She meets him with a sour expression. She takes ten minutes to bring the tea, which turns out to be China tea, so weak that you would take it for water until the milk goes in. The cake is sold as home-made, and Bowling's opinion is that it was made with margarine and egg-substitute. There is nobody else having tea. She stands about by the window, and he can see that if he had not been there she would have been picking her teeth.

He is sitting almost exactly where his father's armchair used to stand, and in the end he has to speak. He asks her whether she has been in Lower Binfield long. She starts, looks surprised, and does not answer. He tries again and says that he used to live in Lower Binfield himself, a good while ago. This time there is no answer either, or only something he cannot hear, and she gives him a frigid look and goes back to the window.

Bowling reads the silence as class. She is too much of a lady to go in for back-chat with customers, and she probably thinks he is trying to get off with her. He decides there is no point in telling her that he was born in the house, because even if she believed it, it would not interest her. She has never heard of Samuel Bowling, Corn & Seed Merchant. He pays the bill and clears out.

The novel gives her no name, no age and no face, and never establishes whether she is from the town at all, because the one question that would have answered it is the question she does not answer.