The two rooms over the lollipop shop in the middle of Stamp Street are small, dark and inconvenient, but they have what Miss Arabella Bassett prizes highly: a wonderful view!

She and her sister Tilly had once owned the sweets and tobacco business downstairs, and Arabella had enjoyed running the sweetshop, serving children with sherbert dabs and sugar mice, and chatting with the customer who came in for their newspapers.

But all that is long past: nowadays there is nothing much for her to do but to look out of the window. There is the lady with the Meals on Wheels, of course, and the man who reads the gas meter, and sometimes the postman, but on the whole she spends her days alone. 

Most of the neighbours are newcomers who do not remember Miss Bassett, nor do they remember Miss Bassett’s mother or her sister Tilly, who both lived with her at the sweetshop, so they leave Miss Bassett to her own devices, and she leaves them to theirs. And all her life is lived, as it were, through the window. 

Saturday is market day, and then there is plenty of life in the street. People dress up in their best and go to the shopping centre for their weekly groceries. Miss Bassett recognises all the “regulars”. There is Old Mrs Thompson who struggles up and down three or four times with her shopping bag. 

“A muddler,” mutters Miss Bassett. “If she had a list she could do it all in one go.” 

Then there is Mr Horton with his aging Labrador. How he dotes on that animal, and has done for years. “Time it was put down,” Miss Bassett pronounces acidly, though she doesn’t really mean it. 

And then there is the family of little girls from Number 14, who come out with their “trannies” and skateboards, more like boys than girls. “Should be seen, not heard,” says Miss Bassett as she watches them through her window, remembering herself as a child with primly folded hands and her embroidery in her lap. She has an inexhaustible repertoire of similar wise sayings and delights in fitting one to every circumstance. 

So much for Saturdays; on Mondays and Tuesdays things are altogether different. Quietness reigns then in Stamp Street, the road traffic diminishes and passers-by are few. Street noises become faint and far-off, except for the lone motorbike or solitary truck passing through. 

It can be quiet and lonely then in the rooms over the shop, which are furnished in the style of a long time past. The dark, heavy furniture and plush curtains seem to draw into themselves such light as there may be, and if the day is wet and cloudy, the prospect from the window is a bleak one. 

So, it might have been on some such Tuesday a few months ago that Miss Bassett caught sight of the fair girl as she sauntered slowly by on the opposite side of the street, her baby-soft hair falling damply over the grey fur collar of her coat. “Not pretty,” was Miss Bassett’s verdict, but the was a look of shy expectancy, an eagerness, on her delicate little face that made Miss Bassett glance up the street in the direction of the girl’s questing gaze. 

And there he was! Black, curling hair; grey bright eyes. For just one mad, heart-stopping moment Miss Bassett thought she recognised him. Time played tricks with her memory, but only momentarily. She recovered at once, and rebuked herself sharply for ever supposing it was Harry, her Harry, who was coming within easy strides down Stamp Street. 

How stupid of her! That had been all of forty years ago, and there had been nobody since. There had only been one Harry. 

Now the two across the road were meeting. Gently the dark haired boy tilted the girl’s chin and kissed her tenderly. 

“She trust you, does she?” murmured the old lady, then added grimly, “Well, time will tell.” 

For hadn’t she trusted Harry? She had been something of a beauty then. Arabella Bassett. A bold girl with a high colour and a way of getting what she wanted, not at all like Till, a quiet brown mouse who left decisions to other people. 

Nevertheless, it was mildly disturbing to find that she, Arabella, was, on her thirty-fifth birthday, still on the shelf. But then, why worry? One day the right man would come along, someone of her own quality, and then she would escape from her narrow existence in the shop to the wider, brighter world! 

The lovers across the way, arms linked, were drifting away now. The teatime rush had begun, and soon the pair were swallowed up by the crowds hurrying home from the day’s work. 

Miss Bassett closed the window, made a pot of tea and settled down for a quiet evening. She didn’t suppose she would ever see either of them again. 

But she was wrong. Every day, without fail, the girl and boy kept their tryst at the western end of Stamp Street, greeted each other lovingly, and every day Miss Bassett’s eager eyes followed their progress eastwards until they were lost from sight in the crowds. 

“Hmph…won’t last long,” declared Miss Bassett. 

Even as a girl she had always been vaguely distrustful of men. She remembered her father, when he was alive, as a severe, censorious parent, never loveable of kindly. But when Harry came along it seemed to alter everything. 

He had come into the shop one day in March, and she had known he was what she had been looking for all her life. A “traveller” for a large firm of sweet manufacturers, he stood hoping for an order. And as her eyes rested on his dark hair and twinkling grey eyes her heart had turned over. 

“Miss Bassett, Miss Arabella Bassett?” he enquired – no one ever asked for Tilly, Arabella was the business head. 

“ I’d like to show you some of the firm’s samples.” 

Arabella smiled as she remembered the ridiculous names they had had for the sweets all those years ago. “Humbugs,” “Lovers Hearts,” Hundreds and Thousands.” She and Harry had joked about the names as she made up an order. Oh, yes, they had been drawn to one another straightaway, and from there it was only a short step to seeing each other for walks and outings and, later, to getting engaged…although, it was true, she’d had to help things a little on their way.

She wonders idly if the Stamp Street couple are engaged yet, although she has heard that young people hardly ever are nowadays. 

Then one day the girl stops coming. Miss Bassett grows quite anxious. She does not like change. It disrupts her routine. But after a week’s absence the girl returns looking in some way indefinably altered. There is a bloom, a joyful glow about her that tells its own tale. Just as if she had seen the ring on the girl’s finger, she knows with complete certainty that the girl is now married. 

Married! Yes, wasn’t that what she, Arabella, had hoped to be. After the engagement, plans had gone ahead for the wedding. Her wedding dress in stiff watered silk had been bought, the invitations sent, a honeymoon in Corfu arranged. She had never been so happy. But her Harry had changed suddenly and had become quiet and withdrawn. “Wedding nerves,” her mother had said decisively in an attempt to dispel Arabella’s misgivings. What had followed had been so painful to her daughter that, even now, even after all these years, she could hardly bear to think about it.

Instead, she turns and looks once more out of her window. Still the lovers come, but there are changes, although only Miss Bassett’s sharp eyes are possibly only the only ones to see them. 

She notices that the girl’s grey coat is getting shabby and the boy’s shoes have a rundown look. 

“Ha,” says Miss Bassett, “What did I tell you. When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window. He’ll leave her, you mark my words.” 

But, all the same, she is appalled when it really happens. The girl still comes, but she comes alone, drifting disconsolately into Miss Bassett’s view, surveys the long, empty street despairingly, then trails sadly away. 

Miss Bassett watches with a pain in her heart, for hadn’t Harry, her Harry, behaved in the very same way? 

Her wedding day had arrived, the day that should have been the happiest of her life, but when she awoke the rooms above the shop were strangely silent. She never dreamed of the reason until she opened the letter lying on the hall table. 

“Dearest sister,” it read, “Harry and I are going away together. We are in love. Forgive us both if you can. Your loving sister, Tilly.” 

And that was all, never a word from either of them since that day. From then on Arabella had devoted herself to running her business, and looking after her ailing mother until Old Mrs Bassett had died, leaving her daughter with a life that seemed to have come to a full stop. 

Not long after that, Mr Greaves, one of the travellers who now represented the sweet firm, called at the shop. With an astute eye for business he had noticed the shop’s possibilities, situated so centrally and so conveniently, and had made Miss Bassett an unexpectedly good offer for her interest. 

Miss Bassett had clinched the deal thankfully, on one condition – that she retained the rooms over the shop for her own use. She could have moved away, there was nothing to stop her, and sometimes she asked herself why she had stayed, without ever having found an answer. 

Tilly must be quite old now, she was only a little younger than Arabella, and Harry, where was he now? 

A week had gone by, a week of obvious disappointment for the fair girl who, loyal to their first meeting, has waited in vain for the dark haired boy. 

But they never do come back! Miss Bassett could have told her that!

The afternoon crowds are thinning. A postman, delivering late, crosses the road, a sheaf of letters in his hands. 

“Something for the shop downstairs,” speculates Miss Bassett, or, if it’s for her the girl in the shop will bring it up. 

Suddenly, her attention is drawn to the girl across the road, for instead of drooping hopelessly by the railings, she is positively glowing, her small face alight with joy. 

So they do come back sometimes, after all! 

Gladly she watches as the girl and boy embrace, holding each other as is they can never bear to part again. Oh, it was all so right that they should! 

The letter box on the outer door rattles. Something for Arabella! But her courage fails her when she sees the precise, old fashioned writing, No it can’t be! 

With trembling fingers she tears open the envelope, but for a moment her mind refuses to make sense of the words that jump about on the white page. 

"My dear Bella,” it reads, when she can at last focus on the neatly written lines. ”I have to tell you sad news. Poor Tilly passed away a few weeks ago. We often spoke of you and wondered if you forgave us for what we did. We were thoughtless and very much in love, but what we did was inexcusable. Is it too much to ask that we can forget the past and now be friends?”

Miss Bassett, with shaking hands, puts the letter to one side. She needs time to think about it, to mourn her silly, flighty sister, to bury the past and, lastly, to think of the future. Presently, she will take up her pen and a sheet of her best lavender-scented notepaper. And she will write him a formal, friendly note, as befits a lady of her age and station.

Of course, he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven, but he will be, because he is her Harry, and somewhere, at the very back of her mind she can hear a much younger Arabella crying, “Yes, come back, harry, my love. Come back, come back, but hurry, hurry, hurry….”