"I'd feel," said Imran, "that you'd come to the wrong building."

"I assumed you'd say something along those lines." Odette turned the yellowed page to face him and laid a pen across it, as though it might try to leave. "Please read it before you decide I've lost my mind. I'd prefer you decide that afterwards, with information."

The page was a photocopy of a photocopy of a handwritten paragraph, and the handwriting belonged to a man who had loved ink. At the top, a printed leaf. Below it, in a slope like a hillside: The Steadfast Provision. Imran read it with his lips moving slightly, which he hated, and which Odette was kind enough not to look at.

It said that the Founder, being of the opinion that no household was ever ruined by hardship so much as by loneliness in the face of it, did direct that every year the Society set aside a sum to be given to one household enterprise, conducted in partnership by a betrothed or wedded pair, to be judged by the Board upon the evidence of their industry, their constancy, and the regard in which they stood among their neighbours.

"Sum," said Imran.

"Forty thousand. It's been indexed, but in practice it's forty thousand a year, for three years, paid into the business." She said it carefully, like carrying something hot. "It hasn't been awarded since the nineteen-eighties. Nobody applies. Nobody remembers it. I found it because I read the charter on my first week, which I'm told is not normal behaviour."

"It isn't."

"It really isn't." The ghost of something crossed her mouth and left. "Your arrears, plus the loan, plus the cost of getting your cars out of the red, come to just under that. Which is why I'm in your office, rather than in my own, doing something I can be disciplined for."

"Which is?"

"Telling you."

He sat back. The plasterboard creaked. In the yard Wim could be heard trying to be quiet, which sounded like a man tiptoeing in a bag of crisps. "Let me check I understand," Imran said. "You want me to apply for money that only goes to married people. By getting engaged."

"To someone."

"To someone."

"A real someone, in the sense that a Board of seven people will have to believe in her." Odette's eyes did not flinch from the sentence. "For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not asking you to find a partner for me to disapprove of. I'm telling you the rule exists. Whether you can meet it is your affair."

It took him a moment. Then he was a man who has read a map upside down and suddenly sees the road. "You've got no right to be telling me this."

"None."

"And you're not telling me for my sake."

She paused, which was an answer. Then, with a very small shrug, she opened her hand on the desk, palm up, the first unplanned gesture he had seen her make. "I'm telling you because you are the only person on my list of four hundred and six accounts in arrears whose file contains a sentence I haven't been able to stop reading."

"What sentence?"

She turned the folder, found a line in his own loan application, two years old, in a handwriting he did not remember being so hopeful, and read it aloud in a dry, neutral voice. "'Reason for loan: so that nobody's child has to learn to drive from a man who's frightened of them.'"

Imran said nothing.

"I read that on Sunday night," said Odette. "I was eating cereal. I stopped chewing."

The kettle clicked off behind them with great tactlessness. Imran got up, because he needed his hands to do something, and made the tea he had already made, and carried it back, and set it down. His shoulders had the ironed look of a man being addressed by a colonel.

"It's not possible," he said.

"I haven't proposed anything."

"You proposed it. It was the first thing you said." He sat. "Let's go through the problems. One: I haven't got a fiancée. Two: I haven't got the sort of life that makes people believe I'd have a fiancée. I live above a launderette. I own four ties, and one of them is a clip-on from a funeral. Three: the whole of Lindenfall banks with you. Your tellers can tell what I had for lunch by the way I tap. If I show up engaged to somebody, the town will want her name and a photograph of her mother."

"I'm aware."

"Four." He looked at her. "You'd be on the Board's desk, a month from now, with a file that said Head of Collections had assisted a delinquent account to apply for the founder's grant. They'd have you for lunch."

"They'd have me for a rather long lunch," said Odette, "and they'd serve the grant afterwards, because grants can't be taken back without a hearing." She said it so simply that he realised she had already run this scenario at length, probably at night, probably aloud. "I would not lose my position. I might lose a promotion. I'd rather not discuss that."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't relevant to your decision."

"It is relevant to mine," Imran said, "if the person asking me to do something mad is also the person who owns my van."

A silence. She picked up the tea at last and drank some of it, and a flicker of astonishment crossed her face that was almost funny, because it was, plainly, very bad tea.

"Wim made that," Imran said.

"It's an experience." She set the cup down. "Mr Haddad, here is the position. You have fourteen days. The application window closes in six weeks, and the interview is public. If you do nothing, I will do my job, and I will do it correctly, and you will lose Tannery Yard. If you do something, I cannot help you openly. I can only tell you that a sentence exists." She stood and tucked the folder under her arm. The camel coat settled like a decision. "I don't expect an answer today."

"The answer's no."

"Then I'll expect it again tomorrow, and the next day." She was already at the door. "The notice will be posted on Thursday. I thought you ought to know before you saw it on the unit door, because the door is visible from the road."

"Is that a courtesy?"

"It's procedure. The courtesy was the telling." And she went out into the yard, small and straight and unhurried, past the Colonel with his bad clutch, past Wim, who stood very still against the wall as if hoping to be mistaken for a downpipe. "Good afternoon," she said to him, and he said, "Sorry," and she said, "For what?" and he said, "I don't know," and she, remarkably, almost smiled, and then she was gone, her heels clicking across the Yard until a car door took the sound.

Wim peeled himself off the wall. "I heard nothing."

"Good."

"I mean I heard something. The walls are plasterboard, sorry, they're basically a suggestion. But it was all very, I'd say, on the whole, professional?" He took a breath that went up through his collarbones. "Is she going to take Brenda?"

"Nobody's taking Brenda."

"Only, Brenda's got the stickers, the learner ones, and I'd miss her. I wouldn't know who to be late for."

Imran did not answer. He went back into the office, shut the door, which had never quite shut, and sat for a while with the founder's paragraph in front of him, though Odette had taken the original. She had left the photocopy. He looked at it and did the arithmetic the way he used to plan fuel: how far, how long, how much, what happens if the road ends. He ran it three ways. All three ended at a keyhole-shaped drain in a bakery floor.

He walked out at six. The launderette beneath his flat was warm and loud, drums turning like a small weather system, and Mrs Okonkwo-Reyes who ran it looked up from her phone and said, "Heard you had a visitor, Imran," and he understood, with the sinking clarity of a man hitting a pothole at speed, that the town had been told. Of course it had. Someone in the yard had posted a picture of a woman in a good coat with a folder, captioned THE REAPER IS IN TANNERY YARD, and eleven hundred people had reacted before the kettle boiled.

"Nobody died," he said.

"Yet." She said it kindly. "Heard she's a ghost. Doesn't eat. Hasn't got a friend in the world."

"She ate cereal."

Mrs Okonkwo-Reyes looked at him over her glasses. "How would you know a thing like that?"

"I wouldn't," said Imran, and went upstairs.

His flat was three rooms and a kettle. He lay on top of the covers in his ironed shirt with his boots on, which was a thing he did when he was thinking, and watched the damp stain on the ceiling that looked, depending on his mood, like Wales or a rabbit. Tonight it was a rabbit. He thought about forty thousand. He thought about Kiera's face at the roundabout. He thought about the man who'd written, two years ago, hopeful enough to put a sentence on a form, and wondered how he'd been so sure that being decent would be enough.

His phone buzzed at nine. A number he did not know, and a message with no greeting.

Don't answer this tonight. Read it and sleep on it. I do not know a single person in Lindenfall who would pretend to be engaged to me convincingly, and I have asked myself, in a spreadsheet, whom I would be willing to humiliate. The list was short. It had one name on it. Pelican Café, tomorrow, 7 a.m., the table by the radiator. Come or don't. If you come, you will have to promise me one thing, which is that you will never, ever tell my grandmother.

Imran read it twice. Then, for the first time in months, in the dark, under a rabbit, he laughed.