It rained from before it was light. Owen heard it on the skylight when he woke, a steady sound with no gaps in it, and lay for a moment working out whether it was the kind that would stop by ten or the kind that would not, and decided it was the kind that would not, and got up.

The shop was down the hill from his flat, on the corner by the closed bank, and it had his name over the door in letters that had been painted by a man who was now retired. Inside it smelt of cardboard and dust and, faintly, of the coffee he made on the little ring behind the counter. There were racks down both walls and a table in the middle, and every rack and the table was full of records in their sleeves, standing up in rows like books, with the cardboard dividers between them going soft at the corners from years of thumbs.

He turned the sign to open at ten. Nobody came. He had not expected anybody to. He put a record on, something quiet with a piano in it, and made a coffee, and sat on the stool behind the counter with the day’s crossword folded under his elbow, and the rain ran down the window in long uneven lines and turned the street outside into a watercolour of itself.

The first customer came in at about half past eleven. She had an umbrella that had given up on one side, and she stood in the doorway and shook it, and then looked at the puddle she had made on his floor and said, “Sorry.”

“It’s a floor,” said Owen. “It’s had worse.”

Her name was Priya, though he did not learn that until later. She left the umbrella against the wall by the door, where it went on dripping quietly to itself, and unbuttoned her coat, and went to the racks, and began at the beginning, at the letter A, as if she had all day. Which, Owen supposed, she did.

There is a particular sound that a person makes going through records. It is not a loud sound. It is the sleeve of one record being tipped forward against the next, and then the next, a soft cardboard tick, tick, tick, with a pause when something has caught the eye and then the ticking again. Owen had listened to it for twenty years and had never grown tired of it. It was, he thought, a bit like listening to someone reading.

The piano record ended. He turned it over. Outside, a car went by slowly with its wipers going and its lights on in the middle of the day.

“Do you mind if I ask what this is?” said Priya, from somewhere around the letter G.

“A piano trio,” said Owen. “Old. There’s a bass player as well, and a drummer, but you’d have to listen quite hard.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s for the rain,” he said. “I’ve got a different one for sun. Doesn’t get much use.”

She laughed, not loudly, and went back to the ticking.

Around noon a man came in whom Owen knew, a tall man called Gerald who came in most Sundays and never bought anything and was always welcome. He nodded to Owen, and went to the jazz section and stood in front of it with his hands in his coat pockets, in the way of a man looking at a view. The rain went on.

Owen made another coffee, and, after a moment’s thought, two more, and put one on the end of the counter nearest Gerald, who took it without comment, and carried the other over to Priya, who looked up, surprised.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“I know,” said Owen. “It’s Sunday.”

She took it in both hands. She had got as far as the letter M. There was a small stack beside her on top of the rack, three records, maybe four, laid flat, which was the sign of someone who was going to buy something but had not yet decided what, and Owen, who had seen a great many small stacks, said nothing about it and went back to his stool.

The record ended again. This time he did not turn it over straight away. He let the needle sit in the run-out groove, going round with its small soft crackle, and listened to the rain and the ticking, and thought that if you had asked him to describe the sound of the shop, it would be this, exactly this.

Then he got up and put something else on. An old folk record, a woman’s voice with a guitar, the kind of thing that sounded as if it had been recorded in somebody’s kitchen, which, he happened to know, it had.

Priya looked up at the first bar of it and then down again, and Owen saw her go still for a moment and then go on, more slowly, and thought, well, that’s one of the four decided.

Gerald finished his coffee and put the cup on the counter and said, “Next week,” and went out into the rain without doing his coat up, because Gerald never did his coat up, and was gone.

The afternoon went on the way rainy afternoons do, which is without seeming to move at all and then, suddenly, being later than you thought. Priya reached the end of the alphabet at about a quarter to three. She came to the counter with her stack, which had gone down to two, and then, at the last moment, up to three again, and put them down.

“The kitchen one,” she said. “And these.”

“Good choices,” said Owen, which he said to everybody and meant every time.

He put them in a paper bag and folded the top over twice, the way he did, and she paid, and then she stood there for a moment with the bag under her arm and did not go.

“It’s still raining,” she said.

“It is.”

“I don’t suppose,” she said, “you’d play the other side of that.”

So he did. He turned the record over and set the needle down, and she went and sat on the low windowsill by the door with her back to the wet glass and the bag on her knees and her coffee, gone cold, beside her, and listened. And Owen sat on his stool. And neither of them said anything, because there was nothing that needed saying, and the woman on the record sang about a river, and the rain, being a river of its own, ran down the window behind Priya’s head.

The light outside began to go. It was only three, but it was that kind of day and that kind of year. The streetlamp on the corner came on early, uncertain, and then made up its mind. Inside, the shop lamps, which Owen had had on since ten, seemed suddenly to be doing some work.

The record played out. The needle lifted, and clicked, and came to rest.

Priya stood up. She picked up the umbrella, which had stopped dripping and was merely damp. She said, “Thank you,” and Owen said, “Sunday,” which was not exactly an answer, and she smiled and opened the door, and the sound of the rain came in, louder, and then the door shut and it was quiet again.

He watched her go past the window, the broken umbrella held over the paper bag rather than over herself.

Then he washed the cups, three of them, in the little sink at the back, and dried them, and put them on the shelf.

He put the folk record back in its sleeve and the sleeve back in its place, under the letter it belonged to, in the rack where she had found it.

He turned the sign on the door. Closed.

Outside, the rain went on, softer now, or perhaps only sounding softer through the glass, running down the window in its long lines, and the streetlamp made a small yellow room of the corner, and nobody was in it.

Owen put the piano record on one more time, low, for himself, and sat.

Tick. Tick. Nobody at the racks. Only the rain.

And the piano went on, quietly, into the evening, and the shop was warm, and the day was done.