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By Root 600 0

in perfectly good spirits when dialling his number. She’d scrubbed the bath, hung clean towels over the edge and done all that raisin business with the apples. Then quite suddenly, on hearing his clipped and well-bred voice, she had dropped into somewhere dark and confined – she was shut inside a box beneath a river. She felt he wouldn’t be able to hear her even if she shouted. This feeling of being locked away from him had something to do with visualising Edward, on the other end of the telephone, leaning against a desk polished by somebody he had never met, blotting the corners of his mouth to remove traces of a meal he hadn’t cooked, with a handkerchief that came fresh and laundered out of his breast pocket as if by magic. It was the privileged style in which the man lived that silenced her.

When she’d first seen him, stepping through the doorway of the outer office in Chalk Farm, he’d reminded her of various portly relatives glimpsed only in the pages of photograph albums. He wore galoshes and held, either in his hand or teeth, the stem of a small and blackened pipe. His face, which was pale and fair, had a curious swelling between the eyebrows as though he had been stung by an insect. Bitten by life, she thought, watching his mouth open and close behind a drift of tobacco smoke. The way he told it, there wasn’t much point to his existence. He had always done the right thing, supported his wife, educated his son, made sure the garden was tidy. There had been that trouble years ago – here he waved his hand rather vaguely in the air as if turning the handle of a gramophone – but he had learned to live with it. Binny pretended at first she was still married, to avoid complications. But later in the evening, rather charmed by those galoshes and the manner in which he constantly puffed, sucked and fooled over his pipe, she allowed him to see her home. He kept looking at himself in the mirror. She couldn’t be sure if the swelling upon his forehead made him appear hideous, or distinguished in a Roman sort of way. She couldn’t tell at all now because, loving him as she supposed she did, she no longer saw him as he was. That first night he had spoken confusedly of his time at boarding school. Captain of the cricket team . . . head of his dormitory . . . That rotter Jonas . . . If it hadn’t been for Muldoon – what a stinker he’d turned out to be. He was obviously re-living the heyday of his prep school years. There was something too about his father and a pair of gloves, and a beastly rumpus over a prefect’s badge. She could make little sense of it. Having attended grammar school and forgotten all about it, Binny was touched by his continued preoccupation with those far off boyhood days.

If she hadn’t been touched, she thought gloomily, she wouldn’t be out in this weather, catering for his friends.

On the pavement outside the British Rail warehouse, lying in disorder across the rusted springs of a double bed, sprawled several elderly men and women drinking out of a communal bottle. Binny retraced her steps and caught hold of Alma’s arm.

‘It’s everywhere,’ she whispered. ‘Where are the police?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ scolded Alma. ‘The last thing we need is a policeman.

Smiling and nodding ingratiatingly, she led Binny forward. An old woman in a fur coat and a pair of tennis shoes, reclining on one elbow as though in a punt on a lake, stared at Alma in admiration. ‘My goodness,’ she shouted. ‘You’re a bonny girl. Will you look at that hair on her head?’ Alma’s hair, rinsed to an unusual shade of strawberry blonde, was blowing in all directions.

Pleased, Alma stopped and confessed it wasn’t altogether natural. ‘I use a little something,’ she confided. ‘Hint of a Tint . . . every second or third wash.’

Bouncing in excitement on the dilapidated bed, unsettling her geriatric companions wrapped in sacking, the old woman laughed and leered her approval. Two men struggled upright into a sitting position and spat violently into the gutter. Their eyes, half averted, were those of animals existing in darkness. Binny ran away, and