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her views on life or the emotions.
    Mrs. Parchman died when Eunice was thirty-seven, and her widower immediately took over as resident invalid. Perhaps he thought Eunice’s services too good to waste. His kidneys had always been weak, and now he cultivated his asthma, taking to his bed.
    “I don’t know where I’d be without you, Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy.”
    Alive today, probably, and living in Tooting.
    Eunice’s urges pressed her to walk, one day to get on a coach and have a day in Brighton, another to take all the furniture out of the living room and paint the walls pink. Her father went into hospital for the odd fortnight.
    “Mainly to give you a break, Miss Parchman,” said the doctor. “He could go at any time, he could last for years.”
    But he showed no signs of going. Eunice bought him nice bits of fish and made him steak and kidney pudding. She kept up his bedroom fire and brought him hot water to shave in while he whistled “The King of Love my Shepherd is” and “I am the Lord High Executioner.” One bright morning in spring he sat up in bed, pink-cheeked and strong, and said in the clear voice of one whose lungs are perfectly sound:
    “You can wrap me up warm and put me in Mum’s chair and take me up on the common, Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy.”
    Eunice made no reply. She took one of the pillows from behind her father’s head and pushed it hard down on his face. He struggled and thrashed about for a while, but not for long. His lungs, after all, were not quite sound. Eunice had no phone.She walked up the street and brought the doctor back with her. He asked no questions and signed the death certificate at once.
    Now for freedom.
    She was forty and she didn’t know what to do with freedom when she had it. Get over that ridiculous business of not being able to read and write, George Coverdale would have said. Learn a useful trade. Take in lodgers. Get some sort of social life going. Eunice did none of these things. She remained in the house in Rainbow Street, for which the rent was scarcely now more than nominal, she had her blackmail income, swollen now to two pounds a week. As if those twenty-three years had never been, those best years of all her youth passed as in the twinkling of an eye, she went back to the sweetshop and worked there three days a week.
    On one of her walks she saw Annie Cole go into a post office in Merton with a pension book in her hand. Eunice knew a pension book when she saw one. She had been shown by her father how to sign his as his agent. And she knew Annie Cole by sight too, having observed her leaving the crematorium just before Mr. Parchman’s funeral party had arrived. It was Annie Cole’s mother who had died, and now here was Annie Cole collecting her pension and telling the counter clerk how poor Mother had rallied that day. The advantage of being illiterate is that one achieves an excellent visual memory and almost total recall.
    Annie thereby became Eunice’s victim and amanuensis, paying her a third of that pension and doing needful jobs for her. She also, because she bore no malice, seeing Eunice’s conduct as only natural in a catch-as-catch-can world, became the nearest Eunice ever had to a friend until she met Joan Smith. But it was time now to kill Mother off finally, she was getting scared, only Eunice as beneficiary wouldn’t let her. She determined to be rid of Eunice, and it was she who, having flattered her blackmailer to the top of her bent on her housewifely skills, produced as if casually the Coverdales’ advertisement.
    “You could get thirty-five pounds a week and all found. I’ve always said you were wasted in that shop.”
    Eunice munched her Cadbury’s filled block. “I don’t know,” she said, a favourite response.
    “That place of yours is falling down. They’re always talking about pulling that row down. It’d be no loss, I’m sure.” Annie scrutinised
The Times
which she had picked at random out of a litter bin. “It