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ashamed of having found distasteful.
    The piano had begun again. He would have gone – unless he was saying good-bye to Emma. She began to walk to the telephone; the day had become simply another fine one, and exciting. Had he
gone? Something made her go back to the garden window, and he hadn’t; he was holding the back of Emma’s bicycle, pushing her along towards the garage, his head bent over her stiff
little pigtails. She could not stop watching them, feeling so little that either of them felt: Cressy, she knew, adored him, but he adored Emma. At the garage Emma got off her bike, leaned it
against the water butt, and threw her arms round his waist until he lifted her up; the bicycle collapsed to the ground behind them, but neither of them took any notice.
    She sighed – a tremor of anticipation, of regret, of danger and satisfaction; the tightrope of longing and secrecy and play-acting was quivering for her, and she picked up the
receiver.
    The room was still the same room, and still too cold. She got up, pulled on her pink mohair dressing-gown as quickly as possible, and went to the same window where he had stood
and wept – what was it, twenty ( twenty ?) years ago. The sloping lawn declined from the house, the wide border against the wall, even most of the trees were unchanged. One or two had
blown down, one or two had been planted; the rest continued in their apparently ageless prime. This morning there was a heavy white mist above the crystallized grass; the sun was like an enormous
frozen firework. There might well be fog, and Emma’s train would be late. She put on her mules, and clacked downstairs for the post.
    There was one letter. She knew the writing immediately, but it was still an extraordinary shock, and she simply held it for a long time in a kind of mindless amazement, before going upstairs to
open and read it.

CHAPTER 3
    DAN
    H E woke to the pulverizing roar of the washing machine, which seemed to be operating in or on his outer ear. His mouth was
like slimy gravel and his eyes like small pieces of scorching plush. The thin, jazzy curtains were letting in light of a second-rate kind and he could hear kids outside. He heaved himself up, found
he’d been sleeping with his head pressed against the rotten little cardboard wall – because the bloody machine noise got less at once – and waited to see whether the inside of his
head was going to keep still or not. Tea was what he craved: a good strong pot of tea, but she wouldn’t hear if he yelled; you got privacy these days with machine noises instead of properly
built houses. Nevertheless, he yelled – once – just to see if he still could, and while the noise was still bucketing through his head like some rocks being chucked down hill, she came
in, her face all pursed up with ready-made shock.
    ‘Sir Walter Scott awake! Well what a surprise! Do you happen to know the time by any chance incidentally?’
    ‘I don’t,’ he said carefully, ‘happen to have it on me. Oh go on, Dottie – be a sport – make us some tea.’
    ‘You needn’t think you’re getting it in bed.’ She twitched back the curtains and began a kind of useless, irritable tidying of the room, which meant, he knew, that she
was nervous as well as angry.
    ‘Look, Dot. You can say anything you like to me if you’ll just get the tea first. Don’t do that to my books.’ She was throwing them into his cardboard brown
suitcase which lay by the settee on which he was wedged.
    ‘You’re a nice one to worry about what other people do with your property: it comes well from you that kind of fuss after your lazy sodden uproar last night with people
banging on walls, and that cat one floor down asking me whatever was the matter last night.’
    ‘Don’t answer her – lazy bitch – she’s not worth your golden breath.’
    ‘I didn’t say: “It was nothing, Mrs Green, only my brother got drunk and beat up my husband before my own eyes”.’ She left the room