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astride the stile above the Big House. Removing one of the three saved Woodbines out of his jacket pocket,
he rolled it between his fingers to coax it back into plumpness.
    He liked to keep an eye on the Glen when the MacFarleys were away. He didn’t consider Master George man enough to be responsible,
not being a married man, and there were so many jobs likely to be overlooked. In his working days he had come to lend a hand
on a Sunday after chapel, and every day on his paid week’s absence from the mines, even when he was off sick, if he could
manage to get away without the wife nagging him too much and going on about him being dishonest to the company. Since his
retirement he came and went as he chose. Some people had their clubs or their bingo or their dart matches: he had his Glen.
    Spitting shreds of tobacco from his flat lips he shambled down the slope, skirting the Big House and George’s bedroom, not
wanting to be greeted until he had introduced himself to the visitors in Hut 4, going down into the valley with lips still
moving and chest still heaving.
    George, though not the first to wake, was the first to leave his bed some few minutes after Willie had passed the wall of
his room. He dressed and folded his sleeping bag neatly before going through to the kitchen of the Big House. There he washed
his hands and face. He was happy because Joseph was in the Glen and there would be things to talk about. George had had a
solitary childhood, albeit in a boarding school, and a solitary manhood, though he wasn’t conscious of any deprivation. He
liked order and he liked company of a sort, Joseph’s sort. Joseph on occasion had discussed Art with him in a way that he
found suitable and in conformity with his own sense of order. If he had known that Joseph was to all men all things and to
his own self nothing, it wouldn’t have spoiled his pleasure or diminished his admiration.
    *
    Balfour had woken shivering an hour or so earlier, minus his boots but otherwise fully clothed, with parched mouth and gelatine
eyelids. He burrowed into his sleeping bag, handsewn by George, thought once about the one-arsed brigadier due to arrive that
day, and drifted again into sleep.
    Joseph and Dotty were lying side by side in the single bed in Hut 4. Their two faces were cold under the beamed roof. On the
chest of drawers Joseph had stood his after-shave lotion, a bottle of green scented water with a spray given to him by his
ex-wife at Christmas. It looked like a floral arrangement with a single bud, propped against the brown wall of the cabin.
    Outside the hut trod Willie, spitting his phlegm into the undergrowth, noting that the washing line had gone from its place
slung between the blackthorn thicket and the elder bush. He scratched his neck under the band of his cap and saw the rope
hanging from the high elm at the boundary of the field. However did it get up there, he asked himself out loud, looking up
into the sky? Puzzled, he shook his head and went down the path.
    Only Kidney had made use of the shed in the bushes. In the night Dotty had woken fretfully and fumbled awkwardly under the
truckle bed for the chamber pot placed there by Mrs MacFarley. As if triggered to wake at just such a moment, Joseph had risen
invisibly in the blacker-than-black night and said ‘Out, out’ and folded like a wing to the mattress again. Obediently Dotty
had gone and squatted under the dark sky, pissing reproachfully into the damp grass. Moth-pale in her voluminous nightgown,
she had crouched with splayed knees, thinking that no doubt Roland and daft Kidney would be permitted the solace of a chamber
pot, but not she, being female. Waddling experimentally forward, she had felt like some duck threading its way through platters
of water lilies in a pond. She stood, trying to list all the animal names of the stars that swam about day and night above
the earth: the winged horse, the dolphin, the eagle, the horned goat, the
scorpion, the serpent, the