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Scotland’s pawn and Scotland’s pride./ England’s bane and England’s heir,/ Mary, fairest of the fair.”) The School Cert girls weren’t supposed to be involved in the pageant; they had too much else on their minds. Quite often Joyce had to wait at the mission by herself in the afternoons, hoping Uncle Dick would remember she needed a lift. She would try to absorb herself deeply in her homework behind the windows of the little office, never lifting her head when she sensed the sailors coming and going on the other side of the glass, scaldingly aware of herself, bent over her books in her prissy neat school uniform, and of the incitement to resentment or violence the sight of her must represent to these strong thwarted shameless men. When at long last it was Uncle Dick’s tall shape in his dark coat and hat that loomed beyond the window, her heart spilled over with relief. The world readjusted itself back inside the shelter of his importance, his air of always being in a hurry, his loud lofty authority with crazy Mrs. Mellor and with the men. “Men,” when he said it, shrank only to mean something about how they were employed, and set Joyce safely above them, condescending to them and beyond their reach.
    One afternoon as they set off in the car, Uncle Dick remembered something he wanted to take back for Vera.
    â€”Just making a little detour, he said to Joyce. We won’t be ten minutes.
    He turned the car around and they drove through the streets to where the Authority was building several new houses, including the one for his family. The designs for the houses had been taken from the Ideal Home Show in London: some of them were already finished and lived in, two or three were still under construction. It had not been discussed, not properly, whether there would be room for Lil and her children when Vera got her new house. Joyce thought perhaps her uncle had some news for his wife about it; perhaps it was ready and he had been keeping it for a surprise. But he pulled up to a red brick house which already had curtains up and a striped awning over the door, although the garden was still a mess of clay on either side of the path.
    â€”You wait here, he said. Good girl.
    He walked up the path, feeling in his pocket for a key, then unlocked the front door and disappeared inside, closing it behind him. He was gone longer than ten minutes. Joyce tried to shrink in her seat so as not to be conspicuous to the children playing in the street. She took off her blazer. She pulled her history book from her satchel and looked at it sightlessly.
    Uncle Dick came back out of the house with a bundle wrapped in brown paper under his arm. When he was halfway down the garden path, walking rather quickly, the front door flew open again behind him, and a young woman ran out after him on high heels, blond and slim. She was wearing lipstick and earrings and a pretty dress that seemed inappropriate for staying at home on an ordinary afternoon: beige, with a low-cut square neck and deep diagonal pleats across the skirt. She took Uncle Dick by the arms and remonstrated with him, seeming to want the parcel, but she wasn’t looking at him: her eyes from the very moment she flew through the door had sought out Joyce in the car, staring at her greedily and challengingly as if this contact between them was momentous. Helplessly, Joyce stared back.
    Uncle Dick said something, not loudly (Joyce couldn’t hear it) but fiercely, so that the woman jerked back from him as if he had hit her. Afterward she always pictured the scene as if he had smacked her lightly and sharply across the side of the face, just as he sometimes smacked Peter when Peter was acting up, even though she knew he hadn’t actually struck this grown-up woman, not in front of her. He strode to the car and threw the parcel into the backseat. He turned the car round; the woman had stepped back into her doorway, stroking down her skirt and