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have.’
    ‘Of course, you could always take the place over, assuming you could afford the lease.’
    ‘What’s a lease?’ Alice felt even more stupid.
    ‘Like rent, only more long term,’ Olive explained brusquely, obviously realising that if someone didn’t know what a lease was it was unlikely they could afford it. ‘Mother appears to have signed a new seven-year lease only last year and it still has six years to run. There was a letter upstairs from the property company asking for this year’s payment and complaining about the state of the place. Me mam, I mean mother, hasn’t kept it properly maintained.’ She sniffed derisively. ‘Instead, she’s let it go to rack and ruin.’
    ‘She hasn’t exactly been well,’ Alice said. ‘How much is the lease?’
    ‘A hundred and seventy-five pounds for seven years. That’s cheap at the price. My hubbie’s in business, so I should know. Mam, mother, paid at the rate of twenty-five pounds a year.’
    Twenty-five pounds! Alice had never even
seen
twenty-five pounds. She glanced around the shabby room and imagined the walls repainted – mauve would look nice – new curtains on the windows, new oilcloth on the floor. The chairs needed upholstering, but could be patched up for now, and the dryers looked as if they’d come out of the ark, but a good polishing would bring them up a treat. She wasn’t sure what came over her when she said to Olive Cousins, ‘Have you posted the letter yet to the property company?’
    ‘It’s in me,
my
bag, to post as soon as I go outside.’
    ‘Would you mind leaving it till morning? If I’m not round by nine o’clock, post it then.’

    The wireless was on in the living room of number eight Garnet Street. Geraldo and his orchestra were playing a selection of Cole Porter songs.
    ‘Night and day,’ Danny Mitchell hummed as he ironed his favourite shirt: blue and white striped with pearl buttons. He grinned as he thought about the evening ahead. In an hour’s time he would call for Phyllis Henderson, a widow in her forties. They would go to the pub, have a few drinks, Phyllis would play hard to get, but end up inviting him back to her house for a mug of cocoa and thence into her bed.
    Danny had a well-deserved reputation as a ladies’ man. During the ten years he’d been married to his beloved Renee and the ten years after Renee’s death, when he’d had a daughter to bring up, Danny had never given another woman a second glance, but then Alice had got married and he began to sow his wild oats, if rather late.
    He was fifty-one, an electrician on the docks, and as lean and fit as a man half his age, with a full head of wavy hair the same colour as his daughter’s. There was nothing particularly handsome about his face, but he had a quirky smile that people found attractive and a look in his blue eyes that made women go weak at the knees. There were numerous widows and spinsters in Bootle whose main aim in life was to tie the knot with Danny Mitchell.
    ‘Night and Day’ ended. ‘You were never lovelier,’ Danny sang under his breath. He was thinking of Phyllis in her black satin nightie when the back door opened and his daughter came in. All thoughts of Phyllis and the evening ahead fled from his mind and he looked anxiously at the face of his only child. He was relieved to see her eyes were brighter than they’d been in a long while. Perhaps things had started to improve between her and John.
    ‘I’ve brought a couple of mince pies, Dad. There wasmincemeat in a jar left over from Christmas.’ She put a paper bag on the table. ‘They’re still warm.’
    ‘Ta, luv. I’ll have them in a minute. There’s tea in the pot if you fancy a cup. Pour one for me, if you don’t mind. I’ve only got the cuffs of this to do.’ He turned the cuffs back, ready for the studs, and hung the shirt behind the door. Then he folded the badly singed blanket he used to iron on, put it away and took the iron into the yard where he