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conversion of a bedroom into a bathroom, the colour scheme. The kettle came to the boil, spluttered and bounced. He put an extra teabag in, though he knew the waste troubled Christine.
    “Where was that, Philip? In a nice part, was it?”
    “Oh, Chigwell way,” he said.
    “This is a second bathroom, is it, dear?”
    He nodded, passed the client her cup, set Christine’s down between the Elnett spray and a can of baked beans.
    “We should be so lucky, shouldn’t we, Mrs. Moorehead? I’m afraid that’s beyond our wildest dreams.” Another wince, the Moorehead woman’s scalp knocking against the nozzle of the dryer. “Still, we must be thankful for what we do have, I know that, and Philip’s promised me a new bathroom here one day, a really luxurious one, and quite a cut above what we’re used to in this street.”
    Mrs. Moorehead probably lived a couple of houses down. She had an angry aggressive look, but that was very likely habitual with her. He talked about bathrooms and traffic, about the springlike weather. Mrs. Moorehead departed, off to some Rotarians’ function, saying unnecessarily, Philip thought, that she wouldn’t give Christine anything over the odds because “you don’t tip the boss.” Christine started tidying up the kitchen, stuffing wet towels into the washing machine. He guessed there were potatoes baking inside the Rayburn and with a sinking feeling knew they would once more be having her favourite standby, a can of beans emptied over a split-open jacket potato.
    Cheryl came in, dressed for going out. She sniffed, shivered. “I don’t want anything to eat.”
    “I hope you’re not getting to be anorexic,” Christine said worriedly. She peered at her daughter in that way she had. It was as if by extending her neck and bringing her face within inches of the other person, symptoms disguised by distance would startlingly manifest themselves. “Will he buy you a meal?”
    “Who’s ‘he’? There’s a crowd of us going bowling.”
    Cheryl was nervous and very thin, her wispy fair hair touched here and there with green and standing up like a bottle brush. She wore skintight jeans and a bulky black leather jacket. If she wasn’t his sister, if he didn’t know her and what she was really like, if he had met her in the street, Philip thought, he would have taken her for a tart, a slag. She looked horrible, her face gleaming with gel, the lips almost black, her fingernails quite black like attachments of patent leather.
    She was on something, he thought, but he didn’t want to think of it; he almost trembled when he wondered if it might be hard drugs. How could she afford it? What did she do to be able to afford it? She hadn’t a job. He watched her standing by the counter, investigating Christine’s bottles and jars, notably a new-type of foamy stuff for “sculpturing,” dipping in a black nail and sniffing it. If anything at all interested her, it was cosmetics, what she called the “beauty scene,” but still she wouldn’t apply for the beautician’s course Fee had suggested. Over her shoulder hung a scuffed black leather handbag. Once, a week or two ago, he had seen it lying about open and notes spilling out, tenners and twenty-pound notes. He had forced himself next day to ask her where the money came from, and she didn’t flare at him or get on the defensive. She just opened the bag and showed him its emptiness, the purse with fifty pee in it in loose change.
    Philip was jerked from this reverie by Cheryl’s slamming the front door. He wandered into the living room, carrying his refilled teacup. In this room he never specially noticed the furniture but he noticed it now. It was recalled to him, as it were, by the reversion of his mind to the past, by the shock of the reencounter with Arnham’s world. The furniture was too good for the room which held it—well, all but the rented television set. Christine had been obliged to sell the house and most of what she had, but not