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to an end. You can tell the foreman in the morning, O.K.? I’m going south. I’ve got a girl in London, worships the ground I tread on, poor cow. She’ll take me in. But that’s between you and I, right?’
    â€˜But why?’
    â€˜He’s found out, her old man, and I reckon he’ll have his heavies out gunning for me. He’s beat her up – bunch of bloody gangsters that lot are. I’ll miss her.’ The tears stood in his eyes, and John stared, amazed, confounded. ‘Poor cow,’ said Gilly, the epithet an endearment, a caress.
    â€˜D’you want me to come to the station with you?’
    â€˜No need for that. I only come in to tell you to tell the foreman. Anyway, I got something to do first, get that statue, that Clio. The train don’t go till eleven, and I want her.’ He turned half away. ‘For a souvenir like, she’s the dead spitting image.’
    â€˜You’d go into the cemetery tonight, for that ?’
    â€˜Like I said, I want her.’ His eyes, glazed, held a pathetic hunger. Of love, in those bare words, he had expressed all he knew how to. On lechery only he was articulate. ‘It’s moonlight,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a torch. I’ll climb the wall.’
    â€˜Goodbye, Gilly,’ said John. ‘Good luck.’
    In the morning the sky was coppery, grey above, reddish on the horizon where the sun hung. The Winter Solstice had come.
    â€˜It’s like the end of the world,’ said Marlon.
    The foreman came in, rubbing his hands. ‘Going to have snow before the day’s over. Gilly’s late.’ John told him Gilly wasn’t coming in. He didn’t tell him why not, and he expected an outburst. But the foreman only stuck out his lip and put the kettle on and helped himself to one of Marlon’s cigarettes.
    â€˜No loss, that,’ he said. ‘We shan’t miss him. And if I’m not much mistaken we’ll all be laid off by tonight when this dump’s snowed up. You’ll be able to get yourselves dug in nice for Christmas, lads.’
    Marlon showed no inclination to leave the stuffy warmth of the hut, where the foreman now had a brazier of coke, for the raw air and yellowed dimness of the cemetery. But the foreman wanted to be rid of them, to be on his own, to be idle and warm in peace. He took down Gilly’s calendar and pushed it among the glowing coke, and the last John saw of it was the glossy tanned body of a naked girl gyrating in the fire. They moved out into the chill of the shortest day, the foreman hurrying them along by cleaning frost off the truck’s windscreen himself.
    John expected trouble from the boy, so forbidding was the cemetery in the gloom and under that strange sky. But Marlon, when John had repeated several times that Gilly was not coming, when this had at last sunk in, became more cheerful and more like a normal person than John had ever seen him. He even laughed. He pushed John about in the cab, and when this made the truck swerve, he hooted with laughter.
    But when they had come to the centre and were working on clearing the main aisle, he fell silent, though he seemed tranquil enough. All those months John had longed for peace, for a respite from Gilly’s ceaseless bragging and innuendo, but now he had it he felt only uneasy. Being alone up here with Marlon had something to do with it. He despised himself for being afraid of a poor retarded boy, yet he was afraid. The thickening atmosphere was part of it, and the windless cold, and the increasing darkness like an eclipse, and the way Marlon would stand for whole minutes on end, staring vacantly, swinging his spade. But what made him long for the snow to begin and drive them back to the hut was Marlon’s new habit, now Gilly was not here to deride him, of touching the gravestones and seeming to whisper to them. That he did this reverently and cautiously did nothing to ease John’s