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feel like taking the bus, and today it was nicer than usual, with this silence hanging snugly over the whole area. You didn’t realize how much noise the assembly track made, shuddering all day behind the factory gates; you got used to it; didn’t notice, until it stopped.
    She dropped in at the newsagents’ to pick up the Evening Mail, and looked through it quickly on a bench in Cofton Park as she took the short cut home. She didn’t linger; the day was darkening already, and getting cold. This had been a bitter winter. Bill was mentioned, but there was no picture, which was probably how he would have wanted it.
    When she got home, he was sitting at the dining-room table, papers spread everywhere. He was keeping himself busy, like he always did. That was one of the things she hated most about the newspapers: they always seemed to imply, whenever there was a strike, that the workers headed straight off to the pub, or sat around at home watching the racing. She had never known Bill do anything like that. As Convenor of the Works Committee he fought a constant battle against paperwork. There was never any getting the better of it. He was up until midnight, two or three nights a week, sometimes, and always staying late for meetings. She didn’t believe that most of the bosses worked nearly so hard. They had no idea what it was like. True, he didn’t do much work on the track any more, but nobody could begrudge him that. He had responsibilities now, huge responsibilities. No wonder his hair was beginning to whiten, just a little, around the temples.
    He was still a handsome man, though. Not bad, for pushing forty.
    ‘Cup of tea, love?’ she offered, kissing him on the forehead.
    He sat back, stretched, threw his fountain pen down. ‘That’d be grand.’ Then, gesturing at the unread correspondence: ‘God, it never ends.’
    ‘You’ll get through it,’ she said; confident, supportive, as ever. ‘Is Duggie home yet?’
    Bill made a face: a scowl, tinged with indulgence. ‘About a quarter of an hour ago. Went straight upstairs. He’s been to that record shop again. He tried to sneak it past, but I saw the bag.’
    On cue, a drumbeat began pounding through the floorboards from Doug’s bedroom. Reggae, although neither Bill nor Irene would have been able to identify it as such. Bob Marley, in fact.
    ‘I’ll get him to turn it down. You can’t work with that going on.’
    Disappearing upstairs on this errand, she left Bill to contemplate the letter he had slid guiltily out of sight just before her arrival. A needless action, really, provoked not so much by its contents, but by the more generalized guilt that came to him so readily these days, whenever Miriam’s name was mentioned, or whenever she was in his thoughts. A bad business, all round. But still: the amazement of that supple body, those lovely breasts so eagerly offered… And she was the – ninth, was it? The tenth? A terrible record, after eighteen years of marriage. Most of them from the factory, the typing pool, the sewing shop; that redhead in the canteen, God knows what happened to her… There was that trip to Italy two years ago, the week at the Fiat factory in Turin they’d wangled by hooking up with the WEA, and the girl he’d met in the hotel bar, Paola her name was, she had been lovely… But there was something different about Miriam, some quality of intensity that made it both better and worse than any of those other, quicker affairs. She frightened him, at some level. Some level he hadn’t quite ackowledged yet.
    He read the letter again, with the same clenched annoyance.
Dear Brother Anderton,
I am writing to complain to you about the work of Miss Newman in her capacity as Charity Committee Secretary.
Miss Newman is not a good Secretary. She does not perform her duties well.
There is a lack of attention on the part of Miss Newman. At meetings of the Charity Committee, you can often see her attention wandering. I sometimes think she has