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walked home across Bevan Square. He went into the tobacconist, open till eight, and bought twenty Marlboro. He had never used to smoke, but being with Carol so much and Carol’s family, he was on to twenty a day now. The square was paved in pinkish-red with flowerbeds surrounded by low brick walls and with a statue in the middle of it that looked like a piece of car bodywork from a scrapheap but was by quite a famous sculptor and called
The Advance of Man
. A smell of garlic and fat hung about the Turkish takeaway. The eldest Isadoro girl and a boy Barry didn’t know sat on one of the flowerbed walls, eating kebab and chips out of paper cones.
    It was dark, the place painted with the brownish-yellow light from the sodium lamps that stood on concrete stilts above Winterside Down. The light turned everything to khaki and yellow and black. Of the boys who huddled or lounged over their motorbikes all round the statue, one had red and yellow hair in a crest like a hoopoe’s and another had dyed his blue, but the light turned all to yellow-brown and glittered like crumbling gold leaf on their black leathers. Those boys were not much younger than Barry, they were almost his contemporaries, but he feltimmeasurably older than his twenty to their seventeen or eighteen. In taking on Carol, in becoming, so to speak, the father of a ready-made family, he had leaped half a dozen years.
    Her husband’s photograph, in a plastic frame from Woolworth’s, stood on the shelf over the living-room radiator. It was the only photograph in the house. Dave. He was dead, killed when the lorry he had been driving went over a mountainside in Yugoslavia. A tall, thin, dark-haired man, Dave had been, with blue eyes and an Irish mouth. Barry didn’t look like him but they belonged to the same type, Carol’s type. Soon after they had first met and he had gone home with her, Carol had told him he was her type and shown him the photograph of Dave.
    Barry dusted the photograph. He dusted the few ornaments in the room and the phone and the back of the television set and then he got the vacuum cleaner out and vacuumed the bit of carpet that had been Iris’s before she went mad (as she put it) and had wall-to-wall. He kept the house clean for Carol, it was the least he could do. Before he had moved in, it had been a tip which was only what you’d expect in the home of someone who had three kids and two jobs.
    There was nothing demeaning or emasculating to Barry in house-cleaning. His mother, had she known, would have sneered and called it woman’s work. But Barry belonged to a generation in which the girls resented menial tasks even more than the boys. He might take it for granted that his mother cleaned and washed and polished but not the woman he lived with. Why should she? She worked as hard as he did.
    He cleaned the hall as well and stripped the bed and changed the sheets. The only nice furniture in the house was in this bedroom, Carol’s bedroom and now his too. The cupboard which Dave had built in when they first moved here and the house was new had its doors made of mirror. It was on the wall facing the bed. Carol liked to sit up in the mornings and look at herself. It brought her achildlike pleasure that warmed Barry’s heart to look at herself in mirrors.
    Barry put the sheets and pillowcases into a plastic carrier with a pile of smelly napkins of Jason’s and took the lot round to the laundrette in Bevan Square. Blue Hair and Hoopoe and the rest of them were still there but clustered now round an old American car, a Studebaker, parked on the edge of the precinct with its windows open and its radio playing loud rock music. Barry felt old, but in a way he felt proud too and responsible. He and Carol had met in a laundrette, though not this one. His mother’s washing machine had broken down and he had taken a couple of pairs of jeans to do himself. Carol had come in with two loads. She had had Ryan and