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lumpy. You decide never to go to church again.
    ‘What?’ says Arthur, later, when Diana is quiet and the washing-up finished.
    ‘I don’t believe in it any more,’ you tell him.
    ‘But our child. Our... our civilization.’
    ‘I’m sorry. It seems ridiculous to me.’
    He looks at you as if you have shot him. His face runs to wrinkles with the effort of comprehension.
    ‘You go on your knees to pray,’ you tell him. ‘And you go on your knees for sex.’
    Arthur’s lips turn blue. He lurches to his feet and rushes over to the draining board, taking you by the shoulders. You cannot imagine what has happened for a moment. You see his arm go back and the flash of his fist and then you are on the floor and the coffee cups are breaking around you and your eye is beginning to close. The room is swimming, and you look up at Arthur who has become huge, standing astride you, looking down, his fists clenched by his side.
    ‘Don’t talk to me like that again,’ he says. He thunders out of the room, and you reach for the door of the cupboard to pull yourself up. You do not know what you have said. You had only begun your speech about knees. He should have let you get to the part about washing the floor.
    You hear her for the first time. You turn on the radio and there she is. She sings, ‘I Don’t Know If I’m Coming Or Going’. You walk out of the house with her name on your bps. That is all you have. You don’t know she is a black woman. You don’t know she is dead. You don’t know that her voice will haunt you for the rest of your life. Lady Day. You will name your son after her.
    The trouble with Arthur was his need for violence. He was the son of a miner. He had been in that war. It was not easy for him. He could never be sorry about it. There was always justification. Violence to him was a kind of love. And you were his wife. And he loved you. In his way.
    And you loved him. And you did love him, Dora, in spite of the beatings. It wasn’t as if he beat you every night, or even every week. Only when you crossed him. Only when he realized that he had been wrong. The rest of the time you could love him. For a while, at least. A long while. Some years. Hoping all the time that he would change. That he would begin to see your world, as you strove to see his. Hoping that he would see the futility of the violence, that he would recognize that he could not hurt you, even if he killed you. And it was too many beatings later before you realized that you were not a wife at all. That you were a symbol. A hated symbol. That you had been replaced in his mind by some thing.
    You held your breath too long in those days. You should have raged. You had every right to rage, Dora, while Arthur was squeezing the life out of you. While he appropriated all the life forces that came into the family, all the forces of renewal and regeneration, and grew stout and red-necked. You should have gone underground, poisoned his food, sawed through the leg of his chair. It would have been worth it. He would have seen you then.
    But you were a traditional girl, like your mother before you. You believed that Arthur should come first, that he should get the best cut of the joint, that his ideas and aspirations were more informed, more valid. You believed in sacrifice, Dora. You were a mystic.
    There was a more or less hazy conviction that if you gave your life to him, he would, like God, give life back to you. But for Arthur there was no mysticism, only duty. And he was short on that. Arthur went through life explaining everything. He left a trail of destruction behind him.
    After Billy was born you decided to leave him. How long after Billy was born? A week, Dora? An hour? Perhaps it the moment of birth itself, the child being an image of release. Suddenly it was possible to throw everything off, to leave yourself vulnerable. Then it would be up to you. But it was not courage. It was desperation that drove you to leave. You had seen yourself in