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wish Princess Margaret’s name to be mentioned in this house again.”
    She was even uncharacteristically generous with the fish-food, flinging in fresh pink shrimp and bite-size worm almost with abandon. Everyone else was rationed. Mr Chivers’ scant teaspoonful of breakfast marmalade was apportioned out the evening before and sat stiffening in an egg-cup overnight. He never saw the jar. Bacon rashers were cut tastefully in half. And when he had swallowed the last morsel of his one barely buttered piece of toast (thin-sliced from a small loaf), Miss Lineham whisked every comestible swiftly out of sight. Not a crumb nor tealeaf remained to give promise of future sustenance. Even the smell of food crept cravenly away at the touch of Miss Lineham’s Airfresh. Five minutes after breakfast the kitchen looked like a morgue or a museum - shining tiles and dead exhibits in sterilized glass jars.
    Mr Chivers started eating out. He sprawled in Joe’s caff or Dick’s diner, elbow-deep in chips, baked beans tumbling down his chin, wallowing in ketchup, gnawing chicken bones. (‘Dogs eat bones, Mr Chivers, not Civil Service gentlemen.’) He ordered both cream and custard on his syrup sponge and slurped it down, savouring every mouthful. Delirious contrast to those tight-lipped breakfasts when Miss Lineham jumped and blinked her eyes every time his teeth made contact with the toast.
    He spent more and more time away. He added the public baths to the public convenience, running the bath full to overflowing and shouting above the Niagara of the taps. He set up floods and cataracts, slooshing water over the side of the cracked white tub. He bought a plastic duck and spent reckless hours torpedoing it with the bar of municipal soap. He flung in whole cartonsful of bath salts and turned the water as blue as Miss Lineham’s fish-tank. He left hairs in the plug-hole and a rim around the bath. Nobody cared. Nobody pinned crabbed little notes on his door, saying “Water costs money, Mr Chivers, were you aware?” No one slipped a purple crocheted doiley underneath his soapy bottom.
    He discovered a bath with a toilet beside it, for only tenpence extra. Now he ruled the world. He jetted his urine at the stained, un-Harpicked bowl, aiming at the central ‘C’ in the maker’s name, his own initial. Sometimes he took risks or invented games, standing further and further back and still not missing, or stopping and starting the stream, or tracing patterns with it, as if the jet were a golden pencil. That done, he sat on the cracked and germy toilet seat (which had never known the chastening caress of candlewick) and strained and groaned in thunderous ecstasy. He even returned to prunes.
    Whatever his excesses in the baths, he was always back in the house by 8.55. Nine p.m. was the angels’ feeding time: the high spot of his day. Miss Lineham was often prowling by the door.
    “Good evening, Miss Lineham. Lovely weather.”
    “Good evening, Mr Chivers. It won’t last.”
    “Good evening, Miss Lineham. Nice bit of rain for the garden.”
    “Good evening, Mr Chivers. They forecast floods.”
    Formalities over, he fixed his whole attention on the fish as he walked slowly, slowly past, watching their perfect gills pant in and out, their dramatic ventral fins flowing like fancy ribbons from their underbodies. There were other inhabitants of the tank, inelegant and drably coloured small fry, creeping things that slimed and gobbled on the bottom, the proletariat of snail and loach. He scarcely noticed them; he was too absorbed in the angels: their wide wings and golden eyes, their steady, soothing motion as they meandered in and out of each other’s shadows, haloed by their own enchanted fins. He longed to know more about them - what sex they were, what age, their parentage, their origins - but dared not ask; indeed, dared not even loiter by the tank. Only in his fantasy did he lay his cheek against the cold compress of the glass and feel his