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an expression of great tenderness: ‘You’re lucky to have someone who really cares. I don’t think my wife would care at all, whatever I did. Ours is a funny marriage. My wife doesn’t understand me at all.’
    â€˜Blimey, she ought to,’ cackled Lill, breaking the mood. ‘I understand you all right.’
    â€˜Why are we wasting time, then, eh Lill?’ And Guy Fawcett bent his heavy body urgently forward to hers over the fence. ‘Let’s get on with it. Have a bit of fun before your lot comes back for their lunch.’
    Lill retreated flirtatiously to the depressing rose-bush. ‘Well, I don’t say that if you come round the back door in ten minutes with a book you’d promised to lend me I wouldn’t let you in.’
    â€˜Oh, come off it Lill. Since when have you taken up with literature? Nobody’d buy that even if they heard me. I’ll just hop over the fence—’
    â€˜Hey, give over you saucy bastard—’ But by then Guy Fawcett had done a one-hand spring over the rickety fence and was approaching her with looks of cinematic lust in his eyes. ‘Hey, give over Guy, someone might see us. Me mother—’
    And at that moment Lill, in giggling mock-flight, did turn her head round in the direction of her mother’s garden, and saw through the gap in the straggling hedge her mother, square and aproned on a kitchen chair, peeling potatoes in the watery sun and regarding them with an air of malevolent disapproval, lips pursed, old black eyes flashing.
    Lill’s reaction was instantaneous and sincere: she turned back towards the gap in the hedge and whipped her fingers into a vicious V-sign. Then she put her arm around Guy Fawcett’s substantial waist, let him paw over her shoulders and round to her triumphal breasts, and so the pair went off towards the kitchen door in an ecstasy of simulated amusement. The back door was shut with tremendous emphasis, and strain as her old ears might, Mrs Casey heard no more. Lill and Fred’s bedroom was at the front of the house. Shaking her head, and with a tear of shame or rage at the corners of her eyes, she put a cloth over her bowl of potatoes and slowly, arthritically, made her way back to her own kitchen.
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    â€˜Penny for ’em, Fred. What are you thinking about?’
    It was one of Fred’s mates in the parks department who asked, coming up behind him as he filled in time beforethe dinner-hour in the garden around the war memorial. It was a question they often felt impelled to ask him, as he poked aimlessly around with hoe or rake, doing no good to anyone and positive harm to the newly bedded plants that before many weeks were out would spell ‘Welcome to Todmarsh’ in pink, yellow and blue under the names of the fallen. And when he was challenged, Fred usually replied: ‘Wondering what’ll win the two-thirty at Newmarket,’ or ‘Remembering that goal in the second half of the cup-tie last Saturday,’ and then went back a little more purposefully to his work. A more honest reply would have been ‘Nothing.’ For in fact Fred had a tremendous capacity for letting his mind go completely blank and stay that way for hours at a time. But even Fred realized that reply would lay him open to ridicule, so he always concocted something. Today he said: ‘Just thinking that if I’d got that double seven in the darts Saturday night we’d’ve won.’
    â€˜Oh aye,’ said his mate. ‘Thought you were down the Rose and Crown Saturday night with your family.’
    â€˜Only early on,’ said Fred, perking up a little, and excavating energetically around a petunia which would very much rather have been left alone. ‘Only early on. Couldn’t let the team down.’
    â€˜Celebration, wasn’t it? Birthday or summat?’
    â€˜My Gordon’s twenty-sixth,’ said Fred, his skinny