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factor of the cop. He lifted the bonnet with the authority of a fat lady opening a box of chocolates.
    ‘Alternator,’ he said, after some poking about and an attempted start-up.
    ‘I thought it would be electrical,’ I said.
    ‘Alternator,’ the oldster repeated, as if to deny it at all connected with the electrics, or to indicate my guess not specific enough to score agreement.
    ‘Emma,’ I told her on the phone, ‘wouldn’t you know it. There’s something wrong with the car’s electrics. We’re here in the industrial estate, at a garage, but the guy reckons he can do the job in half an hour, so we’ll hang on. Anyway, Jack’s fine, and we shouldn’t be long.’
    ‘Ask Summer if there’s anything at the house that I need to go over for.’
    ‘Emma wants to know if there’s anything she can do,’ I told Summer. ‘You’ve nothing turned on, cooking, anything like that?’
    ‘No, but thanks,’ she said.
    ‘No, everything’s okay she says,’ I told my wife.
    At the side of the garage was a bench seat with a view of the workshop and the equipment hire business next door. Jack played among some worn tyres along the wall, and his mother and I sat and waited. ‘If you want to ring your husband now,’ I said.
    ‘It’s okay, thanks,’ she said. She had a habit of scratching her elbows through the fabric. She was naturally blonde, I decided, because I could see the downy hair on the back of her neck. I asked if she’d rather wait inside because of the cold, but she said she was fine, that Jack needed something to keep him occupied.
    ‘It’s Murphy’s law,’ I said. ‘The one time it’s something of an emergency and the electrics give out.’
    ‘But better now than when we were on the way to the doctor.’
    ‘That’s true.’
    ‘I could ring my husband, but we’d be back before he could get here from work,’ she said. We watched a couple in the hire yard struggling to lift a rotary hoe into their off-roader. The woman seemed to have the heavier end. ‘Actually, I need to get home before he does,’ said Summer. ‘Things haven’t been so good for us lately. That’s one of the reasons we came here from Hamilton. New place, new start, new resolves. You know how it goes.’ For the first time that I was aware of she held my gaze, and smiled: a tight smile that caused fine wrinkles at her eyes. ‘Jack, be careful, sweetheart. Don’t climb up on those tyres,’ she said.
    Her face was pink and white because of the cold, and the tendons moved beneath the skin of her right hand as she scratched her left arm. Better not to say anything in reply, in case she didn’t want to pursue her marriage as a topic. She did, though. ‘Paul had so much pressure at work,’ she said. ‘People think lawyers have it easy — money by the minute and long lunch hours in suits with corporate clients.’
    ‘Envy, I suppose, and suppressed anger when they have to seek professional services themselves, and then get the bill at a bad time.’
    ‘Paul had a falling out with his partners, and it all got pretty nasty. It comes home, doesn’t it, one way or another. I don’t mean anything physical, nothing like that. Just impatience and loss of involvement. Nothing you do is good enough for an unhappy person.’
    We were two people who had no connections that weren’t entirely circumstantial. Summer had come to introduce herself to her neighbours and ended up sitting between a garage and a hire firm while her son with fresh stitches in his eyebrow, played among second-hand tyres. And she was telling me of the difficulties in her marriage and her hopes that the shift to a new place would solve them. She had no one else to talk to I suppose.
    ‘A new start can be a good thing,’ I said. ‘How does your husband like the firm he’s with now?’
    ‘Yeah, he does, but he’s lost a lot a confidence. He used to be quite gung-ho, and now he has this oppressive fear of failure.’
    ‘It could be just a bad patch,’