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to speak true. ‘Look, Henry,’ he said, ‘you’re trying to impose some false image on us, aren’t you? We’re not like this, Barbara and me, remember?’ ‘It’s a very sound residential area,’ said Henry, ‘you’d keep your resale value.’ ‘We’d go off our heads in one of these places,’ said Howard, ‘we couldn’t live with these people, we couldn’t live with ourselves.’ ‘I thought you wanted something nice,’ said Henry. ‘No, for Christ’s sake, nothing nice,’ said Howard, ‘I don’t come from anywhere like this. I don’t accept its existence politically. You don’t either, Henry. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’ Henry stared at Howard with a slightly shamefaced, slightly baffled look. ‘There comes a time,’ he said, ‘there comes a time when you realize, Howard. You might want change, well, we all want change. But there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country, Howard. We all come to need a place where you can get down deeper into yourself and into, well, the real rhythms of living. That’s what Myra and I are into now, Howard.’ ‘Here?’ asked Howard. ‘There’s nothing here. You stop fighting.’ ‘Well, fighting,’ said Henry, staring at little photographs of houses in the window, ‘I’ll do my bit for betterment. But I’m divided. I’m not wild about all this violent radical zeal that’s about now, all these explosive bursts of demand. They taste of a fashion. Punch a policeman this year. And I can’t see what’s wrong with a bit of separateness and withdrawal from the fray.’ ‘No?’ asked Howard. ‘That’s because you’re bourgeois now, Henry. You have the spirit of a bourgeois.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ said Henry, ‘that’s nasty. I’m trying to give my life a little dignity without robbing anyone else of theirs. I’m trying to define an intelligent, liveable, unharming culture, Howard.’ ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Howard, ‘evasive quietism.’ ‘You know, Henry, I’m sorry,’ said Barbara, ‘but if I lived like you, I’d die first.’ ‘Bourgeois, bourgeois,’ said Howard the next day as, their things packed, the baby in the back of the van, they drove off from the farmhouse after an uncomfortable parting. ‘Well,’ said Barbara, trying to be kind to the kind, the people who had saved her when she was wandering loose with a television set, ‘don’t forget, they haven’t had all our disadvantages.’
    They drove, over bridges, through chines, towards the town and the sea; they were escaping, back into Watermouth to get the feel of urban life again, to consort once more with staple reality. There were houses and dustbins and rubbish and crime. In the end, Howard resolved to visit the Social Security department in Watermouth; he needed to set his spirit right, to reassure himself that the place in which he was planting his destiny really did have a sociology – had social tensions, twilight areas, race issues, class struggle, battles between council and community, alienated sectors, the stuff, in short, of true living. Leaving the van in the car park, with Barbara and the baby inside, he penetrated into the bleak offices, and was granted a stroke of luck. For here was working one of his own former students from Leeds, a girl called Ella, who wore granny spectacles, and denim jeans and top, and knew his radical temper, and, like any good student, shared it. An adult girl, Howard said to Barbara later, after she had left her desk in the office and got into the minivan with them, crouching in the back, next to the baby’s basket, promising to show them the real Watermouth. She hunted out the areas of deprivation hidden between and behind the old private hotels, the