Mrs. Dacey still held Samuel by the arm. “You’re safe with me. I’ve taken a fancy,” she said. “Once I take a fancy I never let go.”

“And never trust a woman who can’t get up.” Mr. Allingham pointed to a woman sitting in a chair by the Speedboat pintable. “She’s trying to get up all the time.” The woman made a sudden movement of her shoulders. “No, no, legs first.”

“This used to be the cowshed,” George Ring said, “and there was real straw on the floor.”

Mrs. Dacey never lets go. Samuel saw the fancy shining behind her glasses, and in her hard mousetrap mouth. Her cold hand hooked him. If he struggled and ran she would catch him in a corner and open her umbrella inside his nose.

“And real cows,” Mr. Allingham said.

The men and women drinking and dancing looked like the older brothers and sisters of the drinkers and dancers in the club round the corner, but no one was black. There were deep green faces, dipped in a sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, sealed on the cheeks; red and purple, slate-gray, tide-marked, rat-brown and stickily white-washed, with violet-inked eyes or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink lidded, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axlegreased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, salt-cellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrotheads, yolkheads, blackheads, heads bald as sweetbreads.

“All white people here,” Samuel said.

“The salt of the earth,” Mr. Allingham said. “The foul salt of the earth. Drunk as a pig. Ever seen a pig drunk? Ever seen a monkey dancing like a man? Look at that king of the animals. See him? The one who’s eaten his lips. That one smiling. That one having his honeymoon on her feet.”

AFTER THE FAIR

The fair was over, the lights in the cocoanut stalls were put out, and the wooden horses stood still in the darkness, waiting for the music and the hum of the machines that would set them trotting forward. One by one, in every booth, the naphtha jets were turned down and the canvases pulled over the little gambling tables. The crowd went home, and there were lights in the windows of the caravans.