Though there were few young people to be seen there, The Coach and Horses still managed to be a warm and lively place, Banks noticed as he walked in with his father just after eight o’clock that night, his mother’s steamed pudding and custard—the proper food he was supposed to be eating—still weighing heavy in his stomach. His father had managed the walk without too much puffing and wheezing, which he put down to having stopped smoking two years ago. Banks had tapped his own jacket pocket rather guiltily for his cigarettes as they went out of the door.

This was Arthur Banks’s local. He had been coming here almost every day for forty years, and so had his cronies, Harry Finnegan, Jock McFall and Norman Grenfell, Dave’s father. Here, Arthur was respected. Here, he could escape the clutches of his ailments and the shame of his redundancy, at least for an hour or two, as he drank, laughed and told lies with the men with whom he felt most comfortable. For The Coach and Horses was, by and large, a men’s pub, despite the occasional couple and groups of women dropping by after work. When Arthur took Ida out for a drink, as he did on Fridays, they went to The Duck and Drake or The Duke of Wellington, where Ida Banks caught up on the local gossip and they took part in trivia quizzes and laughed at people making fools of themselves in the karaoke sessions.

But there was none of that at The Coach and Horses, and the piped sixties pop music was turned down low enough so that old men could hear one another talk. At the moment, The Kinks were singing “Waterloo Sunset,” one of Banks’s favorites. After Banks and his father had settled themselves at the table, pints in front of them, and introductions had been made, Arthur Banks first lamented Jock McFall’s absence due to hospitalization for a prostate operation, then Norman Grenfell started the ball rolling.

“We were just saying, before you got here, Alan, what a terrible thing it is about the Marshall boy. I remember you and our David used to play with him.”

“Yes. How is Dave, by the way?”

“He’s doing fine,” said Norman. “He and Ellie still live in Dorchester. The kids have grown up now, of course.”

“They’re still together?” Ellie Hatcher was, Banks remembered, Dave’s first real girlfriend; they must have started going out together around 1968.

“Some couples stick it out,” muttered Arthur Banks.

Banks ignored the remark and asked Norman to pass on his regards to Dave next time they spoke. Unlike Jock and Harry, Banks remembered, both of whom had worked with Arthur at the sheet-metal factory, Norman had worked in a clothing shop on Midgate, where he could sometimes get his mates a discount on a duffel coat, a pair of jeans or Tuf shoes. Norman drank halves instead of pints and smoked a pipe, which made him different, almost genteel, compared to the rough factory workers. He also had a hobby—he read and collected everything to do with steam trains and had an entire room of his small house devoted to clockwork models—and that set him even farther apart from the beer, sport and telly crowd. Yet Norman Grenfell had always been as much a part of the group as Jock or Harry or Arthur himself, though he didn’t share that ineffable bond that workingmen have, of having toiled under the same lousy conditions for the same lousy bosses and faced the same dangers day in, day out, for the same lousy pay. Maybe, Banks wondered, Graham had been a bit like that, too: set apart by his background, by his being a newcomer, by his London cool, yet still a part of the gang. The quiet one. The George Harrison of the group.