As Gladys mimicked his voice, Eric glanced away. Suddenly the familiar barbs from Gladys didn’t hurt or embarrass and that surprised him, because they had been doing just that for the past twenty-five years.

‘Well, not bloody likely! I’ll be dealing with that Peggy – and if she doesn’t pay, I’ll be getting the bailiffs onto her myself. No one takes me for a mug!’ She turned on her heel and marched back towards the house.

Eric sighed. Oh, no, no one ever does that, Gladys, he thought. They take you for many things, but never a mug. He tried one last time. ‘Please, please, leave Peggy to me. If she doesn’t pay, I’ll speak to Kathleen Deane; she keeps an eye out for Peggy since Maura left.’

Gladys loved the conversations when Eric pleaded with her best of all. It made him look weak and pathetic and wasn’t her life bad enough, having to live on the Dock Road? Could the straw she drew have been any shorter? Could her sister have done any better if she had tried? The moments when Eric begged were one of the few pleasures she had in life. She stopped and looked back over her shoulder.

‘You are a waste of good air, do you know that? You are the most pathetic specimen of a man I have ever known in my life, and that’s saying something because the streets around here are full of them.’ She stared at him, waiting for a response, but there was none. Disappointed, she turned away.

‘Your trotters and mash are on the table,’ she called back as Eric carried the water into the stable, asking himself the usual question: was it normal to have been married for as long as they had and, for the last twenty of them, to have been spent loveless and in separate rooms? He had no idea.

Eric was a shy man, he never spoke of such things as sex, but he knew other men had it and he didn’t, which had come as a surprise, given that Gladys had been so very keen to lure him up the aisle with promises of a wild and reckless love life once he had been allowed to do battle with the tops of her suspenders. It was Gladys who had unbuttoned her blouse and encouraged him to explore, not him, and the night of his downfall had been filled with such passion, too. They had been dating for only three months when he had been called up and when he had walked her home after telling her his news, they had stepped into the pool of darkness alongside the bins.