The woman was conciliatory in warm fawn. Her hair was a greying fair, thick and shaggily cut. She had a square face and large brown eyes, smiling. She wanted to be friends.

‘How are you finding the flat?’ she asked.

‘It’s fine.’

‘I find it’s so small,’ said the woman. ‘But then, I’ve had all these years to accumulate rubbish.’

Rachaela waited, her heart drumming and her stomach rife, for the challenge of the street and the night.

‘Well I mustn’t keep you. Take care,’ she added kindly, ‘it’s a nasty old night.’

Rachaela went on down the stairs, stowing the piece of junk mail in her bag.

She forgot the woman outside. The wind struck at her, the sky was choked with dark blue churning cloud.

Rachaela walked down the street and caught a bus at the corner. It twisted and turned and bore her into an ominous and derelict suburb, stark in the orange street lights.

Where she got off, the buildings had been knocked down, great rattling walls of corrugated iron, striped with bills, separated her from yawning cavities. She walked past the rowdy pub which had been described and up a hill of council houses fish-boned with fake shutters, gardens spattered by gnomes, and windmills that whirled with weather. The street ended in waste ground. Some youths in leather and day-glo socks were holding a meeting on the gloomy grass. One shouted at Rachaela, a ritual of menace. She walked on and came to a one-storey building surrounded by a cordon of wire fencing.

Through the gate and over the lumpy ground, and she opened the door and went into a long drill hall with a clacking wooden floor.

The air was hot and sour, the room crowded, the lines of wooden seats around the walls filled by women of all apparent ages between the virgin and the crone. It was a place of women, a mocking slightly sordid club. And from a yellow door issued a man in a white coat, and the eyes of his harem of suppliants went to him, the click of knitting needles hesitated and pages of rustling magazines halted.

He joked briefly with a woman in a lilac cardigan at a desk. Then he was gone, like the god.

Rachaela went to the desk.

‘I’ve got an appointment for seven.’

‘Oh yes. Miss Day is it? That’s right. If I could just take your address.’ The woman entered details and nearby the nearer women listened. A pallid girl with round frog eyes watched Rachaela, popping a boiled sweet into her rosy, fatty mouth. ‘I’m afraid we’re a bit behind tonight. It may be a bit of a wait.’

‘All right.’ Rachaela went from the woman and found a chair at the end of the line.

About thirty in front of her. Surely some of them were together. It was ten to seven now.