‘Pity they have to be cooped up here all year just for two weeks’ hunting,’ Newman said quietly, staring into the dogs’ eyes.

Fred reached over and stroked one dog’s head and then stood looking down at them with his hands on his hips. ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll have a place in the country some day,’ he said, as certain as if he were actually negotiating the purchase but was merely being businesslike and reticent.

‘Saving for it?’ Newman asked, smiling.

‘You can’t save for the kind of place I want. But I’ll have it.’ He kept looking down at the dogs.

‘You really mean that?’ Newman whispered, impressed.

‘Certnee I mean it.’ Fred looked into Newman’s glasses now. ‘I ain’t bein’ a sucker all my life. We bust the Jews open and it’ll all come out like from a cracked slot machine. They got so much they’re washing their dishes in hot seltzer.’

Newman laughed softly and Fred did too as he bent over and picked up a broom and swept droppings over to one side. Newman stood there motionless, watching him.

After a while he went down in the cellar with Fred and watched him sandpapering the model boat. He had his glasses on and a strange pleasure of accomplishment flowed through him as he sat there so wordlessly welcome. And while Fred’s chafed hands rubbed the sandpaper back and forth, back and forth, Mr Newman began talking of the war and how he had killed the German. The sandpaper stopped and the cellar was quiet when he described the wound, for he had gone up to the dead man and had seen the bullet hole. It ran through the neck and out the top of the head.

Chapter Nine

LATE Sunday afternoon. A little suburban street lined with young trees. The dry leaves hang motionless. In the window pots the geraniums droop under the weight of dust. An old woman carefully soaks the plot of yellow grass before her house, an aged spaniel nodding in the heat beside her. Two sunburned boys kick a stone along the gutter as they head home from the beach, their bathing trunks slung on their red shoulders. A girl in shorts hoses her car, watched from a front porch by a party of men trying to play cards. Atop a tall ladder set against a house in the middle of the block, a middle-aged man stands painting the shutters of his bedroom windows. Heavy horseflies find the geraniums, the old woman, the spaniel, the girl, and strike against the neck of the man on the ladder.

In such detail the block impressed itself on Mr Newman as he slowly spread green paint over the hot-smelling wood. For although intent upon the wet brush in his hand, he was not on the ladder because his shutters needed painting. He had been driven up there like a cat that sometimes leaps to the branch of a tree for no discernible reason, and sits carefully surveying what seems about to transpire below.