“Little and what you’d call neat, like. What my old man used to call a pocket Venus, dirty old sod. Got a worried face, though, lines round her eyes. Little prinked-up mouth like a baby’s arse.” Beryl sniffed my cigarette once again and took a swig of her coffee. “Not unlike Mrs., when you come to think of it, only younger. Mrs. has had her face done, like, lifted, and this one hasn’t, you can always tell. Men go for the same type, don’t they?”

She began to talk about the neighbors, how Dr. and Mrs. Clark next door had become vegetarians. They said it was a matter of principle but Beryl thought it more to do with economy, the wicked price meat was these days.

“And how about the police knocking them up at number fifteen?” she said. “Last night and the night before. It’s not going to be thieving from cars both times, is it?”

It wasn’t but I didn’t say so. Remarkably Beryl seemed to have no idea that I even knew Silver, still less that I was spending half my life round at the Silvermans’. “He’s got folks in there what are up to no good,” she said. “Drugs, I shouldn’t wonder. You seen the paper today?” She gave me a shrewd look. “No, you’d better things to think about, dirty little stop-out.”

It was at times like this that I thought how nice it would be to have Beryl for one’s mother and envied the son and daughter. “What about the paper?” I said.

“That couple with the little colored boy, they been seen taking him around a theme park in Ramsgate. It won’t be long now before they collar them.”

“Won’t you be sorry?” I said.

Beryl didn’t know, she wasn’t sure. Maybe Jason would be better off with brown people like himself. Anyway, Lane and Barrie had no business taking the law into their own hands.

“When I was young,” Beryl said, “I mean, when I was a little kid, anyone could adopt anyone they liked, it was dead easy. And there was plenty of babies on account of it was a lot harder not to have them and a terrible stigma for those as did and wasn’t married.”

I said that you couldn’t call that a very desirable state of affairs and Beryl said no, maybe not, but at least you knew where you were, everyone knew their place and everyone was the same color. Before I could rise hotly to the defense of the multiracial society she jumped up and set about vigorously vacuuming the living room. I went outside and sat on the iron staircase in the sunshine and looked at the moss and the rampant ivy and thought about what had happened the night before.