Hitherto the three of them had been alone in the snug, but now the place began to fill up. Half a dozen robust middle-aged women, obviously regulars, entered within ten minutes and began their evening ritual of Guinness and conversation. Quite by chance Charles had seated himself in the exact centre of the half circle of chairs which were sacred to their use, and they began by a barrage of meaning glances and loud asides to try to move him. But the mixture of whisky and beer, coming as it did on an empty stomach, was beginning to take effect, and he sat with half-closed eyes, oblivious of their angry gestures and comments. The landlord, a rapidly blurring figure, moved a cloth over the surface of the bar, and from the centre of his alcoholic mist Charles saw himself with a cloth in his hand, passing it, not over a bar, but a window. Gets a contract to clean their windows regular. Sends the bill every three months.

The women were frankly talking over, round, and through his head; snatches of their speech mingled with the phrases that insistently barked inside his brain.

‘So I said, if you want to know why he’s not at school, I said, just you come round to the back,’

He could buy you up.

‘and look at the word he’s written on the coal-house door, I said.’

Two fellers who work for him. Double time if they want it.

‘Well, where else would he hear a word like that? I said. A nasty dirty word. If that’s what they teach them, I said,’

His fingers was all thumbs. He was no good when he worked for me.

‘I hope for your sake, I said, that you’re not suggesting that he hears language like that AT HOME, I said.’

I expect he overcharges them. Every blade of grass.

‘School attendance officer or no school attendance officer, I said.’

In Charles’s breast pocket was a paper packet containing his last cigarette. He took it out carefully, but it had somehow been bent, and the paper was broken in the middle. He began to smoke it, holding it so that one finger exactly covered the torn spot, inhaling deeply. The hot storm-centre of alcohol in his stomach rose to meet the smouldering pool of nicotine in his lungs, and, the burden of guilt and fatigue slipping from his shoulders, he breathed a silent prayer of gratitude to the twin deities of his world.