But driving home that night, the double whiskies at four o’clock already transforming themselves into a faint but persistent head­ache, I was already beginning to regret having given way to him. And there was the trip to London, too; Susan wouldn’t be pleased about that. I generally enjoyed my drive home; the quar­ter of Leddersford where the works were situated was so unmitiga­tedly, blackly hideous, the contrast with Warley so ex­treme, that every day I renewed my enjoyment of Warley. It was some­thing I could rely upon; my reactions were always exactly the same. There was mild relief driving out of the works along Rawdon Road into Birmingham Road; but that was a feeling shared by everyone in the crowds I threaded my way through. It was shared, so it lost its value; the real elation began when I turned off Bir­mingham Road into the Leddersford Ring Road, a short stretch of dual carriageway running through an open-cast mining area now restored to farming land. This evening the fields looked more than usually desolate under the drizzling rain, their dread­ful unvarying flatness an even worse insult to the eye. On another day I should have been glad of this, just as one’s glad of a dry throat before a drink. For soon I’d turn left into the Leeds Road, then right into Warley Road and then there’d be a straight run into Hawcombe. And once at Hawcombe I was home. I never needed the Warley sign to tell me that; at Hawcombe the air began to smell different.

The real elation, the authentic joy, began at Hawcombe; but this evening, it was only a village like any other. The air couldn’t smell any different; Hawcombe was at the bottom of Warley Road and Warley Road climbed to a thousand feet. The fact was, I real­ized, that I didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t only that Susan would be angry about both my trip to London and my going on the Council; it was something much worse. For ten years now this drive home had been an escape; every inch nearer to Warley had been a farther distance between me and my father-in-law and my father-in-law’s world. I naturally saw him frequently now, but only in the capacity of grandfather, only as a private person.

I could accept that, even find him almost human at times. But now he was going to be a fellow-councillor. Or rather, was going to continue being my boss. There wasn’t going to be any escape, there wasn’t going to be any time when I could pretend to be a free and independent person. And there was nothing to be done about it once the Selection Committee had made their decision; as Harry Runcett had once said in his cups, the Park Ward was so safe a seat for the Tories that they’d elect a f—g cat if the Party chose to run one. I’ve got a Siamese Tom at home, he’d said, and if the Party nominates that cat they’ll all vote for it. . . .