There were three photographs with the letter, of Titch, Phyllis and Titch’s mother sitting round the kitchen table on the big night. Uncle Joe must have been on his tenth can of lager, because they were all slightly askew, as though the kitchen floor had suddenly sunk in just before his finger pressed the shutter. Phyllis was in camera mode: teeth graciously bared, eyes staring straight into the lens, hand lifting a wine glass in a determined, recordable gesture of celebration. She was wearing a blouse I hadn’t seen before. Titch’s mother was laughing with her eyes closed, a paper party hat slipping off the back of her hair. And Titch was smiling too, but there was the ghost of something fearful in his eyes.

I turned to the last picture. Titch had arranged his arm so that his fingers were making rabbit ears out of the back of Phyllis’s unwitting, permed head. Good sport of Phyllis to have included it. She loved photographs. It made me laugh out loud. I slipped it into my wallet and went to work.

15

She was a good waitress, and I liked to watch her working. It pleased my eyes to follow her round the room, stopping only when she happened to look over in my direction. She could stack and carry heavy china plates like they were made of paper, and she could keep many different things in her mind at once: the menu for table twelve, the bread for table ten, the bill for table three, and the wine list for the man with the face like an aggrieved muskrat who was signalling at the table by the window.

She was friendly to customers almost all the time, but I saw her behave otherwise once with a man, a City type who had had too much to drink. He was with three friends at a table close to the bar, and all night they had been ordering successive bottles of a very expensive white wine. They had loosened their ties, and their voices became slightly slurred as they grew a little too loud. A jagged haze of noise surrounded them, the kind of noise that always set my teeth on edge.

As the wine flowed, they thought they would have a bit of fun with the waitress. Every time Eve brought them something they would quickly demand something else, ‘Oh, and more bread!’ or ‘Another bottle of mineral water!’ – stagily, like loud, capricious children with a powerless nanny.

With each demand, Eve’s manner grew one degree colder: slowly she was retreating into herself, the way Murdie used to when there was trouble at the Whistle.

She brought them another bottle of white wine, in an ice bucket. ‘Here comes the ice maiden!’ one of them shouted, a tall, sandy-haired type, his face lightly mottled with drink and excitement.