In front the light was sharper, clearer, you could see the Bristol Channel in the distance, across the fence, from the room where you did the lessons that Mr Macarthy set. All the morning you sat in the room. Morning was sums, and history, and the first Latin declensions. And outside in the sharp light everything looked very orderly. You could not wander in the front garden as you did among the currant bushes. The front was as ordered as a Latin declension. The beds were lined with flints.

The garden belonged to Mrs Macarthy. Mr Macarthy sat in his room, even when he wasn’t giving lessons, he sat there just from habit perhaps, he had once been a schoolmaster all the time, now he had arthritis. Mr Macarthy was a mild man, he did everything slowly, partly because of the arthritis, partly because of his gentleness. He was a good man, Julia said. Though he wasn’t a parson, he sometimes preached in church on Sundays, and he went and preached in the almshouse to the old men. Mr Macarthy got up with difficulty into the pulpit. In his surplice he looked like the figure off a tomb, the long straight lines of stone. In the winter he wore mittens on his stiff hands. His fingers stuck out from the knitting with its big holes, like the fingers of a knight from his chain mail. Altogether Mr Macarthy was like one of the knights you saw on tombs.

If Mr Macarthy was quiet and gentle, Mrs Macarthy talked a great deal, spitting always through the gaps in her teeth, rushing at things and pushing them over, or she opened a drawer and the drawer came out. Mrs Macarthy was made of plush, several cushions fastened together, and these were a kind of darkish plush. She also had a soft, black moustache that tickled mysteriously when she kissed. You dreaded Mrs Macarthy’s kiss. Just as you dreaded her voice calling, asking you to come and lace up her boots. There’s a good boy, said Mrs Macarthy, sitting blowing in her chair. Your hands caught in the tangle of boots. The black, flopping tongues, and the snapping laces. On frosty mornings in the dining-room, the boots crackled round your cold hands. You almost cried for hatred of Mrs Macarthy’s boots.

Time went both slowly and quickly in the Macarthys’ house, sometimes you thought one way and sometimes the other, or perhaps it was really like that, a quickening, then a slowing of time. The house was full of clocks. Some of these had stopped, like the old, wooden German clock with two pinecones hanging on chains, the clock that Mrs Macarthy refused to wind. He looked at the German clock on the landing, it became a queer thrill to walk past, because of the Germans, and the German spies, and the corpses of prisoners they boiled down for tallow. Sometimes he broke into a sweat, watching for a movement of the still hands, imagining he saw them move.