The sun wasn’t yet low, and the street—its houses uniform, save for personalised front doors—was hot and empty. Phyllis and Julia had chosen to live where families had lived for years, sons and daughters staying on when they married. People here considered their houses extensions of themselves. They were as houseproud as their ancestors, for whom the working cottages had been built. Phyllis and Julia adapted accordingly.

Julia hesitated at the front door. She was a handsome woman, and the paper-thin boiler suit she wore today emphasised the rolling ease with which she moved. She stopped to assemble her thoughts and consider a way to break the news. The sign-off whistle blew from the nearby Volkswagen depot, and the silence that followed ensnared her. She was still appreciating the moment when something caressed her leg and miaowed.

“Hello, Winston,” she said, as she picked him up and wrapped him around her neck. “Now that you’ve arranged a rendezvous for later, I suppose you want a snack.”

Julia was intrigued by line breeding, and asked the cat about his heritage as she fondled his anthracite coat. But Winston only offered his inscrutable gaze. His genes were a mystery, but from his musical soirees in the early hours, he was obviously leaving his mark on the neighbourhood.

Julia, who never carried a bag, reached into her pocket and drew out the keys with a slow intake of breath similar to the one which preceded her eighty-mile-per-hour serve, and plunged the key into the lock.

Phyllis, in a cotton slip, had her head bowed in front of a steaming kettle, reviving her curls. Had she been witness to an incident earlier in the day, she might have been in need of more serious resuscitation.

The flower seller outside Green Park was not particularly imaginative in his choice of flowers, and Phyllis, rather than walk to the stall in Bond Street and add fifteen minutes to her journey, had taken it upon herself to educate him a little. He was not unresponsive and his selection of wares soon took a more adventurous turn.

The evening of the dinner being a Friday—the day Phyllis treated herself—she was leaving the office in Stratton Street when a man in a green linen suit pushed past her, without apologising, into the building. Phyllis, knowing the manners of the young English and preoccupied with denying the urge to pull the after-work cigarette from her bag, paid no heed. She also missed the upward-looking group on the pavement opposite her building. She brightened a little when the flower man produced the bunch of cream anemones he had put by for her. At the precise moment that Phyllis rummaged in her purse for coins, the man in the green suit reached the eighth floor, and made a desperate lunge for a friend who was just about threatening to toss himself over the balustrade. The suicidal man moved slightly, and the crowd below watched green-suit’s rugby tackle become a swallow dive. Phyllis had just handed over the money, with instructions to keep the change, when the florist’s thanks froze on his lips. The flash of green caught his eye, and a “Gawd” escaped his lips on the thud of impact. Phyllis gave the florist an odd look—it was only a twenty-pence tip, she thought as she joined the throng heading down into the station. Wrong Man Leaps From Building was how one paper headlined the incident the next day.