The address they were seeking was 2 Balaclava Gardens, the fifth turning off Marland Way, a wide road running to the centre of the city. Here was no Sunday calm. The traffic was heavy—cars, delivery vans and a succession of buses bunching on the glistening road. The grinding roar was a constant discordant descant to the continually repeated blare of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” interposed with the first verses of the better-known carols. No doubt in the city centre the “Winterfest” was being appropriately celebrated by the official municipal decorations, but in this less privileged highway the individual and uncoordinated efforts of the local shopkeepers and café owners, the rain-soaked lanterns and faded bunting, the swinging lights blinking from red to green to yellow, and the occasional meanly decorated Christmas tree seemed less a celebration than a desperate defence against despair. The faces of the shoppers seen through the rain-besmirched side windows of the car had the melting insubstantial look of disintegrating wraiths.

Peering through the blur of the rain, which had persisted throughout their journey, they could have been driving through any thoroughfare in an unprosperous inner-city suburb, not so much featureless as an amorphous mixture of the old and the new, the neglected and the renovated. Terraces of small shops were broken by a series of high-rise flats set well back behind railings, and a short terrace of well-maintained and obviously eighteenth-century houses were an unexpected and incongruous contrast to the take-away cafés, the betting shops and the garish shop signs. The people, heads hunched against the driving rain, seemed to move with no apparent purpose, or stood under the shelter of shop awnings surveying the traffic. Only the mothers pushing their baby buggies, the hoods shrouded in plastic, showed a desperate and purposeful energy.

Kate fought off the depression tinged with guilt which always descended on her at the sight of high-rise flats. In such a grimy oblong container, monument to local authority aspiration and human desperation, had she been born and bred. From childhood her one compulsion had been to escape, to break free from the pervading smell of urine on the stairs, a lift that was always broken down, the graffiti, the vandalism, the raucous voices. And she had escaped. She told herself that life in a high-rise was probably better now, even in a city centre, but she couldn’t drive past without feeling that in her personal liberation something that was inalienably part of her had not been so much rejected as betrayed.