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‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’

‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we ’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie—getting married.’

‘Yes, I know.’

It was a familiar topic of conversation b…

‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.

‘I know,’ he sa…

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She couldn’t have touched a thing. She just wanted to go on drinking gin with him. She wanted to get slightly squiffy, a thing she ’d never done before in the middle of the day.

She wanted to put her arm through his.

‘It ’s been nice meeting you,’ he sa…

Again he thought of Hilda. He thought of her wiry, pasty limbs and the way she had of snorting. Sometimes when they were watching the television she ’d suddenly want to sit on his knee. She’d get worse as she grew older; she ’d get scrawnier; her hair, already coarse, would get dry and grey. He enj…

Buying things from her now and again in Green’s the Chemist ’s Norman had come to the conclusion that she was of a tartish disposition, and imagined that if ever he sat with her over a drink in the nearby Drummer Boy the occasion could easily lead to a hug on the street afterwards. He imagined her …