‘The evenings are drawing out,’ said Joyce.

He parked his car in a sort of courtyard, surrounded by Suffolk flint walls, at the bank’s rear. It was a pretty place with winter jasmine showing in great blazes of yellow over the top of the walls, and the bank was pretty too, being housed in a slicked-up L-shaped Tudor cottage. His car was not particularly pretty since it was a G registration Morris Eleven Hundred with a broken wing mirror he couldn’t afford to replace. He lived three miles away on a ten-year-old estate of houses, and the drive down country lanes took him only a few minutes.

The estate was called Fitton’s Piece after a Marian Martyr who had been burnt in a field there in 1555. The Reverend Thomas Fitton would have been beatified if he had belonged to the other side, but all he got as an unremitting Protestant was fifty red boxes named after him. The houses in the four streets which composed the estate (Tudor Way, Martyr’s Mead, Fitton Close and – the builder ran out of inspiration – Hillcrest) had pantiled roofs and large flat windows and chimneys that were for effect, not use. All their occupants had bought their trees and shrubs from the same very conservative garden centre in Stantwich and swapped cuttings and seedlings, so that everyone had Lawson’s cypress and a laburnum and a kanzan, and most people a big clump of pampas grass. This gave the place a curious look of homogeneity and, because there were no boundary fences, as if the houses were not private homes but dwellings for the staff of some great demesne.

Alan had bought his house at the end of not very hilly Hillcrest on a mortgage granted by the bank. The interest on this loan was low and fixed, and when he thought about his life one of the few things he considered he had to be thankful for was that he paid two-and-a-half per cent and not eleven like other people.

His car had to remain on the drive because the garage, described as integral and taking up half the ground floor, had been converted into a bed-sit for Pam’s father. Pam came out and took the groceries. She was a pretty woman of thirty-seven who had had a job for only one year of her life and had lived in a country village for the whole of it. She wore a lot of make-up on her lips and silvery-blue stuff on her eyes. Every couple of hours she would disappear to apply a fresh layer of lipstick because when she was a girl it had been the fashion always to have shiny pink lips. On a shelf in the kitchen she kept a hand mirror and lipstick and pressed powder and a pot of eyeshadow. Her hair was permed. She wore skirts which came exactly to her knees, and her engagement ring above her wedding ring, and usually a charm bracelet. She looked about forty-five.

She asked Alan if he had had a good day, and he said he had and what about her? She said, all right, and talked about the awful cost of living while she unpacked cornflakes and tins of soup. Pam usually talked about the cost of living for about a quarter of an hour after he got home. He went out into the garden to put off seeing his father-in-law for as long as possible, and looked at the snowdrops and the little red tulips which were exquisitely beautiful at this violet hour, and they gave him a strange little pain in his heart. He yearned after them, but for what? It was as if he were in love which he had never been. The trouble was that he had read too many books of a romantic or poetical nature, and often he wished he hadn’t.

It got too cold to stay out there, so he went into the living room and sat down and read the paper. He didn’t want to, but it was the sort of thing men did in the evenings. Sometimes he thought he had begotten his children because that also was the sort of thing men did in the evenings.

After a while his father-in-law came in from his bed-sit. His name was Wilfred Summitt, and Alan and Pam called him Pop, and Christopher and Jillian called him Grandpop. Alan hated him more than any human being he had ever known and hoped he would soon die, but this was unlikely as he was only sixty-six and very healthy.

Pop said, ‘Good evening to you,’ as if there were about fifteen other people there he didn’t know well enough to address. Alan said hallo without looking up and Pop sat down. Presently Pop punched his fist into the back of the paper to make Alan lower it.

‘You all right then, are you?’ Like the Psalmist, Wilfred Summitt was given to parallelism, so he said the same thing twice more, slightly re-phrasing it each time. ‘Doing OK, are you? Everything hunky-dory, is it?’

‘Mmm,’ said Alan, going back to the Stantwich Evening Press.

‘That’s good. That’s what I like to hear. Anything in the paper, is there?’

Alan didn’t say anything. Pop came very close and read the back page. Turning his fat body almost to right angles, he read the stop press. His sight was magnificent. He said he saw there had been another one of those bank robberies, another cashier murdered, and there would be more, mark his words, up and down the country, all over the place, see if he wasn’t right, and all because they knew they could get away with it on account of knowing they wouldn’t get hanged.

‘It’s getting like Chicago, it’s getting like in America,’ said Pop. ‘I used to think working in a bank was a safe job, Pam used to think it was, but it’s a different story now, isn’t it? Makes me nervous you working in a bank, gets on my nerves. Something could happen to you any day, any old time you could get yourself shot like that chap in Glasgow, and then what’s going to happen to Pam? That’s what I think to myself, what’s going to happen to Pam?’

Alan said his branch was much too small for bank robbers to bother with.

‘That’s a comfort, that’s my one consolation. I say to myself when I get nervy, I say to myself, good thing he never got promotion, good thing he never got on in his job. Better safe than sorry is my motto, better a quiet life with your own folks than risking your neck for a big wage packet.’

Alan would have liked a drink. He knew, mainly from books and television, that quite a lot of people come home to a couple of drinks before their evening meal. Drinks the Groombridges had. In the sideboard was a full bottle of whisky, an almost full bottle of gin, and a very large full bottle of Bristol Cream sherry which Christopher had bought duty-free on the way back from a package tour to Switzerland. These drinks, however, were for other people. They were for those married couples whom the Groombridges invited in for an evening, one set at a time and roughly once a fortnight. He wondered what Pam and Pop would say if he got up and poured himself a huge whisky, which was what he would have liked to do. Wondering was pretty well as far as he ever got about anything.

Pam came in and said supper was ready. They sat down to eat it in a corner of the kitchen that was called the dining recess. They had liver and bacon and reconstituted potato and brussels sprouts and queen of puddings. Christopher came in when they were half-way through. He worked for an estate agent who paid him as much as the Anglian-Victoria paid his father, and he gave his mother five pounds a week for his board and lodging. Alan thought this was ridiculous because Christopher was always rolling in money, but when he protested to Pam she got hysterical and said it was wicked taking anything at all from one’s children. Christopher had beautiful trendy suits for work and well-cut trendy denim for the weekends, and several nights a week he took the girl he said was his fiancée to a drinking club in Stantwich called the Agape, which its patrons pronounced Agayp.

Jillian didn’t come in. Pam explained that she had stayed at school for the dramatic society and had gone back with Sharon for tea. This, Alan was certain, was not so. She was somewhere with a boy. He was an observant person and Pam was not, and from various things he had heard and noticed he knew that, though only fifteen, Jillian was not a virgin and hadn’t been for some time. Of course he also knew that as a responsible parent he ought to discuss this with Pam and try to stop Jillian or just get her on the pill. He was sure she was promiscuous and that the whole thing ought not just to be ignored, but he couldn’t discuss anything with Pam. She and Pop and Jillian had only two moods, apathy and anger. Pam would fly into a rage if he told her, and if he insisted, which he couldn’t imagine doing, she would scream at Jillian and take her to a doctor to be examined for an intact hymen or pregnancy or venereal disease, or the lot for all he knew.