That Friday, 1 March, Joyce went as usual to the Childon Arms with Stephen for a ploughman’s lunch and a half of lager, and Alan stuck to his resolve of not taking the three thousand pounds out of the safe. Friday was their busiest day and that helped to keep temptation at bay.

The weekend began with shopping in Stantwich. He went into the library where he got out the memoirs of a playwright (ease it off gradually) and a history book. Pam didn’t bother to look at these. Years ago she had told him he was a real bookworm, and it couldn’t be good for his eyes which he needed to keep in good condition in a job like his. They had sausages and tinned peaches for lunch, just the two of them and Wilfred Summitt. Christopher never came in for lunch on Saturdays. He got up at ten, polished his car, perquisite of the estate agents, and took the seventeen-year-old trainee hairdresser he called his fiancée to London where he spent a lot of money on gin and tonics, prawn cocktails and steak, circle seats in cinemas, long-playing records and odds and ends like Playboy magazine and bottles of wine and after-shave and cassettes. Jillian sometimes came in when she had nothing better to do. This Saturday she had something better to do, though what it was she hadn’t bothered to inform her parents.

In the afternoon Alan pulled weeds out of the garden, Pam turned up the hem of an evening skirt and Wilfred Summitt took a nap. The nap freshened him up, and while they were having tea, which was sardines and lettuce and bread and butter and madeira cake, he said he had seen a newsflash on television and the Glasgow bank robbers had been caught.

‘What we want here is the electric chair.’

‘Something like that,’ said Pam.

‘What we want is the army to take over this country. See a bit of discipline then, we would. The army to take over, under the Queen of course, under Her Majesty, and some general at the head of it. Some big pot who means business. The Forces, that’s the thing. We knew what discipline was when I was in the Forces.’ Pop always spoke of his time at Catterick Camp in the nineteen-forties as ‘being in the Forces’ as if he had been in the navy and air force and marines as well. ‘Flog ’em, is what I say. Give ’em something to remember across their backsides.’ He paused and swigged tea. ‘What’s wrong with the cat?’ he said, so that anyone coming in at that moment, Alan thought, would have supposed him to be enquiring after the health of the family pet.

Alan went back into the garden. Passing the window of Pop’s bed-sit, he noticed that the gas fire was full on. Pop kept his gas fire on all day and, no doubt, half the night from September till May whether he was in his room or not. Pam had told him about it very politely, but he only said his circulation was bad because he had hardening of the arteries. He contributed nothing to the gas bill or the electricity bill either, and Pam said it wasn’t fair to ask anything from an old man who only had his pension. Alan dared to say, How about the ten thousand he got from selling his own house? That, said Pam, was for a rainy day.

Back in the house, having put the garden tools away, he found his daughter. His reading had taught him that the young got on better with the old than with the middle-aged, but that didn’t seem to be so in the case of his children and Pop. Here, as perhaps in other respects, the authors had been wrong.

Jillian ignored Pop, never speaking to him at all, and Pam, though sometimes flaring and raving at her while Jillian flared and raved back, was generally too frightened of her to reprove her when reproof was called for. On the face of it, mother and daughter had a good relationship, always chatting to each other about clothes and things they had read in magazines, and when they went shopping together they always linked arms. But there was no real communication. Jillian was a subtle little hypocrite, Alan thought, who ingratiated herself with Pam by presenting her with the kind of image Pam would think a fifteen-year-old girl ought to have. He was sure that most of the extra-domestic activities she told her mother she went in for were pure invention, but they were all of the right kind: dramatic society, dressmaking class, evenings spent with Sharon whose mother was a teacher and who was alleged to be helping Jillian with her French homework. Jillian always got home by ten-thirty because she knew her mother thought sexual intercourse invariably took place after ten-thirty. She said she came home on the last bus, which sometimes she did, though not alone, and Alan had once seen her get off the pillion of a boy’s motor-bike at the end of Martyr’s Mead.

He wondered why she bothered with deception, for if she had confessed to what she really did Pam could have done little about it. She would only have screamed threats while Jillian screamed threats back. They were afraid of each other, and Alan thought their relationship so sick as to be sinister. Among the things he wondered about was when Jillian would get married and how much she would expect him to fork out for her wedding. Probably it would be within the next couple of years, as she would very likely get pregnant quite soon, but she would want a big white wedding with all her friends there and a dance afterwards in a discothèque.

Pop had given up speaking to her. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer. He was trying to watch television, but she had got between him and the set and was sitting on the floor drying her hair with a very noisy hair dryer. Alan could bring himself to feel sorry for Pop while Jillian was in the house. Fortunately she often wasn’t, for when she was she ruled them all, a selfish bad-tempered little tyrant.

‘You haven’t forgotten we’re going to the Heyshams’ for the evening, have you?’ said Pam.

Alan had, but the question really meant he was to dress up. They were not invited to a meal. No one at Fitton’s Piece gave dinner parties, and ‘for the evening’ meant two glasses of sherry or whisky and water each, followed by coffee. But etiquette, presumably formulated by the women, demanded a change of costume. Dick Heysham, who was quite a nice man, wouldn’t have cared at all if Alan had turned up in old trousers and a sweater and would have liked to dress that way himself, but Pam said a sports jacket must be worn and when his old one got too shabby she made him buy a new one. To make this possible, she had for weeks denied herself small luxuries, her fortnightly hair-do, her fortnightly trip to Stantwich to have lunch in a café with her sister, the cigarettes of which she smoked five a day, until the twenty-six pounds had been garnered. It was all horrible and stupid, an insane way to live. He resigned himself to it, as he did to most things, for the sake of peace. Yet he knew that what he got was not peace.

Jillian, unasked, said that she was going with Sharon to play Scrabble at the house of a girl called Bridget. Alan thought it very handy for her that Bridget lived in a cottage in Stoke Mill which had no phone.

‘Be back by ten-thirty, won’t you, dear?’ said Pam.

‘Of course I will. I always am.’

Jillian smiled so sweetly through her hair that Pam dared to suggest she move away out of Pop’s line of vision.

‘Why can’t he go and watch his own TV?’ said Jillian.

No one answered her. Pam went off to have a bath and came back with the long skirt on and a frilly blouse and lacquer on her hair and her lips pink and shiny. Then Alan shaved and got into a clean shirt and the sports jacket. They both looked much younger dressed like that, and smart and happy. The Heyshams lived in Tudor Way so they walked there. Something inside him cried aloud to tell her that he was sorry, that he pitied her from his soul, poor pathetic woman who had lived her whole life cycle by the age at which many only just begin to think of settling down. He couldn’t do it, they had no common language. Besides, was he not as poor and pathetic himself? What would she have replied if he had said what he would have liked to say? Look at us, what are we doing, dressed up like this, visiting like this people we don’t even care for, to talk about nothing, to tell face-saving lies? For what, for what?