Doll bends over, checking a barrel; she got hips on her under that skirt, sturdy, bovine, though she’d kill him if he said as much. His cheek yearns for her lap, for her stroking hands, for her fantastically common reek of beer and ham and Parma Violets.

Where was the fear? She searched herself as she listened: sometimes the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, rapid and snippy like the keys of two vast duelling type-writers battering out threats to each other on a paper sky.

When she entered the sitting room she was not at first noticed. The music had changed now, to something slower, and the women were dancing; Harri’s dark head against the breast of Gwen’s white shirt, Gwen’s hand low on Harri’s back. Gwen’s eyes were closed and the look on her face, serene and blissful, sent a fright through Clem.

He fingers her stuff, her undies, a stocking. He winds it round his hand, tight silk, unwinds it, lays it back across the chair where it dangles like leg skin.

Clem ground out her cigarette and immediately wished she hadn’t. It had felt like something live she could hold onto

The infant’s eyes were as black as if night were trapped behind his lids, and when he opened them she feared she’d be consumed.

Walking back in the lamp-stained dark, the duckboards greasy and glittering with frost, she wanted to sing, she wanted to scream, she wanted to make love to him, she wanted to die.

And then came Mrs Fletcher, snapping her scissors, the soft scrunch of the blades through thick hanks, the gradual sensation of lightness. Now every scrap of hair that Powell had touched was gone.

Right on the dot, Ted waltzes in as if he owns the place. Vince looks up from the pump. Christ he’s got his ice-cream seller’s jacket on, straw hat, moustache gleaming like a pair of brass handles.