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conversation with one or other of them. And at least at the bar the smell of beer took away the smell of fish.
    He sat on his bench absent-mindedly, watching the seals flop, enjoying the spray on his face, thinking about everything and nothing, exclaiming ‘Jesus Christ!’ to himself from time to time, until the sun sank beneath its own watery weight into the sea. It became immediately chilly. Feeling the cold, he rose from the bench and decided to try his luck. Company was company. He called by the cottage first and peered in through the letter box. All was almost well. He was still in, still reading his mail in his carpet slippers, still watching television. And his rug was still rumpled. But his utility phone was flashing vermilion, which meant somebody had rung him. Perhaps Ailinn saying she was sorry, though she had done nothing to say sorry for.
    After the falling-out, the saying sorry. That was the way. They had all been taught it at school. Always say sorry.
    If it was she who had rung him, should he ring her back? He didn’t know.
    In agitation, because the knowledge that he’d been rung – no matter by whom – distressed him, he let himself in, discovered the caller had left no message – though he thought he detected the breath of someone as agitated as himself – and locked up again. Fifteen minutes later he was in the Friendly Fisherman, ordering a sweet cider.
    iv
    The inn was more than usually noisy and querulous. That fractiousness which was being reported as on the increase throughout the country was no less on the increase here. There’d been an incident earlier in the village hall and some of the bad feeling had spilled out into the inn from that. It was Thursday, Weight Watchers day, and one of the village women, Tryfena Heilbron, had refused to accept that she’d put on a pound since the last time she’d been weighed. Words had been exchanged and Tryfena had lifted the scales and dashed them to the ground. ‘Next time bring scales that work,’ she’d shouted at the weigher who shouted back that it was no surprise to her that Tryfena’s husband preferred the company of sweeter-tempered, not to say more sylphlike, women.
    By the time news of the altercation reached the Friendly Fisherman the men were involved. Breoc Heilbron the haulier, a dangerous brute of a man even when sober, was drunkenly defending the honour of a wife he didn’t scruple at other times to abuse. It struck Kevern Cohen as a sign of the times that men who would once have steered clear of Breoc Heilbron’s temper were prepared tonight to needle him, not only man to man, by impugning his capacity to hold his drink, but by referring to his wife’s notorious temper and even to her weight.Was he imagining it or did he actually hear someone describe her as a heifer? That heifer, Tryfena Heilbron.
    That was how people had begun to talk of one another. Thatheifer, Tryfena Heilbron. That lump of lard, Morvoren Steinberg.
    Followed by an apology to Morvoren’s husband.
    And no doubt, that idiot Kevern Cohen.
    Kevern tried to remember whether the village had ever in reality been the placid haven pictured in its brochures by New Heritage, that body to which every taxpayer in the country was expected to contribute in return for an annual weekend away from the growing turmoil of the towns. Had it? He didn’t think so. Most of the teachers at the village school he had attended had been free with the cane or the slipper before saying sorry. The boys had brawled viciously in the playground. So had the girls. Tourists on their annual weekend breaks were laughed at behind their backs and made to feel unwelcome in the inns, for all that their custom was indispensable to the local economy. But he thought there had been some days when everything was quiet and everyone rubbed along. Whereas now it was never quiet, and no one rubbed along.
    He joined in an ill-tempered game of darts with a group of sullenly drunken men, including Densdell