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p.m., stood a single lamppost, a black iron stem rising from a fluted base, a short knobbed crosspiece near the top, and a glass box that housed an orb of light that spread a hazy, yellowy-gold glow through which the drizzle came drifting like flecks, like hints, or suggestions. My clever fingers plucked and spread tobacco in my paper, then I rolled the thing and licked the edge. I have a squat tin lighter with a hinged cap; with this I lit the cigarette, and then I smoked. Night fell, and the yellowy haze of the streetlamp strengthened and brightened in the blackening air, and still the rain came misting down through its corona on the slant, like so many memories drifting across some lost and benighted mind. I seated myself at the table and reached down for my book.

    The following Sunday had dawned bright and clear, and before eight I heard my father in the kitchen downstairs, filling the kettle and turning on the gas. I heard the clatter of the big black skillet as he set it on the stove, I heard the bread tin being opened for the heel and crust of yesterday’s loaf. Then silence—the smell of bacon fat drifting up the stairs— he is sitting at the table drinking his tea from a chipped white enamel mug and dipping the bread into the hot fat. The scrape of chair legs—he is lacing up his boots—then out the back door, and from my bedroom window I watched him go down the yard to his bicycle.
    It must have been some time that afternoon that Hilda Wilkinson crossed the railway lines by the bridge off Omdurman Close and made her way along the path to the allotments. My father was in his shed sorting through a basket of potatoes he had dug that morning. That shed—what a shudder it still arouses in me, the very thought of the place! It was very dark inside, and it smelled strongly of earth. There were always piles of boxes and sacks and baskets in there, tools of course, spades and rakes and hoes and so on, seed packets in bundles tied with string on the shelves, and up in the shadows, draped between the rafters, the cobwebs. Sometimes I would close the door behind me and watch them for hours, and in the shed’s deep gloom—it had no window, and what light there was slipped in through chinks and cracks— I would at last see a great web tremble as its maker scuttled rapidly along a fine gossamer trapline for its meal. At other times I would fling open the door and let daylight for a moment flood the shed, and then the webs would shimmer in the sunshine as I gazed entranced at the filmy delicacy and perfection of their construction. But I never had enough time, somehow, to examine them properly in the light. There was also a battered, leaking, horsehair armchair in there, and beside it a wooden box on which a candle was stuck in a puddle of old wax; and lastly—and where this came from I’ve not the faintest idea—on a shelf on the back wall there was a stuffed ferret in a dusty glass case. It was snarling, exposing its little white pointed teeth, one paw raised, its sleek lithe body frozen in a posture of sudden alarm, and though one of its glass eyeballs was missing, and stuffing oozed out of the socket, the other glittered sharply in the shed’s gloom and always upset me if I looked at it too long, malignant creature it was.
    My father, as I say, was selecting potatoes to bring back to Kitchener Street, and he didn’t hear Hilda come up the path. It was a bright day, that Sunday, but cold. Then he looked up sharply and saw her framed in the doorway with the light streaming in all around her, hair disheveled, breast heaving from the exertion. He stood there, bent over his basket in the gloom as he turned guiltily toward this woman with whom, by this time, he had more than once imagined copulating. In a leisurely manner she surveyed the inside of the shed. Slowly my father straightened up, unconscious that he had a potato in each hand though clutching them so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Hilda’s hands