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were deep in the pockets of her big fur. “Mister Cleg?” she said hoarsely, lifting her chin and her eyebrows in a sort of interrogatory gesture.
    “Yes,” said my father, at last finding his voice.
    “Horace Cleg?” she said. “The plumber?”
    “That’s right,” said my father, dropping his potatoes into the basket. He was recovering his poise now.
    “I’m having a spot of trouble with my pipes,” said Hilda. “I was told you could help me.”
    M y father’s relationship with Hilda Wilkinson properly began when he went to work on her pipes. She had not lingered long on his allotment; an appointment had been made, the pair of them behaving in an adult, businesslike manner throughout, and then, without a single bubble of hoarse laughter, with no saucy lift of that big pink chin, off she’d gone, swaying and yawing to right and left as she picked her way carefully down the garden path. My father had watched her from the door of the shed, then gone back inside and lowered himself into the armchair. Picking a potato from the basket beside him, he turned it slowly in his fingers, reflecting on what had just occurred.
    Hilda lived over a tobacconist’s shop on Spleen Street, which runs under the gasworks on the side farthest from the canal; she shared a flat with a woman called Nora Temple, the woman in the hat my father had noticed with her in the Dog and Beggar. A few days later then we find him leaning his bicycle against the lamppost outside the tobacconist’s. Glancing up at the looming domes that cast a small sea of shadow on the shops and houses of Spleen Street, he entered the tobacconist’s and went through the back and up a dark flight of steep narrow stairs. It was when he was halfway up those stairs that a peculiar thing happened. From above, the sudden sound of heavy footsteps descending; then a fat man in a thick black overcoat with the collar turned up came clattering down and without a word pushed by my father, forcing him against the banister and almost knocking him back down the stairs. A moment later he could be heard stamping out through the shop and into the street, the little bell on the tobacconist’s door tinkling feebly in his wake. My father was astonished and annoyed; frowning, he resumed the climb. At the sound of his knock the door of the flat was opened a crack, and through the crack peered Nora, who was hostile and suspicious until he said he was the plumber. There would then have been some difficulty about getting the door open, as Nora wouldn’t want the cats to get out, for they had dozens of the creatures, mangy things always yowling and shedding hairs. So my father edged in sideways through the crack and followed Nora as she clumped off on heavy shoes down a short dark passage far more constricted than it need have been on account of the bulky coats hanging from hooks and pegs along the walls, his progress further hampered by the cats swarming about his ankles. At the end of the passage Nora threw open the door of the lavatory. “In here,” she said. But before my father could go in, a familiar voice spoke: “That the plumber?”
    He turned. She was standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She was wearing a dressing gown of some silky material, low-cut at the breast and tightly belted. Her hair was freshly brushed, and she was smoking a cigarette. Without her high heels she was an inch or two shorter than my father, and this fact alone provoked in him a vivid flare of the familiar heat. “Afternoon,” he said, standing stiffly in front of her with his toolbag in one hand and his cap in the other. She was leaning against the doorframe; her room, my father saw, was crowded with furniture. The bed, unmade, was huge, the headboard a dark plate of lacquered wood wedged between two stout posts with knobs at the top. At the foot of the bed stood a dressing table, a mere splinter of space separating it from the bed, its big mirror and two flanking wings almost obliterating the