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passed by and said, See ’ere, girl, ’ere’s shit an’ straw both. What they eats an’ what they lets fall at the far end. Straw’s ’ere to muffle it up when they carts us away. When they’ve planted us in the ground, we’ll turn inter ’urf – which is only by wayuv sayin’ another sorta droppin’. It was an uncharacteristically lengthy speech for her father to have made – at least, in the presence of a member of his own family. — Parked outside the Cock & Magpie with a jujube to suck – or not, Audrey heard not Father, Samuel or Sam, but Rothschild Death holding forth in the public bar: on the follies of the turf, the moonstruck fancies of the new women and the socialistic madness of the Progressives. An occasional late hansom or growler might bowl along King Street – straw bristles plaited in its horses’ tails, followed by a ’bus rattle-chinking towards her father’s garage. A swell got up in Ulster and homburg might elbow a tinker woman away from the pub door, bloody jade , giving a keyhole warbler the chance to slide in to the goldensmoky mirrored cacophony on his coat-tails. Once ensconced she might yowl out, Well if you fink my dress is a littulbit, juss a littulbit – not too muchuvit! While hiking up her petticoats, such as they were, until overwhelmed by cries of outrage: Flip ’er a tinker, Rothschild! Gerriduv ve drab! Her father’s face hanging mottled from the shiny platter of his topper’s brim, the hiss of the jets in the outsized glass lamp that hung above the double doors. Up there, in the elemental radiance, floated a softly moulded figure in a dainty print gown. Up there, where speechless Thought abides, Still her sweet spirit dwells, That knew no world besides . . .
    Audrey had seen her father with horses – and she had seen him with men, a stallion among them, his commerce easy enough – yet fraught with sufficient danger to give him authority, Gentlemen, I have dived into Romano’s, and now . . . his sausage seegar sizzles innis face . . . my tissues are refreshed! He’s a study, Rothschild, a quick turn, who hooks his thick neck in the crook of his bamboo cane and hoiks himself offstage. He had so they said once thrashed a navvy to wivvinaninch, not that you would divine these fistic manoeuvres from the way he plotted his course home down the Fulham Palace Road, his flame-haired slippuv a dorter clipping along in front of him, lighting the way through the particular to anuvver meat tea . . .
    Albert and Stanley sit, both with books held open by the lips of their plates, both with collars unbuttoned, their tea cups cradled in their hands for warmth as much as refreshment. Vi and Olive gawp, pasty faces pinched by pointed shoulders, each with a slice of bread and dripping in their hand as they behold this virile spectacle: the man and the boys taking turns to hack at the leg of mutton, then put meat in their too-similar faces. Albert’s glassy paperweight eyes, Welsh-slate blue, scan up and then down the narrow columns of Rous’s Trigonometric Tables – not consigning cosines, sines and tangents to memory, only confirming the tight joins of the granite setts already laid out along the rule-straight roadways of his metropolitan mind. And Stanley – his complexion cooler, his brows finer than those of his older brother – he sighs, ahuh, shuffling fingertips from one page to the next of a Free Library book. His eyelids flicker and his fringe bobs, the whirring mechanism of Bakelite and crystal rods, propelled by scores of flywheels, squeezes his very atoms into the kinetomic beam in a number of abrupt spasms that, while they bend him back so far his just-stropped neck touches his rear, are not in the slightest discomforting – and all the essence of Stanley is then discharged from the elevated muzzle of the contraption, shooting a streak of light between the spokes of the Great Wheel at Earls Court. Up and up above the city it goes – dolorous hoots from the