complain about the noise in the evenings.
‘Pah!’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘It couldn’t ’ave burst inside him. Feeding through a glass tube!’
We heard the honeymoon couple bounding down the stairs. The front door slammed, then we heard the thunderous stutter of the motorbike.
‘He could be had up,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘No silencer.’
‘Well!’ Mrs Cooksey said. ‘I am glad somebody’s having a nice time. So cheap too. Where do you think they’re off to?’
‘Not the hospital,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘Football, more likely.’
This reminded him. The curtains were drawn, the tiny television set turned on. We watched horse-racing, then part of the football match. Mrs Cooksey gave me tea. Mr Cooksey offered me a cigarette. I was back in favour.
*
The next day, eight days after Mr Dakin had gone to the hospital, I met Mrs Dakin outside the tobacconist’s. She was shopping and her bulging bag reflected the gaiety on her face.
‘He’s coming back tomorrow,’ she said.
I hadn’t expected such a rapid recovery.
‘Everybody at the hospital was surprised,’ Mrs Dakin said. ‘But it’s because he’s so strong, you see.’ She opened her shopping bag. ‘I’ve got some sherry and whisky and’—she laughed—‘some Guinness of course. And I’m buying a duck, to have with apple sauce. He loves apple sauce. He says the apple sauce helps the duck to go down.’
I smiled at the little family joke. Then Mrs Dakin asked me, ‘Guess who went to the hospital yesterday.’
‘Your brother and his wife.’
She shook her head. ‘The foreman!’
‘The one who burned the ladder?’
‘Oh, and he was ever so nice. He brought grapes and magazines and told my husband he wasn’t to worry about anything. They’re frightened now all right. As soon as my husband went to hospital my solicitor wrote them a letter. And my solicitor says we stand a good chance of getting more than three hundred pounds now.’
I saw the Knitmaster on the landing that evening and told him about Mr Dakin’s recovery.
‘Complications couldn’t have been serious,’ he said. ‘But it’s a nervous thing. A nervous thing.’
The Knitmistress opened the kitchen door.
‘He’s coming back tomorrow,’ the Knitmaster said.
The Knitmistress gave me one of her terrible smiles.
‘Five hundred pounds for falling off a ladder,’ Mr Cooksey said. ‘Ha! It’s as easy as falling off a log, ain’t it, Bess?’
Mrs Cooksey sighed. ‘That’s what the Labour has done to this country. They didn’t do a thing for the middle class.’
‘Bent arm! Can’t go to the seaside! Pamperin’, that’s what it is. You wouldn’t’ve found’Itler pampering that lot.’
A motorbike lacerated the silence.
‘Our happy honeymooners,’ Mr Cooksey said.
‘They’ll soon be leaving,’ Mrs Cooksey said, and went out to meet them in the hall.
‘Whose key are you using?’
‘Eva’s,’ the footballer said, running up the stairs.
‘We’ll see about that,’ Mrs Cooksey called.
*
Mrs Dakin said: ‘I went down to Mrs Cooksey and I said, “Mrs Cooksey, what do you mean by insulting my guests? It’s bad enough for them having their honeymoon spoilt without being insulted.” And she said she’d let the flat to me and my ‘usband and not to my brother and his wife and they’d have to go. And I told her that they were leaving tomorrow anyway because my husband’s coming back tomorrow. And I told her I hoped she was satisfied that she’d spoiled their honeymoon, which comes only once in a lifetime. And she said some people managed to have two, which I took as a reference to myself because, as you know, my first husband died during the war. And then I told her that if that was the way she was going to behave then I could have nothing more to say to her. And she said she hoped I would have the oil from my brother’s bike cleaned up. And I said that if it wasn’t for my husband being so ill I would’ve given notice then and there. And she said it was because my husband was ill that she didn’t give me notice, which any other landlady would’ve done.’
*
Three things happened the next day. The footballer and his wife left. Mrs Dakin told me that the firm had given her husband four hundred pounds. And Mr Dakin returned from hospital, no more noticed by the rest of the house than if he had returned from a day’s work. No sounds came from the Dakins’ flat that evening except for the whine and rumble of conversation.
Two days later I heard Mrs Dakin racing down to my flat. She knocked and entered at the same time. ‘The telly’s coming today,’