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area of the business over which she was in direct control was quality control of the girls, and not the ones you can get for a hundred quid a go. She looked after the expensive ones.
    Other business matters were attended to by Mickey and myself.
    I lit a cigarette and nodded in assent to the number of offices we had.
    “Yes,” she said, because it hadn’t been a question.
    I waited.
    “And none of them have closed recently,” she said.
    Another non-question. I waited again.
    “In that case I can’t make a great deal of sense out of these figures,” she said. “Of course, they add up. But compared to the figures for the previous three-month period, they don’t.”
    “McDermott told me he’d had to do a bit of juggling in the Coventry area; we had to set up a couple of new addresses.”
    “I’m not talking about that kind of thing. Come and look at this.”
    I got up and stood next to her and leant over the desk. Jean pushed two books side by side. I looked at one set of figures, and then at the other. Then I looked at them again.
    I didn’t say anything.
    “You see what I mean,” she said.

THE SEA
    I CLIMB THE TANK and sit on top of the turret which has been fused forever to the rest of the metal by the pounding of the rockets. The surrounding flatness causes my present position to seem doubly elevated and the sea takes on a greater illusion of depth.
    I light a cigarette and then I withdraw the hip flask from the pocket of my anorak, take a long pull, and wait till it hits. Then I take another drink and set the flask down on the rim of the turret. The blackened cannon points out to sea in metallic parody of Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh .
    Of course, in many ways, Jean would have been an ideal choice to look after the business, if I’d been looking for a partner and not only a wife. As I’d been looking for neither, her business sense had been an additional bonus. But I could never have considered her as either until I’d discovered what her reaction was to the real nature of myself and of my occupations.
    For a long time, I held off. A long long time. Even in the normal way of things, I stayed away from her for six weeks after the tragedy.
    And after that, when things had taken the course I’d known they would, it had been a very gradual process; after all, before the snowball could begin to gain momentum, I had to find out as much about her as she was going to know about me.
    But I’d never expected her to assume the mantle I’d graduallyextended to her in quite the way that she did. People are a constant surprise; everything conceivable is in them, but very few people know of the possibilities beneath the surface they assume to be themselves, even fewer have the courage to dismiss their former selves as a mere cocoon. Later in our married life, she’d told me that there had come a point at which anything I’d casually hinted at had not only been expected but eagerly looked forward to. And when the barricades were finally down, each new aspect of the view into my world opened up new insights into herself, her reactions tipping and tilting horizons never even considered before. She was like an instant alcoholic with a life pass to a distillery. Literally, after her husband’s death, she became a new woman.

THE SMOKE
    “I T LOOKS LIKE A case of overconfidence,” said Jean.
    I stood by the window and lit another cigarette.
    “I’m going to have to go right back,” she said, looking at the books. “This didn’t start yesterday.”
    I didn’t answer. If there was anything I hated, it was something like this. You paid them more than they could ever hope for, and it still wasn’t enough.
    “How long will it take?”
    “God knows,” she said.
    “There’s no point in saying anything to Mickey yet.”
    “No.”
    Through the window I watched a jet as it dawdled across the sky.
    “Anyway,” I said, “I’m going over to the Steering Wheel.”
    “Do you think that’s a good