quick green fuses, shiny new nickel-alloy five- and ten-pence pieces, together with a few tarnished tanners and chunky thruppenny bits, how soon they’ve come to seem of another age . . He reaches for one of little dodecahedrons and presses it hard between his fingers, so hard that when he parts them it sticks to his forefinger and he sees the portcullis impressed in the pad of his thumb. He lifts it to his nostrils and smells its cold taint of old blood. For quite a while Busner takes the little voice Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year for thought — a colleague? recalled droning on in a case meeting. Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce — next he thinks it comes from the over-tranquillised patient on the far side of the ward — a year, Farver’s gonter sea, Muvver’s gonter bringim back. . finally he realises it is right in his ear, but micro-phonic, and, straightening up, he leans back in to hear this: the utterances of some still smaller and more warped old woman vibrating in the larynx of this one. He tunes in to the friction of the parchedlips: A penny won’t urtyer, a ha’penny won’t brayk yer, A farving won’t putyer in ve work’uss. . Now the cold dial of his sphygmomanometer lies cold against her neck and smells still fishy — she had found it together with plenty of others underneath the fishmonger’s cart and there were more in the gutter in front of the Leg of Lamb, a mean little gaff, her father said of it, a grog shop for the navvies and shonks, but Audrey thought the low weatherboard building — little more than a shack — had a romantic air, not that she altogether understood what this was, saving that sometimes when Mother left her and her sisters with Missus Worth she would put the three small girls in a row, admonish them to be still and, opening the lid of her cottage piano, send silvery sound bubbles floating up in the stuffy parlour to kiss their reflections in the mirror, then die. When Missus Worth shut the lid, she said, Girls, that is a very romantic air what I have played you. — Then is it that same romantic air that hovers around the Leg of Lamb, or is it the carolling blue tit come down for a milk churn? Audrey is a little feart of the dark outline left on the old boards by a mulberry tree that her mother said used to grow there — maybe that too has a romantic air? The oyster shells smell fishy and they’ve got weedy beards, but there’s a horse trough by the pub and Audrey scrubs them until vey cummup luvlee and Bert comes by with Mother, who cuffs her while Bert laughs: You don’t do no grottoing ’til July, Or-dree, an you does it wiv fresh shells, not manky ones. Alluv ve uvver girls is doin’ spring gardens now, you ain’t gotta be different. She does have to be different, though, so she bundles the shells up in her pinny and Mary Jane drags her back to Waldemar Avenue, where Audrey makes her grotto by the front railings, ordering Vi and Olive to get pebbles like vese — not vose,and boxing their ears in turn. Three or four Sally Army oafs come by, just loafing, not marching, one lugging a big bass drum, the others larkin’ abaht with their horns, squelching and parping. They’re pulled up short by the unseasonable grotto — and by Vi, who’s cried so much she has smutty rings round her eyes. They give the little girls a penny and Audrey sends Vi to get a candle from Curtis’s on the corner, then she sneaks it alight from the range and afterwards is content to sit at the kerbside holding the toes of her boots warm puppies, what with it being a fine evening and the sunset catching the swags ’n’ roses so sharp, the swags and roses Mary Jane pointed to proudly, See, proper stukko . .and the balustrades that ran along the first floor of the terrace, their pillars plump and squared off. In the gathering darkness Audrey croons the rhyme: Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year, or possibly only thinks she does in the hope that it will ward off Strewel Peter, whose cloud of orange hair rises above the chimblies opposite. How could her mother say that? When all the swags ’n’ roses were the same, all the houses were the same? How can anything be beautiful or noble or romantic when it’s the same? Farver’s gonter sea,Muvver’s gonter bringim back — She’s beef to the heels, that one! cries Arnold Collins, who works on the ’buses with Audrey’s father — eez iz conductah — and who comes along the road fulfilling the same role after hours, because Sam Death looks quite tight. The two men are carrying their work satchels and Rothschild still has his gauntlets on — he tousles her hair with his sweated-leather-and-horse smell, then cups her cheek to pull her other one up to his wet scrubbing brush. As her father bends over, his waistcoat bunches up, and his watch flops from its pocket, so that for an instant it lies cold against her clenched face. Collins stands a few feet away, thumbs in his own waistcoat pockets, cap at a jaunty angle. ’E finks isself a reg’lar masher, ’e duzz, Audrey has heard her father tell her mother, the two of them taking their ease over a glass of port wine. — There’s a marshyuness over ’Ammersmiff, a shop girl up in ve Bush. He belches, laughs, wipes his moustache. I dunno, some chap is gonna givim a pasting one of vese days — all of this said with indulgence bordering on respect. But Audrey never likes the way that Arnold Collins looks at her, his hard black eyes rolling over her hair, her chest, her ankles. Getting ready for bed in the front bedroom with the little girls, Audrey still feels those black marbles upon her — and, as the boys join them and all five Death children kneel to murmur perfunctorily, Godless Muvver, Godless Farver, Collins’s eyes are on her yet. In bed, she huddles up against Violet to avoid them while concentrating on the lantern show behind her own eyelids: dark processional shapes moving through riverside mist that are at once the marshyuness, the shop girl and also stately ladies with extravagant bonnets, bustles and parasols that transform into Just So elephants, how-dee-how-dahs waggling on their backs to a brass-band accompaniment, Oo-rum-pum-pah! Oo-rum-pum-pah! magically transmitted from the bandstand in South Park, goldschein, the world sucked gurgling into the fiery trumpet, then blown out again, when all it was, when all it was . .was a line of cows being herded by a farmer’s boy across the scrublands of Barnes Common on that ripping day when Bert played truant and took her with him over to the Surrey Side — ’Ow we caught it! — Singaht, girl, singaht! His watch is cold against her cheek, his leather fingers twist her chin. — Singaht! Singaht! She quavers. . A penny won’t urtyer, A ha’penny won’t braykyer, A farving won’t putyer in ve work’uss. . and Sam Death exults: Ahh, gerron! She’s a precious little goose, ain’t she, Arnold? She must avvit. He pulls the other man to him by the lip of his satchel, then sifts through the pouch, selecting, then tossing one coin after the other into the opening of Audrey’s grotto. — There’s a penny anna ha’penny anna farving — an yer know what, girlie, it won’t break me never, coz I’m the fellow az once divvied up a shilling — a whole shilling, mind — to set wiv the Tichborne claimant over at Leadenhall Market. Did I ever tellya that, Arnold. . Did I not? And the two men are up the front steps and into the house, from where Audrey hears her father calling mockingly, Mary Jane, you’ll av some fine gal-an-tine for Mister Collins, willyer not?