Illywhacker

Emma was wearing her pearls and her New Look suit. She was out of the cage and playing dutifully with her youngest son over on the southern gallery, racing a heavy lead motor car up and down and fighting for possession of it without taking the slightest trouble to protect her expensive nylons.

Leah offered Mr Lo his card back, but he insisted – he held up his soft pale palm to indicate his meaning – that she keep it. Leah and Mr Lo then bobbed at each other and Leah picked up her dangerous potatoes and squeezed her way past the rusty birdcages and made her way round to Emma's side. She squatted, not only because she was tired, but because she wished to speak to her friend in confidence.

"Who's that?" asked Leah Goldstein.

"That's Mr Lo." Emma gave Hissao the car and found herself a wooden truck to crash into it with. "There," she told the pretty rouge-cheeked boy, "now you're dead."

"Not dead," Hissao said. He started running around the gallery but stopped when he saw the adults were more interested in whispering than chasing.

"Why is he there?" Leah Goldstein hissed and Hissao came back to listen. He snuggled in against his mother, picking at the soft cotton of her dress, rubbing it against his cheek and smudging it, although no one realized.

"He wants to stay," Emma said. "He wants a job, so I gave him one."

"Gave him what?"

"I gave him a job," said Emma and, although she did not smile, there was something happening with her face, as subtle as her perfume.

"Emma!"

Emma pouted but she was not unhappy. She was almost never unhappy. Soon Leah would be going away, as soon as Charles's daddy came to get her, and she would miss her, miss the custard and rich soups, the games of canasta, the long companionable silences, but she would not be unhappy.

"Dear Leah," she said. She was about to fetch some perfume to dab on her friend's wrists when she heard her husband's great big feet – she saw them in her mind's eye, those punched brown brogues, size eleven, on the worn stair treads – they were coming this way. She could hear Charles and cranky Van Kraligan shouting at each other about the budgie factory. Van Kraligan's voice came up over the gallery – he was working below – but Charles was already up the stairs to the fourth level.

"Balt," Van Kraligan said. "I am not a bloody Balt. Balt is from Baltic. I am not Baltic. Fix it," he yelled, "fix it your bloody self, mate."

Charles strode through the door. He had shed his wartime camouflage and emerged with tailor's stitching on his gaberdine lapels. His suits were pressed each day by the American Pressers in Angel Place. He came through the stairs like a wealthy man, turned right rather than left, and thus missed the melancholy but hopeful Mr Lo standing at attention inside the cage Charles had commissioned from Spikey Dawson.

Charles walked – twenty-eight years old and still lifting his feet too high – round to the west side, as far as the door to the kitchen, and then he leaned over the railing so he could shout at Van Kraligan on the gallery below. Don't worry what he said – it was all to do with his ignorance about geography – but rather that Mr Lo heard the tone of voice and did not need to look for a gold watch to know that this hairy giant was definitely the boss.

He therefore readied himself, exposing his cuffs the correct amount and placing a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. When Charles had finished with Van Kraligan, Mr Lo gave a cough, very small, and very polite, which Charles did not hear – he noticed, instead, Emma and Leah staring in the direction of the cage.

When Mr Lo saw that he had the boss's attention, he proceeded to show him what he could do 38 He did not mind if she was mad – he would look after her, just as he had looked after Leah when she arrived, with one thin summer dress crammed in her handbag; just as he gave money to his mother and provided for his children. He got great pleasure from providing. It was a miracle that he could do it. He, Charles Badgery (who did not know what order the letters of the alphabet went in, who was ugly, awkward, shy, deaf, bandy), could provide.

When he threatened to call in doctors, which he often did, it was not because of her madness or lack of it. It was because of the thought that she mocked him. It was the look in her eye, secretive, malevolent, wrapped in thin clear plastic.

And it was this look that he saw, or feared he saw, on the day she put the Asiatic in the cage.

Charles leaned across the rail and watched Mr Lo thoughtfully, as though he were nothing more than a newly arrived cockatoo whose responses he was attempting to judge, to see if he would adapt to his cage readily or would end up noisy and a nuisance to his fellows.