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He crouched down, still in his coat, opening and closing cupboard doors. Then he stood up. ‘How about chips? I'm paying.'

‘Wow,' she said.

So they set off down the street. Sarah didn't look at Winston as he tried to make enough for two servings out of the small coins in his hand. You could see him struggling against it, but he was always
in free-fall when it came to having to spend money. As a part-time junior lecturer he was paid almost nothing of course, and that had to go round the three of them.

‘I work in the bar Fridays remember,' Sarah said. ‘I'm a rich woman. My turn to get the chips.'

‘We'll go Dutch,' he said, as if confiding a small truth.

The chip shop had a long, Edwardian front window, elegant really for a chippy. It always felt to Sarah like she might be queuing up with the ghosts of mill girls who'd just come streaming out of the factories in flickering hoards, blankets round their shoulders, clattering wooden clogs. The chimney stacks rising above the hills of red-brick terraces were smokeless now, and gaggles of students had taken over most of the back-to-back terraces, but old Leeds lingered on persistently in the stones and in the air, in damp cellars smelling of coal, where entire families once slept between mill shifts, in cherished rosewood dressing tables and the inlaid wardrobes that stood on the pavement outside crowded junk shops – going for nothing – a work basket filled with someone's half-finished lacework.

They waited in the aromatic steam, not talking, Sarah reading the faded poster about fish until it was their turn to have the wet chips plumped on the counter and soused with vinegar.

They walked home picking hot chips out of the ripped newspaper. The lamps were starting to come on, orange against the dark blue sky. Winston remarked on how Sarah was shivering. Asked if she wanted his jacket. Sarah thought again about Sally and what she could do to her poor professor and his family.

When they got back they found Eloise home and not so much in a bad mood as incandescent.

‘She's the size of a house,' she was yelling. ‘Huge. Expecting his twins. At any moment. And he's gone off with some beanpole who's
willing to wrap her legs round him. What is wrong with men? She's just destroyed.'

Then she sniffed. Saw the almost-finished chips in their hands.

‘Oh Winston, honestly. You know the smell hangs around. At least put the papers straight outside in the bin. She took the baby from under the folds of her Indian smock, adjusted something. The baby had fallen asleep during his feed. She glared at them to be silent and took him through to the bedroom.

They gave each other a glance of commiseration, about how tough it is to be a new mum, how they understood.

Winston followed his wife through to their bedroom.

Sarah ran a bath as quietly as she could in the tiny, antiquated bathroom. She could hear the sound of the news on their TV as she lay in the rapidly cooling water. It was a small cast-iron bath with chalky enamel, layered and uneven, the cold metal draining what heat the geyser on the wall had been able to come up with. She lay with her white knees bent out of the water, imagining she was warm, watching the red light of the heater through the rising vapour, the line of Eloise's tights and underwear through the misty room. Under the window there was a blossoming of black mould spots that even the draughts from the sash window had failed to ventilate away. The cold puckered the flesh across her breasts into goose pimples. She scooped warm water over her chest and thought of Winston in the kitchen late one night. He was heating milk at the stove. His head was bent, the back of his neck exposed.

Shivering, she towelled off her narrow, white body and wrapped her hair in the damp towel. Pulled on a long T-shirt with a drooping neck and went back into the kitchen to make cocoa.

She jumped. Winston was there – as if her thoughts had conjured him up – sitting at the table marking papers. He looked up and smiled
at her when she came in. He wore a vest. The hidden places under his arms shadowy and intimate.

‘Can I make you a drink?' she asked, showing him the cocoa tin. He shook his head and carried on marking.

Sarah reached up to get a mug from the cupboard. She felt a cool draught round the back of her leg and yanked down her T-shirt with the other hand. She glanced at the table, but Winston was writing hurriedly, frowning.

Sarah rinsed out the pan, left it to drain and started sipping at the hot cocoa, holding the mug in both hands. ‘Oh, I've booked for the poetry symposium, in Bradford.'

‘Excellent news.'

‘You're speaking?'

He nodded.

‘Night then,' she said.

He looked up at her. And she caught a look of startled longing in his eyes – like when he was counting through change, when he really wanted to get something, but knew he couldn't afford it.

‘Sarah's just going to bed then,' he called out heartily to Eloise in the sitting room.

‘Oh yeah, night then,' said Eloise as if she couldn't be less interested.

Once a week that term Sarah had a lecture from Winston. Modern poetry. Everyone said he was a fantastic lecturer. Everybody came out of his classes in love with modern poetry and also a bit in love with Winston. He wasn't only brilliant about Eliot and Pound and Hughes and all that lot, Sarah found that he was also into a lot of unexpected stuff, Romanian and Caribbean poets. And he had a thing for Patten and Henri and the sixties Liverpool poetry scene. Where he and Eloise met as students.

Sarah found a seat as near to the front as she could. Winston was standing in front of the huge whiteboard at the bottom of the auditorium. The class was full, rows of students in the stepped seats, listening to Dr Jackson as he walked up and down holding a slim book open in one hand and stroking the air with the other to mark the rhythm. Sarah was feeling ridiculously proud of him, feeling as if Winston were her secret.

Someone sat down on the chair alongside her, a mess of books and folders sliding onto her lap. He leaned over to gather them in. It was Nicky, the boy from the seminar. He gave her a big grin but she frowned at him. Winston was reading a snippet from McGough and she wanted to hear it. It was a poem about a priest in a fish and chip queue, wishing he were buying supper for two people as he quietly waited in the vinegary air for his lone portion. Sarah felt her heart starting to beat hard, like she'd just had a message from the other side, something portentous and meaningful. He was reading it for her. She thought of them, standing together in the queue, in the aromatic vinegary air. Knew she was being silly. Then Winston glanced up to where she was sitting; he'd known where she was sitting all along. He'd read it for her. He'd meant it for her.

The banked-up students were laughing at his next reading, Adrien Mitchell's Batman poem, but Sarah was still floating above them, everything feeling hyperreal, waiting for when he'd be putting his books away in his briefcase. And she would go down and say . . .

‘After this,' she heard someone whisper. ‘If you'd like. We could go to the Feathers.'

‘What? Sorry.' She shook her head. Nicky had been speaking to her.

‘If you'd like to go to the Feathers. A drink.'

She shook her head again, annoyed that he was speaking over the lecture again. Winston was announcing the symposium on modern
poets at Bradford university the next weekend, saying they could come along and hear him if anyone was interested. But the room was already starting to chatter over him, people standing and making plans in little huddles for the evening.

By the time she made her way through the students to the bottom of the stairs, Winston was gone. Must have left pretty quickly.

Laura caught hold of her sleeve. ‘Did you hear about Sally?'

‘What's happened?'

‘It's awful. She's had some kind of nervous breakdown. Has to go home for the rest of the year.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘There was a huge fight at our place last night. The wife of her old professor bloke came round and she was screaming and pulling Sally round by the hair. He's suspended, and now Sally can't stop crying. It's awful.'

‘God, that's terrible. Poor Sally.'

‘I know. But look, her room's free now, you see,' said Laura. ‘I don't suppose you want to move into our house share? It's horrible, but we're good fun, and at least you can get out of that freezing attic and away from weird Eloise.'

‘I'm sort of committed until the end of the term, rent agreements and things.'

‘Well, let me know. Better get off to the library. I've got to do three years' catch-up work before finals.'

Sarah turned and headed back to her digs. She wasn't being strictly accurate; if Eloise had heard Laura's offer she would have immediately given Sarah a get-out from any rent agreement. Eloise, it seemed to Sarah, would have been happy if everyone left, including Winston.

Back at the house Sarah walked into an empty kitchen. She liked the shabby calm of the room, of finding herself alone there. Then
she realised she could hear crying coming from Eloise's sitting room. Eloise was on the sofa, working her way through a box of tissues, her eyes red and swollen-looking. She didn't seem to mind when Sarah went in, sat down by her on the futon.

‘Are you all right?'

Eloise waved a crumpled ball of tissue around in the direction of where baby Jackson was slumped out in his pushchair, asleep. She began crying again.

‘Oh, Eloise,' said Sarah. She put her arm round her. She could feel her shaking with muffled sobs, and there was a sour, tired smell coming from her, of old milk and stale clothes.

‘He never sleeps,' Eloise said, pointing at the child.

‘He's asleep now.'

‘Yes, but he'll wake up,' she said with passion. ‘He wakes up, and then it all starts again. Just when I start to sleep, then he wakes up again.'

Sarah felt a thin but bracing wave of pity break over her. She saw again the friendship that she had imagined when she first met Eloise.

‘Let me watch him. You go and get some sleep, a proper lie down in your room, and I'll watch over him.'

Eloise looked greedily tempted, but her eyes swivelled back to baby Jackson.

‘I promise I'll come and get you the moment he stirs.'

‘Well, perhaps. OK then,' she said, and headed out of the room, her eyes still fixed on the baby to check that he hadn't seen her escaping.

Sarah took possession of the futon and got a book of poetry from her bag, but silence had fallen over the flat, an atmosphere of sleep like a fine gas. After a few stanzas she felt her concentration beginning to blur. She got up and went and checked on Eloise, peeping through her half-open door. Eloise was sprawled on her back across the unmade
double bed, her jumper rucked up to one side, an arm thrown above her head. She was snoring. Sarah smiled at her work, and felt a tender protectiveness for Eloise.

Sarah slipped back to the sitting room still smiling. But the balance of peace was shifting. The baby was making small kicks and jumps in his sleep. Now Sarah was tensely on the edge of the futon, waiting in anticipation of the ack-ack noise that would announce baby Jackson awake. Already. There it went.

Then Sarah had a moment of inspiration. Winston was always taking the screaming child out in the buggy and returning eventually with a sleeping baby; the baby could not resist the soporific movement of wheels over bumpy pavements. So in her mood of solidarity Sarah committed herself to go the extra mile, and carefully bumped the buggy down the flight of stairs and out of the front door.

The Victorian municipal park was stunningly boring with its triangles of lawn and tarmac paths, but it suited the mission. She walked all the way to Headingly in her new mood of generous service, and after a while noticed that the light was going in the overcast sky. A shuffling and then a cannonade of snorts meant the baby was well and truly awake again.

By the time Sarah got back to Chestnut Grove the baby was set in a rhythm, shuddering with sheep-like sobs. She saw Eloise, white-faced, up in the widow. Eloise thundered downstairs, unstrapped the infant from the buggy and gave Sarah a look of hate before bearing the child away.