Chapter 2. The Spare Man

Mrs Sadler lay, tremulous, on a sofa bed in the downstairs front room: in her late thirties, with an upturned nose, plucked eyebrows and hazel eyes, her prettiness was fading to mournfulness, her cheeks turning flat and pale, her hair straggly, mousy. She groaned, clutched her stomach, and frowned with pain.

She lived with her husband and three children in Grange Road, one of a cat's cradle of narrow streets, off Drapers Lane, a tributary of the High Street. The terraces were two up and two down houses, with front doors onto broken grubby pavements. There were no bathrooms, the outside toilets were through the kitchen door.

I was shown in by her husband, a Council labourer. He and his wife were uneasy with one another. She was pre-occupied with a vaporous jealousy, intermittently convinced that he was unfaithful. After a night of bickering, inflamed on both sides by bottles of Guinness, exhausted and benumbed by his plausible denials, terrified that she was mad and deluded, she had little energy for the morning, three children, and twenty minutes walk to her job in a factory canteen.

This was certainly the view of her hapless husband, a man who told me that he relied for extra income on “doin' a bit o' thievin'” of roofing lead from his employers. He tipped to one side as he walked, hindered by a slight limp, a legacy of childhood polio. He had also lost firm ground under his feet in the fen of his wife's malaise. He would have needed energy and imagination to deceive her. I thought her jealousy was delusional.

Thin and worried, propped against the pillows, a cotton nightdress fastened to the neck, she dismissed the fickle husband to the kitchen. Her teenage daughter took his place as chaperone. Jean was like her mother, anxious, appealing, not exactly pretty, slight, reliable. Mrs Sadler was discontented with the two older children, teenage boys, tall, awkward, scowling or grinning lads, too big for the house, who threw long