Amy was typing envelopes, sending out the final copies of the newsletter. A pile was already to hand and he began folding the pamphlets and inserting them into the envelopes. The job wasn't easy. He had tried to economize with the size and quality and the envelopes were in danger of splitting. He now had a mailing list of 250, only a small minority of whom were active supporters of PANUP. Most never paid any dues towards the organization and the majority of the pamphlets went unsolicited to public authorities, local firms and industry in the vicinity of Larksoken and Sizewell. He wondered how many of the 250 were read and thought, with a sudden spasm of anxiety and depression, of the total cost of even this small enterprise. And this month's newsletter wasn't his best. Rereading one before he put it in the envelope, it seemed to him to be ill-organized, to have no coherent theme. The principal aim now was to refute the growing argument that nuclear power could avoid the damage to the environment through the greenhouse effect, but the mixture of suggestions ranging from solar power to replacing light bulbs with those which consumed seventy-five per cent less energy seemed naive and hardly convincing. His article argued that nuclear-generated electricity couldn't realistically replace oil and fossil fuels unless all nations built sixteen new reactors a week in the five years from 1995, a programme impossible to achieve and one which, if practicable, would add intolerably to the nuclear threat. But the statistics, like all his figures, were culled from a variety of sources and lacked authority. Nothing he produced seemed to him genuinely his own work. And the rest of the newsletter was a jumble of the usual scare stories, most of which he had used before; allegations of safety breaches which had been covered up, doubts about the safety of the ageing Magnox stations, the unsolved problem of storing and transporting nuclear waste. And this issue he had been hard put to it to find a couple of intelligent letters for the correspondence page; sometimes it seemed that every crackbrain in north-east Norfolk read the PANUP newsletter but that no one else did.

Amy was picking at the letters of the typewriter which had a persistent tendency to stick. She said: 'Neil, this is a bloody awful machine. It would be quicker to write the addresses by hand.'

'It's better since you cleaned it and the new ribbon looks fine.'

'It's still diabolical. Why don't you buy a new one? It would save time in the end.' 'I can't afford it.'

'You can't afford a new typewriter and you think you're going to save the world.'

'You don't need possessions to save the world, Amy. Jesus Christ had nothing; no home, no money, no property.'

'I thought you said when I came here that you weren't religious.'

It always surprised him that, apparently taking no account of him, she could yet recall comments he had made months earlier. He said: 'I don't believe Christ was God. I don't believe there is a God. But I believe in what He taught.'

'If He wasn't a God, I don't see that it matters much what He taught. Anyway, all I can remember is something about turning the other cheek which I don't believe in. I mean, that's daft. If someone slaps your left cheek then you slap his right, only harder. Anyway, I do know they hung Him up on the cross so it didn't do Him a lot of good. That's what turning the other cheek does for you.'

He said: 'I've got a Bible here somewhere. You could read about Him if you wanted to. Make a start with St Mark's Gospel.'

'No thanks. I had enough of that in the home.'

'What home?'

'Just a home, before the baby was born.' 'How long were you there?'

'Two weeks. Two weeks too bloody many. Then I ran away and found a squat.' 'Where was that, the squat?'

'Islington, Camden, King's Cross, Stoke Newington. Does it matter? I'm here now, OK?' 'It's OK by me, Amy.'

Lost in his thoughts, he hardly realized that he had given up folding the pamphlets.

Amy said: 'Look, if you're not going to help with these envelopes you might as well go and put a new washer on that tap. It's been dripping for weeks and Timmy's always falling about in the mud.'

'All right,' he said, 'I'll do it now.'

He took down his tool kit from the high cupboard where it was kept well out of Timmy's reach. He was glad to be out of the caravan. It had become increasingly claustrophobic in the last few weeks. Outside he bent to talk to Timmy, caged in his playpen. He and Amy had collected large stones from the beach, looking for those with holes in them – and he had strung them on to strong cord and tied them along one side of the playpen. Timmy would spend hours happily banging them together or against the bars or, as now, slobbering against one of the stones in an attempt to get it into his mouth. Sometimes he would communicate with individual flints, a continuous admonitory prattle broken by sudden triumphant squeals. Kneeling down Neil clutched the bars, rubbed his nose against

Timmy's, and was rewarded by his huge, heart-tugging smile. He looked very like his mother with the same round head on a delicate neck, the same beautifully shaped mouth. Only his eyes, widely spaced, were differently shaped, large blue spheres with, above them, straight bushy eyebrows which reminded Neil of pale and delicate caterpillars. The tenderness he felt for the child was equal to, if different from, the tenderness he felt for his mother. He could not now imagine life on the headland without either of them.

But the tap defeated him. Despite his tuggings with the wrench he couldn't get the screw to shift. Even this minor domestic task was apparently beyond his powers. He could hear Amy's derisive voice. 'You want to change the world and you can't change a washer.' After a couple of minutes he gave up the attempt, left the tool box by the cottage wall and walked to the edge of the cliff then slithered down to the beach. Crunching over the ridges of stones, he went down to the edge of the sea and almost violently wrenched off his shoes. It was thus, when the weight of anxiety about his failed ambitions, his uncertain future, became too heavy that he would find his peace, standing motionless to watch the veined curve of the poised wave, the tumult of crashing foam breaking over his feet, the wide intersecting arches washing over the smooth sand as the wave retreated to leave its tenuous lip of foam. But today even this wonder, continually repeated, failed to comfort his spirit. He gazed out to the horizon with unseeing eyes and thought about his present life, the hopelessness of the future, about Amy, about his family. Thrusting his hands in his pocket, he felt the crumpled envelope of his mother's last letter.

He knew that his parents were disappointed in him, although they never said so openly since oblique hints were just as effective: 'Mrs Reilly keeps on asking me, what is Neil doing? I don't like to say that you're living in a caravan with no proper job.' She certainly didn't like to say that he was living there with a girl. He had written to tell them about Amy since his parents constantly threatened to visit and, unlikely as this was actually to happen, the prospect had added an intolerable anxiety to his already anxiety-ridden life.

'I'm giving a temporary home to an unmarried mother in return for typing help. Don't worry, I shan't suddenly present you with a bastard grandchild.'

After the letter had been posted he had felt ashamed. The cheap attempt at humour had been too like a treacherous repudiation of Timmy whom he loved. And his mother hadn't found it either funny or reassuring. His letter had produced an almost incoherent farrago of warnings, pained reproaches and veiled references to the possible reaction of Mrs Reilly if she ever got to know. Only his two brothers surreptitiously welcomed his way of life. They hadn't made university and the difference between their comfortable life style – houses on an executive estate, en suite bathrooms, artificial coal fires in what they called the lounge, working wives, a new car every two years and timeshares in Majorca – provided both with agreeable hours of self-satisfied comparisons which he knew would always end with the same conclusion, that he ought to pull himself together, that it wasn't right, not after all the sacrifices Mum and Dad had made to send him to college, and a fine waste of money that had proved.