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A few battered cottages, a
general shop, a couple of low public-houses, and three perky red-brick
villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you
will, of Murglebed-on-Sea. Renniker is a wonderful man.
I have rented a couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas. It has
a decayed bit of front garden in which a gnarled, stunted stick is
planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of
the villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in
Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the
morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers
over the waste, building as he goes. In the evenings he gets drunk at
the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man,
with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams.
His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set,
black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of
her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under
foot.


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