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provincials.’
    When they had gone into dinner, and after Rycker had said a short grace, Querry’s hostess spoke again. She said, ‘I hope you will be comfortable,’ and, ‘Do you care for salad?’ Her fair hair was streaked and darkened with sweat and he saw her eyes widen with apprehension when a black-and-white moth, with the wing-spread of a bat, swooped across the table. ‘You must make yourself at home here,’ she said, her gaze following the moth as it settled like a piece of lichen on the wall. He wondered whether she had ever felt at home herself. She said, ‘We don’t have many visitors,’ and he was reminded of a child forced to entertain a caller until her mother returns. She had changed, between the whisky and the dinner, into a cotton frock covered with a pattern of autumnal leaves which was like a memory of Europe.
    ‘Not a visitor like the Querry anyway,’ Rycker interrupted her. It was as though he had turned off a knob on a radio-set which had been tuned in to a lesson in deportment after he had listened enough. The sound of the voice was shut off the air, but still, behind the shy and wary eyes, the phrases were going on for no one to hear. ‘The weather has been a little hot lately, hasn’t it? I hope you had a good flight from Europe.’
    Querry said, ‘Do you like the life here?’ The question startled her; perhaps the answer wasn’t in her phrase-book. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘yes. It’s very interesting,’ staring over his shoulder through the window to where the boilers stood like modern statues in the floodlit yard; then she shifted her eyes back to the moth on the wall and the gecko pointing at his prey.
    ‘Fetch that photograph, dear,’ Rycker said.
    ‘What photograph?’
    ‘The photograph of our guest.’
    She trailed reluctantly out, making a detour to avoid the wall where the moth rested and the lizard pointed, and returned soon with an ancient copy of Time . Querry remembered the ten years younger face upon the cover (the issue had coincided with his first visit to New York). The artist, drawing from a photograph, had romanticized his features. It wasn’t the face he saw when he shaved, but a kind of distant cousin. It reflected emotions, thoughts, hopes, profundities that he had certainly expressed to no reporter. The background of the portrait was a building of glass and steel which might have been taken for a concert-hall, or perhaps even for an orangerie , if a great cross planted outside the door had not indicated it was a church.
    ‘So you see,’ Rycker said, ‘we know all.’
    ‘I don’t remember that the article was very accurate.’
    ‘I suppose the Government – or the Church – have commissioned you to do something out here?’
    ‘No. I’ve retired.’
    ‘I thought a man of your kind never retired.’
    ‘Oh, one comes to an end, just as soldiers do and bank managers.’
    When the dinner was over the girl left, like a child after the dessert. ‘I expect she’s gone to write up her journal,’ Rycker said. ‘This is a red-letter day for her, meeting the Querry. She’ll have plenty to put down in it.’
    ‘Does she find much to write?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know. At the beginning I used to take a quiet look, but she discovered that, and now she locks it up. I expect I teased her a little too much. I remember one entry: “Letter from mother. Poor Maxime has had five puppies.” It was the day I was decorated by the Governor, but she forgot to put anything about the ceremony.’
    ‘It must be a lonely life at her age.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. There are a lot of household duties even in the bush. To be quite frank, I think it’s a good deal more lonely for me. She’s hardly – you can see it for yourself – an intellectual companion. That’s one of the disadvantages of marrying a young wife. If I want to talk about things which really interest me, I have to drive over to the fathers. A long way to go for a conversation. Living in the way I