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while this struggle goes on and one offspring disposes of the other two. The mother does not intervene .
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    John Clearwater was a mathematician. It seemed an innocuous statement to make but, as far as Hope was concerned, that was both the root cause of his allure for her and the source of all his enormous problems. She knew he was not particularly good-looking, but then she had never been very drawn to handsome men. There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought. It was too commonplace, for one thing, and thereby devalued. Everywhere she went she saw notionally “good-looking” men of one type or another: men serving in shops, men eating in restaurants, men erecting scaffolding, men in suits in offices, men in uniforms at airports…. There were many more good-looking men in the world than women, she reckoned. It was much much harder to find a beautiful woman.
    Clearwater was of average height but he looked stockier. He was also a little overweight when she met him, and these extra pounds added to the impression of squat solidity he gave off. He had wiry black hair, thinning at the front, that he brushed straight back. He wore unexceptionably orthodox clothes: brown sports jacket and dark gray flannels, Viyella shirts and knitted, patternless ties, but they looked absolutely right on him, she thought. There was a literally careless quality about the way he dressed, and the well-used, well-fitting nature of his clothes ignored fashion and style with a blunt panache that she found far more attractive than the most tasteful and soigné modishness.
    He had a long, straight nose and bright, pale-blue eyes. She had never known anyone who smoked a cigarette so fast. His driven-back hair and his demeanor of restless hurry were both oddly exciting to her, and liberating. When she was with him she felt her own potential expand to preposterous lengths. He was indifferent to the ephemera and faddiness of the world, its swank and swish. His tastes, like most people’s, were both banal and arcane, but they seemed to have developed under their own impulsion, self-generated, uninfluenced. She found that innocent confidence and self-sufficiency very enviable.
    There were disadvantages too. That self-sufficiency made him relatively incurious about her likes and dislikes. When they did something she wanted, she always felt it was an act of politeness on his part, however much he protested to the contrary. And his utter absorption in his work, which was of an abstraction so rarefied as to be vertiginous, excluded everyone, as far as she could see, apart from a handful of people in distant universities and research institutes.
    She met him, eventually, one June evening at an end-of-term faculty party. She had just collected the typescript of her Ph.D. thesis from the typing agency and the strange joy that the sight of that ream of paper had provoked had encouraged her to drink too much. When she finally found herself face to face with Clearwater she stared at him very intently. He needed a shave—he had a heavy beard—and he looked tired. He was drinking red wine from a half-pint glass tankard filled to the brim.
    â€œSo, what’s your racket?” he said to her, with no enthusiasm.
    â€œYou can do better than that,” she said.
    â€œOK. You’ve spilled wine on your blouse.”
    â€œIt’s not wine, it’s a brooch.”
    He leaned forward a few inches to peer at the jet cameo pinned above the swell of her left breast.
    â€œOf course it is,” he said. “I should have brought my specs.”
    â€œAre you American?”
    â€œNo, no. Sorry: ‘ brawt .’ How’s that? I spent four years at Cal Tech. It can damage your vowels.”
    She looked at his clothes. He could have been a prep school master in the 1930s. “I could tell you’d lived in California. All those pastel colors.”
    He looked a little taken aback, suddenly lost, as if