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I’ve been kissed by five young men since then, four of whom mattered not at all.”
    â€œAnd the fifth? Oh, tell me about the fifth, wicked promiscuous girl! Thank heavens Lesbia is away from you.”
    â€œThe fifth is the cause of my going. Oh, he does not matter to me,” she protested quickly as she saw the question surface in the other’s bright eyes. “But in therelationship he matters greatly to himself, and I, perhaps not as greatly, matter to him also.”
    She added as if the fact were beside the point, “He is a road worker.”
    â€œI see. Or do I see? Perhaps . . .”
    â€œThere is nothing to see. He is digging the drains five blocks away. Don’t be astonished. The whole affair has a peculiar simplicity. And now I have quite consciously created a narrow spiritual pit for him to dig desperately until he has sweated out all feeling for me. I did it cruelly, I suppose, and coldly certainly. And therefore I’m going.”
    â€œWas he angry with you? Aren’t you afraid to build these emotional robots? You must be afraid.”
    Elsie leant forward and touched the older woman’s arm lightly.
    â€œTerribly afraid, Mrs Crozier. So frightened of his anger maturing throughout this day that I feel I must on no account see him. Even an attempt at explanation seems pointless, for how can I explain what I don’t really understand but merely feel? We scarcely saw each other last night after I got in from the plane, and, cowardly, I’d like to slip away without seeing him or discussing it at all.”
    Mrs Crozier’s kind eyes looked startled.
    â€œCould you do that? Would you want to?”
    â€œIt would all come to the same thing,” replied the girl somewhat wearily. “This town is so small I feel Ican hardly avoid seeing him, and his temper and frustration are something not to be seen, I assure you.”
    â€œYou know best, my dear.”
    Mrs Crozier resumed pricking her daughter’s outline in white silk. The sun sifted uneasily through the gluttonous bougainvillea which held the entire northern side of the bungalow in its embrace. Half a mile away the Hermit Park school rang the end of recess, and the distant roar of twelve hundred young taking nourishment and expending their vigour ceased suddenly to leave a fragile silence quivering in the air. It was now eleven thirty and taking that from eight o’clock left eight and a half more hours to be filled in. Or was it “worn away”? A species of moral detrition. The unworthy consideration that perhaps there was something of excitement to be wrung from the situation she had to confess she found entertaining, for although her fear was real the fact that she was the centre of one man’s wrath flattered. Even as she toyed with the sentiment she also despised her own nature. But there were excuses to be found, too, for who, stranded like some gasping sea-creature on one of these lonely beaches, would not take succour wherever it was offered? No one could possibly know the way loneliness ate into the mind so that any alleviation was clutched at almost unthinkingly. It was hard to believe that for seven weeks there had been the rain, the drudgery of the job, the crying child and Mrs Buttling’smachine singing like a locust the entire week-end. Was it some excuse that the child snored asthmatically in the double bed three feet away and that the conversation of the landlady reached screaming point in banality? Or would it be the radio programmes, endlessly loud, endlessly commercial and endlessly tawdry? And Sundays at twelve, the father-in-law, atoning in part for his son’s defection, coming to mow and trim the rank little allotment, then sit down to baked midday dinners, stinking from his exertion and the grey flannel singlet wet with sweat. There was some vanishing point for all of these things, a point where they actually met with a dagger-like acuteness and