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shows. It is a job that has also introduced him to the artists of the city, most of whom just want to get out of the place — this city, the whole country. Who feel they’ve been cooped up, with no possibility of escape, far too long. And so they argue, even fight (fists and all, sometimes), because that’s what you do when you’re cooped up and can’t get out. And what a time to be cooped up in this place, with its sooty palms and grimy little two-bob touches of New York or London, that will always be just that: grimy little touches of somewhere else. The Americans have gone but there are still uniforms on the streets and the occasional sad troop train carrying the returned troops, some of whom still have the bony look of stick-figure soldiers, those who were either too sick to move or who were unlucky and just had to wait their turn to come home because it takes a long time to end a war and bring back an army. George has a university degree (which is why he became the art critic, and which is why he still thinks of his favourite writers as Mr this or Mr that — because his tutors did) and when his time came to go into the army he went directly to the Education Corps and never left the city. Which is also why he was one of the first out of uniform. So the war never brought him travel (or death or danger or a bony frame that might stay bony forever) and like the artists of the city he too just wants to get out of the place. But, even now, he knows there will be a sense of loss whenhe does, as there will always be loss in leaving behind the place they all struggled in and against for so long. There is also a part of George that wonders if the combination of this place and these sad and violent years that they have all just emerged from did not, in fact, bring out the very best in these painters with whom his job brings him into contact. That when they all flee and look back from wherever it is that they flee to, they might just conclude that they left their very best back there in that place in which the war trapped them, and which they dreamt of leaving for so long.
    But what to do with the next hour? Grasping the rolled-up paper, containing the story of the old woman in the tent that will soon become yesterday’s news and yesterday’s story of yesterday’s pioneer, he walks back towards Little Collins Street just behind him, where there is a café with a faintly amusing Russian name, where these painters gather and where he may well meet one or two of them and pass away the next hour in that jumpy world of groups and factions, friends and former friends, old lovers and new, in which they all live.

4.
The Painter Reads the Journalist
    W hile George is standing on the footpath at the front of the newspaper offices, a painter, not far away, has the evening paper opened at the same page and is reading the same article about an old woman who lives in a tent, not knowing that it is written by the journalist he sees at exhibition openings and whom he meets at the various cafés and milk bars at which they all gather; one who mixes with the city’s artists, but, being the art critic, one who keeps his distance as well.
    This painter, whose name is Sam, is drawn to the photograph for the same reason that George was drawn to the idea of the old woman before he even met her. He has been staring at the photograph for some time. And it seems to him that as much as the old woman is shooing away the journalist, she is also calling. At least, she is calling to this painter, who sees in her the very thing he is always looking for: a subject. And in thinking this, he does not see himself as cold or someone whofeeds off the lives of others. He is simply interested in other people, other people’s lives, as much as he is interested in the ideas he brings to them or with which they come.
    This old woman is both life and idea. She looks like a type (and ‘type’ is the word he silently articulates). Like a distant relation in a