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crash helmet.”
    We watched, sipping our beer, as Joe crossed the garden and returned with a folded piece of newspaper. “After this one I’m going on the pill,” said Clara.
    When Joe had finally finished cooking the dinner we went into the house and ate it, seated around the heavy table in the dining room. The baby had been fed and exiled to the carriage on the front porch, but Arthur sat in a high chair, where he evaded with spastic contortions of his body the spoonfuls of food Clara poked in the direction of his mouth. Dinner was wizened meat balls and noodles from a noodle mix, with lettuce. For dessert we had something I recognized.
    “This is that new canned rice pudding; it saves a lot of time,” Clara said defensively. “It’s not too bad with cream, and Arthur loves it.”
    “Yes,” I said. “Pretty soon they’ll be having Orange and Caramel too.”
    “Oh?” Clara deftly intercepted a long drool of pudding and returned it to Arthur’s mouth.
    Ainsley got out a cigarette and held it for Joe to light. “Tell me,” she said to him, “do you know this friend of theirs – Leonard Slank? They’re being so mysterious about him.”
    Joe had been up and down all during the meal, taking off the plates and tending things in the kitchen. He looked dizzy. “Oh yes, I remember him,” he said, “though he’s really a friend of Clara’s.” He finished his pudding quickly and asked Clara whether she needed any help, but she didn’t hear him. Arthur had just thrown his bowl on the floor.
    “But what do
you
think of him?” Ainsley asked, as though appealing to his superior intelligence.
    Joe stared at the wall, thinking. He didn’t like giving negative judgments, I knew, but I also knew he wasn’t fond of Len. “He’s not ethical,” he said at last. Joe is an Instructor in Philosophy.
    “Oh, that’s not quite fair,” I said. Len had never been unethical towards me.
    Joe frowned at me. He doesn’t know Ainsley very well, and tends anyway to think of all unmarried girls as easily victimized and needing protection. He had several times volunteered fatherly advice to me, and now he emphasized his point. “He’s not someone to get … mixed up with,” he said sternly. Ainsley gave a short laugh and blew out smoke, unperturbed.
    “That reminds me,” I said, “you’d better give me his phone number.”
    After dinner we went to sit in the littered living room while Joe cleared the table. I offered to help, but Joe said that was all right, he would rather I talked to Clara. Clara had settled herself on the chesterfield in a nest of crumpled newspapers with her eyes closed; again I could think of little to say. I sat staring up at the centre of the ceiling where there was an elaborately-scrolled plaster decoration, once perhaps the setting for a chandelier, remembering Clara at high school: a tall fragile girl who was always getting exempted from Physical Education. She’d sit on the sidelines watching the rest of us in our blue-bloomered gymsuits as though anything so sweaty and ungainly was foreign enough to her to be a mildly amusing entertainment. In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents she was everyone’s ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity. At university she had been a little healthier, but had grown her blonde hair long, which made her look more medieval than ever: I had thought of her in connection with the ladies sitting in rose gardens on tapestries. Of course her mind wasn’t like that, but I’ve always been influenced by appearances.
    She married Joe Bates in May at the end of our second year, and at first I thought it was an ideal match. Joe was then a graduate student, almost seven years older than she was, a tall shaggy man with a slight stoop and a protective attitude towards Clara. Their worship of each other before the wedding was sometimes ridiculously idealistic; one kept expecting Joe to spread his overcoat on mud puddles or drop to