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his knees to kiss Clara’s rubber boots. The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.
    I looked at her, feeling a wave of embarrassed pity sweep over me; what could I do? Perhaps I could offer to come over some day and clean up the house. Clara simply had no practicality, she wasn’t able to control the more mundane aspects of life, like money or getting to lectures on time. When we lived in residence together she used to become hopelessly entangled in her room at intervals, unable to find matching shoes or enough clean clothes to wear, and I would have to dig her out of the junk pile she had allowed to accumulate around her. Her messiness wasn’t actively creative like Ainsley’s, who could devastate a room in five minutes if she was feeling chaotic; it was passive. She simply stood helpless while the tide of dirt rose round her, unable to stop it or evade it. The babies were like that too; her own body seemed somehow beyond her, going its own way without reference to any directions of hers. I studied the pattern of bright flowers on the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive.
    We left early, after Arthur had been carried off to bed screaming after what Joe called “an accident” behind the living-room door.
    “It was no accident,” Clara remarked, opening her eyes. “He just loves peeing behind doors. I wonder what it is. He’s going to be secretive when he grows up, an undercover agent or a diplomat or something. The furtive little bastard.”
    Joe saw us to the door, a pile of dirty laundry in his arms. “You must come and see us again soon,” he said, “Clara has so few people she can really talk to.”

5
    W e walked down towards the subway in the semi-dusk, through the sound of crickets and muffled television sets (in some of the houses we could see them flickering blue through the open windows) and a smell of warm tar. My skin felt stifled, as though I was enclosed in a layer of moist dough. I was afraid Ainsley hadn’t enjoyed herself: her silence was negative.
    “Dinner wasn’t bad,” I said, wanting to be loyal to Clara, who was after all an older friend than Ainsley; “Joe’s turning into quite a good cook.”
    “How can she stand it?” Ainsley said with more vehemence than usual. “She just lies there and that man does all the work! She lets herself be treated like a
thing
!”
    “Well, she is seven months pregnant,” I said. “And she’s never been well.”
    “
She’s
not well!” Ainsley said indignantly. “She’s flourishing; it’s him that’s not well. He’s aged even since I’ve known him and that’s less than four months. She’s draining all his energy.”
    “What do you suggest?” I said. I was annoyed with Ainsley: she couldn’t see Clara’s position.
    “Well, she should
do
something; if only a token gesture. She never finished her degree, did she? Wouldn’t this be a perfect time for her to work on it? Lots of pregnant women finish their degrees.”
    I remembered poor Clara’s resolutions after the first baby: she had thought of it as only a temporary absence. After the second she had wailed, “I don’t know what we’re doing wrong! I always try to be so careful.” She had always been against the pill – she thought it might change her personality – but gradually she had become less adamant. She had read a French novel (in translation) and a book about archaeological expeditions in Peru and had talked about night school. Lately she had taken to making bitter remarks about being “just a housewife.” “But Ainsley,” I said, “you’re always saying that a degree is no real indication of