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trust came back to her with a potential recipient and asked her to attend the center for a medical examination, she had not been able to stand up for herself.
    She said nothing to Alistair. She went for the medical in her lunch hour. Of course, she still intended to tell him. Ironically, if things had been going badly for them she might have told him, she might have been made stronger by adversity, but their relationship was in a successful and happy period—why spoil it? Just the same, she meant to tell him well in advance of the harvest date. She would have to tell him, she knew that.
    The bank sent him to Hong Kong. He was to be away a week and it was during that week that the donation was to be made. Donors should be met, it was advised, on leaving the hospital and accompanied home. She would have to do without that, or she would have to do without Alistair. Dorothea would meet her, Dorothea was discreet and would say nothing. Perhaps Alistair need never know. Whatever advances she had made, she had by then reverted to type, and telling herself she was a coward and a fool made no difference.
    Mary relived all this as she walked through the park to the Monkey Gate, over the canal bridge and into Charlbert Street. It had been a day like this, sunny and breezy, but autumn not spring, when she went to the hospital for the harvest collection. The only risk, contrary to what Alistair suggested, was that associated with general anesthetic, the same as if undergoing any operation. She was “out” for about two hours, during which time they took a liter of marrow and blood, or five percent of the total in her body.
    Coming round, she had felt at first excitement. It was done, she had done it. She had been able to do it, use her own good health to repair someone else’s ill health, to mend nature’s mistake. If she had done nothing much up till now, no good deeds, if she did none in the years to come, she had performed this one act to justify her existence.To no one on earth would she actually have said those words; to Dorothea when she came in to visit she made light of it, saying it was nothing, a breeze. But in her heart she experienced a deep satisfaction. Even if it failed, if the transplant was useless, she would have tried, she would have done what all philosophies and all religions told us we were here to do: love our neighbor and with positive intent.
    This emotional high was not long enduring. The words she had used, though silent and unspoken, now embarrassed her. She came back swiftly to practical things. Dorothea accompanied her home in a taxi, made a meal, and shared it with her, telling her to take it easy, not to come back to the museum till the following week. Mary had been tired and a little stiff but otherwise well. She ate three meals a day, went for gentle walks, took the iron pills prescribed for her, and waited for Alistair to come home.
    It was something she had never been able to account for, to explain to herself, why she had not once looked at the place on her body from which the harvest had been taken. She knew precisely where it was, the cavity of the hip, the iliac crest. It would have been normal surely, natural, to have studied these punctures on the smooth pale skin, even though she had been assured they would not leave a scar. Some revulsion, if not regret—never that—must have kept her eyes from the spot while she undressed, while she took a shower. Some unwillingness to see what altruism had done to a body that was perfect, without a blemish?
    Alistair saw the marks. He saw them when they made love and the bedroom was flooded with autumn sunshine, soft golden light falling on her nakedness, her whiteness and its single flaw …
    •   •   •
    The first-comers made straight for the shop where Stacey sold them calendars and postcards of Lily Langtry and Eleanora Duse, leather-bound reissues of the novels of Ada Leverson, painted fans, beadedbags, batik, appliqué work, and very