David had arrived in the little town without having watched the sky or been much aware of the sun’s kind warmth on his back. Why had he let what amounted to nothing more than a briefly frightening episode turn him inward where he discovered no insight worth the name, a mournful irritability rather which he disliked in himself? He was thirsty. He would go to the horseshoe bar and drink a beer with the locals.

The bartender this morning was a woman of toughened age, still dyeing her hair and painting her face in a caricature of desirability. She was talking to a woman sitting alone halfway down the bar, younger, more tentatively hopeful. On the other side of the U three men nearly identically dressed in khaki seemed camouflaged for the desert. Even their hair and skin were the colour of dust. They seemed to stare at without seeing the two women. All eyes had shifted to David when he walked in and shifted immediately away, except for the bartender’s. She left her companion promptly, swiped the already clean counter in front of David and smiled at him.

‘What’ll it be this morning?’

‘Have you draft beer?’

‘Sure do.’

He drank it gratefully, realizing how rarely he had been really thirsty, the pleasure of a drink intensified as it answered a need. It was like being with Diana and Constance where even the most inconsequential and, with Constance, sometimes odd exchange slaked a loneliness in him he had accepted as his condition. How different it was from the two conversations at the bar, the men in mock modesty really bragging about how much they could afford to lose, how many machines they owned which could break down. One man had just had his damned plane in for an overhaul. Another complained about the faulty air conditioning in his tractor, and they all competed to claim the prize lemon of a car they had at one time or another been crazy enough to buy. The women did not talk to be overheard, but David could hear them in a reversal of the usual roles, the bartender telling her troubles to her customer.

‘I told her, “Don’t think getting knocked up will change anything.” Where do kids get these ideas, off the tube?’

‘You don’t look around you when you’re a kid. You think you’re different. You think it’s going to be different for you,’ said the customer.

David thought of Christine, who was afraid of being different, who wished she had a mother who would talk with her. How primly he expected she would draw back, faced with the experience these women might offer up. Sheltered. All these women were sheltered, Jack said. Ben and Mike were already in league with their father to keep the less savoury truth about the real world from Laura. And they were there building the fence to protect Constance.