The girl did not really respond. She did not speak. Her black slow gaze had roamed from Timothy to Amanda to Clive, as they talked. But when Amanda said her name, Ruth looked back at her. The look was closed as the eye of a camera. Was she on drugs?

"Well, Ruth," coldly said Amanda, "how do you do?"

"Now come on, Tim," said Clive Mills, "this is a bit much. We come back and find you parked in here with some girl we've never seen or heard of."

"But I told you about Ruth months ago," protested Timothy. He looked very sincere and slightly outraged as always when he was lying.

"Give me a bit of credit, Tim."

Amanda turned to the doorway. She felt a kind of hormonal boiling. "I'm going upstairs for a minute," she said. "Clive?"

But Clive did not join her. He had planted himself like a tank in a suit on the rug before the fireplace, the teasels in their vase outlining him oddly.

Amanda went out and up the stairs, to see what had happened, and if they had used her bed.

When she came out of Timothy's room, her husband was standing in the passage outside. He regarded her, sneering slightly. "Snooping? Well, has he?"

"Don't be crude," she said. She shut the door.

"What do you mean, crude? What have I said? I asked you—"

"I don't think so."

"No, he didn't have time. We messed that up for him good and proper."

"How can you be so flippant. Do you want him bringing sluts in off the street to sleep with?"

"Now who's being crude." Clive Mills waited for her returning blow, which did not come. He sighed. He wondered if the girl was a slut, or just impressed by Tim, his big mouth and his car and the Italian dinner they had apparently had while he, Clive, was driving back din-nerless.

Clive sensed himself vaguely, tallish and heavy, in his expensive lounge suit with a spirit of mauve, the lilac tie —but not the matching handkerchief which his wife had told him was vulgar. He doubted this. He had seen TV news presenters in just such ensembles. She was always getting at him. She drove him mad, with her "Living Room" and "Loo," her white meat and fish, her nouvelle cuisine salads, her endless tirades on social propriety and constipation. Amanda. She had been easy on the eye once. Now the rigid diet had made her face a skull, and had left the skin of her arms rather too loose, but he was too tactful to tell her. Not like her. She was quick enough to criticize.

That bloody veal. He wished he had never ordered it. Had the sodding diet plate. Then there would never have been all this.

Old Tim, eh. What could you say? He must have had girls before, not still a virgin for Christ's sake.