‘You have the funniest ways,’ she said, ‘Tib.’

As Tibby Szabo kept on going up and down her arm.

When he started on the shoulder, she said:

‘Stoput! What do you think I am?’

He heard enough to alter course.

A man’s head in your lap somehow always made you feel it was trying to fool itself – it looked so detached, improbable, and ridiculous.

He turned his eyes on then, as if knowing: here is the greatest sucker for eyes. Oh God, nothing ever went deeper than eyes. She was a goner.

‘Oh God! ’ she said, ‘I am not like this!’

She was nothing like what she thought she was like. So she learned. She was the trampoline queen. She was an enormous, staggery spider. She was a rubber doll.

‘You Austrahlian girls are visout Temperament,’ Tibby Szabo complained. ‘You are all gickle and talk. Passion is not to resist.’

‘I just about broke every bone in my body not resisting,’ Miss Slattery had to protest.

Her body that continued fluctuating overhead.

‘Who ever heard of a glass ceiling!’

‘Plenty glass ceiling. Zet is to see vis.’

‘Tibby,’ she asked, ‘this wouldn’t be – mink?’

‘Yehs. Yehs. Meenk beds are goot for ze body.’

‘I’ll say!’ she said.

She was so relaxed. She was half-dead. When it was possible to lift an arm, the long silken shudders took possession of her skin, and she realized the southerly had come, off the water, in at the window, giving her the goose-flesh.

‘We’re gunna catch a cold,’ she warned, and coughed.

‘It is goot.’

‘I am glad to know that something is good,’ she said, sitting up, destroying the composition in the ceiling. ‘This sort of thing is all very well, but are you going to let me love you?’

Rounding on him. This fat and hairy man.

‘Lof? Faht execkly do you mean?’

‘Oh, Tibby!’ she said.

Again he was fixing his eyes on her, extinct by now, but even in their dormancy they made her want to die. Or give. Or was it possible to give and live?

‘Go to sleep,’ he ordered.

‘Oh, Tibby!’

She fell back floppy whimpery but dozed. Once she looked sideways at his death-mask. She looked at the ceiling, too. It was not unlike those atrocity pictures she had always tried to avoid, in the papers, after the War.

It was incredible, but always had been.

By the time Miss Slattery stepped into the street, carrying her business hat, evening had drenched the good address with the mellower light of ripened pears. She trod through it, tilted, stilted, tentative. Her neck was horribly stiff.

After that there was the Providential, for she did not remain with Better Sales Pty. Ltd; she was informed that her services would no longer be required. What was it, they asked, had made her so unreliable? She said she had become distracted.

In the circumstances she was fortunate to find the position with the Providential. There, too, she made friends with Phyllis Wimble.