He was sitting forward.

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘a Hungarian one!’

And let the horsehair curl round Tibby’s thigh.

He was sitting forward. Tibby Szabo began to sing:

‘Csak egy kislány
van a világon,
az is az én
drága galambo-o-om!’

He was sitting forward with eyes half-closed, clapping and singing.

‘Hooray for love,
it rots you,...’

Miss Slattery sang.

She cracked a cigarette out of the grazier’s lips.

‘A jó Isten
de nagyon szeret,’

sang Tibby Szabo,

‘hogy nékem adta
a legszebbik-e-e-et!’¹

Then everybody was singing everything they had to sing, guitars disintegrating, for none could compete against the syrup from Tibby Szabo’s compulsive violin.

While Miss Slattery cracked. Breasts jumping and frolicking. Her hair was so brittle. Lifted it once again, though, under the tawny sun, hawking dust, drunk on the smell of the tepid canvas water-bags.

Miss Slattery cracked once more, and brought down the sun from out of the sky.

It is not unlikely that the world will end in thunder. From the sound of it, somebody must have overturned Hypotenuse of Angst. Professional screamers had begun to scream. The darkness filled with hands.

‘Come close, Petuska.’

It was Tibby Szabo.

‘I vill screen you,’ he promised, and caressed.

When a Large Person appeared with a candle. She was like a scone.

‘These studios,’ the Large Person announced, ‘are let for purposes of creative arts, and the exchange of intellectual ideas. I am not accustomed to louts – and worse,’ here she looked at Miss Slattery’s upper half, ‘wrecking the premises,’ she said. ‘As there has never been any suspicion that this is a Bad House, I must ask you all to leave.’

So everybody did, for there was the Large Person’s husband behind her, looking as though he might mean business. Everybody shoved and poured, there was a singing, a crumbling of music on the stairs. There was a hugging and a kissing in the street. Somebody had lost his pants. It was raining finely.

Tibby Szabo drove off very quickly, in case a lift might be asked for.

‘Put on your top, Petuska,’ he advised. ‘You vill ketch a colt.’

It sounded reasonable. She was bundling elaborately into armholes.

‘Waddayaknow!’ Miss Slattery said. ‘We’ve come away with the grazier’s whip!’

‘Hef vee?’ Tibby Szabo remarked.

So they drove in Tibby’s Jag. They were on a spiral.

‘I am so tired,’ Miss Slattery admitted.

And again:

‘I am awful tired.’

She was staring down at those white rugs in Tibby’s flat. The soft, white, serious pile. She was propped on her elbows. Knees apart. Must be looking bloody awful.

‘Petuska,’ he was trying it out, ‘vill you perhaps do vun more creck of ze whip?’

He could have been addressing a convalescent.

‘Oh, but I am tired. I am done,’ she said.

‘Just vun little vun.’

Then Miss Slattery got real angry.

‘You and this goddam lousy whip! I wish I’d never set eyes on either!’

Nor did she bother where she lashed.

‘Ach! Oh! Aÿ-yaÿ-yaÿ! Petuska!’