Miss Slattery cracked.

‘What are the people gunna say when they hear you holler like that?’

As she cracked, and slashed.

‘Aÿ! It is none of ze people’s business. Pouff! Yaÿ-yaÿ-yaÿ-yaÿ!’ Tibby Szabo cried. ‘Just vun little vun more!’

And when at last she toppled, he covered her very tenderly where she lay.

‘Did anyone ever want you to put on boots?’.

‘What ever for?’ asked Phyllis Wimble.

But Miss Slattery found she had fetched the wrong file.

‘Ah, dear,’ she said, resuming. ‘It’s time I thought about a change,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling sort of tired.’

‘Hair looks dead,’ said Phyllis Wimble. ‘That is always the danger signal.’

‘Try a new rinse.’

‘A nice strawberry.’

Miss Slattery, whose habit had been to keep Thursday evening for Tibby Szabo, could not bear to any more. Saturdays she still went, but at night, for the nights were less spiteful than the days.

‘Vair vas you, Petuska, Sursday evening?’ Tibby Szabo had begun to ask.

‘I sat at home and watched the telly.’

‘Zen I vill install ze telly for here!’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the telly is something that requires the maximum of concentration.’

‘Are you changing, Petuska?’ Tibby asked.

‘Everything is changing,’ Miss Slattery said. ‘It is an axiom of nature.’

She laughed rather short.

‘That,’ she said, ‘is something I think I learned at school. Same time as Balaton.’

It was dreadful, really, for everyone concerned, for Tibby Szabo had begun to ring the Providential. With urgent communications for a friend. Would she envisage Tuesday, Vensday, Friday?

However impersonally she might handle the instrument, that old Huthnance would come in and catch her on the phone. Miss Slattery saw that Huthnance and she had almost reached the point of no return.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not Thursday. Or any other day but what was agreed. Saturday, I said.’

She slammed it down.

So Miss Slattery would drag through the moist evenings. In which the scarlet hibiscus had furled. No more trumpets. Her hair hung dank, as she trailed through the acid, yellow light, towards the good address at which her lover lived.

‘I am developing a muscle,’ she caught herself saying, and looked round to see if anyone had heard.

It was the same night that Tibby Szabo cried out from the bottom of the pit:

‘Vhy em I condemned to soffer?’

Stretched on mink, Miss Slattery lay, idly flicking at her varnished toes. Without looking at the view, she knew the rhinestones of Sydney had never glittered so heartlessly.

‘Faht for do you torture me?’

‘But that is what you wanted,’ she said.

Flicking. Listless.

‘Petuska, I vill gif you anysink!’

‘Nossing,’ she said. ‘I am going,’ she said.

‘Gowing? Ven vee are so suited to each ozzer!’

Miss Slattery flicked.

‘I am sick,’ she said, ‘I am sick of cutting a rug out of your fat Hungarian behind.’

The horsehair slithered and glistened between her toes.

‘But faht vill you do visout me?’

‘I am going to find myself a thin Australian.’