If only the tape, if you knew the trick with the wretched switch.

Jum Wheeler decided not to look at his wife. Little guilty pockets were turning themselves out in his mind. That woman at the Locomotive Hotel. Pockets and pockets of putrefying trash. Down along the creek, amongst the tussocks and the sheep pellets, the sun burning his boy’s skin, he played his overture to sex. Alone.

This sort of thing’s all very well, Miss Cullen decided. It’s time we turned practical. Are you sure we can find our way back to the car?

Always trundling. Crackling. But there were the blessed wagtails again.

‘Wonder if they forgot the machine?’

‘Oh, God! Hasn’t the tape bobbed up in Pymble?’

A single willy-wagtail sprinkled its grace-notes through the stuffy room.

‘Everything’s all right,’ Nora announced. ‘He’s calmer now. I persuaded him to take a drop of brandy.’

‘That should fix him,’ Jum said.

But Nora was listening to the lone wagtail. She was standing in the bush. Listening. The notes of bird-song falling like mountain water, when they were not chiselled in moonlight.

‘There is nothing purer,’ Nora said, ‘than the song of the wagtail. Excepting Schubert,’ she added, ‘some of Schubert.’

She was so shyly glad it had occurred to her.

But the Wheelers just sat.

And again Nora Mackenzie was standing alone amongst the inexorable moonlit gums. She thought perhaps she had always felt alone, even with Arch, while grateful even for her loneliness.

‘Ah, there you are!’ Nora said.

It was Arch. He stood holding out his bandaged wound. Rather rigid. He could have been up for court martial.

‘I’ve missed the willy-wagtails,’ Nora said, raising her face to him, exposing her distress, like a girl. ‘Some day you’ll have to play it to me. When you’ve the time. And we can concentrate.’

The Wheelers might not have existed.

As for the tape it had discovered silence.

Arch mumbled they’d all better have something to drink.

Jum agreed it was a good idea.

‘Positively brilliant,’ Eileen said.

A Glass of Tea

Malliakas decided to use the introduction only on his second visit to Geneva. He had come there in connection with property belonging to an aunt, a rich Alexandrian who had spent her widowhood, and died finally, at Lausanne. On his first visit he knew for certain he would have been bored, and even now, as he heard his letter flutter and fall inside the box, he wondered what had possessed him – to use the introduction Ellison, the elderly Englishman who had known Philippides in the Levant, had as good as forced into his hand. Days of grace made Malliakas hope a mistake might have been corrected, when Philippides wrote, in engraved words, expressing a wish to receive his friend’s acquaintance. Although the note was brief and dry, its appearance suggested the inevitable. Milliakas was horrified, but caught the bus to Cologny the day before he was due to leave.