Yes, said Mrs Standish. And now shall we eat?

Wally’s conversation was largely anecdotal. It was refreshing, she told herself at times, the significance of fact. More often she plunged beneath it, into the waters of her own preoccupation, let the current of narrative pass overhead. Still, she could register a surface interest, her eyebrows raised, her mouth fixed in a receptive smile.

Do you know why I like you, Kate? he said. Because you always understand.

Now, Wally, she laughed. You’ll make me feel like an oracle.

A what?

Oh dear, she sighed mentally. It was sometimes exhausting.

A Greek priestess who knew all the answers, she said.

Oh.

Greek priestess or not, she knew the hell of a lot. It often made him afraid. It was not like the tootsies you laid once and talked about the movies afterwards. That old bit of Wally’s, the boys said. It made him ashamed, trying to explain. She knows the hell of a lot, he said. I’ll say, it was an easy crack, so she oughta, at her age. He could have lammed out at someone. It made him sore.

Wally Collins himself wondered a bit, in his private moments, how it happened, him and Kate. Because it happened without your knowing, but easy enough, it might have been arranged. Sitting on the sofa, there was the radio, and an early highball after lunch. She wasn’t in the habit of drinking, she said, but there, what have you, you couldn’t go on sitting around. And then he began to tell her about himself. The radio was playing the ‘Chanson Hindoue’. It was sort of sad. I’m glad, she said, we met, it’s sometimes meant for two people to meet. She was that sincere, moved, the way her bust, that you put out a hand. Sometimes it made him sweat, just how it happened, and a dame of her class.

A dame of her class. She looked at a pair of hands and knew that she would dwindle to anything that Wally made her. She lay exhausted on a rumpled bed. She lay with her eyes closed, the hair moist, the skin still tingling. Out of the radio the steady wash of music that drenched the limbs, as lethal as the erotic act. But somewhere, some time, out of all this she would grope towards her self, just not lost, pick it up with the discarded clothes. To lose yourself. This was the ultimate but ineffectual aim. You opened your eyes on the furniture. You thought about catching the bus home.

Now they sat eating minestrone in a cheap Italian restaurant.

Does you good to get some good hot food inside of you, Wally said.

Satisfaction announced itself in his whole body, through the smacking of the lips, in the drawn-out string of parmesan swinging from the mouth. Mrs Standish tried to eat with bravado, in the way expected of her, eating with Wally Collins, the women he must have known.

Yes, she said, sweeping with her spoon. Lovely hot soup.