“We react,” Ian answered quickly. “We react to the damn machines, and go dead when they’re shut off.” The two couples had grown expert at these evenings together—the children upstairs with the mumble of television, the venerable neighborhood quieting down beyond the windows, which leapt into light when a passing car swung through the curve of Common Lane. Phyllis didn’t mind Ian; like her father, he had spent his life hunched over a two-dimensional task, and his darkly prophetic mood reminded her, perhaps, of dire adult palaver in Cambridge faculty circles. Sensing this, Ian played to her. “Are you aware,” he said, widening his appeal to include Owen and Alissa, “that as recently as our grandparents’ generation it was a common ability of people of any means to play a musical instrument, to carry a harmony part in group singing, and to be able to draw—to sketch out of doors and do at least watercolors? All those Victorian travellers could draw, and all the writers, not just Thackeray. Now not even the professional artists can draw. They slap up these huge abstractions that are an insult, a joke. The common man has a Brownie camera. Not even Brownies—that dates me. Brownies would take too much skill, they aren’t automatic enough.”

In agitation at hearing so much of her husband’s voice, Alissa crossed and recrossed her legs on the old velvet sofa, which had been recovered with sailcloth and decorated with several tattered crocheted shawls. “I remember my father,” she volunteered, her washed-out eyes moving from face to face uncertainly, “pacing off the distance with his old Kodak. That was how he photographed me and my brothers. The pictures came out surprisingly sharp. The little triangular viewfinder had broken off, too. He did it by guess. The snapshots fascinated me—there weren’t too many of them, the way there are now. He kept them in old candy boxes; when you took off the lids there was still the faint smell of chocolate.”

“See,” Ian said, “your old man, limited as he was, had mastered his tools. Nobody can use tools any more. They have to have everything done for them, by so-called experts, at twenty-five bucks an hour. And even so it’s all done badly. One of the few good things about this so-called revolution under way is that middle-class children are taking up the trades, carpentry and so on, in rebellion against their ham-handed white-collar parents.”