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interest level in the noise and glittering red, white and blue illuminations having been remarkably low throughout, as though the circus were too familiar to bother with: though this, Fred commented ruefully, was supposed to be a quiet residential area.
    “You’d better drive the BMW to the hospital,” Fred said, “and collect them and take them home.”
    “Um . . .”
    “I can’t do it,” he said reasonably. “I promised Meg I wouldn’t be late. She’s got her hands full . . . the children were crying because their spots are itching.”
    “Won’t the hospital send them home in an ambulance?” I asked.
    Fred looked at me pityingly. “This is not the National Health Service. This is pay-through-the-nose country.”
    “Oh, all right. Where’s the hospital?”
    He began to give me directions but shrugged finally and said I’d better follow him: so he led me to the entrance, pointed to it emphatically through his open window and, without pausing for more speech, zoomed away towards the chicken pox.
    I found Greg and the friendly policeman sitting glumly side by side in the waiting area, Greg looking drained and gray, the policeman glowing with health and watching the passing nurses in the same sort of way that I did, once I settled myself in the next seat.
    “How are you feeling?” I asked Greg: an unnecessary question.
    “Tired,” he said, “but my head’s all right. They say there’s only a bruise. Got to rest a bit, that’s all.”
    I nodded. “I brought your car,” I said. “I’ll drive you home.”
    He said limply, “Thanks.”
    Conversation lapsed. The ratio of middle-aged to nubile nurses proved to be ten to one. Disappointing.
    After a long time Vicky reappeared, sitting in a wheelchair pushed by a (middle-aged) nurse and accompanied by a young doctor whose smudged white coat spoke of long hours on duty. Vicky, wearing a large white bandage like an earmuff above the bloodstained sparkling tunic, held a tissue to her mouth and had her eyes shut. Her face, cleaned of makeup, appeared lined and pudgy. The false eyelashes had been removed. The trouper persona was in abeyance; the grandmother alone inhabited the body.
    The young doctor told Greg that his wife was fine, he’d stitched the ear under local anesthetic, it should heal without trouble, he’d given her painkillers, sedatives and antibiotics and she should come back later that day to have the dressing changed. Vicky opened her eyes and looked no better.
    I glanced at my watch and found it was very nearly two o’clock. Time flies, I thought wryly, when one’s having a good time.
    The doctor departed and the policeman gently asked Vicky questions that she answered in a low voice without emotion. After a while he produced a card with his name on it and asked her and Greg to go to the police station at ten in the morning to complete their statements.
    “You too,” he said to me.
    “Your pals have already given me a card.” I showed it to him. He peered at it and nodded. “Same place, same time.”
    He said goodnight to us and left, his kindness, I saw, a habitual way of getting things done, not a deep compassion for each individual. Much better, all the same, than a brusque automatic universal disregard of sensibilities.
    A nurse reappeared to push Vicky to the doorstep, but no farther. Hospital care and hospital insurance stopped right there, she firmly said. We persuaded her merely to let me fetch the car to the door, rather than have Vicky walk to the car, a concession she made with impatience. Both Greg and Vicky were beyond caring.
    They chose to sit together in the back of the car, and I asked for the most elementary instructions on how to get to their home, like which way out of the gate. It was amazing we ever reached the house, as Vicky closed her eyes again and kept them shut, and Greg kept drifting off to sleep, waking when I stopped and asking where we were. You tell me, I said.
    I stifled the beginnings of irritation and