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time’s your appointment?”
    “Ten-thirty.”
    “The banks open at ten.”
    “Not for me. I’m overdrawn far too much.” She smiled, un-worried as only the habitual extravagant can be. He looked along the promenade, saw the truck disappear; he was so far in debt he couldn’t remember if the truck was paid for. He looked down at her, at the broad beautiful face, the golden hair that looked so unreal and the voluptuous body that was her snare. Sex and overdrafts, he thought, our mutual interests. She continued to smile up at him, reading his thoughts. “There’s time, darling, if you feel up to it.”
    He reached for his wallet, took out forty dollars as he slid into the seat beside her, bending his long legs beneath the dashboard. “I’ll feel I’m paying for it.”
    “It doesn’t worry me if it doesn’t worry you.” She was cool and unoffended; she reached across and kissed him on the cheek. “Ich Hebe dich”
    “You don’t,” he said, but it didn’t worry him.
    Then Bixby was standing over him, towering above the tiny car. “Be seeing you again, Mr. Savanna?”
    Again there was the tightness in his throat. “I don’t think so. We got all we needed.”
    “Well, that was all you come for, wasn’t it?” Bixby took a match out of his pocket, began to chew on it. “Hooroo, Mr. Savanna. Put in a good word for us with old Grafter when you see him.”
    Helga started up the car and pulled it away from the curb. “What’s the matter, darling? You sounded afraid of him. Funny, I never thought you would be afraid of anyone.”
    “You don’t know me.” How can you, he thought, when I’m just starting to find out things about myself?
    “No, except on Tuesdays and Fridays. I really don’t know what you are like the rest of the week.”
    “We’re quits, then. I don’t know you.”
    “No,” she said, smiling to herself. “It’s better that way.”
    Later in her flat he lay in bed and watched her as she came out from the bathroom drying herself. Whether by instinct or by practice, she had a talent for making even the most every-day action look sensual; she towelled her body with the slow, lazy grace of a strip-tease artist unaware of her audience. He liked that: she ran the towel lazily over her full breasts, conscious that he was watching her but making no attempt to put on a cheap titillating act. Josie would have done that; or retreated coyly to the bathroom. He felt a twinge of conscience and, much worse, a sharper stab of pity for Josie. There was not much hope for a marriage when the deepest pain you could feel for your wife was pity.
    Helga turned away from him and he saw the ridiculous tattoo marks on her buttocks, the crude sniggery joke that fitted so ill with her personality.
    “I still wonder what you did in Germany.”
    She turned back, knowing what had prompted his remark. Then she wrapped the towel round her hips, the one modest thing she had done since they had entered the flat almost an hour ago. But she did not blush or lose her poise; along with
    everything else she had learned, she had acquired the art of cool self-possession. He knew he was not the first man who had queried her about the nipples on her plump behind.
    “I’ve told you—I was a secretary. And I did some modelling. But not that sort. Those marks, they were a stupid joke. I was only fifteen. Didn’t you do things as a dare when you were a teenager?”’
    “That’s a cruel question. I can’t remember back that far.”
    She came across, sat on the side of the bed and kissed him on the cheek. “I wouldn’t be cruel to you, darling. I never think of you as—whatever you are. I don’t even know how old you are.”
    “Fifty-four.” That was how low he felt this morning, that even vanity was no longer worth the effort.
    Her surprise was genuine. “Really? Darling, you’re marvellous!”
    “Louis the Fourteenth was doing it twice a day when he was seventy.”
    “I don’t mean that. I mean your looks.