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big ones, they’re just gettin’ too smart.” David is slipping into his yokel dialect; he does it for fun, it’s a parody of himself, the way he says he talked back in the fifties when he wanted to be a minister and was selling Bibles door-to-door to put himself through theological seminary: “Hey lady, wanna buy a dirty book?” Now though it seems to be unconscious, maybe he’s doing it for Claude, to make it clear he too is a man of the people. Or maybe it’s an experiment in Communications, that’s what he teaches, at night, the same place Joe works; it’s an Adult Education programme. David calls it Adult Vegetation; he got the job because he was once a radio announcer.
    “Any news?” Joe asks, in a neutral mumble that signals he’d prefer it if I kept from showing any reaction, no matter what has happened.
    “No,” I say, “Nothing different.” Voice level, calm. Perhaps that was what he liked about me, there must have been something, though I can’t reconstruct our first meeting, now I can: it was in a store, I was buying some new brushes and a spray tin of fixative. He said Do you live around here and we went to the corner for a coffee, except I had a 7-up instead. What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
    Claude comes back with the beer and I say “Thank you” and glance up at him and his face dissolves and re-forms, he was about eight the last time I was here; he used to peddle worms in rusted tin cans to the fishermen down by the government dock. He’s uneasy now, he can tell I recognize him.
    “I’d like to go down the lake for a couple of days,” I say, to David because it’s his car. “I’d like to look around, if that’s okay.”
    “Great,” says David, “I’m gonna get me one of them smart fish.” He brought along a borrowed fishing rod, though I warned him he might not have a chance to use it: if my father had turned up after all we would have gone away without letting him find out we were here. If he’s safe I don’t want to see him. There’s no point, they never forgave me, they didn’t understand the divorce; I don’t think they even understood the marriage, which wasn’t surprising since I didn’t understand it myself. What upset them was the way I did it, so suddenly, and then running off and leaving my husband and child, my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing. Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn’t really mine. But I admit I was stupid, stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results, and I didn’t have any excuses, I was never good at them. My brother was, he used to make them up in advance of the transgressions; that’s the logical way.
    “Oh god,” Anna says, “David thinks he’s a great white hunter.” She’s teasing him, she does that a lot; but he doesn’t hear, he’s getting up, Claude is hustling him off to make him out a licence, it seems Claude is in charge of the licences. When David comes back I want to ask how much he paid, but he’s too pleased, I don’t want to spoil it. Claude is pleased also.
    We find out from Claude we can hire Evans, who owns the Blue Moon Cabins, to run us down the lake. Paul would take us for nothing, he offered, but I wouldn’t feel right about it; also I’m sure he would misinterpret Joe’s amorphous beard and David’s moustache and Three Musketeers hair. They’re just a style now, like crew cuts, but Paul might feel they are dangerous, they mean riots.
    David eases the car down the turnoff, two ruts and a rock hump in the centre that scrapes the car’s belly. We brake in front of the cabin marked OFFICE ; Evans is there, a bulky laconic American in checked shirt and peaked cap and a thick knitted jacket with an eagle on the back. He