She marched beside him along the corridor and down the stairs, her short clipped steps syncopating with his own lank strides. As they descended, the smell of straw, droppings and formaldehyde grew stronger: a colony of overflow experimental mice from the science building lived in the cellar. When– he saw that she was leaving the building too and probably going home, he offered her a lift.

“Only if you’re heading that way anyway.” Louise didn’t accept favours, she had made that clear from the start. When he’d asked her if she wanted to take in a film with him she said, “Only if you let me pay for my own ticket.” If she had been taller he might have found this threatening.

It was colder, the weak red sun almost down, the snow purpling and creaky. She jumped up and down beside the car till he got the plug-in engine heater untangled and the door opened, her head coming out of the enormous secondhand fur coat she wore like a gopher’s out of its burrow. He had seen a lot of gophers on the drive across, many of them dead; one he had killed himself, an accident, it had dived practically under the car wheels. The car itself hadn’t held up either: by the time he’d made it to the outskirts—though later he realized that this was in fact the city—a fender had come off and the ignition was failing. He’d had to junk it, and had decided stoically to do without a car until he found he couldn’t.

He swung the car onto the driveway that led from the university. It bumped as though crossing a metal-plated bridge: the tires were angular from the cold, the motor sluggish.