“I try to talk to him,” she said. “I try to help him but I can’t get through to him. If they don’t get what I mean though I’ll know they’re all phonies and I can just walk out.” She was twisting her cup on the table top, her lips were trembling.

Morrison felt his loyalties were being divided; also he didn’t want her to cry, that would involve dangerous comforting pats, even an arm around her shoulder. He tried to shut out an involuntary quick image of himself on top of her in the middle of the kitchen floor, getting white latex all over her fur. Not today, his mind commanded, pleaded.

As if in answer the reverberations of an organ boomed from beneath their feet, accompanied by a high quavering voice: Rock of a-ges, cleft for me… Let me HIIIDE myself… Louise took it as a signal. “I have to go,” she said. She got up and went out as abruptly as she had come, thanking him perfunctorily for the tea she hadn’t drunk.

The organ was a Hammond, owned by the woman downstairs, a native. When her husband and nubile child were home she shouted at them. The rest of the time she ran the vacuum cleaner or picked out hymn tunes and old favourites on the organ with two fingers, singing to herself. The organ was to Morrison the most annoying. At first he tried to ignore it; then he put on opera records, attempting to drown it out. Finally he recorded it with his tape recorder. When the noise got too aggravating he would aim the speakers down the hot air register and run the tape through as loudly as possible. It gave him a sense of participation, of control.

He did this now, admiring the way the tape clashed with what she was currently playing: “Whispering Hope” with an overlay of “Annie Laurie”; “The Last Rose of Summer” counterpointing “Come to the Church in the Wild-wood.” He was surprised at how much he was able to hate her: he had only seen her once, looking balefully out at him from between her hideous flowered drapes as he wallowed through the snow on his way to the garage. Her husband was supposed to keep the walk shovelled but didn’t.