“Don’t go,” he said to the girl. “Please, I shan’t be a minute.”

“Oh, I’ve nothing to take me away. My department all think I’m half dead by now.”

Miles opened the door and admitted an indignant half-dozen. He directed them to their chairs, to the registry. Then he went back to the girl who had turned away slightly from the crowd and drawn a scarf peasantwise round her head, hiding her beard.

“I still don’t quite like people staring,” she said.

“Our patients are far too busy with their own affairs to notice anyone else,” said Miles. “Besides you’d have been stared at all right if you’d stayed on in ballet.”

Miles adjusted the television but few eyes in the waiting-room glanced towards it; all were fixed on the registrar’s table and the doors beyond.

“Think of them all coming here,” said the bearded girl.

“We give them the best service we can,” said Miles.

“Yes, of course, I know you do. Please don’t think I was finding fault. I only meant, fancy wanting to die.”

“One or two have good reasons.”

“I suppose you would say that I had. Everyone has been trying to persuade me, since my operation. The medical officials were the worst. They’re afraid they may get into trouble for doing it wrong. And then the ballet people were almost as bad. They are so keen on Art that they say: ‘You were the best of your class. You can never dance again. How can life be worth living?’ What I try to explain is that it’s just because I could dance that I know life is worth living. That’s what Art means to me. Does that sound very silly?”

“It sounds unorthodox.”

“Ah, but you’re not an artist.”

“Oh, I’ve danced all right. Twice a week all through my time at the Orphanage.”

“Therapeutic dancing?”

“That’s what they called it.”

“But, you see, that’s quite different from Art.”

“Why?”

“Oh,” she said with a sudden full intimacy, with fondness. “Oh what a lot you don’t know.”

The dancer’s name was Clara.

Courtship was free and easy in this epoch but Miles was Clara’s first lover. The strenuous exercises of her training, the austere standards of the corps-de-ballet and her devotion to her art had kept her body and soul unencumbered.

For Miles, child of the State, Sex had been part of the curriculum at every stage of his education; first in diagrams, then in demonstrations, then in application, he had mastered all the antics of procreation. Love was a word seldom used except by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity. Nothing that he had been taught prepared him for Clara.

Once in drama, always in drama. Clara now spent her days mending ballet shoes and helping neophytes on the wall bars. She had a cubicle in a Nissen hut and it was there that she and Miles spent most of their evenings. It was unlike anyone else’s quarters in Satellite City.

Two little paintings hung on the walls, unlike any paintings Miles had seen before, unlike anything approved by the Ministry of Art. One represented a goddess of antiquity, naked and rosy, fondling a peacock on a bank of flowers; the other a vast, tree-fringed lake and a party in spreading silken clothes embarking in a pleasure boat under a broken arch. The gilt frames were much chipped but what remained of them was elaborately foliated.

“They’re French,” said Clara. “More than two hundred years old. My mother left them to me.”

All her possessions had come from her mother, nearly enough of them to furnish the little room—a looking glass framed in porcelain flowers, a gilt, irregular clock. She and Miles drank their sad, officially compounded coffee out of brilliant, riveted cups.

“It reminds me of prison,” said Miles when he was first admitted there.

It was the highest praise he knew.

On the first evening among this delicate bric-a-brac his lips found the bare twin spaces of her chin.

“I knew it would be a mistake to let the beastly doctor poison me,” said Clara complacently.

Full summer came. Another moon waxed over these rare lovers. Once they sought coolness and secrecy among the high cow-parsley and willow-herb of the waste building sites. Clara’s beard was all silvered like a patriarch’s in the midnight radiance.

“On such a night as this,” said Miles, supine, gazing into the face of the moon, “on such a night as this I burned an Air Force Station and half its occupants.”

Clara sat up and began lazily smoothing her whiskers, then more vigorously tugged the comb through the thicker, tangled growth of her head, dragging it from her forehead; re-ordered the clothing which their embraces had loosed. She was full of womanly content and ready to go home. But Miles, all male, post coitum tristis, was struck by a chill sense of loss. No demonstration or exercise had prepared him for this strange new experience of the sudden loneliness that follows requited love.

Walking home they talked casually and rather crossly.

“You never go to the ballet now.”

“No.”

“Won’t they give you seats?”

“I suppose they would.”

“Then why don’t you go?”

“I don’t think I should like it. I see them often rehearsing. I don’t like it.”

“But you lived for it.”

“Other interests now.”

“Me?”

“Of course.”

“You love me more than the ballet?”

“I am very happy.”

“Happier than if you were dancing?”

“I can’t tell, can I? You’re all I’ve got now.”

“But if you could change?”

“I can’t.”

“If?”

“There’s no ‘if.’”

“Damn.”

“Don’t fret, darling. It’s only the moon.”

And they parted in silence.

November came, a season of strikes; leisure for Miles, unsought and unvalued; lonely periods when the ballet school worked on and the death house stood cold and empty.

Clara began to complain of ill health. She was growing stout.

“Just contentment,” she said at first, but the change worried her. “Can it be that beastly operation?” she asked. “I heard the reason they put down one of the Cambridge girls was that she kept growing fatter and fatter.”

“She weighed nineteen stone,” said Miles. “I know because Dr. Beamish mentioned it. He has strong professional objections to the Klugmann operation.”

“I’m going to see the Director of Medicine. There’s a new one now.”

When she returned from her appointment, Miles, still left idle by the strikers, was waiting for her among her pictures and china. She sat beside him on the bed.

“Let’s have a drink,” she said.

They had taken to drinking wine together, very rarely because of the expense. The State chose and named the vintage. This month the issue was “Progress Port.” Clara kept it in a crimson, white-cut, Bohemian flagon. The glasses were modern, unbreakable and unsightly.

“What did the doctor say?”

“He’s very sweet.”

“Well?”

“Much cleverer than the one before.”

“Did he say it was anything to do with your operation?”

“Oh, yes. Everything to do with it.”

“Can he put you right?”

“Yes, he thinks so.”

“Good.”

They drank their wine.

“That first doctor did make a mess of the operation, didn’t he?”

“Such a mess. The new doctor says I’m a unique case. You see, I’m pregnant.”

“Clara.”

“Yes, it is a surprise, isn’t it?”

“This needs thinking about,” said Miles.

He thought.

He refilled their glasses.

He said: “It’s hard luck on the poor little beast not being an Orphan. Not much opportunity for it. If he’s a boy we must try and get him registered as a worker. Of course it might be a girl. Then,” brightly, “we could make her a dancer.”

“Oh, don’t mention dancing,” cried Clara, and suddenly began weeping. “Don’t speak to me of dancing.”

Her tears fell fast. No tantrum this, but deep uncontrolled inconsolable sorrow.