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...quite cosiness. He sat himself sideways to a window, pulled a black-bound book, which was his all-purpose writing and sketch book, from a small canvas valise he wore bandolier-fashion, tossed the book on the table and the valise on the floor, tilted his chair back, gazed out the window and sipped the coffee he brought from the cafe over the road.
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Max had signed on to the writing group on an impulse. He had expected to repent at leisure, but in fact he looked forward each week to the meetings, held in a large, damp, poorly lit upper room in the town hall. The others, all women, knew each other well, veterans of many other such adult classes. They were indiscriminate in their enthusiasms. Most were taking a class in Swedish at the same time.
They talked about this, and other matters of parochial and mostly feminine interest, volubly and in good humour, seemingly forgetful that a man was present, having accepted Max as one of them. Max was grateful for this. He was aware from past experience how a man's presence could turn a room full of women politely mute. He had liked these women from the first, five of them besides the instructor, and admired their intelligence, and now they were as open and easy and--the word came to him now--defenceless as six casually introduced human beings could be to one another.
Fay Bryan-Brown, a bossy horse-faced woman with close-cropped stiff grey hair and an aggressive bosom, ran a weekly movie night at the flea-pit in the Forest; a macher, Max said to himself, reaching deep into a mostly forgotten Yiddish lexicon. She wrote astonishingly erotic poetry, in what seemed to Max a fluent and achieved idiom. He did not consider himself a proper judge in such matters, but he thought she was the only real poet in the group. Her lush and inventive imagery, the hints of tangled, avid passions, invited speculation about her personal life, but she betrayed nothing except in her verse, which she read to the mesmerized group in a soft, cadenced contralto.
Eva joined the group a week late. When she introduced herself to Max--she already knew the others--she shook his hand slowly and firmly, "Eva Jones." A finely judged pause, then deadpan, as though spelling out something obscure and difficult, "J-O-N-E-S." Max had forgotten this wry Welsh joke, as he took it to be, until the following week. In a conversation with Fay Bryan-Brown, which he had steered around to the subject of Eva Jones, he learned she was a retired medical doctor, considerably older than she first appeared to be, born in Austria, married to a man named Jones. Of course--Max actually smacked his forehead, to the amusement of Fay Bryan-Brown--the Jones joke was more Jewish than Welsh. The following week he saw the tattooed number on the inside of her left arm.
The rest of the group consisted of Marilyn, the youngest, a part-time teacher of something occupational at the local comprehensive, who wrote sentimental verses about animals and children; Charlotte Moon, aloof, slight of person, oblique of mind, precise in her speech, the window of a senior lecturer in something; finally, a...
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