dies in a car accident before changing his will against her and on her inheritance she travels the world, never quite finding what she is looking for. Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight "Wagtails" is the visit by Jum and Eileen Wheeler to their bird-watching friends Arch and Nora Mackenzie. Preparing to be bored, they meet Arch's secretary Mildred Cullen, as she leaves by taxi, which they consider a luxury. The after-dinner entertainment for the evening is the bird-watching couple's latest recordings of lyre birds and bell birds. When the tape fails the hostess hurriedly replaces it with one of willy wagtails while she attends to other things. Jum and Eileen are left alone in the lounge room with the recording which starts with the birds, but includes the unwitting sounds of lovemaking in the bush until they hear the voices of the host and his secretary, making them uncomfortable witnesses to a secret affair. When Nora returns to the room for the last bird calls, they realise it was she who made the recording though she doesn't say so outright. Nora carries on as if nothing has happened while insisting Arch listens to the whole tape with her, another time. A Glass of Tea Caught up in storytelling in a mouldering summer house, the middle-aged Greek, Malliakas visits an old friend's contact and octogenarian, Philippides in Cologny, in Geneva, Switzerland. Over tea, he hears the Greek-centred love story of Yanko and his jealous Constantia, of prophecy and Russian glassware, precious for a reason. A vague, oblique story, it keeps him wrapt while they wait for the wife to return. Clay Clay Skerritt is a sensitive boy living with his widowed mother who on a whim, named him after pottery. The kids bash him up because of his unusual name and because he is "different". His unimaginative mother fearing his unconventional nature, has his head shorn to emphasise his maleness, causing the kids to bash him for that as well. Growing up, he meets Marj with the voice as flat "as the colour of masonite" ( p122) who like his mother, also lacks understanding – except that later, she has intuited the need to erase links with his mother. After his mother dies they marry stalely, while slowly Clay begins to change for the worse, shocking in his eccentricity. The Evening at Sissy Kamara's The story opens with Mrs Pantzopoulos at the dentist.