One of the two best stories, ‘The Vigil’, is placed first. A young boy, obsessed with a beautiful young woman almost twice his own age, begins to stalk her, perching in the oak tree just outside her window, watching her every movement, glimpsing fragments of her naked body through the tattered blind. During a flash of lightning, she discovers him and begins a ritual display, a demonstration of female perfection, an inculcation into its mysteries. An episode that could easily have slipped into sleaziness is handled with skill and even tenderness. The wisdom of the young woman is acknowledged and, in the process, her love for the boy and concern for his evolving masculinity. This story is unforgettable.

This moral and psychological complexity is also a feature of ‘The Pact’, the most fully realised and probably the best of these stories. It begins with a man, Jack, discovering a packet of letters from a lover among his dead wife’s papers. He is forced to contemplate not only the sterility of his marriage – it was his decision not to have children – but also the sterility of his life and, perhaps as a consequence, his writing. According to the lover, the writing is ‘like himself – completely self-absorbed. His only subject is himself ... but Jack isn’t an interesting enough person, to put it brutally.’ Many of the men in these stories are would-be or has-been writers, and their failing creativity is a reflection of their ennui, their unlit lives. In ‘The Pact’, all three – wife, lover and Jack himself – are victims of Jack’s selfishness.

Typical of Clancy’s men is the one in ‘Loyalties’ who stands alone, uninvited and unobserved on the edge of a sports field, watching his son’s race from a distance while the mother and her partner applaud on the sidelines. The son, already a victim, desperately balances his loyalty to his mother, in bed with the owl-eyed magistrate, and his father. Meanwhile, we encounter this desolate father/ex-husband figure again and again. The protagonist in ‘A Full House Beats an Empty House’, for instance, lives, he says, ‘in a perpetual limbo’: ‘More and more often, as I look into the future, it seems to narrow, like a funnel that tapers at the end to a tiny point. I turn back to the past for comfort and assurance and yet the past holds nothing for me. It is another country.’  One can’t help feeling sorry for these poor chaps but, apart from ‘The Vigil’ and ‘The Pact’, we don’t hear much about the woman’s point of view. The lover in ‘The Pact’ does suggest that the wife deliberately committed suicide – she crashed her car – so as not to hurt either of the men. Of course. One would. Did anyone mention self-obsession? Several of the women have been denied children by ‘uncommitted’ consorts. The flip reply of one, when asked by his lover to give her a baby, is ‘I haven’t got one’!

But it is not all doom, gloom and male angst. Clancy has a fine sense of humour, and several stories are very funny. Some of the humour is directed at the processes of one of the newer institutions, Blamey University, where the departmental head likes to be called the Boss and staff–student sexual affairs are almost de rigueur. It is here that a student, dying from AIDS, is treated to a tutorial on ‘Death the Leveller’ in seventeenth-century poetry. It almost destroys the lecturer, who realises at once the utter futility of all his learning and pontification.

What do we value in a short story? Clancy’s stories satisfy all its stringent demands: for brevity yet psychological and situational development; and for that moment of illumination, of self-awareness, of resolution, which delights and satisfies the reader. The stories, when read as a collection, reflect a society where self-absorbed and uncommitted people, usually men, are leading futile and empty lives. The loyalties of the title have all too often been abandoned.