The world of animal perceptions, he decided now, while thinking so genially of automobile companies—this sweet world of animal sense—had been lost to him during the damp winter months of his wife’s illness. Domestication on the back veranda. No wonder domestic pets, the really coddled ones, squinted at you with that half-begging, half-begging-off look. They had lost communication with the cosmos of their guts. Anything might happen to them, without warning, as anything happened to man.

  He now rebelled against his too early abdication of his animal awareness. It was a silver if not golden afternoon, storm had backed to the mountains, and pleasant codliver clouds owned the east. Daughter and father topped the sandhills in their creditably well-manufactured Japanese truck and saw the long beach disappearing on both their right and left into distances clouded with a nimbus of spume.

  His front hooves pawed the floor; he felt he could take the length of that beach at the gallop. He might have toppled, so suddenly did she brake. Immediately he composed himself and scratched the shoulder his singlet left bare, scratched ruefully, on the model of old men. For his instincts were against letting Barbara know how sportive he was. There she was, climbing down from her cabin, unimpressed by her own elegance, hunting stooped for her sheaf of plastic bags marked Stevens Fresh Bait in red. ‘Throw down the berley,’ she called.

  He did, the bag of rotting fish he had travelled with.

  When she dropped the tailpiece and placed a ramp for him, he stepped down with a wary gratitude, like a convalescent’s.

  ‘Snip ’em in two,’ he advised her. ‘Those worms. Stevens’d never know.’

  ‘Stevens’d know. His customers would tell him.’

  Stevens owned a sports store in town and sold bait. Ten of his seaworms cost forty cents, and earned him and Barbara two cents per worm each. If she was lucky, she earned ten dollars a week from worming.

  ‘There’s a hard head at one end,’ she was explaining. ‘Customers look for it.’

  ‘But it’s no good for bait.’

  ‘They still look for it.’

  ‘All right,’ he sang in perhaps seven or eight quavers, yielding her up to her unworldliness.

  Trying to get some resonance into it, Mr Glover coughed. ‘I’m going to have a swim,’ he announced.

  ‘I will too,’ said the girl, ‘and work wet.’

  The father saw the dry olive down on her legs. ‘Righto,’ he said. ‘It won’t do you any harm.’

  ‘What about your chest?’ she asked.

  ‘Gord!’ he said.

  ‘All right then. Listen, I’m going to charge in.’

  ‘Like a kid!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Half your luck!’

  The happy eventuality was she sprinted ahead and left him free to enjoy the day, to snort riotously through his nostrils, to savour his eupepsia without having it used in evidence against him.

  Barbara rolled in the shallows, a long scissors of a girl. She rose up dripping, and with that stare of faraway innocence which was, he thought, helped by unadmitted astigmatism.

  She called something to him. For he was only a yard or so behind her, letting the flinty bubbles of foam comb his chest and belly, feeling parent-pride at the way the weight of water in her shirt forced emphasis on her excellent body.

  ‘You got in fast,’ was what she was calling to him, with her glaring lack of intent.

  ‘The air got me,’ he confessed, adopting the wonderment of the newly well. ‘It’s great to be out.’

  Waves flopped over on their sides with the easy slackness of voluptuaries turning over in bed, and went fizzing down his underbelly.

  ‘I hope your mother’s all right. With Damian,’ he soberly called to her.

  Suddenly taken behind the knees by a young wave, she laughed as if tickled or even about to call out, ‘You damned old hypocrite!’

  Barbara’s bag of bad fish hissed over the wholesome, almost jellified sand like a rag over slate. At once a half-dozen small heads rose to the savoury rottenness. There was an animal quickness in Barbara’s hand that jerked at a worm and had it drawn from the sand and in the bucket before Mr Glover’s fingers had got beyond a state of readiness to act.

  In a second she would dismiss him from helping: she was quick at tasks and impatient of assistance, while he had been encouraged to become more and more of a blunderer in the years since the accident. He and Mrs Glover had felt withdrawn, endowed with a serenity. In them and to them had been supremely demonstrated the folly of human self-seriousness. Their hands had accordingly begun to bumble. And it seemed that Barbara herself had sensed their exemption from labour. Both parties nevertheless suspected that his immunity had to be established by a small pro-forma rite of ineptitude.

  The bag of offal hissed, worm-heads rose, his fingers tangled with Barbara’s, the worms vanished.

  Mr Glover whistled. ‘They’re not worms. They’re projectiles.’

  Barbara shared a fleeting smile with the sea and the easterly cloud-banks. It was a habit with her: to bounce smiles or grimaces off distant natural objects.

  ‘How about if you leave it to me?’

  He yawned. ‘Do you want me to put them in Mr Stevens’ bags for you?’

  ‘No. You go for a nice walk.’

  Again he yawned, to mask the animal freedom that surged in his belly. How he would have kicked up the sand if she hadn’t been about.

  ‘It’s safer for me in the sandhills. You know.’

  ‘Good,’ she said in a dream, intent again on her work.

  He wondered, however, if she knew about him, his weakness for heifers. Weakness? he thought. God in heaven, it wasn’t weakness, it was strength, enough to drive rivets home. Perhaps she was too innocent and thought he was faithful to her mother. Perhaps her look of profound knowing was entirely a matter of a cast in her eye. Or perhaps she thought that, because he was bestial, his bestiality could not be a grave sin. Was she broadminded or innocent or simply damning him to his unspoken vice? Imagine not being sure of these basic matters, despite his years of association with her!

  ‘Righto,’ he muttered. ‘You just honk the horn when you want to go.’

  Nothing in the dunes or forests could possibly detain him, he implied; he was world-weary.

  Ignoring his ennui, she landed five worms in her bucket.

  So he sloped off into the sandhills like an old beast looking for the necessary coalescence of moment with topography in which to die. He left his haunches slack and dragged them through the violet-flowering pig-face that topped the dunes. Behind the hills, at the moist verge of the swamp, he was gaining speed on a silt surface bound by runner-grass.

  Watch out for prickles! Watch out for the red-bellied snakes that had had such a damp winter for sleeping. The swing of his quarters, thump, thump, was a syncopated mystery that made gold-medallist umpteen-metre runners look sick. Fishermen, get a glance at me through the tea-trees and have the bait scared from your hook. Fat-bummed mums from town, taking a risky dip in the shallows, looking out for some murderous fin to break the second line of surf (‘Trevor, I told you not to let the pup in. Sharks can smell dogs.’), turn around and get a load of me. A load, right enough. Bend over, madam.

  He reared away from a she-oak in his path and cleared his vision of women, who were not a possibility.

  An episode out of Women’s Weekly: Eric pursued Clarisse for three miles and at last convinced her that he had been dehorned and was no vision, but a living breathing thing. While they sat in the sand, the endless pulse of the sea was matched by a growing pulse in Clarisse’s breast as his animal good looks began to wreak their magic…

  Sour Mr Small had a grid perhaps one and a half miles past Glovers’ and grazing the headland with the rest of his herd were half a dozen sweet young Jerseys. Through tiny grassed hollows that brought him a view of the sea, Mr Glover came to Small’s fenced-off headland.

  Below him he could see small beaches of shingle which he himself had found good for fishing in those months before the accident. Two men had come there this afternoon in tall fishing-boats and oil-skins; one of them spry, the other easing himself over the basalt flanks of the hill with all the unhardihood of the hernia sufferer. Even from a distance, their tackle looked expensive—fibreglass; and their sedan, parked on the green common to Mr Glover’s right, was this year’s model.

  He cursed them for being there. Was the fishing so much better here than at any number of other places closer in? Were the damned jewfish milling at the feet of Small’s herd? And if they were so sodding affluent—boats, tackle, and car—why didn’t they buy an outboard and join the Blue Water Club, like all the other clever dicks from town?

  He gathered himself behind a thicket of bottlebrush and galloped over the saddle of the road. Stretching his neck over an embankment of rank grass, he saw that old Risky-Guts, the fisherman, had seen nothing that shouldn’t be. He chuckled at the grey pearliness of the sky and the distant storm-gathering mountains, and had no doubt that he was king.

  The risk lay with the drivers of the titanium tankers, who might roar through the virgin scene, clattering the hell out of Small’s grid, bearing the stuff of space rockets. But, paid by the load, the company’s men were solid with benzedrine. A fine bull of a man could be the least of the phantasms they might see on their way through Campbell’s Reach, day or night.

  At the canter, he re-crossed the crown of the road, carefully passed the grid, and was again among trees, a knot of scrub with sickly glossy leaves that seemed to be a mockery of holly-leaves. Through them ran Small’s fence and gate, which he opened. The gradual flank of the hill led him on. He could perceive an electric quiddity in the air, and knew that he would walk over the rise and find himself among cows.

  He prayed for a second. Since I have already lusted and damned myself, please don’t let me be disappointed.

  Ah! Cropping the open places by the combed-back outline of the wood. Below them, the sea washing in and out with a passionless mastery. Some of the herd had lifted their heads, or, with a frowning petulance, gave up one tussock for another.

  ‘All the joy gone out of grass, dearie?’ he mumbled.

  He advanced among them; in their sideways manner, they were all aware of him. Oh, sailor on your coastal steamer, clutch your telescope and see a trick they can’t show you in Bangkok, Singapore, or Cairo.

  Mr Glover had seen some of the things they show you in Cairo when, in the name of democracy, he had visited it as Lance-Corporal Glover in 1942. Reprehensible, those things, depths of malice. This was different: oysters naturel. He hadn’t asked to be blessed with the bizarre potency of a bull.

  An old cow moved across his front, eyeing him off. ‘You needn’t worry, madam!’ he told her. A sweet little heifer had given up grazing and stared at him in a peculiarly momentous way he had come to recognize. There lay in her eyes a sort of liquescent assent.

  A minor disquiet held him back from the full flush of his sovereignty. Memory told him that he would end in feeling suicidal, eroded—an abrasive weight of disgust. God was not quite fair and played heads-you-lose-tails-I-win with the fornicator. He had the right to, since he owned the game. But it made for sadness, and ashes in the mouth.

  This time he would take pride in the physical achievement. We don’t choose the lineaments of our needs, and from most points of view coupling was disgusting, even eating was obscene.

  He came up to the heifer whom lazy Small had not dehorned. He patted her haunches once and grabbed both horns.

  Tilting the heaven over which he was king, a yellow impact knocked him to his knees. The quiescence of the young heifer, he could see, had been broken and she pivoted on her front legs. Such promptly evasive behaviour made Mr Glover fear for a second that he had been shot.

  Then he saw Small’s Jersey bull a few feet away, pawing at the headland: thank Christ, Small had got around to dehorning him!

  With a token, deal-with-you-later-lunge, Small’s bull stampeded the heifer and gathered himself to knock Mr Glover further into the ground. Another impact, Mr Glover felt certain, would burst something inside him. He watched his own panicked pale fingers scrabbling at one of the discs of conglomerate rock that were embedded all over the hillside.

  ‘You rotten shiek bastard!’ he said, and let the stone tablet fall across the bull’s brows. The clop of stone on bone exalted and alarmed him. An expensive noise for farmer Small.

  The bull plopped to his knees, lowing urgently. Boss, boss, come and see what they’re doing to your livestock. In case the damage was serious and Small could claim damages, and in case it was transitory and the bull would soon rear up again. Mr Glover crashed into the trees and over the rise. The leaden erotic weight in his belly persisted, imperative in a way that was detached from the entirety of Mr Glover, a fact in itself. For the rest, the harsh-edged bull had shamed him. In the haze or drone or murk of pastures he competed with beasts for a beast’s prize. It was a sea of gall he sighted again at Small’s gate.

  If now he moved quickly, it was to avoid making Barbara blow her horn. Also, he behaved more chary of snakes, his hoofs no longer enchanted. His bones seemed still to carry the nauseous shock of Small’s bull, and he pitied himself to the extent of limping.

  On one point the swamp lapped close, reeds and wide islands of floating cabbage, scums of bronze, algaed reaches of fibrous grey and blue—all splendid and decayed tints, like the markings of serpents. Through its far verge ran someone’s old fence, the timbers furzed over till they seemed luscious vegetables in their own right, the wire in whorls; and caught by the neck and horn in one of the wire loops, a young heifer, hip-deep and seemingly weak. She had been lowing in a peculiar plaintive manner, and perhaps had been there for days, catching bloat from eating the nitrogenous swamp weeds.

  He waded to her, making faces because the bottom of the swamp seemed living fur. Once he turned his head to see his wake run gorgeously over the surface of multicoloured decay, purpled, yellowed, grey. In the snagged cow, who watched him sideways, there was no movement; she awaited him—rescue or solace—in tremulous silence. She stayed quiet as he widened the loops and eased her head free. Yet he was too soured to search for any messages in her eye.

  ‘Hold still,’ he told her.

  The predictable abhorrence took him at the climax, and with it an impotence, a jolting abnegation imposed by himself at the crest of desire, with an immediate horror of the cow’s body awakening to the reception of his. This was the summit of his proud afternoon, this stammer of frenzy, this pitiable epilepsy.

  Dismounted, he stood for a second absolutely still. The swamp sucked and simpered in flurries around the place of their stamping rape. His cow had begun to shuffle and toss her freed neck luxuriously sideways.

  As far as he could tell, he had not reached any decision about his future actions, but found his hands lunging and taking her by the horns. Immediately she began to roar but was weak from her residence in the swamp; so he sat sideways on her and felt her hindquarters give way and slop beneath the surface. She was roaring like an abattoir, but her forelegs gave way with a rush. Down you go, biddie. Her terror sucked water into her throat and she bellowed and gagged, her nose at water level. Under with her head, and her uppermost hind leg kept spiking him in the side. But a strange human righteousness kept his wrists firm: he was willing to hold her under for an hour if that was how long it would take.

  Large whorls of grey water rose out of the nub of her pain and panic, but very soon the body slackened, accepted drowning with an alacrity that was nearly sad.

  His singlet carried balls of hair, his coat was spiky with mud. Back at the shore, he wiped himself down, without much hope of improving his looks. Very tired, he felt, willing to die if it could be quickly arranged. Raking the hairs of his body with a literal vengeance, he thought of Damian, the crucible of hope, and began to weep.

  The evening of your homecoming.

  You sat in the kitchen playing with the radio. Outside, the television offered whacking haunches of sound and gravelly self-applause. Both the parents were deep in a television comedy which both pretended to detest. They seemed as unwilling to confess the jet-age expertise of the television comic as they had been, thirteen years past, to hint too early at nature’s plan for girls. For both phenomena failed somehow to fit the harsh structures of their lives on Campbell’s Reach.

  You found on the radio band something orchestral and buoyant, and a documentary on watchdogs. ‘Heroic Rover,’ you muttered. The town station was sending out calls all over the valley, to people who had just lost their gall-bladders (keep the pecker up!), those smitten with love, anniversaries, or hepatitis. And one for the boys on the night shift at the valley cooperative. How did they feel to have their names intoned on the vacant air of the valley? Did they cry, ‘Christ, this is death: death and howling hell and towering oblivion are a cheerio-call to me, Alan Somebody, reading the gauges on the condensers at the creamery that is too good for Glover milk’?

  The light was not on. The kitchen remained luminously dim beneath a new drench of rain. Barbara entered it from the hallway, wearing a detestable and preventive dressing-gown of shaggy red and white check that had once belonged to her mother. She was going to the laundry, down four steps to the west of the kitchen. There she would bathe herself in one of the washtubs, three feet off the ground, and rinse the brine and paspalum seeds off her long legs.

  It may have been a form of paranoia in you: yet you felt, at moments like this one, that she intended you to remember that she had wormed and milked her heart out while you drowsed through the afternoon. You sensed that what you needed was the courage not to be too impressed by the mere quantity of her performance. Such courage you had rarely risen to. You knew that performance might simply be based on energies released in people by all manner of suspect demons. Yet action—early rising, quantities of work—still awed you.