She sauntered a little, signifying a relaxed mood and a willingness to be consulted on this latest of Glover predicaments: the mother’s staph mastitis.

  ‘Barbara,’ you said. She stopped. ‘Barbara, it’s no use pretending our reasoning hasn’t let us down. We thought their life-spans would be average and their deaths sudden. But her death isn’t going to be sudden.’ You lowered your voice. ‘And she stinks. You’d be used to that. But she really does reek. Badly.’

  She nodded. Her assent filled you with urgency. How could you have slept the afternoon away in the face of your mother’s animal illness? Perhaps you had buffered yourself both ways, convincing yourself that there were senses in which she could not be said to be your mother, and other senses in which her mastitis was unreal—an unbroken habit of the mind, as you had told Helen. You began to speak with a new and penitential (rather than aggressive) emphasis.

  ‘What brassy new supermarket will you buy the can in to deal with that smell?’

  Wood exploded in the range and gave your sister a chance to scoop up the fragments from the floor. Such diversions suited her; she often spent whole arguments in acts of niggling housewifeliness, pottering behind a chaste, unmocking grin with soap or curry powder or Parisian essence.

  Now she stood upright with all the cinders in a dustpan in her right hand, her towel and soap in her left. She reminded you of the saying: she really has her hands full…

  ‘The point is,’ she told you, ‘I always take as much account as I can. You know that. So the details don’t need to be mentioned now, do they?’

  ‘But I think at the moment it’s going to be a mistake to take account of everything, all the factors. I…suggest that although she leans in the direction of any sickness that hits her, we’ve reached the point where we just have to ask ourselves: Have we a sick parent now? And we have.’

  ‘I don’t dispute she’s sick. Listen. If you want to know, I think that early on I helped spread the infection by treating it with ointment through a nozzle. The nozzle helped spread the infection. But a person can only do what’s humanly possible.’

  Your instincts warned you that this might be a feint: her admission of her own lack of veterinary wisdom. She might be subtly implying that she had to take into account day by day matters of such monstrousness that their weight would have crushed you. Once again, the appeal to performance!

  In its own complex way, the claim angered you. You frowned with a fraudulent earnestness. ‘Look, I don’t want to offend you. But it doesn’t count for anything any more—having power over them. When we were young, they were demi-gods. They were…you know…worth dominating. But now they’re only two sick old freaks.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean. Do you think I enjoy being the boss mamma?’

  You spread your hands. Secretly you were hoping she would lose her temper and her aura of detachment. ‘Just looking at it separately from the other motives that drive you…you know, love and concern…it sounds unbelievable that domination ought to come anywhere into it. But we can’t look at our motives as if they were one simple little circle with one centre. They’re millions of interlocking circles with all varieties of centres. I know you’ve sunk so much of your…young life into them. But there’s still time.’

  ‘You too,’ she said. ‘You must have varieties of centres.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And is one of them,’ she asked, without any rancour, ‘that you want to hand them over because there’ll be no more responsibility then, because handing them over isn’t like sending normal parents to a hospital where you’d still have to visit them and pay the bills? Because there’d be none of that if we passed them on to the authorities?’

  ‘No, that’s not true.’

  ‘But,’ she murmured, ‘if what we do has a million centres, how can anyone say yes or no?’

  She waited in her prophylactic dressing-gown; twenty times more graphic than your now hazed image of Helen.

  ‘People might lack simple motives,’ you told her. ‘But they can give simple answers to simple questions such as: Does she need help?’

  ‘Oh, help’s desperately indicated.’

  ‘Well…?’

  She went to the telephone handset by the refrigerator. ‘You can do it. The town number is 2839, a very fine qualified man called Alexander. Call him if you have to.’

  You were astounded: she knew you couldn’t take decisive action. How could you be called on to give up your parents to some stranger called Alexander at 2839?

  ‘But it’s your area,’ you said. ‘You’re the only one who can brief him.’

  ‘Brief him?’ She laughed quite sincerely. ‘No, you do it. Here you are.’ She cranked the tiny handle for you.

  ‘But it’s your place to…’

  She put the receiver back. ‘You’re free to. Whenever you like.’

  There you were, like some third patent person (not honest contorted Damian), some politician whose weakness everyone complained about. You were wagging your head, you knew, and blushing because of the direct blunt way she had shown you up.

  ‘You take it for granted,’ she explained, ‘that I can somehow inform him bit by bit, get him used to the idea. But I can’t. He would have had to be here with us from the beginning to get used to it. And that’s why we must go on letting her…simply…talk.’

  Then she went on down to the laundry and locked herself in. The radio still chattered, again predicting floods. There was no light down in the laundry. You imagined her bathing in the dark. The Empress Barbara.

  You muttered ironic things about her.

  The Empress Barbara takes account. As always. Amen. The benefits of the reign of the good Empress Barbara are two secondhand refrigerators, one for the cowshed, one for the kitchen. In the kitchen refrigerator were two deep-frozen chickens, beer for her demon-lover Frederic and chilled antibiotics for her to play Dr Dan with.

  Within a mere five years of the electrification of her empire, a twenty-three-inch television receiver was installed in the barn, and her subjects enjoyed continuous evening transmission. Except for a night in 1967 when a blue crane got caught in the aerial and died of electrocution or lack of moral fibre…

  There was very little fun, though, in that sort of thing.

  Your bedroom backed on to the veranda by a window that had not been open for ten years. The demands of your adolescent shames and modesties had made you block it out with strips of patterned oilcloth.

  At some time during the night, you woke to a code of knocks on this window. Whoever it was—your insomniac father wanting talk or a cup of tea, or your mother asking for support in some seizure of pain—they had been rat-rattatting persistently, for you had heard it in a dream as the tolling of one word, loss, that chimed as regularly as the fist that went on knocking now. Loss, loss, loss, you had heard and had seen Helen’s face peering at you from the flank of a Georgian clock. Wait for it, she had said. And loss, loss, loss, the clock had donged, waking you.

  It had turned colder. You grabbed for your old windcheater, with the St Moritz badge on its biceps. St Moritz! No chance of a Glover leaving jaunty bones on the skislopes! In what fit of gaucherie, you wondered, had you bought such a thing? You supposed there was some force in the world that made you swallow all your old spasms of inane spaciousness, even if they had been suffered merely on bargain day at the Union store.

  You paused now to try and rip the badge away from the garment, but the manufacturer had taken the trouble not merely to sew it there but to glue it as well. Whoever he was, he deserved bankruptcy.

  Hastening to the veranda, it occurred to you that you had never so thoroughly realized the loss of Barbara as you did now; for it seemed that sleep had made it easier for you to adjudge the imperiousness which she had been able to treat you with earlier in the night—so workmanlike, surer and more dispassionate than a lover is to a lover.

  You muttered her name several times. You remembered Helen sharply, but merely for her limits, a safe wife who knew no sortilege. It would need, you understood, some twin contagion of irreducible chastity and inverted dominance to draw you free of Barbara, if freedom was what you wanted.

  You found your mother alone on the dark veranda. ‘It’s your father,’ she told you. She was able to speak quite loudly beneath the gabble of the rain. ‘He’s been gone, at least half an hour. And I can see he’s taken his oilskins. He said last night, while we were watching the television, that he wouldn’t let Barbara use the flood as an excuse for doing nothing.’

  Your central preoccupation was so distant from hers that you had to ask her, ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘About qualified help, of course. He’s been very attentive. He wasn’t always that way. But he shouldn’t have gone to the extent of…’

  You groaned. ‘Not on a night like this.’

  ‘But, as I said, that’s his very point. When the flood comes on we could be cut off for a week. Ten days, even. He wants the matter settled. So do I.’

  ‘Oh God,’ you said, half-mocking and fully angry. ‘Impetuosity.’

  ‘Now, don’t go on at him too strongly. He doesn’t appreciate it when Barbara goes on at him.’

  Your father would have taken the road to town. Along it, mineral trucks, sufficient to scatter the corpse of a stray cow every few miles, came day and night. Driving for bonuses, the drivers, drugged, and overstimulated by delivery targets, had no reason to believe their eyes or to brake for the sake of someone’s stray cow.

  The mother kept babbling instructions at you, and you could tell she was exhilarated by your father’s gesture. Nor did she seem to consider it possible that he would actually come to the point of entering the town and clopping through its empty lighted heart in the small hours, on the lookout for some unspecified help, priest or wonder-worker, policeman or veterinary surgeon. Was it too glib of you to consider that she took your father’s token escape as sufficient, that she would not care for it to go so far as produce her cure, which would leave her bereft of her busy illness and her grievance? Perhaps, too, she saw that Barbara had always been right: isolation and secrecy were ultimately the only policy. Certainly, the more remote a figure Helen became to you, the more impossible a trust in the world’s tolerance seemed.

  ‘Use the truck,’ your mother recommended.

  You found the keys atop the refrigerator which hummed with a mechanical gaiety. That was progress, country-style: you had already written a short clever poem on the point:

  NOTICE AT THE TOWN HALL

  On the day all the fathers

  turned pederast,

  and all the mothers cannibal,

  uninterrupted electricty supply

  will be maintained.

  Outside, the rain was warm on your face, but the solid thud of it on your eyes made you frown, gave you a headache. There would be a flood, logs, breadboxes, chairs, and the gaseous shapes of dead cattle swilling into the appendix of swamp on which the Glovers lived. If things were ever to be different, an outlet had to be dug through the dunes to the sea. Glover’s Inlet. The fish are running at Glover’s Inlet, in the shade of the Glover Hilton.

  You balanced choke against accelerator to prevent the hacking growl of the truck’s imperfect mechanics, and the motor immediately started. You did not switch on the lights until you were on the road, and the areas they lit were grained solid with rain.

  You drove slowly. Your lights took in the grub-white limbs of eucalyptus and the botanical convulsions of the hated tea-tree. Into such backgrounds your father would fuse only too well.

  After a painstaking four miles, you turned back. The blue holes of eucalypts you mistook continually for your father’s blurred face. Speed suited you now, to drive back down the road with lights low and take your lumbering father by surprise.

  There was one place, about two miles from the farm, where the road rose over a low spur of rock, a rare crest. Beyond it, the track right-angled and then ran without curving for a full mile. Coming into the right-angle corner, you had a vision of brown flanks lolloping into cover. You braked, over-shooting the place, but reversed frenziedly to it and leapt out.

  ‘All right,’ you yelled from the edge of the road. ‘All right. I know you’re there.’ But you knew nothing—it might have been some bona fide lost cow. The numbing rain hissed over you.

  ‘Come on,’ you reasoned at the top of your voice, feeling foolish. ‘If you want to go to town, I’ll drive you. But you can’t get there and back alone. The road will be cut. You know that.’

  You heard a sigh as the father materialized at your side. ‘Does Barbara know?’ His sparse hair was washed diagonally across his forehead and gave the erroneous impression that he had been weeping.

  ‘She doesn’t even know. God, you’re wet!’

  ‘Wet?’ he mocked. He shook his sodden flanks: there was a small slapping sound of shed water. ‘Well, what now?’

  You thought you sensed, in the evasiveness of the question, the same reluctance you had guessed at in your mother—a devotion to the affliction rather than to the cure, to the grievance rather than its redress. Was he performing a charade or reparation for the understandable but unspeakable recourse to heifers, about which you and Barbara seemed to know without having to be told? Surely he didn’t really want to be found at dawn in front of the Shire Offices, or be hounded past the library and the J. D. Dickson Memorial Swimming Pool? Could he really envisage himself, a fable, a figure of speech, an accident, groping beneath genuinely municipal light posts?

  ‘Let’s go home,’ you suggested. ‘There really isn’t much time for anything else.’

  ‘Ah. She’s got you tied up all ways, hasn’t she?’

  ‘That isn’t the point. I mean, what were you going to do in town?’

  ‘I hadn’t made up my mind.’

  ‘It was a gesture?’

  ‘I wanted to show strangers could have more…you know…genuine mercy than Barbara has.’

  ‘Strangers? In that town?’

  ‘That’s right. The time comes when you want to find out what stuff the world’s made out of. Put it to the test.’

  You laughed. ‘Look, you forget what you are. So do we all, for limited periods. You’re the nice Glover couple, yes. We know that. We’re so used to knowing it that we forget to look at each other through a stranger’s eyes.’

  ‘I’ve heard that sort of argument before. “They’ll make a circus of you.” As if Barbara hasn’t already done that. Anyhow, I came out in the hope you’d catch up. Why don’t you go on into town, even on your own?’

  ‘I could. But I won’t. Barbara’s right; she knows the limits of cow-doctors. They’re good citizens. A good citizen has a number of categories in his mind. He tries conscientiously to be broadminded—that is, to put everyone he deals with into one of the categories. If he can’t conscientiously manage it, whatever it is, it becomes a thing to him. To the world, you’re a thing, and nothing’s too bad for a thing. We mustn’t risk it.’ There are no categories, you had told Helen; now would be the time to break the habits of mind and drive on into town with your father. But the trouble involved, the demand on the nerves, was too much for you.

  ‘Thank you!’ your father said, savagely, through his teeth. ‘And when your mother dies of blood-poisoning…’

  You lost your temper, and found yourself turning to the lit truck as if to find a weapon. ‘You know Barbara’s doing her best. You also know being sick keeps the mother occupied. You know it all. Why don’t you do the best with your situation? And come home.’

  ‘She stinks.’

  ‘I know she stinks.’ You were angry enough to be cruel. ‘For better or worse.’

  ‘Don’t get so bloody parsonical.’

  Both of you were screaming. Suddenly your father laughed through his nose with a slow recanting bitterness. ‘All right, we both know what women are.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Christ, if you grew up with Barbara, you do. They like it best when you’re performing great feats that do nothing to change the way things are. So why don’t you bring me struggling and bloody protesting…you know…home?’

  Now you found going back nearly as unthinkable as going on. In the nausea of loss in which you had woken, you called out, ‘Why didn’t you save both of us the trouble of getting wet?’

  ‘It was all necessary. To keep the bloody girls happy. You’ll learn, you smart know-nothing bastard.’

  ‘All right.’ But you could tell he was beginning to speak with an honesty that was rare between you.

  ‘And she does stink. You don’t have to live with it. But I want the fact bloody recorded.’

  ‘All right. Of course you don’t like it.’

  ‘And while we’re being so bloody Lord-Chesterfieldand-his-son with each other, what am I supposed to do with this twelve inches of mine? I’m still healthy, I’ve still got needs. I’d look bloody silly pulling off twelve bloody inches of myself.’

  ‘Yes,’ you said, almost laughing, but with your sickness of loss turning to one of pity. ‘Yes, I know. It’s hard.’

  ‘Well, what a thing for a man to end up with, twelve inches of A-grade barmaid’s delight. It could be more, for all I know. I’m no good at distances.’

  ‘I’m sorry. If you’re still religious, it might help you to know that a friend of mine at the university, who was in the Jesuits, tells me there’s a theological opinion that celibates are allowed to masturbate if they can’t otherwise continue. But that’s a mockery, isn’t it, staying celibate at the expense of fiddling with yourself? However, I thought I’d mention it.’

  Your father made a noise of contempt. ‘Wouldn’t a man be better off if they treated him as a thing and put a bullet in him? Oh, I admit Barbara’s tried to give us a sort of dignity. But every day our…bodies show us up.’

  An animal hubbub descended on you. Broad light glared over the tops of trees and then dipped to dazzle your father and show up his quarters, the hair spiked with wet. You knew by the noise that it was a mineral truck, one of the large ones with the two spaced tanks to carry the heavy titanium. It seemed to you that you smelt, and identified yourself with, the panic of the driver, who had taken the crest and corner at the highest speed he could manage, presuming a clear road but finding a truck baulking him and an hallucination on the edge of the scrub. You saw a man in the high cabin, fighting with the steering, heard the high sizzle of the slewing wheels on the wet clay. The blue Glover truck was avoided, but the trailer, freighted with its tons of metal, seemed to overshoot its own cabin. The company’s ten tons of truck swept sideways off the road, its left wheels pitched, and with a thunderous concussion, it nuzzled its cabin nose-first into the earth. The excessive impact shook the mud beneath your feet.