‘Christ,’ prayed the father, as if in the awed hope that metal would never again crash with such force. There was meanwhile something criminal about the impunity of the small Japanese truck, still lit and intact on the verge of the road, which you now crossed. A wheel, vast and slow as a millstone, spun above your head. Jumping to clutch the cabin door, you had it fall open with a force that came close to braining you. Befuddled wiring had turned on the cabin light, so that you could see to drop yourself to the ground inside, which was framed by the cabin’s shattered windscreens. You landed by the man’s forearm, severed by the windscreen’s central bar. His head was face-down in the moist earth. A large man, black haired, three light creases across the solid back of his neck, olive skin. Perhaps Frederic, you crazily thought, and lifted him by the shoulders. There was no face; the front of the head had the consistency of egg-yolk. You dropped the shoulders and were sick against the cabin’s far wall; but looked again, feeling unfathomably to blame. The man’s frame, the burrowing head, the raised buttocks, one leg kneeling, seemed the most eloquently innocent shape that could be devised.

  While the Glovers (you felt) continued criminally obsessed with their family game, it was in the innocent world that the tears were shed, and men grew simpleminded enough to chase bonuses through Saturday night and into Sunday morning.

  ‘Damian,’ your father was calling, ‘watch his spine if you’re going to move him.’

  You climbed out in a fury to prevent further oddments of army first-aid from stirring in your monstrous begetter. You could suddenly see him over the line of the door, which made a sloping platform below you.

  ‘What do you think there is to move? You heard the impact.’

  He explained plaintively what damage could be done to injured people if broken bone cut their spinal cord.

  You yelled at him. The spinal cord was irrelevant, you said, climbing free of the wreck with an intensity that made him flinch in expectation of a beating. Yet you could easily sense that he felt appropriately guilty, and merely wanted to atone in so stressing the spinal cord. Both feeling so culpable, it was beyond you to report the accident to the company and the police; only people of less centripetal obsession were fit for such civic-minded admissions.

  The rain fell with a new fervour.

  ‘Now that we’ve kept the girls happy with gestures,’ you spat at him, ‘are you willing to come home?’

  Good cover for the moonlighter Glovers, the rain spouted in veils from your farmhouse roof. You slept late under its nattering reassurance, willing to go under again every time you approached waking up to the bereaved Sunday.

  Barbara could be heard when she went out at dawn, and the parents stirring ruefully. Their unexcitement told you that Barbara did not, or had chosen not to, know anything of your father’s escape and recapture.

  You heard her come back at seven and tune the radio in. Flood warnings are current, you heard yet again before she turned down the volume.

  ‘Barbara,’ you said over and over into your dumb pillow. It seemed to you that her shaming of you in the matter of your mother’s illness, combined with the Mineral Deposits calamity, had finally deprived you of any hope of her. Your mouth was still foul from that sickness in the crumpled cabin, and Barbara’s sharp name came out furry.

  At last it occurred to you that officials from the company or the police would have already come had they been coming. Some cunning clock in your brain beat more assertively and pealed you fully awake. It was already half past nine.

  Immediately some texture of the air or bed-clothes mysteriously recalled your experiment with overalls and gumboots last May; how your thin sister had become, the closer your wide thighs thrashed to their climax, the supervisor and witness of your convulsions, tending you through some risky seizure. That was the nature of the woman, you decided. But the memory added to your coyness as you dressed and went out to meet her.

  ‘How is she?’ you asked, coming into the kitchen.

  Barbara was sawing the legs off a frozen supermarket chicken. ‘About the same,’ she said. She wore an antique pair of her father’s trousers rolled up to her brown calves. ‘Very subdued, in fact.’

  You felt weak. You would have told her the whole story of the catastrophe if the telling had not been such a nervous effort.

  ‘Any news?’ you slackly asked.

  ‘A flood,’ she said ironically, lifting her eyes to the clamouring roof. ‘Another fifty points and it’ll top the levee in town.’

  Her knife, grating into the chicken’s knees, uttered an avian squawk savagely. ‘No chance of a milk pick-up from the piggery, of course. The refrigerator will get very crowded. That’s the bore with floods—you have to go on milking, even if you empty the pail straight back into the mud. I did think you were going to help in the mornings.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I don’t know what happened, I…I couldn’t quite…you know…face this morning.’

  ‘Are you embarrassed? About that telephone business? You don’t have to be. I’m sure you behaved the way you did out of concern. I simply ask you to believe the same of me, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ you said quickly, eager to quash any comparison of sincerities.

  She smiled in a muted way, a little rueful at finding you so disposed to suppress any mutual statements of motive.

  There was nothing to be said as she returned a plastic bag of giblets to the refrigerator. Wholesome soup for the whole family Monday night! Country-style, as they said in the barbarous supermarkets. Next she immersed the solid little shape in a sinkful of water. Only then did she speak, to tell you to read a government letter which you would find above the refrigerator.

  ‘It’s hard to believe,’ she said, ‘but it’s likely the pattern of our lives will be changed.’

  You found the letter.

  Dear Sir (it said), The conversion of the dairy industry to bulk production, bulk storage and bulk pick-up is proceeding at a very marked rate, and it should not be long before a representative of our Department visits you to advise on the cost and rationalization involved in converting your property to bulk methods. Though bulk production should mean increased profit to the modern producer on a medium holding, the initial investment in freezing unit, plumbing, docking facilities and road improvement may prove, in the case of some smaller holders, beyond their financial capacity; while in the cases of others, conversion would not place them in a position in which they could expect to recoup capital outlay on the required improvements to their property. These difficulties should not, however, cause concern amongst small holders, for there will be a range of highly profitable forms of intensive farming to which they can turn. By advising the small holder on how he can best use his land in the future, and by providing him with the technical advice and the bridging finance necessary to the making of the change, this department is determined to pursue a policy by which no farmer shall be the loser as the result of the coming conversion. In the meantime, we invite any small holder who has doubts about his capacity to convert to bulk production, to write to this Department, outlining the nature of his holdings and describing their characteristics, and to obtain details of future probable lines of development…

  ‘I can understand you,’ you said, not looking at her, ‘objecting to becoming a…you know…an anachronism at the age of twenty-six.’

  ‘Not only that. I don’t want them assessed for conversion to bulk production. Besides, what can we produce intensively here?’

  ‘Water lilies?’ You hated your own nervous laugh.

  ‘I can see myself as a market gardener,’ she mused, seeming to ignore you, ‘peddling water-melons on the highway. But any other change…’ She shrugged. ‘Intensive farming would mean asking all sorts of people in, men with rotary hoes, pickers, casual labourers. It’s frightening.’

  There was no question of your saying that you would work something out between you. Any such reassurance might make her ironically desist from raising her eyebrows.

  ‘They say on the radio there was a truck-driver killed on the way into town. He has his peace,’ she said, quaintly consecrating the realities of the crushed corpse that you had handled.

  You nearly told her, fiercely, Yes, but at the price of meeting Charon and of taking Charon’s wielded oar flat on the face.

  ‘I’m quite capable,’ you mumbled, ‘of doing the whole milk tomorrow. You can have a rest in.’

  Celestial bitch and bloody angel, you thought, from somebody-or-other’s poem.

  All the time keeping her eyes on the submerged chicken, and as if she had augured the event from the disposition of the bird’s corpse, she said with her native oblique, almost apologetic, omniscience, ‘There’s someone pulling up out the front.’

  Jolting to the window, you saw Helen leave her parents’ irridescent station-wagon and work blindly on the gate latch in the undiminished rain.

  ‘I wasn’t going to let things hang all that time,’ she whispered without any introduction as soon as you opened the door. ‘Ten days of flood.’ She was wearing, as she often did, the university’s red tracksuit, though she was, as far as you knew, no athlete. It was her travelling suit, her uniform for taking political action; it understated her prettiness and distracted males from her feminity. Or so she naively thought. In fact, even on this morning of stress, you could scarcely hold your hands back from feeling for the certainties of her body beneath the drooping ambiguities of the tracksuit.

  ‘How will you get home again?’ you asked her, taking almost hysterical account of the coming flood.

  ‘That’ll have to look after itself. I nearly stalled in two feet or so of water back there.’

  ‘Oh God. Don’t turn off your ignition then.’

  ‘Too late,’ she sang merrily. ‘I already have.’

  ‘Christ! You probably won’t get it going again. Without a new battery and generator.’

  ‘Oh? They’re more trouble than they’re worth,’ she said of her parents’ splendid beast of an automobile.

  ‘Come in,’ you groaned.

  She did. Her crisp and unapologetic walk took her straight in to the kitchen.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ said Barbara.

  Both women looked to you emphatically for introductions. You performed them.

  Helen expanded on them. ‘I’m the girl you telephoned Friday evening.’ She was bent on frankness, as if she were actually trying to sell something to Barbara. ‘I wasn’t quite truthful then. I do know Damian quite well. I didn’t know, though, whether he wanted me to mention the fact.’

  ‘Oh.’ Barbara towelled her hands in a secretive and unaccommodating manner; it was the mannerism of a wife caught at less than her best by one of her husband’s outside interests. You cursed both of them: the way that, once they were faced with each other, everything they did was in terms of proprietorship.

  Barbara was, just the same, not at her ease, being clever enough to sense the depths of Helen’s cleverness. Unfortunately she did not lack the courage to be direct. ‘I suppose he was with you when I rang?’

  ‘That’s right. But very distressed, worried about his parents and you, but too disturbed to do anything about it, that day anyhow. He really couldn’t have come home on Friday. It would have been beyond him.’

  ‘If you’d told me,’ Barbara said with one of her private, frugal smiles, ‘it would have saved me a lot of searching and delays.’

  ‘I realize that. But I felt that my first responsibility was to Damian. He was in obvious…you know…distress.’

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘No, no. Truly. If I can get my car to start again, I’ll be going soon.’

  She took one of the kitchen chairs and sat. So did Barbara, as if they were playing a chess-game with furniture. You stood back, trying not to seem some difficult child, some third object for domination. It was worse than being discussed at the age of six by your mother and the schoolteacher, for each saw herself as both mother and teacher and were determined to have their exhaustive identities established.

  ‘It must be very dangerous on the road today.’

  ‘About two feet deep at the worst.’

  ‘Yes. But…’ Barbara conveyed the reservation to her hands, which twiddled a thread of towelling. ‘There’s a floodgate over to the west that holds back all the buildup in the catchment. A time comes when the floodgate is topped and a wave of water comes down, five feet high. About five. That’s when the real flood begins. You’ll have to be careful.’

  It all reminded you, the very way they sat, of the Saturday tea parties of the years after the accident. Helen received the warning with a sporting pucker of the lips. Let flood wait until straight talkers had their say!

  ‘I really couldn’t have waited,’ she said, ‘until the floods were over to resolve my relationship with Damian.’

  ‘How do you mean, resolve your relationship?’ you shouted. She nodded, as if assenting to your hatred of verbiage; and then found and used the most frightful words possible.

  ‘I want you to marry me,’ she said.

  Barbara jerked the thread. Her face was struck frozen with its smear of a grin.

  ‘Oh hell,’ you said, shamelessly willing to convince your sister, by the quality of the contempt you could muster for Helen, that Helen was not a factor to be considered. ‘If you only knew the endless other matters to be resolved…’ You spurned the word. ‘Before I could think of marrying anyone!’

  Barbara was neither deceived nor mollified. She knew Helen’s true stature: you seemed to have hoaxed yourself out of the conversation, that was all. Both of them knew you and forgave you your clumsiness.

  As a matter of form, Barbara explained that as far as she was concerned it was your basic right to decide when to marry. There was no family problem that in itself made it necessary or even unwise for you to delay. She laughed chastely but without intending any virginal ill-will. ‘It’s a strange world when the boys are so backward the girls are left to do the proposing.’

  ‘Girls need to be direct now,’ Helen told her. ‘Anyway, I’m an activist by nature.’

  You’re a squaw by nature, you considered saying, and in that no different from the girls of Aldous Huxley novels. It could have been no more maladroit to say some such thing than any of your other contributions to the dialogue had been.

  ‘Has he given any indication of a willingness to marry you?’ Barbara asked. The sentence could have been spoken by the sour maiden sister of some boy in a Chekhov short story. There was about Barbara a certain lack, of what would tend to be called social sense, that made her dangerous in conversation.

  Helen too sensed it and inhaled strenuously. Her fine skin, that had survived all the carbohydrates of residential college kitchens, shone. ‘I don’t,’ she avowed, ‘believe in the old coupon-card system of getting engaged. By doing this, that and the other with a girl, a man forfeits to her a number of coupons, and when she has a bookful she’s earned the right to marry. A boy sleeps with a girl, for example. To some people, that’s worth about two-thirds of his freedom coupons. Ridiculous! Damian has no obligations to me. All I came for was to ask him would he marry me.’

  A ponderous yes or no could have slipped out of your mouth like a stone, and either for reasons equally unknown to you. And that, cute radical Helen, one predestined squeak of assent, that was the entire coupon book.

  ‘Just the same,’ Barbara was musing, with farm-bred intransigence, ‘he must have given some sign of willingness.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ you barked. ‘I slept with her.’

  ‘I made it impossible for you not to,’ Helen told you, not wanting her sexual parity to be questioned. ‘I made the approaches. I know that your sister might think women should be withdrawn and need to be drawn out. But really the woman ought to make the overtures, instead of letting herself be tempted to be a bitch and make a fool of the man. It’s too damn profitable for a woman to be what they used to call virtuous.’

  It was all so pedagogic: Helen had actually gone to the trouble of being kind or arrogant enough to educate Barbara in her own moral view.

  Barbara became generous, and drew on her experience of worldly television dramas. ‘Nonetheless, surely after that, there are grounds for expecting a continued relationship?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Helen admitted.

  Barbara nodded. You noticed with fear her too-bright, fragile willingness to acclimatize herself to the chancy world of Helen’s ethical judgements. ‘Damien will take you in the truck if your car won’t start.’

  ‘But I mightn’t get back here then,’ you protested.

  ‘Isn’t it only right that you take the risk?’ It was hard for both Helen and yourself to tell whether her brittle alacrity had at last tipped over into mockery.

  What occurred to you immediately was that you couldn’t face the loss of Barbara: you feared you might even begin to beg in front of the guest. Losing Helen you could face, for the future, you felt assured, would be replete with Helens: that was, surely, statistically certain. The claim you had made on Friday to the incumbent Helen, that the Glovers were less persons in their own right than a range of relationships to Barbara was nearly true; without Barbara, you would be deprived of existence, not in the sense that you would die, but in the sense that you would be drained of significance.