She exulted that her bull from Mineral Deposits had no need of literature or theology to know what his part was. Lust was leveller and educator supreme, its culture was deposited painlessly in the blood of the literate and illiterate.

  Flailing, she felt her thighs loose rivers of liquor (pink and tart and salt, she envisaged it) as his first salt seed hit her palate. She heard his bellow of release squashed by the locked softness of her hams.

  The flowing ceased. There was a second’s ambient repose. Then the tough little pellet of her mind seemed to plop back into its socket. Oh God, it begged, I am old, my thighs ache, my belly is hollowed, I am hate with a man’s rubbery abomination in my mouth. The mouth she withdrew warily, as if the thing might now grow fangs and strike her. Just then, Frederic, with a grin of Disneyesque fulfilment, loosed his gorged mouth from her and smiled at her around the outside of her thigh. An executioner’s grin.

  Such as they might have grinned over Jehanne except that the executioner found he had to burn her entrails and heart with oil, sulphur and charcoal, again and again all morning, but they would not be devoured. The symbolism: a heart inviolate to fire, to all the fuel in the municipality. Through the mid-afternoon town, the burner went running to Dominicans for absolution, after throwing the virgin’s heart into the Seine. That was Jehanne.

  In Barbara’s case, Frederic grinned around the outside of her thigh, and said, ‘Christ!’ in confidence of future play.

  She jumped up, spitting, retching, and ran up a loose crumbling slope. Thinking she was romping, he came up behind her and wrenched her down by the hips, so that they both went slewing downhill again into the pit, like creatures into an ant-lion’s crafty hollow. She clawed and bit, but there was nothing she could do to his coarse flesh that he didn’t take as a joke.

  When they rolled to a halt in their by now obtrusive nakedness, she hit him in the mouth with her closed fist. Drawing back then, he looked at her purposefully and confirmed her scowl.

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ he said viciously.

  ‘Let me get dressed. And keep away from me always.’ She knew how mean it was, though, to pretend he had done damage which had all the time lain tacit in her.

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ he spat. He too was testy with excess.

  She began to cry without shame, and Frederic sighed. To him the experience was familiar. ‘Look, I’m sorry.’

  Her four pieces of clothing hugged to her breasts, she stumbled out of the sandtrap, hawking up traces of his seed. Reaching the sea, she washed her mouth, gargled saltwater, thinner, more healthily abrasive than what she had insisted on taking into her.

  She thought of suicide and of her father moping home, after some heifer, to be twice as dismally attentive to the mother. She was convinced that she had come to the far side of the illusion of desire, she had drunk down the earth. Death was the next and only possible convulsion. She sat in the shallows and let herself be rinsed by a long curling wave. She realized, grating over the sand bottom, that all experience was now altered beyond toleration. Then, still wet, she hurried into the damp comfort of her clothes.

  She was drawing on the shallowly expiatory ugliness of her oilskins when Frederic arrived in the surf, dressed in swimming-trunks. Without looking her way, he strode to a point thirty yards out, where the slack between waves held him waist-deep. He dived beneath a wave and was lost to sight for a full half-minute, a deliberate absence, she thought, even a little jealously, as if he were getting some absolution not available to her; from which he certainly came back thoughtful, and wavered towards her.

  At that second she felt a certain power of invocation (so she thought of it) come over her, though it was more than that, a majesty over the substance of other minds. The forgotten smell of such majesty on the morning of the accident now returned to her, its precise savour. She smelt too in Frederic the howling vacancy, the impoverished suggestibility, the paltriness of malice she had identified in her parents. I brought it off, she exulted in terror, knowing she couldn’t outlive the knowledge. Yet this time, she could not prevent herself hoping, I might acquire the knack in a more lasting manner.

  ‘Go away,’ she called. ‘Quickly.’ Lest her mind take its off-hand lunge at his.

  He was startled sure enough, found it alarmingly unlike the standard brush-off.

  ‘What are you trying to…?’ he began.

  She screamed warnings at him. He stared slowly down his body, expecting something monstrous. Unenlightened by the survey, he frowned again. A viable parody of him jostled at the limits of her consciousness, as if she possessed the ability to impose new forms. She was shaken by a loathing for such creativity, and grew strident, still warning him when he had turned and begun to quick-walk, then jog away inland. He was urgently embarrassed or afraid, and she laughed when she saw him sprint up the dunes, his legs striking out widely on the crumbling hill.

  ‘How is it done?’ she screamed, scattering coward gulls who had swept in at the tang of her berley. She felt certain that, by some half-accidental exercise or rune of the type that had consecrated her to her parents, she had been about to add Frederic to the Glover circus.

  You woke with a shock early that afternoon to find yourself captured whole by a dreadful love for your parents. Your father’s second or two of gracious self-mockery that morning seemed grounds for acquittal from the evasions and horrendous animal scufflings of the past. Your mother’s pain was purply real in your mind, and her grief at your misuse of Helen, even if expressed in her own excessive terms, justifiable in anyone’s argot.

  You rose to go to them, be affectionate and vibrant, full of stories. They were, you found, innocently sleeping on their knees.

  It was half past two, and the telephone began to ring. You found it to be Helen’s mother, full of business even on a Sunday. She had reason to be; Helen had left quite early that morning in the station-wagon, without saying where she was going. Now she’d been away for five hours and they had telephoned everyone she’d known in town. Could she possibly have called on you?

  For a second you considered lying, because the question aroused a sense of your other culpabilities. All nervous reserves for facing accusers had been designated for the case of the truck-driver, and you felt it beyond you to admit to Helen’s visit and the disengaged way you had let her go away.

  You admitted she’d left your house about eleven that morning, and that she hadn’t wanted anyone to go with her.

  The mother chirruped, ‘But the river will be over the levee here by four. Then she’ll have trouble getting just from one part of the town to another. Let alone…’

  You felt sick. Whatever had become of sweet Helen’s capable little body?

  You said you’d go out immediately and look for her. But you explained that this morning’s meeting hadn’t been happy and that she might be parked somewhere in town, just looking at the rain, more or less.

  With a sting, the mother said, ‘Damian, there’s a flood on. Perhaps you could have swallowed your pride when there’s a flood on?’

  ‘I’ll go now.’

  ‘Damian, telephone me. Please. It’s a heavy wagon—one and a half tons. Surely floodwaters couldn’t —’

  ‘No.’ But terror for her had already dried you out. You remembered Friday night with a new immediacy, the ointment she had broken over your head that should have been saved for some king or free man.

  ‘But ring me!’ shrieked Helen’s mother.

  You wrote in your long untidy hand a short accusatory note to Barbara that explained where you had gone.

  Four miles along, you came to the principal floodway and could see, not one third of the way across it, the stationwagon apparently firm and still on the road bed. Water from the west moved over the swamp in a swathe perhaps five hundred feet across, sucked at the inset doorhandles of Helen’s wagon, eddied about its grill at the speed of rapids. Helen sat on the roof, her hair pigtailed all over her face from hours of drenching. If she had seen you, she gave no sign.

  You noticed how efficient she had been about surviving. The contour of the front windscreen was missing, so that she must have escaped by it to the engine cowling and thence onto the roof. Self-reliant, you thought, a thinker. A person with a taste in hysteria would have tried to wade the temptingly small distance to the edge of the flood, and been sluiced naked and drowned.

  You waved to her. She shivered, so you thought, and raised a hand towards you. When you called to her, indicating in large dumb-show gestures that you would drive to her and that she could step onto your bonnet and roof, she nodded with a broad casualness.

  So you draped a burlap over the radiator and took the truck into the water; and were pleased to find it hold itself in motion. But when you had come to a stop, hard in against the rear of the wagon, the truck carriage lifted and washed sideways. In that same instant the engine stalled and you felt the rear wheels lift once more. Beyond the teeming windscreen you saw Helen on her knees, calling to you from her island, urging energy. You took a small wrench from beneath the seat and shattered the glass with it. The sudden decomposition of your frontwards vision into a wall of opaque glass cells panicked you, and you risked your hands poking holes in the granular pattern. You emerged on the bonnet, seeing the powerful water as, if anything, higher than eye-level and fabulously menacing. As steps to Helen’s roof the partly opened rear windscreen and a dust deflector (of all ironic things) presented themselves, and Helen’s hand was held out too.

  ‘Well.’ She shivered. ‘Blue Lagoon!’

  ‘Ah!’ you squealed; for the Glover truck was sweeping round on the pivot of its front wheels and seemed about to vanish.

  But ‘No!’ you said, when it swung to the lee of the wagon until, nearly parallel to it, it faced back up the road down which you had come.

  You shouted over the startling susurrus of the waters. ‘Your parents will have a good idea you’re here, when I don’t ring them back.’

  She nodded. ‘Let them get one of their friends from the Blue Water Club to lend them a power-boat.’

  Shifting on your hams to survey the truck, you kissed her shoulders. ‘Don’t try to understand!’ you yelled. ‘But Christ, I’m glad you’re well!’

  ‘Good!’ she mocked you, out of pink lips.

  You felt some anxiety but no terror on that tiny refuge, though you prowled a little on all fours, lacking Helen’s stillness; and with amazement you sensed a pleasure in her at being with you even at this price, wet and endangered and beset by moving planes of brown water that scattered the mind and bullied the memory, so that that morning’s scene lost its significance.

  There arose therefore a strong sentimental urge to insist that she marry you and form one of those penny-pinching campus unions. There seemed to be evidence, literary or otherwise, that people trapped together by rising water or stuck anchor chains had always thought compulsively of marriage. Bewildered perhaps at dusk on some Catholic Youth Club hike, and lacking a compass, your sentimental father would have rushed to suggest marriage to the lean and passively pretty girl your mother had then been.

  ‘I think of you,’ you lied involuntarily, ‘at least a dozen times a day. I know how much I need your…you know… serenity.’

  She raked her hair back from her face. She threatened you. ‘If you marry me because I make you feel safe, I’ll react. I’ll have a crack-up.’

  You felt a sudden anger. ‘Do you have to be so bloody facile?’

  At about four the rain stopped and steam rose from your clothes. Helen was sneezing casually; in fact, you had both become jaded by the flood that seemed to be failing to eke higher towards you. All the objective evidence that you were about to become the season’s first flood casualties failed now to awe you yourself, let alone Helen.

  The decisive thunderheads were marshalling, and occasionally fat drops of rain fell over your faces in handfuls. A mineral company truck drove up to the near verge of the flood. You could see Barbara leaning from the passenger’s window. Cutting a wide wake, it came up, and a sensation of unreality took you at a gulp when you saw the Frederic whom Mr Placer had felled last May smiling at the wheel.

  ‘This is Frederic,’ Barbara told you on dry land and without blinking.

  ‘That’s only half the news,’ Frederic said, not seeming to recognize his fellow drinker of all those months past. He was gay now, light, had lost the sluggish melancholy of that concussed autumn afternoon. There was a feverish confidence that he could extricate both awash vehicles, and he insisted on your help. Showing a vast willingness to endanger himself, he secured the truck and the sedan and pulled them clear, to a point where he stood furiously grinning, aggrandized to giddiness by Helen’s token thanks and Barbara’s abstracted concern for him.

  ‘Tell ’em the news then,’ he babbled when leaving you all at Glover’s gate.

  ‘I will,’ Barbara muttered. ‘Later. Not now.’

  ‘No, no.’ Frederic was boyish. ‘Tell ’em now.’

  She focused her impenetrable eyes in her purblind yet visionary manner on some point that seemed beyond the vision of you other three. Not for the first time, you wondered if she had a cast in her eye. ‘Frederic and I are to be married.’

  ‘Ah,’ you heard Helen say formally. ‘Congratulations then, as well as thanks.’

  Madness now seemed unavoidable, and you found it less unlikely that they were actually mocking you than planning marriage. But neither of them gave a hint: Barbara stared, with astigmatic intensity, Frederic went on beaming, his broad, blatant possessiveness.

  You had foreseen her loss as an academic possibility, but such obscene loss was beyond all mental and emotional good sense. It was janglingly wrong for a woman who took account of every pint of milk, offcut of meat, portion of bait, to pay herself away in one lunatic spree.

  ‘Can I see you tonight?’ the dark oaf was actually asking her.

  ‘No, not tonight. Tomorrow is a possibility.’

  They kissed, Barbara remotely but with a sort of devotion. So obviously obscene it was—something like pederasty—that you expected protest from Helen. But Helen was taking stock of her sodden clothes.

  Nothing more was said until you were all indoors, where you began to tremble.

  ‘But it’s foul. You can’t bear his bloody vegetable children.’ The words themselves brought out of you a long retching bark, which both the women ignored. You sat down grinding your brows in your hands, trying to make tears come but managing only to cough; the ridiculous unhandiness of the male when it came to express its grief! Barbara did not try comforting. Instead, you heard her speaking reasonably from the far end of the room.

  ‘I’ve committed myself to him. You know the ease that people get committed to each other with. I committed myself. Or anyhow, I was committed. You know. You understand. It’s happened to you.’

  Was she talking about Helen? you wondered. The accusation was ridiculous. Helen! It was as if you had forgotten she was in the room.

  ‘You mustn’t worry,’ Barbara went on. ‘You’re really more of an innocent than I am. You think a person is only a matter of who he does this and that with. You think that if I were married to Frederic that’s what I’d be: Married to Frederic. But it isn’t always true. Anyhow, it wouldn’t matter. These things are what the mother would call God’s will. That’s probably absolutely true, a better way of putting it than committed.’

  ‘You can sound reasonable,’ you shouted, ‘but you’re getting revenge on me for Helen. And that’s primitive as hell.’

  ‘Revenge?’

  ‘On me. For Helen.’

  You became aware that Helen, still drenched, was speaking to her parents on the telephone; and when she was not speaking, the anxious yapping of Mr and Mrs could be heard. Looking up at the seated Helen, you saw her with her cold knees together, sobbing under reprimand.

  ‘But I haven’t got the energy to reassure you,’ Barbara was saying. ‘It’s been such a day. But you oughtn’t to think it’s all roses for Frederic. I scare him. He’s not as happy as he seems. He’s only happy because he knows life’s taken a sort of unavoidable turn. Because he’s committed. He doesn’t know what he’s in for, though. He hasn’t had all the schooling in that sort of thing that we have. But he was committed to asking me and I was committed to saying yes.’

  ‘Committed!’ you shouted. ‘You only know the word from the bloody news on television.’

  ‘Please,’ Helen said, her hand protecting the mouthpiece, ‘please. They think I’m in the middle of violence.’

  Barbara went on to the veranda, where the afternoon was darkening now. Her parents’ faces there were livid with the blue light of some wildlife programme on the television, but they had turned down the volume to listen to the kitchen conversation.

  The mother’s face was set: she claimed to have had a bad afternoon and needed to be attended to. Barbara agreed and fetched bucket and sterile rags and the proper medicines. The symptoms justified such humility.

  ‘That young girl isn’t going to stay here?’ the mother asked.

  ‘I don’t know where else,’ said Barbara.

  ‘The things a mother comes to,’ the mother uttered wanly.