Her parents, new to the town and making an impact, were both away at the family hardware business. You kissed her under shelter of banana-trees on the back patio of the new house—three generations newer than Barbara’s farmhouse, yet even more odious. Both of you were neutralized by new brick, white wrought-iron chairs and glass-topped wrought-iron table; both sapped by the separate home-Christmases that lay between you and a new academic year. Suddenly Helen was listless, said she needed rest, muttered unmagical good-byes.

  You had merely to find a truck that was going by the beach road. Two mineral trucks stood in the railway yard. They would pass by that narrow alcove of swamp on which the elder Glover, your father, had staked everything when you were a child. Now you sat in the shade to wait for the drivers to come back; but were forced to pace, fearing that, paid by the load, they might come soon, before your home-coming courage could coalesce. Pacing, you brought on a thirst and went for beer.

  On your way to the Caledonian, a sick hunger, rooted in Helen but overshadowed by your sister, slowed you. Was it that you wanted Helen so much as you wanted to want her? On the campus she was thought especially vivid, a cosmos of feminine interest. Beside Barbara she seemed pleasant and formal: orthodoxy was her keynote. Her face, breasts, and limbs seemed as orthodoxly laid out as the pattern of her rebel evangelism.

  Barbara is the illimitable one: to talk to her is to see brewed up before you a discreet atmosphere of endless surprise. Isn’t that so? You were on edge at having to return to her and to the seasonal infatuation that recurred each vacation. Wanting now to delay, you might curse yourself tomorrow for delaying.

  A service station summed up your malaise, SWING INTO THE SPACE AGE WITH OUR WONDER ADDITIVE, it sang in luminous yellow on a black base. A maxim printed over a prison gate you hadn’t yet sinned enough to enter. One day Barbara might turn you over to some neat girl from the world of wonder additives, prestige upholstery, barbecue pits. You wouldn’t save your vigour then. You’d already seen the jaunty Helen go stale in such a context.

  The bar, this afternoon being Friday, was full of farmers; their brown maltreated hands, slung loosely on the bar and as if in payment for beer, panicked you. Though not quite the same as your father’s hands, they evoked them. You lost all courage, then, to face your father until this morning at the earliest.

  So, drinking more in neglect of finding transport and allowing time for Helen to rest, you began to feel less of a transient. The afternoon jolted forward and you turned towards the girl’s place.

  And the keenest welcome. Her face looked fresh from water, her eyes had cleared. As if for you rather than to mock her parents, she had put on a light little-girl dress that showed off nearly edible knees.

  ‘I thought you were going home,’ she said. ‘The filial Damian.’

  You wilfully set your eyes at lament innocence. ‘I couldn’t face up to them. Not so soon after leaving you.’

  The girl frowned with a more authentic innocence than yours. ‘I’m pleased you came back.’ She took your wrist, ‘Look, I’ll get someone to go to the Student Power Congress in my place…’

  With a contrite shrug of your shoulders, you promised her scant return for such a sacrifice.

  ‘I can get the car most days,’ she went on proposing. ‘We can surf on those beaches, do our holiday reading together.’

  Her neat jaws champed on those nougats of words: surf, beach, holiday, reading. It was a torment to see her eyes kindle at these futile possibilities: the sharing of lonely beaches, the naked swimming and making of love, the arguing and declaiming, the mouthing of verse and rebellion.

  ‘Helen, it can’t be arranged. If only it could. It wouldn’t be fair to…you know…pretend the thing was possible.’

  Then Helen took your hand and led you into the living-room. Sitting you in an easy chair, she herself crossed the room and briskly sat, ankles crossed beneath her, in a large petit-point lounge. She seemed to align the forces of the room against you, to invoke the twenty-five-year-old photograph of her father in air force uniform, the wedding picture of her elder brother, the large silky-veined buffet crammed with china, the carpet whose pile grew like clover, the television cabinet topped with its programme guide. She seemed to be ironically saying, In the name of all these expensive items from the best bazaars of this, our Nullabor of the spirit, confess!

  ‘Now,’ she told you—and could have been a houseproud young wife cutting a salesman down to size, ‘now what about this family of yours? Are you ashamed or something?’

  ‘Shame doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘Well what? I’ve just been talking to an old schoolfriend of mine. Her family’s been in this valley for eons. She tells me there used to be talk of your parents being cripples, but she hadn’t heard anything of them for years and—to be frank—thought they were dead or perhaps gone away?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ she repeated, rejecting it as an answer.

  But before she could make any further demands the telephone rang. She rose and backed to it, keeping you in sight. For a second it seemed sufficient for your future happiness that you should be bullied endlessly in the direction of sanity by those brusque, pretty eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said into the telephone. ‘Oh, Barbara Glover. Damian’s sister? Yes, that’s right. Yes, the newsagent was right. I am just home.’

  You felt afraid with a fear far more immense than the tensions between these two competing women, than anything they could do at the moment to punish you. And you knew that it was Barbara who had injected the moment with this nauseous terror. Your blood tingled in your cheeks, and you felt halfway compelled to snatch the phone and beg to be taken home.

  ‘No…well I couldn’t say.’ Helen was temporizing in her crisp way, ‘because there are so many undergraduates on the road. If he was depending on other people for his travel…No, I’m sorry that I can’t…No, no trouble. Please let me know if…All right.’

  With a few stressed, portentous strides she came back to her lounge and, with her eyes never leaving you, furled herself into a corner. You pretended to stare at your boots.

  ‘She’s going to hunt around the pubs for you. Don’t you think you could go and tell her you don’t want to go home yet?’

  You gave a shrug and a short breathy giggle that accused her of being simple-minded. ‘Aren’t you glad I fled to you?’

  ‘Darling,’ she said for the first time, sounding unpractised, like a child playing happy families. ‘I’m very flattered. But these are your family.’

  ‘And you think a person is bound more to a poor family than he would be to a wealthy one? Like yours?’

  ‘Oh,’ she told you, in proof of her naivety, ‘poor families are less arrogant, surely. What they do for their children is a genuine sacrifice, not just a tax paid so that they can drop your name at service-club dinners and discussion groups. They get very angry with me, my parents, because my education hasn’t made me a refinement of them. Them with a vocabulary and the ability to speak about Big Subjects without making a fool of myself which they suspect they’re doing half the time without knowing it. But your parents —’

  Your harshest groan stopped her. ‘Don’t talk to me about my parents, for sweet Christ’s sake, Helen. My sister’s the only important one. Because my parents and me…you know…we rate according to how we relate to Barbara. She’s the only absolute in our household. You know…we only really exist in as far as we trust her.’

  ‘She sounded pleasant,’ Helen suggested.

  ‘Pleasant? It’s the size, the pure bulk of what she’s done. For us, I mean. I’m the one who gets away for an education. I’m the Glover’s gift to the outside world. I’m already… you know…under suspicion in her inner world. She’s the one that’s bound to them. What’s the time? Four o’clock? She’ll have to head home before much longer. To attend to my mother.’ You went on, speaking of a sad thing you felt you could not prevent: ‘She’ll be running around the pubs, looking for me. Drunks will call out “What about it darling?”’

  ‘You’re full of guilt, aren’t you?’ she glibly suggested.

  ‘The more I’m away from it,’ you said, ‘the less I can face it. You’ll think I’m sort of neurotic.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ She sounded pert. ‘That’s why I love you.’

  You were depressed by such coy nonsense, because you wanted to treat her as more than a refuge, you were actually doing your best to fall in love with her, to break your reliance on Barbara. But, her knees sedulously locked beneath her, the girl went on looking as pitiably avid and bright as a long reading of women’s magazines could make a person; the path to her womb seemed suddenly as predictably laid down, with as much bland inevitability, as an expressway approach.

  She smiled. She was not a possessive woman, but her smile seemed possessive. This, you know, was your own fault: you were a temptation to anyone’s possessiveness—being so passive, a boy waiting on a summons, some unlikely summons. Whenever you looked in a mirror you saw a long, soft, kind mouth which, you feared, might have been made to give some final assent to the impossibility of life, joy and sanity. Hamlet, prince of the Glovers.

  So you began to distract Helen with vivid anecdote. ‘Let me tell you how we live out at Campbell’s Reach,’ you said. ‘Spelt R-E-T-C-H.’

  You were eloquent about the house, the mange-coloured damp spots from floods, the ugly beading which you could scarcely imagine anyone having the heart to nail to the walls, the walls themselves sprung away from the joists, the rooms full of the smell of earth that had not dried out in centuries.

  ‘There’s a bloody tarantula, big as a plate, who comes out at night on the ceiling and hangs right over my bed. He’s been doing it since about 1954.’

  ‘Every night?’

  You contradicted all science with a flourish of the hand. ‘Listen, don’t worry what some nice Englishman in the zoology department tells you about the life-span of spiders. None of it applies to that bastard.’

  And although you spoke mockingly, you felt a genuine fury against that punctual tarantula. ‘No, I tell you. If ever you felt warm or safe or full of hope—if, notice!—out would trundle this whopping piece of spidery livestock to hang above your face. Really, I think he was just being sarcastic most of the time. You know—like a teacher who knows he’s frightened shit out of the class and now he can have his little jokes with them? I think he’s saying, “All right, boys, nymphs, shepherds, and archangels, all right! We’ll teach Glover to sleep with his mouth shut and his thing between his legs.”’

  Helen gave a dissatisfied chuckle, while you felt alive with rhetoric. ‘And besides the tarantula and the damp spots, there is that aggressive bouquet, two parts shit and one part creosote, that tells you where the outhouse is. Someone should pressure-pack that. For homesick cow-farmers in the city.’

  Without warning you saw that she was angry. She said, ‘I don’t care how much damp and creosote there is in your ancestry. But you owe it to me to trust me.’

  To show what she meant, she walked in front of you to a framed reproduction of stallions gambolling in heavy surf under the threat of a storm. It was, you could see, terrible enough. ‘I trusted you and showed you all this!’ She struck the discreet walls with the pad of her fist. ‘You’re not the only one with tarantulas in your roof.’

  ‘I think that’s a fine painting,’ you told her. ‘No, listen, don’t be superior, just because we’re prejudiced and know what expressionism is. God, if I liked that painting, really liked it, I’d be a king. And I’d certainly pity the poor bloody me I am now. With reason.’

  She gave the reproduction a final push, out of spite. Its thundery sky danced with the reflections of the thundery afternoon in which you both stood, debating.

  At last you held your palms out to submit. ‘You want to know about my parents?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I can’t give you every detail.’

  ‘Why not?’ She was jealous of her honour, her ability to love everything except the hearty affluence of her parents.

  ‘Why not? Because you wouldn’t believe it.’ In fact, you were disturbed by the extent to which you were about to mislead her. Now that she had become somehow electric again, and distanced from her parents’ home, she was once more clearly a girl to marry. Wisdom, if nothing else, told you.

  ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ you said. ‘About nature and man. To a police magistrate, nature’s what happens most of the time. You know. If you put a hundred male guinea-pigs in with one hundred female ones, and ninety-eight of the males importune ninety-eight of the females, well that’s what a police magistrate would consider natural. No matter what the remaining four individualists happened to be up to.’

  ‘So endeth the first lesson,’ she mocked.

  You took what seemed an angry handful of your own stomach flesh. ‘No, it’s a subject close to my guts. If that makes them decadent guts, I’m sorry. Back to nature! There was a family out on Campbell’s Reach, one of the better ones. Pious as hell. Prayed their arse-holes off. They had a little boy. Hay-coloured hair. When he’s four he gets sick and begins to change into a girl. When the change seems complete, he or she dies.’

  Helen frowned over the story, as if trying to stop herself from saying how much she hated stories like that. ‘The fact that he died indicated that the change was against his nature,’ she said.

  ‘No. Maybe he just died because of the family’s general demoralization. You know…at finding themselves treated so badly by something as reliable as their idea of nature.’

  ‘That’s a dreadful thing to say about his parents,’ she couldn’t prevent herself from saying.

  ‘You see, we’re all stuck with this idea of nature as being not only glossy and restful and honest and definite, but something outside of us. Bom-tiddy-bom-tiddy-bombom-bom-tiddy-bom,’ you sang to a melody from the Pastoral Symphony. ‘In fact, nature doesn’t exist except in our minds. Nature is a habit of our minds. There aren’t rules, if people would only realize.’

  Helen herself was beginning to clock-watch. ‘Look, I think you’ve been side-tracked.’

  ‘Oh no,’ you told her, ‘the fact is not simply that Barbara is…you know…in a sense enslaved to them, because she feels outsiders will mock them. No, that’s just half of it. The deeper truth is that they might only seem unnaturally…well…afflicted; they might only seem it because of a habit of our minds, and that if we had the courage to break that habit, even at the cost of going insane, we could be free people. The four of us.’

  ‘How would you break such a habit?’ the girl asked, a little hushedly, in reverence of the risk involved.

  ‘I don’t think you would know that until the moment the chance came,’ you said, and then thought for ten seconds. ‘You hear of five-legged calves being born, with a third front-leg growing stupidly out of their chests. Ah, big news! Farmers come from all over the river expecting to see the great believe-it-or-not sight. They see it. Then the owner splits the poor thing’s skull with a mallet, and buys himself a lottery ticket for luck and calls it Tri-pod.’

  ‘Don’t make me sick,’ said the girl.

  ‘My point is that if our habits of mind made it acceptable to people that…you know…twenty per cent of six-yearolds changed sex we could accept it. We’d be prepared to say to people, “How’s your little boy transforming? Yes, I can remember how touchy Bert was while transforming to Bertha.”’

  The girl laughed despite herself. ‘That’s appalling,’ she said.

  ‘But,’ you urged, ‘it’s because of our habit of mind that what we call nature gets its fun, its dividends. Not only in terms of…you know…crucified flesh, but also because most of the moral blindness is derived from our poisonous…’ (you shook your head at the extent of the damage) ‘poisonous concept of what’s natural. Our judgment words—abnormal, subnormal, deformed—deformed, no less!’

  Through the half-opened blinds behind Helen you could see high-school boys biking home. They could be heard calling out to one another, because for them it was Friday, a bounteous afternoon, and Gunsmoke on the television at eight.

  ‘Well,’ said the girl her hands joined in what seemed piety, ‘I gather that your parents are handicapped in some way.’

  ‘They’re dwarfs,’ you lied, putting a hand over your mouth and weeping gratefully into it. Helen jumped up to hold your jerking shoulders. Even through your shirt you could feel the coolness of her arm, and again decided it would be excellent for the future to have such cool arms to fall back into. Yet you knew that such decisions were not entirely your affair.

  ‘Hairy little faces,’ you let yourself sob. ‘Christ I don’t want to have to see those hairy little faces.’

  Helen had made you coffee, over which you mooned, no more easily at misleading her, but committed now.

  ‘You’re free,’ she urged you, though she had begun to smoke in a clipped urgent way, and took frequent squinting readings from her watch, all of which seemed to cast doubt on her own freedom at home-coming. ‘You’re free to spend the night in town if you want. But you ought to tell your sister. Then she can go back to your parents knowing where you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ you agreed. ‘But she’s had the trouble of being with them all the year, every solitary day. You can’t expect her to be too tolerant if I can’t…you know…make myself go home at the proper times.’

  ‘You’ll have to have a difference of opinion over that.’

  ‘Her temperament doesn’t allow for differences of opinion.’

  ‘Whose does?’ She hissed smoke out between her teeth.

  ‘Yes,’ you admitted softly. ‘But I’m not a coward, Helen. I am going back.’

  ‘Who says that’s not cowardice?’

  You shrugged. How could you tell her that it was more your sister’s bountiful mystery than the family’s impasse that brought you home three times a year? Your frightened hope was that she would no longer allure you. They were not two feuding hopes—the desire to find yourself both free of Barbara and slave to her. At their core they were the one wish. For she was a sign of contradiction, your dark avatar of a sister, and therefore had the power to make you lose at any of your home-comings.