‘I know. But people don’t easily give strangers lifts any more. I must look like a psychopath or something.’

  ‘Did you pass your examinations?’

  You smiled over a shiver of annoyance. ‘Of course. I’m your brother, aren’t I? Out of pure hide-bound tradition, the authorities will fail to publish the results till after Christmas.’

  ‘Barbara, how can you be so bloody inhuman?’ your father called.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ said Barbara. ‘They count the days. When you don’t come it’s as bad as if mathematics itself had let them down.’

  One of your hands appealed to reason. ‘Look, you can’t leave the university the moment you put the last full-stop on the last paper. You have to say good-bye to friends. Go to thank the tutor. Settle old debts. You’re bound to these things.’

  ‘Of course.’ She gave the distant assent so disturbing to all the other Glovers. You could scarcely avoid wincing.

  ‘You have to return books, you know. And have a beer here and there because of Christmas. There were people at the bookshop too, who’d been kind about credit —’

  ‘Barbara!’ your father roared.

  ‘They know you’re here,’ said Barbara without moving. She was obviously resting from their demands this morning, for her sanity’s sake, or so that a given moment could be savoured. You yourself were indecently willing to delay facing them.

  ‘How’s the mother?’

  ‘Ill, Damian,’ Barbara told you simply. ‘But not as ill as she looks or thinks she is. You’ll see.’

  You nodded towards the syringe. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Vaccination.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘The mother. Against edema. We can’t take risks.’

  ‘No.’

  With respect, you looked at the scoured sink, the gleaming kidney bowl on the draining-board, the bare surface of the table eroded by sandsoap to a landscape of ferocious hygiene.

  ‘I should go out to them,’ you said.

  ‘Just when you’re ready.’

  ‘Barbara, for God’s sake!’ sang your father.

  ‘You can hear it in his voice,’ Barbara softly commented.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He knows his son is home.’

  There was a thunderclap low down over the house, a scatter of thick summer raindrops over the roof. Barbara lifted the syringe and made for the door, towards which you yourself wavered. Her hand on the knob, she turned back with a question.

  ‘Where did you stay last night?’

  ‘The front of a truck. The cabin. Very comfortable.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes. It was so bright last night. It reminded me of that time you had me recuperating out there, you remember, I had scarlet fever? You used to lie out there with me and help me make out bad similarities of camels and kings and so on in the clouds.’

  ‘Jumbos,’ she ventured. ‘I remember you were very good at spotting jumbos.’

  ‘Yes, I had a radio too. In the cabin. Popular music has gone over to songs that sound like bad verse.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Mixed metaphors.’

  Pity for her jolted you: how sad it must be to be the only person on Campbell’s Reach who knew what mixed metaphor was. Except perhaps your father, who was also a furious self-educator.

  ‘I don’t know whether it was any better when it all sounded like Campbell’s Reach Public School masturbating to drums.’

  You had done it: for the first time she simply laughed, and a habit her top lip had of turning up in a very young, half-worried, resistant guffaw dazzled and oppressed you, while your blood sang, with formal apologies to Helen, Yes this is the woman!

  ‘Better,’ she said, ‘if you wait here while I give the injection.’

  When she opened the door, bottom and top, an impression of shaded verandah entered, while more (seemingly) shoulder-height thunder rolled and big drops rattled the roof. Barbara went out.

  You stood listening to the marginal voice of the fuel stove that could be heard even as the clouds burst. So too could Barbara’s and her father’s, both sharpened by the abrupt release of rain.

  ‘None too soon, Barbara. What’s going on?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Is Damian home?’

  Barbara teased him off-handedly, yet with a ward-sister heaviness. ‘Damian? Do I know a Damian?’

  Inside, you picked up the phial from which the syringe had been filled—something to occupy your large hands. Being a compulsive reader, you strained to make out the minute lettering. You saw immediately that the drug declared itself an antibiotic, not a vaccine. Casual interest raised your brows and brought you to the refrigerator, where you matched the phial with a pharmaceutical box on one of the shelves. In the box was a flimsy of directions which you began to read.

  Meanwhile, there was the shuffle and scrape of feet from the verandah, very loud, as of perhaps half a dozen farmers.

  ‘Now look,’ you heard Barbara say, ‘Keep still.’

  For the first time your mother spoke. ‘Do you really think that stuff will do me any good?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  The feet were concentratedly still. Then there came a further scraping, a noise of propping—your mother’s misbehaviour in the face of the needle.

  Barbara sounded professional. ‘Listen, this has to go in the vein. Dad, here! Put your thumb there over the vein, will you? No, not too hard.’

  The mother snatched a breath in the moment of pain.

  ‘Ah,’ said Barbara.

  ‘Intravenous hurts like hell,’ the father conceded.

  Your mother still conveyed in her voice the hurt of the needle. ‘I should have treatment. From a professional.’

  You heard Barbara murmur in her bitter-sweet way, ‘I don’t want you pestering Damian on that point. Do you understand?’

  ‘I need every ally I can get.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Barbara came close to snapping. ‘I think you can safely take it for granted I’m on your side.’

  ‘Any sign of the boy?’ the father asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you the moment he comes.’

  A section of Barbara could be seen, backing through the door.

  ‘But leave the door open,’ the father commanded her. ‘Right open.’

  ‘And listen to all your talk about Damian and professionals? No thank you.’

  She came inside and closed both segments of the door with emphasis, with a deft institutional firmness rather than in the spirit of the irradicable doubt and anger that infested her. At the sink she dismantled the syringe and began to boil water. In the meantime, you hid the drug flimsy in your pocket.

  ‘You say she’s well?’ you whispered.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She patted the grumbling electric jug. ‘They can’t hear above this. About the mother…?’ Perhaps because it had so early been allowed to you both to see your parents as objective entities, you both used the definite article in this way—the mother, the father. ‘She’s well enough. Better…I ought to stress this…better than she looks. She leans with the condition, you know, she lets it take her in any direction it wants. She has this ambition, to be visited by a qualified man, a real professional. To tell him everything. How important her symptoms are. How I neglect her. I don’t want to be unjust to her, but there’s this television show called Surgery Hours. Its other title is Dramatic Confrontations of Doctor and Patient. She seems to get endless encouragement from it. I could shoot those television people.’

  Absorbed in malice towards soap opera, she did not speak again till a drop of boiling water spat from the lip of the jug onto her hand. She sniffed and switched the power off. ‘Listen, you didn’t sleep in that truck cabin, did you?’

  You at once felt a familiar weeping sensation in your stomach. A minority of your lies from the past thirteen years had survived, but you had become accustomed to have her extempore insights leap at you from every corner of the house.

  ‘All right,’ you said.

  ‘I know you.’ She was pouring water into a basin; and you could hear the leniency in her voice, and cringe in accord.

  ‘If you’d slept in a truck cabin you would have said it. “I slept in a truck cabin at…” naming a place. You always fill in scenery when you’re lying. Clouds you watched!’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

  She gave a small laugh that may have been ironic; if not, ever so little hysteric. ‘Me worry?’

  Suddenly you found yourself angry that she so consistently saw herself as the centre of gravity in the Glover vortex of suffering. You found yourself also squaring your shoulder, as if you wanted to punch somebody. But certainly not Barbara.

  ‘You know I value your being here all the time. No visitors.’

  But she had already begun to dodge out from beneath your avowals. ‘I have my own universe. Complete.’

  Indeed, you had frequently seen a powerful joy suffuse her as she performed small chores of hygiene or medication—such chores as to scald a syringe and find it so easy a matter to protect your mother from infection by needle. You sensed, however, that such joy was not at work today.

  ‘But never having the stink of the place out of your nostrils,’ you urged. ‘Rushing to town on Fridays, back home in time to see to the mother. Being sweet…’ The word came out with the sound of an accusation, but you straightaway modified it. ‘Sweet. You are sweet. Being sweet to them.’

  ‘They’re the conditions of our world,’ she said cursorily. ‘One of us can have a separate existence. Clearly, it has to be you. Where did you stay last night?’

  In view of the ascertainable damage you had done Helen, you did not feel morally justified in pleading your separate existence. That aside, you were in any case, in a family context, overtly committed to chastity.

  ‘I have a friend in town,’ you ventured.

  Barbara kept chancing the tip of her second finger on the surface of her scalding bowl of water. Side by side with this office of self-punishment, she interrogated you in her blank, detached way.

  ‘You mean you were there all the time?’

  ‘I couldn’t find a ride out this way.’

  ‘You stopped fifteen miles short. When they were waiting for you.’

  ‘But who comes this way late at night?’

  ‘Mineral trucks. If you’d gone round the pubs you would have been sure to find a truck-driver coming this way.’

  ‘Well, it happens that a person feels a bloody fool walking into bars and shouting “Who’s going the beach road tonight?”’

  Instantly the father shouted, ‘Is that Damian?’

  Neither of you felt bound to answer.

  ‘I hope you won’t have to offer return hospitality.’

  ‘No, of course not. I wonder though if we’re too concerned about them.’ You nodded towards the veranda. ‘It’s becoming a different world.’

  ‘It’s the same world. I see it on television.’

  ‘No, the old…you know…habits of mind are breaking down. Categories are falling apart.’

  ‘I know. The church is falling apart…’

  ‘You know whose fault that is,’ you said. A reflex humanist, you.

  ‘It’s everyone’s fault. But it’s the same world.’

  ‘No,’ you insisted. ‘There are actually young people who don’t think in the old moulds. I know I do, but I’m not fully typical. There are really people who, in their grain, in their very…you know…cores don’t think in terms of human or inhuman, natural or unnatural. All prior judgements are suspended, as far as they’re concerned.’

  Barbara murmured, ‘I know there’s a lot of rebellion. Every night —’

  ‘Not rebellion. Acceptance of things on their own terms. You, for example. You’re wasted, Barbara. Whereas the world is full of people who, if they loved a person, wouldn’t give a damn if her parents were…’

  But now Barbara had chanced her finger too deeply into the hot water, and the burn gave an edge to her answer. ‘What are you talking about? No love is ideal. We’re cemented, you, me, them. That’s what decides what you’ll be—the way you’re locked. You can’t risk those you unavoidably love, for the sake of some possibly ideal marriage. With someone who just mightn’t happen to worry that your parents are pretty heavily afflicted.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth about the syringe?’ you asked her, and felt in your pocket for the printed directions. It was clear that she felt harried.

  ‘The syringe? What do you know about the practicalities of looking after a mother whose future’s so uncertain?’

  You shook your head, as if to clarify your motives. ‘I don’t mention it for…you know…the sake of cancelling out my lie with one of yours. I just wonder, that’s all. It sounds pretty serious. This preparation is classified a dangerous drug and should be administered only under expert advice.’

  Barbara spun away from the sink, folded her arms in a brisk fury. ‘Oh Damian, now I’m really angry.’ Her black hair swayed. ‘Certainly the drug’s an antibiotic, and certainly your mother has an infection. You’ll see that soon enough. But it’s mockery to ask me do I have expert advice.’

  You read from the flimsy. ‘Thick…yellowish…blood-tinged. All this applies?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a dangerous enough infection. I’d thank you not to tell her though.’

  Your belly leapt as your eye caught the words Dispose of infected bedding…aborted foetuses…You read them aloud in a diminished febrile voice. ‘…and afterbirth by deep burial in quicklime.’ You cast the instructions away across the sandsoaped table, but a secret current of air spun them about and glided them back towards your hand. It was all as unreal as your own death. You clung to the obtrusive clatter of the rain, a point of reference from your (in its own way) orderly childhood. ‘You surely don’t mean she’s…?’

  ‘In…in child? Of course not. The conditions exist in circumstances other than pregnancy.’

  Reassured, you hitched a hip onto the table and rested, but toyed once more with the sheet of directions. ‘Suspected subjects should be blood-tested…That hasn’t been done?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She moaned. ‘You know that hasn’t been done.’

  With the rain beginning to falter, you began to dread the day that might develop, a sticky sun rolling between thunderheads, all the insects out, and lizards, in revolting frills and teguments, blinking on every second rock. And still you hadn’t seen your parents.

  Strength was prescriptive. No more morbid hesitancy. ‘I must go out and see them now,’ you told her.

  Her hands, drawn down her face, left her chin and revealed a regretful, unconscionably gentle smile, shared with her spread fingers, as if they actually carried some loved photograph.

  ‘Oh yes. You’ll get an earful. “What I need is some specialist attention, Damian. Your mother suffers something awful, Damian. Make her get help, Damian.”’

  This litany, too, had reached your father on the veranda and he called, ‘Hey, Barbara! What in the hell! Is that Damian?’

  You felt your face give way with the helpless love and detestation you bore the three of them. Your tears broke out, your mouth was taken by a soft stammering, and you went across the room with your mute hands out. Barbara took you into her ample arms and you were reminded by contrast of bird-boned Helen. To prevent torment spilling untidily from your mouth, you locked your lips on Barbara’s shoulder; while she soothed quietly but could not supply for the inalienable duties you now must perform.

  Your scattered energies rallied again. It really was, then, time to face your parents.

  The veranda was fenced in and the canvas blinds, candy-striped thirteen years past (in the short summer of high Glover hopes), now bleached, had been rolled down to within inches of the fence. So the veranda light shone beneath the decreasing din of rain.

  When you saw their turned faces grow vacuous with joy, the shock of their condition recurred. Throughout your adolescence, as your personality became more unified and you caught the overall sense of your own body, their state recoiled on your mind with new harshness, a triannual concussion after a term’s suspended disbelief. So central, strident and incisive was their reality that libraries, debate, coffee in the Union, poetry, and carousings in Gamma block all seemed as removed and improbable as the life of some of the thirteenth century: the term-time Damian became a figure whose motives and aims were a mystery to you.

  Seeing your parents, you knew that you would grow a face like theirs; the play of your face, which is a matter of habit and temperament but can be optionally controlled, will become more and more foreseeable, as desire, avidity, curiosity, and fear sink into muscles, become fixed in the bone. The fixed facial pattern of your parents’ delight was as automatic and terrible as you had feared.

  ‘Well,’ you told them inanely, ‘I got here.’

  Your mother, you could see, was obviously quite deformed by the infection.

  To begin with the Glovers’ first winter at Campbell’s Reach:

  When Barbara woke you it was scarcely any lighter than when the accustomed hornbills, flapping low over the house, had given the morning the quality of not being a time at which a young girl would die.

  She said, ‘Damian, I’ve got a big favour to ask.’

  You could hear the brittle noises of the day’s beginning: your mother at the crockery, your father stamping into his boots. Barbara herself was dressed to help with the morning milk, and you smelt the dismal soapy cleanliness of her clothes. Above all, she seemed greyer than dawn, grey from dying all night.

  ‘Are you dying again?’ you asked. You yearned to be asked to soothe or save her.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said flatly, as if in withdrawal from your zeal. A fear beset you, that she would now, after her thorough fright, become one with the household that smelt of disillusion: Mr, and before that, Corporal Glover’s returned-soldier’s millenium gone sour. The Pacific’s splenetic victor with his Mrs victor, joylessly in debt, belting himself to meet his poor dawn herd, and pecking tea from an anodized mug in a kitchen on the least significant of continents, the arsehole of the earth.