When you came home from university in your twentieth year, you found Mr and Mrs Glover quite comfortably set up on the veranda with all the items of their peculiar freedom. Your eyes oblique, you saw first your father’s chair lined with sheets of classified advertising and showing off a tin labelled Three Nuns, which had been a Christmas present last year and had now been brought out after eleven months to mark your home-coming. There were his library books, chosen by Barbara who knew his tastes well, his especial fondness for works that put forward long-odds interpretations of history: that Hitler was an illegitimate son of the Hohenzollerns, that Roosevelt had planned the Pearl Harbour shambles. From such reading he had built a miscellaneous knowledge of nearly quiz-king dimensions; but did his best to conceal it. He had a large library of Reader’s Digests and a hostility to the exploration of space.

  Your mother was thinner than you could remember her ever being, and wore one of her everlasting cardigans in unvibrant pastel. Her hands toyed absently with a nasal spray, which symbolized her tendency to be a sickness bore. She had grounds for it now, though, in her appalling under-carriage.

  She was a Catholic in the old mould, and in accordance had once or twice achieved a rare insight that God had chosen her out to punish in her the straying limbs of man and woman; that she was therefore elect. It was thirteen years since she had been to Mass and she thought that all latter-day talk of rebellious priests and anti-Papal bishops was a plot of Masonic-Communist origins. As late as this last winter, she had written in unspecified terms of her affliction, and in hope of a cure, to the Shrine of Saint Jude, Hope of the Hopeless, in the United States.

  ‘Oh Damian!’ she called. She seemed to react as if you had raised a siege, and gratefully wept.

  ‘Son,’ the father was muttering. ‘Son.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry I’m late.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter!’ she howled and held out her arms categorically, drawing you in against her flat chest.

  ‘How are you?’ you asked them.

  That made the mother weep a little more heartily. Your father answered for her.

  ‘She’s bad. She’s in pain,’ he said with the solemnity he always devoted to her symptoms.

  ‘I need a professional man,’ she said. To demonstrate, she turned slowly on her angular quarters. With some strain, you looked at her. A shiver ran down her sad red flanks, you could see purple knottings in her udders and the course of the violet veins that ran, noticeably distended, as far as the front legs. She moved with back legs ludicrously propped apart. You might consider shooting a mere cow that had to move like that.

  Even so, you felt buffered from what you saw by an indistinct sense of the fraudulence of most of your mother’s disorders, as if she had wilfully let them enter by a secret gate.

  ‘Barbara belittles its importance,’ said your father. ‘But it’s really bloody serious.’

  Your mother reached a large book called The Complete Guide to Dairy Farming from the veranda cupboard and raised it with both hands. ‘Page 218,’ she said, ‘Mastitis.’

  That was too laconic a summary for your father’s taste. ‘But not ordinary mastitis…You can’t just treat it with bloody penicillin.’

  ‘No?’ you sputtered, beset. ‘No?’

  ‘All the symptoms are of staph infection.’ Your mother put the book away again, under an old lace tablecloth and a rotting edition of Pear’s Cyclopaedia. A proud little burst of sobs broke from her. ‘I could die of blood-poisoning. Or just of the infection.’

  Turning again with care, she yelped when her udders swung against the grotesque parenthesis of her hind legs.

  ‘That aside,’ said your father, descending from his heavy and, in its turn, somehow varnished concern for his wife, ‘how about yourself? God, you’re a bloody big dark womanizer!’

  ‘Now! I’m sure he’s not.’

  ‘’Course he is. I bet it takes more than three Hail Mary’s at bedtime to keep the women off him.’

  ‘Don’t let him influence you, Damian. I can tell by your face that you’re chaste.’

  You couldn’t help laughing, and your father laughed too, as if he hoped it wasn’t true. Already you felt the burden, however, of his hope and half-conviction that your academic life was hearty, both full-blooded and stylized, at a pitch somewhere between The Student Prince and A Yank at Oxford.

  ‘What have you been doing up there?’ he wanted to know, and nodded towards the escarpment to the west. In the first part of the nineteenth century, convicts had suspected that China lay over there. Was that a more bizarre belief than your father’s assumption that European éclat and the civilized life were to be found at the tiny university up there, beyond the harsh forests of the plateau rim? ‘Did your head-serang close down the free college? Is Alec still painting “Prince Charles is a queer” all over the footpath?’

  ‘Things like that,’ you nodded. ‘“The Pope is a transvestite”—all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Trans-what?’ the father asked, though he knew. It was one of those words he frequently and defensively pretended ignorance of; as if, once he admitted knowing them, he was in danger of then being asked why, knowing so much, he was a failure. He leaned back hooting, his hands on his waist. ‘Christ, you can’t beat them!’

  ‘That’s not right,’ your mother was sighing.

  It was so sad that the old man actually believed that to be flagrant, gay, piquant. He was not a man difficult to please.

  ‘But about mother?’ you said.

  He sobered instantly. ‘Well, now you’re here, you can call someone in.’

  Your mother was wheezing: all that turning and wielding of The Complete Guide. Was that the mastitis too, that audible congestion?

  ‘Or you can force Barbara,’ said the mother. ‘She won’t even understand, not even the pain. And it’s like she can’t see the veins. You know.’ She took on an appearance of coyness, modesty, her eyes cast down to take in the line of her own cheeks. ‘When she attends to me, it’s excruciating. I don’t have to tell you. The pain of moving…’

  She spoke for minutes, her once firm cheeks depleted. The smell you had noticed grew an edge as she detailed everything except what you could easily read and hopelessly love in her somewhat exalted eyes: here I am (was the point her eyes made), a woman of shattering insignificance, yet twice I have had my importance verified—the accident and this sickness, whose pain is massively real and so testifies to my reality. Sometimes, as she talked, she would take up one of her patent medications—atomized mists and creams, lozenges and antacids—and seem to take precise account of the dimensions of its tube or bottle, the nature of its packaging. To prove her desire for health, she brought out a letter from the American friar who tended the shrine to Saint Jude, Hope of the Hopeless, and who had pledged boundless spiritual resources towards her recovery from her undefined disease. You felt close to hysteria when you were given the envelope to handle, and the buff brochure with its boggling promises: Yes, in the space age just as in other centuries, we devout clients of the saint can expect startling manifestations of his power. Kindly mark your letters, ‘Attention: Father Anselm.’

  Barbara had always been tolerant, you saw, buying her the pharmaceutical fripperies with which now she fed the edges of the fire of her mastitis, writing at her dictation the letter marked Attention: Fr. Anselm. But how could she be impervious to the clear peril of those swollen veins; how could she face it in such a low-keyed way as she had ten minutes before? And had she abstracted from the symptoms and managed not to see them, or had she decided that the thing was fatal so that fuss would merely excite the patient?

  Now the rain had stammered out, and a half-emerged sun gave the distances of forest the numb sheen of anticlimax. All the frogs squealed, and the rain, dripping in goblets from the furled ends of the blinds, made softer gutturals. Such foetid details seemed likely to seize your mind, to bring out a rash on your brain.

  The mother kept speaking. ‘I feel like my belly might split open with the pain. There’s a general dull pain around my lower parts that comes to a head every few minutes. What’s the use of talking about it? I talk about nothing else to your father and Barbara. But everything’s streaked with blood. And bloodclots! Even in my water. I mean, that’s dangerous. It’s grey. Grey with blood tints…’

  You looked sympathetic, since what you felt was predictably unutterable. While off-guard, you found yourself again drawn into your mother’s breasts. Your head rang, for the smell of her disease came too sharply to you.

  ‘You’d think it was the most important thing in my life,’ she mused. ‘But it isn’t. You are.’ She kissed him with the robust suction noise that hearty mums made in old films. ‘Welcome home, Damian.’

  The father smiled. How could they be happy with the fly-ridden sun fully exposed above the house?

  ‘This pain,’ you said. ‘Who do you want to see her?’

  The parents made what seemed a consolidated silence. ‘Someone professional. No one special. Just a qualified man.’

  ‘But…you know…he’s going to find the ménage pretty —’

  ‘Mén-who?’ asked your father, without sympathy.

  ‘You know…the set-up. He’s going to think it’s strange. He might feel bound to talk about it to other experts, or to someone in authority.’

  You could tell from their hooded eyes that they had often enough heard the same argument from Barbara.

  ‘We’re ordinary people, son,’ he asserted, as a threat. ‘Ordinary people in need of help. How would he gain?’

  ‘How could any professional man be so unkind?’ The mother bolstered him, well-practised. ‘It isn’t as if we’d committed any crime.’

  ‘No,’ you admitted. You could have gone looking for the household frogs with a paling, and taught them for drumming in that niggling way. ‘But I thought that was why we’d gone to all this trouble…you know…led the life we’ve led. Because…for some damned reason…people will spend time and talent on being nasty.’

  There was a silence. Both parents inhaled.

  ‘It’s simpler than that, son,’ the father said. ‘Your mother needs treatment. No one should be left to suffer as she does.’

  ‘The maximum dose,’ stated the mother, ‘it doesn’t sedate me any more. I wake screaming. I could scream now if I wasn’t such an old hand at suffering.’

  ‘She hasn’t even told us, son, that she’s reached…you know…maximum sedation. She doesn’t know we know. You’ve got to get through to her.’

  You paused before making a suggestion. ‘This new drug. Maybe it will do the trick. Give it a week or so.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the father spat. ‘Let the old bag suffer another bloody seven days!’

  The mother said, ‘Dad! Dad!’ as if she didn’t, in fact, believe in naked pressure.

  ‘Make her get a qualified man, Damian.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ you promised them; but the father’s bunched fist pounded the library books and the Three Nuns jumped.

  ‘Look, it isn’t the sort of case where you just see what you can do!’

  ‘No, no. My boy will do his best. Won’t you, Damian?’

  In penitence, and eyes down, your father had begun to reclassify the Digests on his chair. You saw with longing headings such as ‘I was a Castro Terrorist’ and ‘A Revolution for Kidney Sufferers’. God, couldn’t you make any editorial board sit up and reach for their eighteen-point Roman!

  ‘Look,’ your father was muttering. ‘I’m sorry, boy. I’ve been living with your mother’s pain for three months.’ He brought up phlegm. You felt an urge, as he reached for a rag beside the magazines, to call out—No, keep it and we’ll analyze it. Cure may be in accessible bottles on some druggist’s shelf. Yet you knew there was no hope. As you had told Helen, you had mild hopes of a cure on some psychological level.

  Your father dredged the clot from his mouth quite delicately. He was a gentler man now than the blatant hawking failure of the pre-accident days. You suffered a sudden kindred feeling for him, so innocent beside the furry and acquisitive wombs that were the mother and Barbara. And Helen, too. You remembered Helen strangely and as if she were allied to her mother. How easily, you thought, such adroit and managerial wombs outrode the illusion of male potency.

  Your father was trying to work back to chatter. ‘And all your boozy mates! How are they? No paternity suits?’

  For some reason you grew harsh. ‘Aren’t I supposed to go and talk to Barbara?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’ Already you were at the door-handle, back-on to them. ‘It’s good to be home.’

  Inside, all medical equipment had been tidied away. Barbara stood scouring the sink with one of those ferocious powders they put in pop-art canisters and called Speed or Whiz or Slam. It somehow comforted you to see her plying a scouring pad, as if she had fallen away to a manageable domesticity.

  She said, ‘I know what you’ve been asked to do and I know you need explanations. All I ask is, not just at the moment.’

  ‘Barbara,’ you said, ‘it’s monstrous. I’ve never seen anything as bad on other farms.’

  ‘Oh, its common. Farmers don’t admit to it. They hit the beast on the head.’

  And bury it in quicklime, you thought.

  ‘But please, not now,’ she repeated.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Because I know we’ll quarrel if we talk about it now,’ she threatened.

  ‘All right. Poor Barbara.’

  Your hand could not stay away from her long black hair and its sweet turned-up rim. ‘Poor Barbara,’ you whispered and repeated it, catching a special fervour from the grain of her hair. Both of you stood still, but you knew she was more appalled than captivated by your stroking; while outdoors the mother squealed on a tight bubble of pain.

  ‘Hold on to it, hold on,’ the father could be heard telling her.

  The mother’s cry of begging and thanks, tension and release, filled the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t Damian,’ said Barbara at last. Meaning Don’t touch my hair.

  In her childhood, Barbara was allowed during illnesses to handle some parchments in angular cursive French which her father had picked up as a soldier one idle day in Alexandria. Mr Glover had gone to an Arab curio shop in search of little sandalwood camels for his newborn daughter, but was electrified by the parchments, which thrilled him with a sense of his tenuous descent from one contingent woman after another.

  In buying the wad for fifteen piastres and, after worrying at the pages with his fingers, sending them home, he was giving his daughter something ultimately more soothing than hand-carved beasts. About the time of the accident, Barbara could obtain from contact with the document the same indefinite evocation, never coming to a head, that her father had felt. She became accustomed to the cursive hand-writing, and in her early high-school years could identify this and that point of grammar. The document began:

  Au nom du Seigneur, ainsi soit-il!

  Içi commence le procès d’examination d’une femme, Jeanne, vulgairement dite La Pucelle, avant le Faculté Theologique de Poitiers, et par autente Regnault de Chartres, Évêque du Riems.

  The fourteen sheets of parchment were signed:

  Jehanne Pièrre Seguin,

  Grand Bedeau de la Faculté

  Guillaume Aymerie

  From a large French dictionary, she discovered that Pucelle was an old word meaning Joan, the Maid of Orléans. She found Grace James’s Saint Joan in a library, read Bernard Shaw’s play, sensing its misrepresentations, and was lent Anatole France’s Saint Joan by a teacher. She learned that Joan spelt her name ‘Jehanne’ and that at her trial she had often asked that what she called the Book of Poitiers should be produced—the record of an examination she had faced in the town of Poitiers in March-April 1429. It was never produced, for certain and understandable human and political reasons, and no one knew what had happened to it.

  She knew too that Regnault de Chartres was the Archbishop of Reims who had crowned the Pucelle’s slack-grained beneficiary, Charles VII of France, and that the same archbishop had been president of the examination board at Poitiers at the time of Joan’s examination. And last of all, she could see that most of the questions recorded on the parchment had been asked by a Frère Seguin and Frère Guillaume Aymerie, both of whom, so all the books said, had examined Joan of Arc at Poitiers.

  These pages might be the ones Jehanne had waited for.

  Barbara came to believe it with a different degree of belief at different times. But even at fifteen she did not dream too intemperately. Instinct told her that tycoons might tend to fill their high houses with death-masks of Napoleon and ground-plans of the battle of Jena; so, too, those wracked by outlandish charisms might see themselves as Jehanne and, reading so often of her piteous invoking of the Book of Poitiers, supply her with a copy one, two, three hundred years too late. Barbara might have thought herself of compensating Jehanne with a version in high-school French, four hundred and thirty years too late, had not chance already provided one.

  She was at the same time intolerant enough of fantasy to ask herself if the document should be in French, and whether the French was of the right kind.

  But beyond such detachment she allowed herself a daydream. She knew that you and she both had spiritual features that could be dressed to dazzle. Figures of mystery in European auction rooms, Hansel and Gretel from a far clearing, you shopped your magic manuscript about with peasant wiliness. An authentic Book of Poitiers, she considered, must be worth at least some hundreds of pounds sterling.

  Her willingness to put a price on it showed that she had acquired in a few years a peasant attitude that Jehanne herself no doubt possessed; the conviction that mortgages, cold dawns, frost-bitten chores, summer fatigues, mealtime quarrels consecrated the family holding, made it less expandable than art treasures.