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him, his mother’s cloyingly brainless protectiveness. It had been an enormous relief to go away to boarding school, and set a pattern which he was to follow from that first term at Geelong Grammar until the day of his thirtieth birthday. Why try to struggle with a situation that was manifestly impossible? Avoid it, ignore it. His mother’s money had been settled on him at the time of his majority, and was more than enough for his needs. He would live his own life, then, far from Melbourne and parents, carve his own kind of niche.
    But the imminence of war had destroyed all that. Some things could not be avoided or ignored, after all.
    His birthday dinner had been a splendid affair, very formal, the guest list liberally sprinkled with ladylike young debutantes his mother considered eligible contenders for marriage to her son. There were two archbishops at the board, Church of England and Roman Catholic, one minister from the state legislature and one from the federal, a fashionable medical practitioner, the British High Commissioner and the French ambassador. Naturally his mother had been responsible for all the invitations. During the meal he scarcely noticed young ladies or important personages, indeed was hardly conscious of his mother. All his attention was focussed on his father, sitting at the far end of the table, wicked blue eyes forming irreverent conclusions about most of the guests. How he could divine so accurately what was going on in his father’s head Neil didn’t know, but it warmed him deliciously and made him long for an opportunity to talk with the little old man who had contributed nothing to his son’s appearance save the color and shape of his eyes.
    Later Neil had understood the magnitude of his own immaturity at that relatively late stage in his life, but when his father had linked an arm through his as the men finally rose to join the ladies in the drawing room, he was simply absurdly pleased at the gesture.
    ‘They can do without us,’ said the old man, and snorted derisively. ‘It’ll give your mother something to complain about if we disappear.’
    In the library full of leather-bound books he had never opened, let alone read, Longland Parkinson settled himself into a wing chair, while his son chose to subside onto an ottoman at his feet. The room was dimly lit, but nothing could disguise the signs of hard living in the old man’s seamed face, nor diminish the laceration of a gaze that was fierce, stone hard, predatory. Behind the gaze one could see an intelligence which lived quite independent of people, emotional weakness, moral shibboleths. It was then Neil translated what he felt for his father in terms of love, and wondered at his own contrariness; why choose to love someone who did not need to be loved?
    ‘You haven’t been much of a son,’ the old man said without rancor.
    ‘I know.’
    ‘If I’d thought a letter would bring you home, I’d have sent it a long time ago.’
    Neil spread out his hands and looked at them; long, thin-fingered, smooth as a girl’s, having the kind of childishness which only comes from never putting them to work that had soul-deep meaning and importance to the brain controlling them; for his painting had not meant that to him. ‘It wasn’t your letter which brought me home,’ he said slowly.
    ‘What was it, then? War?’
    ‘No.’
    The wall sconce shining behind his father’s head lit up its pink hairless dome, threw all the shadows forward onto his face, in which the eyes burned but the hard gash of a mouth remained resolutely closed.
    ‘I’m no good,’ said Neil.
    ‘No good at what?’ Typical of his father, to interpret the statement dynamically rather than morally.
    ‘I’m a rotten painter.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I was told so, by someone who does know.’ The words began to come more easily. ‘I’d accumulated enough work for a major showing—somehow I always wanted to start with a bang, no single work hanging here, a