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ever be the same again. My brothers are called to hurry along, and I am bundled into the car, to make a rapid journey south, through the night, along the Desert Road. My brothers stare with apprehension through the windows of the car. My father stops the car so they can pee under frosty autumn stars, while the wind makes a rushing sound in the telephone lines overhead and over the vast, tussocky, dark land stretching away to the mountains, and for once they do not try to outdo each other in their arc.
    I see them by the dim interior light of the car as they stand pointing at the night, two awkward boys in tight serge shorts. When they climb back in the car, we all settle down and are quiet, knowing that this is what is expected of us. Mike, Bernie and Rob, three farm kids in the back seat of a car, going they didn’t know where. My mother’s head is bent before me so that I see the pale nape of her neck, her dark and langorous curls escaping from a scarf tied roughly around her head. This naked neck seems vulnerable , as if it is arched for the executioner’s stroke. When she lifts her head I see her profile, the narrow temples, the slender outline of her face, the shadows on her cheeks. She averts her gaze and is lost to me. My mother, my mother, my mother, I say.
    It must be towards morning that I have this dream, because when I wake the room is full of pale light, the sea is an unearthly blue streaked with fog, the hills look as if they have been lifted from a Japanese painting and it’s time for work again.

four
GLASS
    B Y THE TIME Glass follows Edith to the kitchen for his first cup of black Rio Gold, she is measuring blueberries in a jug for a muffin bake. Already she has mixed the first cup of flour, four raised teaspoons of baking powder, half a cup of sugar and a pinch of salt in a bowl. Edith doesn’t like doubling quantities. It spoils the balance. Today she will show people through her garden, the first of her spring tours. Edith smiles to herself, whisking an egg with oil, and adding the mixture to the bowl, then the blueberries, lightly dusted with flour so they won’t sink during baking.
    ‘Did you put the chairs under the trees?’ she asks.
    ‘I was afraid they might blow away.’ Mares’ tails had appeared in the sky the evening before and, once, waking briefly in the night, he had heard wind over the house.
    ‘Can you do it now?’
    Glass thinks about forcibly taking her back to bed. The strength of his desire for her, all things considered, still astonishes him. From time to time, like this morning, he has flashes of her in his mind’s eye as she was when she was young, with long, strong limbs and a boy’s gait. He thought then that she looked like a farmer’s wife, but he was wrong. He can see now that she wore her flesh too lightly, her chin too high. She was uncertain of herself, as might be expected, and perhaps she still is, only you can’t tell any more with Edith. You can’t know what she thinks, you can only watch what she does. If he were to take her back to the bedroom, she would not struggle or accuse him of some obscure violation. Instead, she would sigh with resignation, tighten her mouth and avert her face so slightly that, if he mentioned it, she would say he was imagining things.
    On the radio, the forecast promises a sunny day, no wind or rain, just a light nor’-westerly turning to the south by evening. He decides to put the chairs out.
    ‘It’ll soon come round time for this baby,’ he says. ‘I wonder how Roberta’s keeping.’
    Edith’s spoon flies round the bowl, mixing fast so the mixture will be light and elastic. Speed is what counts.
    ‘Why don’t you ring her?’ she says. Her voice is distant. He sees the tumbler among the mixing bowls. She follows his glance; her hand closes quickly over the glass, and he knows it is going to be one of those days. He hopes that, by nightfall, Edith can still remember this morning.
    ‘They won’t be up. You know they