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poor little blighter’s life a misery during the day, but scooted off to the pub and left him to do their dirty work! They had the hide to tell me they was all coming back to clean up! I’ve a good mind to knock a couple of hundred quid off of Mr Harry Markham’s bill!’
    Mary put down her teacup and stared at Mrs Parker, puzzled. ‘What makes you so indignant, Mrs Parker?’
    The yellow and purple pansies swathing Mrs Parker’s ample bosom heaved. ‘Well, wouldn’t you be? Oh, I forgot, I didn’t see youse last night to tell youse what those miserable bastards did to the poor little bloke, did I? Sometimes I swear I could kill every man that was ever born! They don’t seem to have a skerick of sympathy or understanding for the underdog, unless of course he’s a drunk or a no-hoper like themselves. But someone like Tim, what does a decent day’s work and keeps his end up, they don’t feel any pity for him at all. He’s their butt, their whipping boy, and the poor little coot’s too dill-brained to realize it! He can’t help it if he was born simple, now can he? A terrible shame, though, ain’t it? Fancy a boy what looks like him not being the full quid! I could cry! Well, anyway, wait until I tell you what they did to him yestiddy morning at smoke-oh…’
    Mrs Parker’s nasal, common voice whined on as she told Mary her horrible little story, but Mary only half-listened, her eyes riveted on the bent golden head at the bottom of her yard.
    Last night before she had gone to bed she had culled the shelves of her library, searching for a face that looked like his. Botticelli? she wondered, and finding some of his reproductions in a book she dismissed the artist contemptuously. Those faces were too soft, too feminine, too subtly cunning and feline. In the end she had given up the search, quite unsatisfied. Only in the ancient Greek and Roman statues had she found some hint of Tim, perhaps because his kind of beauty was better illustrated in stone than on canvas. He was a three-dimensional creature. And she had wished bitterly that in her ungifted hands there had resided the skill to immortalize him.
    She was conscious of a terrible, crushing disappointment, a desire to weep: Mrs Parker’s presence had faded to the back of her thoughts. It was a kind of ironic anticlimax to discover now that Tim’s tragic mouth and wistful, wondering eyes led inward to a nothing, that his spark had been snuffed out of existence long before there could possibly have been tragedy or loss. He was no better than a dog or a cat, which one kept because it was good to look upon and blindly, lovingly faithful. But it could not think, it could never answer intelligently and draw out a shivering response in another questing mind. All the beast did was sit there, smiling and loving. As did Tim, Tim the simpleton. Tricked into eating excrement, he had not vomited it as any thinking being must; he had cried instead, as a dog would have howled, and been cajoled back into smiling again by the prospect of something good to eat.
    Childless, loveless, destitute of any humanizing influence, Mary Horton had no emotional yardstick whereby to measure this new, frightening concept of a mindless Tim. As retarded emotionally as he was intellectually, she did not know that Tim could be loved because of his stunted mental growth, let alone in spite of it. She had thought of him the way Socrates must have thought of Alcibiades, the ageing, unlovely philosopher confronted with a youth of surpassing physical and intellectual beauty. She had imagined herself introducing him to Beethoven and Proust, expanding his careless young mind until it encompassed music and literature and art, until he was as beautiful within as he was without. But he was a simpleton, a poor, silly half-wit.
    They had a pungently evocative way of expressing it, smacking of the earthy callousness so typical of the Australian; they translated intelligence into money, and expressed the one