He was reading the lectureship application sent in by a recent DPhil from Bristol, who had appended a strenuous article on Edith Wharton to her CV. She had only one refereed publication and minimal teaching experience. But she was the student of a famous James scholar, a woman who wielded academic power. Tom thought of his book; of the weight the Englishwoman’s endorsement would carry with publishers.

After a while he realised he had stopped reading and was constructing a tale. ‘Nelly and I go looking for him whenever we go up there. Oh, I know it’s hopeless now. Not knowing what happened is the worst thing. But I tell myself he was doing what he loved best, following a scent.’

This fiction, queasy with the play of desire and disloyalty, was interrupted by a specific memory: the dog, plumed tail held high, absorbed in tracking a moth around the room, breathing on it.

Internal windows in Tom’s study gave onto a narrow sunroom, where a long, gridded window overlooked the yard. The effect, when he looked up from his desk, was of a bright, pictorial glow ruled with black; a Mondrian fashioned from iron and light. The impression of clean modernity carried through to his study, a geometric, dustless space. Here books were ranked like soldiers on dark metal shelving that rose against pale walls. Lamps leaned at acute angles. Surfaces gleamed. There was a rug from Isfahan on the boarded floor, its pink and slaty blues smudged with white, for naturally the dog was in the habit of singling out its sumptuousness, and Tom could not at present bring himself to rid the room of that animal residue.

He was, in any case, habitually tolerant of traces of the dog’s passing, of grit, earth, fur, a warm, sweetish reek. His forbearance had called forth the light mockery of his wife; for the streak of dried sauce Karen left on a kitchen counter or the pink-stained toothpaste she neglected to swill from the washbasin were tiny barbs on which Tom’s temper quickly unravelled.

His disgust was disproportionate, its blossoming rooted in childhood. In scrubbed Australia children know the causal chain that links dirt and disease as a cautionary tale. In India, the word was made flesh. Skin peeled, or flared with ominous pigmentations; burst to reveal its satiny red lining shot through with gold. Distended or racked bodies were everywhere on public view. Even a child’s eye could perceive the fatal, webbed relation between the flies sipping at a sore and the black crust that crawled over sweetmeats on a stall.

Therefore years later Tom recoiled from dishes accumulating in the sink; from the clotted handkerchief his fi ngers encountered under a pillow.

Around the time of his thirtieth birthday, he grew conscious that the narrowing of his life had begun. Karen and he still took pleasure in each other’s company, sought it in each other’s flesh. They were working hard, starting to make money. But from time to time there would swim into Tom’s mind a page from a book he had owned when very young. Within the book, paper tabs could be pulled or rotated to bring illustrations to life. One of them had stirred the child’s imagination with special pungency. It showed a cottage with two front doors set in a garden filled with flowers and birds. A tab on the left flipped open the corresponding door and pushed out an apple-cheeked boy in blue breeches; the right-hand tab produced a girl in a gingham pinafore.

Again and again, the child Tom trundled out the boy, the girl; singly, together. They were Boo and Baby. He conducted complicated conversations with them. Sometimes he punished one or the other, Boo’s door or Baby’s remaining shut all day. He would stroke the relevant tab, shift it a fraction; then withdraw his hand. The satisfaction he knew at such moments was intense.

But in years to come the page struck Tom as a terrible foreshadowing of his ordered existence. Each day was a sum with a red tick beside it. Intellectual curiosity, love’s huge anarchy: he had succeeded in taming even these. There he came, the bright-eyed boy, one arm raised in merry greeting; the plaything of a shuttling machinery.

Into these broodings arrived the dog.

The dog hid blood-threaded bones down the side of a couch. He tore open a pillow and clawed the paint from a door. He sprang into a neighbour’s ornamental pond and swallowed a goldfish. There was his ecstatic fondness for rolling in fi lth.

He would dig in his ear with a hind foot; extract the paw and lick it. Now and then while snuffling along a footpath he would hastily eat a turd. His desires were beastly. At his most docile, he remained an emissary from a kingdom with enigmatic laws.

And slowly, slowly it dawned on Tom that the animal acquired to please his wife spoke to a need that was his alone. All giving is shot with ambiguity, directed at multiple and paradoxical ends. A gift might exceed thought and desire. It might be epiphanic.

The dog was handsome, sweet-natured. It was easy to love such a creature. Nevertheless, his core was wild. In accommodating that unruliness, Tom’s life flowed in a broader vein.

Late for work while the dog danced out of reach, followed his own imperatives through mud and weeds, Tom was conscious of anger ticking in him like time. It didn’t preclude elation. For fleet minutes, a rage for control had been outfoxed.

Matted fur drifted against skirting boards. Even as he worked a soft grey clump from the bristles of a dustbrush, Sucks to you, Boo, thought Tom.

It was not the end of disgust, which is an aversion to anything that reminds us we are animals. But the dog unleashed in Tom a kind of grace; a kind of beastliness.

Sundays were ritualistic. Morning tea, lunch, a video, afternoon tea; then Tom would return his mother to Audrey.

He was transferring sugar from packet to bowl that afternoon when he became aware of an unambiguous organic stench.

He lived in what had once been a capacious family house, one that had offered pleasure to the eye in a way that was commonplace before architects discovered their talent for brutality. Later two dentists had run their practice on the ground floor. Later still, the building had served as a rooming house. Finally, it had been converted into flats. This last rearrangement had taken a lavatory situated outside the back door of the original house and placed it between Tom’s laundry and sunroom with doors to both. The old-fashioned seat there, marginally higher than the one in the renovated ensuite, was preferred by Iris.

Tom hovered in the sunroom. Rain had pooled, trembling, in the lower corners of the windowpanes. He raised his voice: ‘Ma, are you OK?’

‘Yes, yes.’

He heard her moving about. Water gushed. A ripeness filled his nostrils.

After some minutes, she called, ‘Tommy?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you come?’

On the floor near the seat lay part of a large turd; the rest had been tracked over the linoleum. Faeces and wadded paper clung to the sides of the lavatory bowl. The seat, imperfectly wiped, showed pale brown whorls.

Tom’s first thought was of a child: of a monstrous infant soiling its pen.

His mother said, ‘There is a piece of shit.’

She said, ‘Don’t be angry, Tommy. I can’t pick it up.’

She was clinging to the edge of the basin; because the handles of her walker were soiled, realised Tom. He reached around her, ran the tap over a facecloth, used it to wipe the handles clean.

It was difficult to manoeuvre in the constricted space. With infinite care, he led his mother to the door, trying, with his hands over hers, to steer the walker clear of the fi lth; trying also to avoid stepping in it.

He was murmuring, ‘It’s OK, don’t worry, it’s OK.’

In the laundry he kneeled and, one at a time, lifted Iris’s heels and eased off her ballet slippers. For a small woman, she had broad feet; he had to tug to dislodge the shoes.