All the while, ‘Wait, wait,’ shrieked Iris. ‘I’m falling.’

‘You’re fine. It’s OK.’

She was wearing nylon knee-highs. ‘These stockings are slipping.’ Again she screamed, ‘I’m falling.’

‘I’ll walk you to your chair, Ma. Just hang on a sec.’

Tom checked the wheels on her walker; ran the facecloth over them.

‘Have you washed your hands?’ he asked; and caught, again, the echo of childhood.

‘Yes, yes.’

Iris let herself be steered along the passage to the living room. Her chair waited in front of the TV. She lowered herself onto it by degrees, with creaks and sighs. When she looked up she saw a face that had slipped from its bones in the grey depths of the screen. It was a moment before she recognised her refl ection.

She said, ‘Give me my bag.’

While she was foraging in it, Tom went into his bathroom. He washed his hands, thinking that it was the first time he had heard the word shit from his mother. It was out of place in the realm of the ladylike, which admitted only big job, kakka, number two.

When he returned to her, Iris was checking her lipstick in a hand mirror: pressing her lips together, pushing them out. About to snap her bag shut, she said, ‘Better see that I’ve got my key.’

‘You have. You checked before lunch, remember?’

Iris went on pulling pills, spectacle case, tissues, rosary from her bag. ‘My God, what’ll happen if it’s lost?’

‘It’s not lost, Ma. How could it be?’

‘But how will I get in?’ Her voice had risen. She was close to tears.

‘Your key can’t possibly be lost. Think about it. If it is, I’ve got a spare. And so has Audrey.’

‘What if she’s not there?’

Tom felt he might scream with her. He said, ‘Ma, I’ll be driving you home. I’ve got a key. And in any-’

‘Ah. Found it.’ Her agitation subsided on the instant.‘Thank God for that.’ Then she said, ‘These tissues are all wrong now.’ She began refolding them, all her attention concentrated on the flimsy pink squares.

Tom was reminded of his own intense involvement, as a child, with his immediate surroundings. A segment of a forgotten day came back to him: he was sucking up a fi zzy orange drink through a straw, sometimes letting the liquid in the anodised metal tumbler subside before it reached his mouth. While this was going on, the sun moved in and out of clouds, and there was the pleasure of light alternating with shade on the side of his face.

He handed his mother a small, silver-capped bottle.

‘What’s this?’

‘ Cologne.’

‘What for?’

‘You might like to put some on.’

‘What?’

‘Put some on!’

Deafness, conducive to imperatives, discouraged nuance. Tom said, ‘How about a cup of tea?’

Iris, absorbed in perfuming herself, ignored him.

‘Tea!’ he bellowed.

A tray held a milk jug and sugar bowl, a white cup, a pastry cloud on a blue-glazed plate. The mother inspected these objects. The son braced himself for criticism.

Praise was rare on Iris’s tongue. When Tom, as a child, presented her with his school report, she would scan it for deficiencies. ‘What is this 87% in Geography? Why are you second this term?’

She had her father’s sixth sense for inadequacy. No servant had lasted long in the de Souza household: Sebastian reached automatically for the smudged tumbler on the credenza, Iris’s finger trailed over the undusted ledge. The dhobi’s fortnightly bundle of spotless laundry unfailingly lacked a sock or a pillowcase.

But her son overrode Iris’s instinct for shortfalls. In the last month of her confinement, gripped by premonition, she had prayed daily that the child would be spared Arthur’s nose. Then he arrived, furiously protesting the breach of their union. Iris saw a slimy, dark, curiously elongated organism that was whisked from her at once. She began to cry, because she had beheld perfection.

Her son was healthy; he grew up handsome and clever. Of course she feared for him. There was the evil eye. If a neighbour remarked that the child was looking well, Iris assured her at once that he was sickly. When Arthur heaped praise on the boy, she cut him short and crossed her fingers behind her back. Calamities, like moths, are drawn to the light. To speak glowingly of Tommy was to risk the wrong sort of attention. Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light, piped the massed infants of St Stephen’s; and Iris, radiating pride in the front pew, thought how men, even the best intentioned, so often missed the point.

It became her habit to call attention to her son’s limitations. Disparagement might mean the opposite of what it says; it might be a form of love. Only, it is difficult for the disparaged to construe it as such. How was Tom to distinguish between the flaws his mother discovered in his best efforts and her fault-finding with the world? ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Arthur would say; but like so much Arthur said, it was easily discounted.

When Tom was older, he might have been capable of unravelling Iris’s ruse; but if so, he would have scorned it. ‘It’s superstition, Ma! How can you be so irrational?’ Thus he greeted the pinch of salt his mother flung over her shoulder, the pin over which she bent stiffly in the street. It never occurred to Tom that superstition might be an expression of humility: an admission that knowledge is limited and possibility infi nite. Rooted in the desire to free his mother from unreasoning fear, his loving impulse flowered as criticism. ‘Ma, that’s totally dumb!’ Of course Iris, recognising her own strategy at work in her son, paid no attention to his belittling. Besides, the devil lurked in spilled salt. Besides, See a pin and let it lie, / All the day you’ll have to cry.

And so: the tray, the milk and sugar, golden tea in a cup, a miniature éclair on a blue plate.

Tom’s breath caught in anticipation.

‘That looks absolutely nice,’ said Iris.

Tom assembled gloves, lavatory brush, disinfectant, cream cleanser, water, mop, wipes, what was left of the roll of paper.

Afterwards, while the floor was drying, he took his nailbrush and Iris’s shoes into the yard. There he turned on the hose and scrubbed dark, gummy excrement from their soles, using a twig to gouge it free where necessary.

He washed his hands again and soaped his arms all the way to the elbow. There was the tang of lemon verbena. And behind it, the fragrance of faeces.

It went on and went on, like a terrible dream. Floor, bowl, seat, lavatory brush, paper-holder, washbasin were spotless.

The soiled towel had been replaced with a fresh one. His nails gleamed, but to be safe he dug them into the wedge of soap. With his hand on the tap, he saw a few brown grains stuck to the chrome.

At the back of the deepest drawer in Tom’s desk was an object unlike any other he owned. In the Loxleys’ last week in India, he had spied a small, lilac-bound book among the rubbish in a wicker wastebasket. It was his mother’s old autograph album. He retrieved it straight away and secreted it under three starched white shirts in his suitcase.

It was an unfathomable action. For weeks Tom had watched the unwitting objects that had furnished his life-dessert spoons, mattresses, a treadle sewing machine, a carom board- sold or given away. This dismantling of the past, which had seemed so solid and was now shown to be as flimsy as a painted backdrop, had caused him no grief. He had known he was witnessing something at once terminal and cathartic. He met it with the grave exhilaration that was its due.

Yet there was his baffling rescue of the autograph album. As a small child he had turned its pastel pages carefully, drawn by their delicate, water-ice hues. Later, when he had learned to decipher handwriting, he read the verses the album contained; but only as he read everything that came his way. Years had passed since he had troubled to look inside it. Autograph albums were a girlish amusement. Twelve-year-old Tom Loxley held them in scorn.