He glances at what she is writing. In fat letters: (EC thinks) Australian novelist – what a fate! What does the man have running in his veins? Under the words, a line across the page scored savagely into the paper. Then: After the meal they play a game of cards. Use the game to bring out their differences. Blanka wins. A narrow, intense intelligence. Drago no good at cards – too careless, too confident. Marijana smiling, relaxed, proud of her offspring. PR tries to use the game to make friends with Blanka, but she draws back. Her icy disapproval.

A meal and then a game of cards. PR and Blanka. Are they to be a family together after all, he with the ice-water in his veins and the Jokics, so full of blood? What else is Costello plotting in that busy head of hers?

The scribbler sleeps, the character prowls around looking for things to occupy himself with. A joke, but for the fact that there is no one around to catch it.

The scribbler's busy head lies at rest on the pillow. From her chest, if he listens carefully, a faint rattle as the air pumps in, pumps out. He switches off the lamp. He seems to be turning into the kind of person who falls asleep early and wakes up in the dark hours; she would seem to be the kind who stays up late, spinning her fantasies into the night. How could they possibly set up house together?

TWENTY-NINE

'NOT AN UNANNOUNCED visit,' he says. 'I don't like people visiting me unannounced and I don't make unannounced visits myself.'

'Nevertheless,' says Elizabeth Costello, 'break your rule just once. It is so much more spontaneous than writing letters, so much more neighbourly. How else will you get to see your mystical bride on home ground, chez elle?'

His mind goes back to his childhood, to Ballarat in the days before the spread of telephones, when the four of them would get into the Dutchman's blue Renault van on a Sunday afternoon and set off to pay unannounced visits. What tedium! The only visits he remembers with any pleasure were to the smallholding of their stepfather's horticultural friend Andrea Mittiga. It was at the Mittigas', among the spider webs in the cramped space behind the huge water tank, that with Prinny Mittiga he carried out his first breathless explorations into the difference between male and female.

'Come back next Sunday, promise,' Prinny Mittiga would whisper when the visit was over, when, with the raspberry juice drunk and the almond cake eaten, they were getting back into the van, weighed down with tomatoes or plums or oranges from the Mittigas' garden, for the drive back to Wirramunda Avenue. And he would have to shrug. 'Dunno,' he would have to say, his face impassive, though he burned to go on with the lessons.

'Paulie and Prinny were playing doctor again,' announced his sister from their makeshift seat in the back of the van.

'Weren't!' he protested, and dug her in the ribs.

'Allez, les enfants, soyez sages!' admonished his mother. As for the Dutchman, hunched over the wheel, dodging the bumps and holes in the Mittigas' road, he never listened.

The Dutchman drove at bottom speed, in fourth gear. That was his theory of driving, learned in Holland. When they came to hills, the engine of the van would hammer and choke; other cars would queue up behind and hoot. The hooting had no effect on him. 'Toujours pressés, pressés!' he would say in his grating Dutch voice. 'Ils sont fous! Ils gaspillent de l'essence, c'est tout!' He was not going to gaspiller his own essence for anybody. So they would crawl on, into the dark, with no lights, to save the battery.

'Oh la la, ils gaspillent de l'essence!' he and his sister would whisper to each other in the back of the van that smelled of rotten dahlia bulbs, rasping their consonants in the barbaric Dutch way, snorting with laughter, holding back their snorts, while the proper can, the Holdens and Chevrolets and Studebakers, accelerated past. 'Merde, merde, merde!'

The Dutchman had taken to wearing shorts. Nothing could be more embarrassing than the Dutchman in his baggy shorts with his pale legs and his ankle-length check socks among the real Australians. Why did their mother ever marry him? Did she let him do it to her in her bedroom in the dark? When they thought of the Dutchman with his thing doing it to their mother they could explode with shame and outrage.

The Dutchman's Renault van was the only one in Ballarat. He had bought it second-hand from some other Dutchman. Renault, l'auto la plus économique, he would enounce, though in fact there was always something wrong with the van, it was always in the repair shop waiting for some part or other to arrive from Melbourne.

No Renault vans here in Adelaide. No Prinny Mittiga. No playing doctor. Only the real thing. Should they pay a last unannounced visit, for old times' sake? How will the Jokics take it? Will they slam the door in the faces of their surprise visitors; or, coming from the same world, broadly speaking, as the Mittigas, a world gone or going, will they make them welcome and offer them tea and cake and send them home laden with gifts?

'A real expedition,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'The dark continent of Munno Para. I'm sure it will take you out of yourself

'If we visit Munno Para it will not be in order to take me out of myself,' he says. 'There is nothing in me that I need to escape from.'

'And so good of you to invite me along,' continues Elizabeth Costello. 'Would you not prefer to go by yourself?'

Always gay, he thinks. How tiring it must be to live with someone so resolutely gay.

'I would not dream of going without you,' he says.

Years ago he used to cycle through Munno Para on the way to Gawler. Then it was just a few houses dotted around a filling station, with bare scrub behind. Now tracts of new housing stretch as far as the eye can see.

Seven Narrapinga Close: that was the address on the forms he had to sign for Marijana. The taxi drops them in front of a colonial-style house with green lawn around an austere little rectangular Japanese garden: a slab of black marble with water trickling down its face, rushes, grey pebbles. ('So real!' enthuses Elizabeth Costello, getting out of the car. 'So authentic! Would you like me to give you a hand?')

The driver passes him his crutches; he pays the fare.

The door is opened a hand's width; they are inspected suspiciously by a girl with a pale, stolid face and a silver ring in one nostril. Blanka, he presumes, the middle child, the shoplifter, his unwilling protégée. He had half hoped she might be a beauty like her sister. But no, she is not.

'Hello,' he says. 'I am Paul Rayment. This is Mrs Costello. We were hoping to see your mother.'

Without a word the girl disappears. They wait and wait on the doorstep. Nothing happens.

'I reckon we go in,' says Elizabeth Costello at last.

They find themselves in a living-room furnished in white leather, dominated to one side by a large television screen and to the other by a huge abstract painting, a swirl of orange and lime green and yellow against a white field. A fan spins overhead. No dolls in folk costume, no sunsets over the Adriatic, nothing to put one in mind of the old country.

'So real!' says Elizabeth Costello again. 'Who would have thought it!'

He presumes these remarks about the real are in some sense aimed at him; he presumes they are made with irony. What their point might be he cannot guess.

The putative Blanka puts her head around the door. 'She's coming,' she intones, and withdraws.

Marijana has made no effort to pretty herself up. She wears blue jeans and a white cotton top that does nothing for her thick waist. 'So, you bring your secretary,' she says without preliminaries. 'What you want?'