Charles showed the man his snake and the man gave Lenny some money.

After that they went to a cafe in Rowe Street and Lenny asked questions about Charles's mother. It was a cafe for artists and poets and he thought she might be known there.

Lenny went patiently from table to table. He began the same way, exactly, each time. "Excuse me, please, gentlemen, perhaps you can help." Or: "Excuse me, please, sir." Charles put his hands in his pockets and jingled the pennies he had left over from the Post Office. He stared around at the posters on the wall. He tried to appear nonchalant, but he hated it. He wanted to go. He did not know why he was being stared at.

When Lenny arrived at the last table, Charles was already at the door.

"Excuse me, please, sir," said Lenny, "perhaps you can help."

The man was very fat. He had wet red lips and slicked-back hair. He sat sketching in a book no bigger than a matchbox but Charles noted none of this. Neither did he listen to Lenny's speech. He was hot with embarrassment. He was wondering what item of his wardrobe was incorrect, if it was the coat or perhaps the hat.

"Know her?" the artist's voice was high and fluting. "I should say I know her. Casually," he said, "artistically, socially, biblically."

Charles was brought back from the open door to meet the man who knew his mother. The man's hand was soft as a pillow.

"Your mother", he said loudly, "is one of the great characters of Sydney. One of the great hostesses. One of the great free spirits. Go," he said, tearing a page from his tiny sketchbook and giving it to Charles. "Here is her address. See her. Talk to her about your wardrobe."

The whole cafe burst into laughter and Lenny, escorting his young charge out into the hot street, suggested he might like to look at some clothes at Anthony Hordern's.

And that was how Charles presented himself at his mother's doorway looking for all the world (as Mr L., her visitor at the time, remarked) "like the very latest thing in bank clerks".

8

Svelte cats named Swinburne arched their backs above the harbour and rubbed their silver fur against the fluted plaster columns that Annette Davidson had painted chrome yellow and kingfisher blue. The walls were pale peach and the great window uncurtained. On the polished wooden floor were rugs of exotic origin and on a low table (a snazzy thing of glass and chrome) sat a single white bowl with nothing in it but a dying beetle.

Charles, imprisoned in his new suit, pressed his knees together as he perched himself on the tiny chair. His neck burned beneath his collar. His mother had not, as yet, so much as touched his hand. There had been no embrace. No lipstick marked his cheek and every eye was free from tears. She had taken the parcel of rabbit skins but had not even opened it. He tried not to blame her. The fault was with the other visitor, this Mr L. who droned on and on in a voice that Charles, having limited experience of such things, thought must be that of a clergyman, the mistake being made because of its mellifluous nature, its lack of self-consciousness, its easy assurance that its audience would not escape.

Charles balanced his cup and saucer on his knee. He had already finished it but he did not know where to put it and this problem occupied his entire mind. He felt himself observed and wondered what was correct. He was inclined to put the cup and saucer on the glass table and yet it was so ostentatiously bare that he felt it might be wrong to do so and, in any case, the table was glass and would make a loud noise and draw attention to his mistake, if mistake it was. So he continued to hold the saucer on his knee and looked, with what he imagined was polite attention, in the direction of Mr L.

The famous Mr L. sprawled in the settee while remaining, somehow, as neat as a pin. He was boom-voiced, big-nosed, with a sensuous mouth below oddly pinched, slightly disapproving nostrils. His hair was cut fringed like a boy's but was flecked with silver and Charles, attempting to understand the gist of the argument, gathered only that the speaker did not like communists, Jews or proponents of what he called "Bank Clerk Culture". He went on and on about "LCD" and it was twenty years later that an older Charles realized, one insomniac night, that he had been referring to Lowest Common Denominator and that what he was most frightened of was democracy.

But it was to my wife that Charles gave the bulk of his attention, and it was not the polite uncomfortable look he felt obliged to give the self-satisfied Mr L., but something its object felt to be a reprimand. Charles stared, his eyes heavy with love and censure. His mother was, in her mid-thirties, still a young woman. If there was something dark and shadowy around her eyes it suggested no more than the burdens of beauty. Charles's mother was like a gypsy. She was totally beyond imagining. Everthing about her (the painted pillars, the arching cats, the smooth honey colour of her skin) was unlike anything Charles had ever seen. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and its tail fell, a cascade of tiny roses, over one bare shoulder. Her hands were shapely, the fingers long, flexible and expressive. When she spoke a throaty contralto came from lips which hardly seemed to move and yet enunciated her vowels in a manner that her son could only describe as posh; the manner of speaking suggested great passion and great control.

He waited for a pause in the man's speech, imagining that, when it came, his mother would have a chance to explain that he was Charles Badgery, her son, and that they would, of course, wish time together and then the man might look at him less oddly. She had introduced him, with a jerky motion of her hand, as Charles, then held her bare throat and laughed. It was a jarring, silly outburst. Mr L. had blinked and continued with his speech.

The pause, at last, arrived. His mother stood. She took the saucer and cup from his knees and departed, with a murmur, to the kitchen.

Charles, disappointed, stretched himself inside the confines of his suit. He knew that Mr L. was staring at his brown boots and knew that Lenny had been right and that he should have bought shoes, or, if he were intent on boots, at least black boots. Now he was sorry he had been stubborn about the brown boots, but he had always wanted them, although this would be difficult to explain, just as he knew – looking at the man's pale sleepy supercilious eyes – that he could not explain that the suit was only so ill-fitting because he had been in a hurry to get here, that it was to be returned to Anthony Hordern's tomorrow where the legs would be lengthened, the sleeves let down, the backside made more generous.

"Nice day," he said to Mr L., unable to stand his staring.

"Noice day," said Mr L., and Charles could not believe that he was being mocked.

Meanwhile Phoebe clattered around the kitchen in a tizz, not knowing what it was she should do. Afterwards she would regret (particularly when in her cups) not having sent the famous little satyr away and thus removed the problem of having to socialize with two such different personalities at once. Yet both of them had arrived, almost together, and both without warning; she had found herself trapped between what she had once been and what she would like to be.

One always gave boys biscuits. She looked for biscuits but Annette had been up in the night, prowling the house, and had eaten them all. Her son (she found it hard to credit she had ever had one) and not even a damn biscuit to give him. He had smelt (she wrinkled her nose, looking for sugar lumps) distinctly odd. He was like a yokel in a suit. He was odd, repelling, ugly, with frighteningly demanding eyes that she was tempted to label as insolent but could not, of course, because she was his mother. Also there was this: that he was disconcertingly familiar, like photographs of her father as young man, and she felt towards this image a halting pulse of affection that was no weaker than the undertow of her irritation.