She did things in an order that had its own logic. First she attended to Charles. She washed a saucepan and heated up some milk. When she had done this she poured it into a large mug and added a very generous portion of her crime de menthe. She sat him on her knee and spoke to him soothingly. She took off his shoes and socks and played this little pig went to market and when the creme de menthe seemed slow in acting, made him another one. She was, perhaps, too generous, for Charles went to sleep before he had finished his second mug. She put him into bed fully clothed and then changed Sonia.

I heard all this but it did not touch me. I was in my own fever world, composed of whirling aeroplanes, spars, rotary engines, guy ropes, and buildings with splintered towers. Herbert Badgery, who does not cry, whimpered like a child.

As she cleaned out the bedroom she spoke to me, as she removed the bits and pieces Phoebe had left behind (three dresses, a silk scarf, two petticoats, scribbled poems crumpled on the floor, a chamber-pot-unemptied – a vase, lipsticks, the dress she had been married in) she talked to me.

"You were a doormat, poor man. Don't mind, don't worry. God will have mercy on you. Molly is here. Dearie me, look at it." She hurled things from the room as she spoke, bustling around. She tore sheets from the bed, removed prints from the wall. "You'll see," she said. "You'll see. Good riddance. Bad rubbish. Little Miss Uppity, little Miss Spoiled."

She carried the wreckage from the room down to the river, squelching through river mud in high heels, and threw what she had not dropped into the oily waters.

She removed her muddy shoes and stockings outside the door and threw these, as if they too might be tainted, into the ashcan on the doorstop. Then she lit the wood stove and stacked its firebox full. She riddled the grate. She washed the dishes. She did her work with a passion, crashing dishes and saucepans. "They'll die," she said, "you'll see. You're a good man. Too good, too kind. Built her a house", she said, "with his own hands. Fed and clothed, the little riddance, the little uppity."

Thus Molly set upon her cure. First the clean house. "Thought I was silly," she said, mopping the oilskin table. "Looked down at me. Laughed."

She came to me then to attend to my wounds, smelling of disinfectant and Velvet soap. My mind was not right. I blubbered like a baby, howled and hugged her, raged like a warrior, giggled like a girl. She persuaded me into the bed. I sat up and talked like an adult. I told her I had been fired and then, in the middle of this, a great black blind came down over my head and I wanted to bang my head against the wall until it broke.

I ran out to the birdcages and released them. I shooed them out, as if this magic might bring back my wife. I wrung the neck of a parrot that would not leave. Not just wrung its neck, but pulled its head off. Molly got me back to bed and washed the blood and feathers from my hands. She got me undressed. I had no vanity or modesty. She got me into pyjamas and sat by my bed sponging my face with a warm wet towel.

"It's a death," she said. "That's what it is, a death. Grieve. You can howl. I howled when Jack died, howled and howled. She is dead", she said, "and gone. Poor man, you were a doormat. Mud on you, mud from her feet. Miss High-and-Mighty, and left her babies."

I woke up in a dark room and plunged back into the pit. Molly sat in the kitchen. She had the firebox door open. I could see the flames. She came in, dressing gown pink, soft fluffy slippers, her hair brushed out.

She sat on my bed and held me.

I am sure, to this day, that she did not plan what happened. To plan such a thing would have been repugnant to her. Had someone suggested she do such a thing she would have been outraged. Perhaps I did it. I do not know. But somewhere between my search for comfort and her desperate desire to provide it, my head found its way to her breasts. Not young girl's breasts, dear Leah, not firm, pert, but large, and pendulous. Don't wrinkle up your little puritan's face and turn away. Face me. Look at me while I tell you that I, Herbert Badgery, took a breast in my mouth like a child, while the north wind turned to rock the little house of my disgrace. The dark and the wind isolated us from reality, from her god even, from the priest and the dusty confessional, and Molly was the angel of sleep, claimed that right, that role, out loud. "To make him sleep," she told her fierce and vengeful god, and I hope her god heard her. I hope he saw her discard her belt, heard it clunk to the floor, the slippers flop, the gown shed like a whisper; saw her body, the fleshy arms, the red corset marks on her generous stomach, the appendix scar, the blue veins on her thighs, the dimples of her sagging backside. Hope he saw them and found them beautiful.

"In it goes," she said, "poor baby."

"Molly, Molly, what's happening?"

"Shush, shush, slow and easy. Mama's got you, slow and easy."

No, my darling Leah, I will not plead normality and go rifling through my bureau to pull out birth certificates to show she was only six years older than I was. For making it normal would miss the point. We did not think it normal, either of us, it was abnormal, extraordinary, wonderful, embarrassing, and it did not happen just once, but merely raised the curtain on a time of my life when I was not the me I thought I was, and she was not the she she thought she was.

I will tell you, my mother-in-law and I became lovers, but there was never in it anything as casual as the life of lovers, no waking together, no dropping of clothes on floors and piling into bed. There were firm rituals (as set as the Latin incantations by which she reached her god) that must be gone through. There were lines that must be said which soon would assume the form, not of words at all, but odd-shaped keys to doors that were otherwise locked tight.

Our mornings were as proper as you would expect, both waking on our own beds. The demands of life ensured that breakfast would be made, fires lit, Molly's car be started, a formal but friendly goodbye be given while she left for work.

I stayed at home and did not go into a world where I was a fool, a cuckold, a man without a job or a wife. I made myself into a small man and sat in the sun with a blanket over my knees with no more future than that suggested by the peas I slowly shelled for dinner.

When I did finally venture out into the world with a new Dodge truck I was as shaky and nervous as any invalid, not surprised to find myself unwanted by employers. I read no newspapers and so made no connection between my misfortune and that of others.

But this is leaping ahead a little and there is more skin, my darling, to regale you with. And why is your nose so wrinkled while your eyes are so bright?

47

Oh, how pleasant it is for a man to be looked after, and if I have made myself a pitiful thing, a broken spirit, an invalid with no dreams left, I do not take it back but present to you the other side of the grubby coin: that year with Molly in which I did not need to strive, to impress, to make a sale, to do anything other than sit in the sun or by the fire. Here I had the childhood I had never had, was petted, cosseted, indulged, and if there was a dark wound in my soul, if the yellow dusk and the white smoke from the tannery sometimes filled me with melancholy as I waited for my mother-in-law's car headlights bumping over the paddock, flickering like motor-cycle lights on the rough land, then that, I am sure, is the natural order of childhoods: that certain lights produce sadness, that the night be full of threatening shapes, and the sight of ants crawling along a windowsill is enough to induce an inexplicable terror.

My children ran wild, with dirty faces and, often as not, empty bellies.