'There was nothing wrong with the speech in itself. But the title was not appropriate. And she should not have relied on Kafka for her illustrations. There are better texts.'

'There are?'

'Yes, better, more suitable. This is America, the 1990s. People don't want to hear the Kafka thing yet again.'

'What do they want to hear?'

She shrugs. 'Something more personal. It doesn't have to be intimate. But audiences no longer react well to heavy historical self-ironization. They might at a pinch accept it from a man, but not from a woman. A woman doesn't need to wear all that armour.'

'And a man does?'

'You tell me. If it is a problem, it is a male problem. We didn't give the award to a man.'

'Have you considered the possibility that my mother may have got beyond the man-woman thing? That she may have explored it as far as it goes, and is now after bigger game?'

'Such as?'

The hand that has been stroking him pauses. The moment is important, he can feel it. She is waiting for his answer, for the privileged access he promises. He too can feel the thrill of the moment, electric, reckless.

'Such as measuring herself against the illustrious dead. Such as paying tribute to the powers that animate her. For instance.'

'Is that what she says?'

'Don't you think that that is what she has been doing all her life: measuring herself against the masters? Does no one in your profession recognize it?'

He should not be speaking like this. He should be keeping out of his mother's business. He is in this stranger's bed not for his bonny blue eyes but because he is his mother's son. Yet here he is spilling the beans like a nincompoop! This must be how spy-women work. Nothing subtle to it. The man is seduced not because he has a will to resist that is cleverly overcome, but because being seduced is a pleasure in itself. One yields for the sake of yielding.

He wakes once during the night, overwhelmed with sadness, such deep sadness that he could cry. Lightly he touches the naked shoulder of the woman beside him, but she does not respond. He runs the hand down her body: breast, flank, hip, thigh, knee. Handsome in every detail, no doubt about that, but in a blank way that no longer moves him.

He has a vision of his mother in her big double bed, crouched, her knees drawn up, her back bared. Out of her back, out of the waxy, old person's flesh, protrude three needles: not the tiny needles of the acupuncturist or the voodoo doctor but thick, grey needles, steel or plastic: knitting needles. The needles have not killed her, there is no need to worry about that, she breathes regularly in her sleep. Nevertheless, she lies impaled.

Who has done it? Who would have done it?

Such loneliness, he thinks, hovering in spirit over the old woman in the bare room. His heart is breaking; sadness pours down like a grey waterfall behind his eyes. He should never have come here, to room 13 whatever it is. A wrong move. He ought to get up at once, steal out. But he does not. Why? Because he does not want to be alone. And because he wants to sleep. Sleep, he thinks, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. What an extraordinary way of putting it! Not all the monkeys in the world picking away at typewriters all their lives would come up with those words in that arrangement. Out of the dark emerging, out of nowhere: first not there, then there, like a newborn child, heart working, brain working, all the processes of that intricate electrochemical labyrinth working. A miracle. He closes his eyes.

A gap.

She, Susan Moebius, is already there when he comes down for breakfast. She is wearing white, she looks rested and content. He joins her.

From her purse she takes something and lays it on the table: his watch. 'It is three hours out,' she says.

'Not three,' he says. 'Fifteen. Canberra time.'

Her eyes rest on his, or his on hers. Green-flecked. He feels a tug. An unexplored continent, from which he is about to part! A pang, a tiny pang of loss, shoots through him. Pain not without pleasure, like certain grades of toothache. He can conceive of something quite serious with this woman, whom he will probably not see again.

'I know what you are thinking,' she says. 'You are thinking we won't see each other again. You are thinking, A wasted investment!

'What else do you know?'

'You think I have been using you. You think I have been trying to reach your mother through you.'

She is smiling. No fool. A capable player.

'Yes,' he says. 'No.' He draws a deep breath. 'I will tell you what I really think. I think you are baffled, even if you won't admit it, by the mystery of the divine in the human. You know there is something special about my mother – that is what draws you to her – yet when you meet her she turns out to be just an ordinary old woman. You can't square the two. You want an explanation. You want a clue, a sign, if not from her then from me. That is what is going on. It's all right, I don't mind.'

Strange words to be speaking over breakfast, over coffee and toast. He did not know he had them in him.

'You really are her son, aren't you. Do you write too?'

'You mean, am I touched by the god? No. But yes, I am her son. Not a foundling, not an adoptee. Out of her very body I came, caterwauling.'

'And you have a sister.'

'A half-sister, from the same place. The real thing, both of us. Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood.'

'And you have never married.'

'Wrong. Married and unmarried. What about you?'

'I have a husband. A husband, a child, a happy marriage.'

'That's good then.'

There is nothing more to be said.

'Will I have a chance to say goodbye to your mother?'

'You can catch her before the television interview. At ten, in the ballroom.'

A gap.

The television people have chosen the ballroom because of the red velvet drapes. In front of the drapes they have set up a rather ornate chair for his mother, and a plainer chair for the woman who will engage with her. Susan, when she comes, has to cross the whole length of the room. She is ready to travel; she has a calf-leather satchel over her shoulder; her stride is easy, confident. Again, lightly, like the brush of a feather, comes a pang, the pang of forthcoming loss.

'It has been a great honour to get to know you, Mrs Costello,' Susan says, taking his mother's hand.

' Elizabeth,' says his mother. 'Excuse the throne.'

' Elizabeth.'

'I want to give you this,' says Susan, and from her satchel produces a book. The cover shows a woman wearing antique Grecian costume, holding a scroll. Reclaiming a History: Women and Memory, says the title. Susan Kaye Moebius.

'Thank you, I look forward to reading it,' says his mother.

He stays for the interview, sitting in a corner, watching as his mother transforms herself into the person television wants her to be. All the quaintnesses she refused to deliver last night are allowed to come out: pungent turns of speech, stories of childhood in the Australian outback ('You have to realize how vast Australia is. We are only fleas on Australia's backside, we late settlers'), stories about the film world, about actors and actresses she has crossed paths with, about the adaptations of her books and what she thinks of them ('Film is a simplifying medium. That is its nature; you may as well learn to accept it. It works in broad strokes'). Followed by a glance at the contemporary world ('It does my heart good to see so many strong young women around who know what they want'). Even bird-watching gets a mention.

After the interview Susan Moebius's book almost gets left behind. He is the one who picks it up from under the chair.

'I wish people wouldn't give one books,' she murmurs. 'Where am I going to find space for it?'

'I have space.'

'Then you take it. Keep it. You're the one she was really after, not me.'

He reads the inscription: To Elizabeth Costello, with gratitude and admiration. 'Me?' he says. 'I don't think so. I was just' – his voice barely falters – 'a pawn in the game. You are the one she loves and hates.'

He barely falters; but the word that first came to mind was not pawn, it was clipping. A toenail clipping, that one steals and wraps in a tissue and takes away, for one's own purposes.

His mother does not reply. But she does give him a smile, a quick, sudden smile of – he cannot see it in any other way – triumph.

Their duties in Williamstown are over. The television crew are packing up. In half an hour a taxi will take them to the airport. She has won, more or less. On foreign turf too. An away win. She can come home with her true self safe, leaving behind an image, false, like all images.

What is the truth of his mother? He does not know, and at the deepest level does not want to know. He is here simply to protect her, to bar the way against the relic-hunters and the contu-melists and the sentimental pilgrims. He has opinions of his own, but he will not speak them. This woman, he would say if he were to speak, whose words you hang on as if she were the sibyl, is the same woman who, forty years ago, hid day after day in her bedsitter in Hampstead, crying to herself, crawling out in the evenings into the foggy streets to buy the fish and chips on which she lived, falling asleep in her clothes. She is the same woman who later stormed around the house in Melbourne, hair flying in all directions, screaming at her children, 'You are killing me! You are tearing the flesh from my body!' (He lay in the dark with his sister afterwards, comforting her while she sobbed; he was seven; it was his first taste of fathering.) This is the secret world of the oracle. How can you hope to understand her before you know what she is really like?

He does not hate his mother. (As he thinks these words, other words echo at the back of his mind: the words of one of William Faulkner's characters insisting with mad repetitiveness that he does not hate the South. Who is the character?) Quite the contrary. If he hated her he would long ago have put the greatest possible distance between the two of them. He does not hate her. He serves at her shrine, cleaning up after the turmoil of the holy day, sweeping up the petals, collecting the offerings, putting the widows' mites together, ready to bank. He may not share in the frenzy, but he worships too.

A mouthpiece for the divine. But sibyl is not the right word for her. Nor is oracle. Too Greco-Roman. His mother is not in the Greco-Roman mould. Tibet or India more like it: a god incarnated in a child, wheeled from village to village to be applauded, venerated.

Then they are in the taxi, driving through streets that already have the air of streets about to be forgotten.