Illywhacker

She had fare welled her daughter to the library. She had seen Herbert Badgery walk away down the esplanade. It was Bridget's day off. She was all by herself and she had, twice, put on her dressing gown and walked through every room of the house and around the wide veranda. There was no one in the house but there were voices. It was not the wireless, which she had disconnected from the wall, nor His Master's Voice.

She retired to bed with voices in her ears. She was having tiny explosions in her head. She detected malice in the voices. Her bed was too far off the floor and made her giddy. She lay in the bed, pale and sweating, while her green eyes viewed the garden from a bed of puffy flesh.

It was then, as one particularly vicious gust of wind shook the branches of the leafless peach tree and bent the fleshy green stalks of the canna lilies until their faces were pressed into the ground, that the naked figure of her daughter sailed slowly through the air above her eyes. She did not seem to merely fall, but to move with dream-like slowness, transcribing an arc while the coppery triangle of her pubic hair, until now protected from her mother's gaze, was exposed quite clearly to its anxious audience.

The figure landed with a thud on the grass beyond the canna lilies.

It said: "Hoof."

Molly McGrath was beset with hot prickling skin and a thundering heart which she tried to still with the pressure of her hand. She saw her daughter stand, and saw her arm hang like a broken wing.

Molly McGrath whimpered and curled her fifty-year old body into a shaking ball beneath the sheets.

When Jack McGrath arrived home, triumphant from his negotiations in Colac, he had great difficulty in persuading his wife to leave her bed. The slightly fixed smile she brought to the table made him feel very uneasy indeed.

38

I find myself, with Phoebe in mid-air, wondering about Mrs Kentwell's nipples, and whether they were ever sucked by man or child, and by God one is tempted to imagine her little black-suited cricket of a brother with his soft child's lips sucking at them, snorting and moaning, and Mrs Kentwell's teeth in a glass on the dresser, but I can't stretch to it, and will content myself with more or less established facts.

Jonathon Oakes, Mrs Kentwell's brother, stole letters.

He was twice arrested, but never charged. He followed the postman like a nervous dog, always at a distance, hiding in the gateways, behind hedges, dipping into unknown letterboxes in hope of news. He also had two post office boxes of his own, to which certain private correspondences were addressed.

It is easy enough to understand why he got himself into this state, because Mrs Kentwell ruled the house in Western Avenue with an ivory-handled paper knife on which was engraved the image of an elephant-headed god from India.

On the day in question, Jonathon Oakes was doing his rounds and Mrs Kentwell was taking tea alone in the drawing room. She poured with a steady hand and placed the cup and saucer to her left. She then slit open each of the morning's letters with her paper knife. She removed the stamps and placed them in a neat pile and then removed the contents of each envelope. Those from her friends in England she placed on the top, those from Assam (there were two) were placed underneath. The two local letters were for her brother but she would, as usual, read them before he did (which would not be until she had dealt with matters in Assam and England). He was far too timid a fellow to protest at this high-handedness, but not such a dull one that he would not take his own compensation.

As Alice Kentwell concentrated on parish problems in a village in Kent, her brother was puffing up the hill from his morning's work, anxious to get home before he was soaked by rain. Phoebe, meanwhile, was flying from the roof.

Mrs Kentwell looked up just in time to witness Phoebe's fall. She stood, immediately, substituted paper knife for umbrella and strode out on to the veranda in the style of a woman about to lay low a marauding snake. She tapped the metal point of the umbrella up and down on the wooden floor. She hissed. The naked figure of Phoebe McGrath ran with its rag of a broken arm, while the umbrella played an angry tattoo.

Mrs Kentwell was not astonished. She was beyond astonishment. Western Avenue, she decided, must stand up and fight if it was to remain anything at all.

She stood on the veranda, a tall straight figure in severe black which had begun as mourning for a dead husband and now seemed to represent a different mourning altogether. Mrs Kentwell mourned the lost standards of English civilization which wilted and died in this society of Irish peasants and jumped-up cockneys.