'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.
'So,' says his mother. 'A clean getaway.'
'I do believe so. Have you got the cheque safe?'
'The cheque, the medal, everything.'
A gap. They are at the airport, at the gate, waiting for the flight to be called that will take them on the first stage of their journey home. Faintly, over their heads, with a crude, driving beat, a version of Eine kleine Nachtmusik is playing. Opposite them sits a woman eating popcorn out of a paper bucket, so fat that her toes barely reach the floor.
'Can I ask you one thing?' he says. 'Why literary history? And why such a grim chapter in literary history? Realism: no one in this place wanted to hear about realism.'
Fiddling in her purse, she makes no reply.
'When I think of realism,' he goes on,'I think of peasants frozen in blocks of ice. I think of Norwegians in smelly underwear. What is your interest in it? And where does Kafka fit in? What has Kafka to do with it all?'
'With what? With smelly underwear?'
'Yes. With smelly underwear. With people picking their noses. You don't write about that kind of thing. Kafka didn't write about it.'
'No, Kafka didn't write about people picking their noses. But Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, half-tamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. Kafka's ape is embedded in life. It is the embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we are embedded, you in me, I in you. That ape is followed through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping. That is where Kafka fits in.'
The fat woman is observing them frankly, her little eyes flicking from the one to the other: the old woman in the raincoat and the man with the bald patch who could be her son, having a fight in their funny accents.
'Well,' he says, 'if what you say is true, it is repulsive. It is zoo-keeping, not writing.'
'What would you prefer? A zoo without keepers, where the animals fall into a trance when you stop looking at them? A zoo of ideas? A gorilla cage with the idea of a gorilla in it, an elephant cage with the idea of elephants in it? Do you know how many kilograms of solid waste an elephant drops in twenty-four hours?
If you want a real elephant cage with real elephants then you need a zookeeper to clean up after them.'
'You are off the point, Mother. And don't get so excited.' He turns to the fat woman. 'We are discussing literature, the claims of realism versus the claims of idealism.'
Without ceasing to chew, the fat woman removes her eyes from them. He thinks of the cud of mashed corn and saliva in her mouth and shudders. Where does it all end?
'There is a difference between cleaning up after animals and watching them while they do their business,' he starts again. 'I am asking about the latter, not the former. Don't animals deserve a private life as much as we do?'