They are lying in the dark, flank to flank, in the text of memory, talking.
'So: has it been a successful visit?' she asks.
'From whose point of view?'
'Yours.'
'My point of view doesn't matter. I came for Elizabeth Costello's sake. Hers is the point of view that matters. Yes, successful. Successful enough.'
'Do I detect a touch of bitterness?'
'None. I am here to help – that is all.'
'That is very good of you. Do you feel you owe her something?'
'Yes. Filial duty. It is a perfectly natural feeling among humankind.'
She ruffles his hair. 'Don't be cross,' she says.
'I am not.'
She slides down beside him, strokes him. 'Successful enough -what does that mean?' she murmurs. She is not giving up. A price has yet to be paid for this time in her bed, for what counts as a conquest.
'The speech didn't come off. She is disappointed about that. She put a lot of work into it.'
'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.
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.'
