There is no absolute way of photographing brains, Ornella. Sometimes brains are visible in a person’s eyes—a certain spark or gleam of vitality or quickness. Even in the most studiously composed images, Mother’s brains definitely got in the way of beauty. There was a crease in her brow long before the age at which creases naturally appear.

Veda Gray, says Julia, had the ambition but not the resources to further it. She had the intelligence but not the requisite belief in her intelligence. She had the talent, but not the right temperament. She had the talent (so says Julia) but not the right sex. Emily Platz says: ‘Veda Gray lived in inimical times.’

TYPES OF LOVE

Mother was working on a book. Papa told me this in a hushed voice so I knew to creep around her, not to disturb her. I didn’t like this working on a book: it made Mother even less comprehensible to me. This book sent me away to the Parishes, where the toys were good but the floor was cold and the food had no sugar or salt. This book made Mother a hunched-over shape at a desk with smoke rising from her elbow. She took long sleeps. She smelt sweet and sticky in that way I had become accustomed to, and she would switch abruptly from ignoring me to shooing me out of the room to gathering me up and kissing me and saying: ‘Poor poor Owen! Poor darling O-yo, Mummy’s such a bad old Mummy …’ And then she might drop me and become despondent again.

How could I know what to be, with a mother like that?

If I interrupted at the wrong time, saying I was hungry, she could be joyous—‘Darling O-yo! Let Mummy feed her darling O-yo!’—or murderous, thrusting a hastily peeled banana at me as though the act of getting up and collecting it from the fruit bowl had extinguished an irretrievable moment. I slunk away. I talked to my Matchbox cars and drove them over cliffs. I made her pictures of things she might like, like red flowers and purple dresses on pretty women with yellow hair.

Sometimes she talked to me like a grown-up: ‘I don’t know why I force myself to sit here like this, Owen, at my desk, trying to squeeze out words. I’d be better off in a typing pool.’ ‘Mummy’s problem is concentration. Professionals damn well shut out the world and they concentrate. Yes, that’s it …’ Or sometimes she’d say, ‘Oh bugger it’ and she’d pack a picnic and we’d eat it in the front garden and I would explore behind the ferns, and peel the bark off the paperbark tree in the street, thinking she was watching me all the time, until I’d notice she was scribbling in her little book, after all, and would become cross with me when I stubbed my toe.