‘So you think I’d prefer to be walled up in that mausoleum—that grave of a house.’

‘What is so preferable to it?’

Before she could circumnavigate, the whole of her future jolted before her. The trains, the city, her search for some grubbing, nasty ill-paid job, a room somewhere, the noise of neighbours, the teeming streets, the overt viciousness of the capital. She saw too the length of days, the black-bullet chambers of the nights. She saw her aloneness, now loneliness, and she saw the vista of age, which she had never contemplated before. She was shiftless, had made no provision. She had lived as if awaiting rescue, her mother’s money, the arrival of the Scarabae.

‘It will be my life.’

‘It’s yours, wherever you are.’

This was fundamentally a fact.

She would have to get up and leave the church. The longer she stayed here the more power he had over her. It wove like a web.

But she was so tired and her heart beat so quickly. She did not want to go. She was glad he was here, his strength beside her on the bench, keeping her safe with his darkness from the blue sanctity of the Virgin.

The red window was a dark rose. The sun had gone in again.

‘How did you come to the town?’ she asked, to prevaricate.

‘I hired a car. How else? Do you think I’d walk all the way, like poor Carlo?’

‘How did you call the car?’

‘That was Carlo. Or Cheta. Someone in the village I imagine gave them use of a phone.’

‘The car didn’t come to the house.’

‘As you know, the road doesn’t go so far.’

‘Why did you come and not the others?’

‘I’m the young one, remember. And I’m the nearest to you in blood.’

‘In blood,’ she said. ‘The blood of the tribe.’

‘Your blood and mine are different.’

‘How?’ she said again.

There was a long interval. She felt him gather himself like a beast on the powerful springs of its limbs. He said at last, ‘Come back and see.’

She said, ‘You want to sleep with me. That’s what it is. You say I’m your daughter, you believe it, but you want to fuck me.’

From the corner of her eye she saw his face turning towards her. As if moved by a key, her own head turned until she confronted him. His face was like a blow. She could hardly breathe.

‘Yes, I want to fuck you. Come back and be fucked by me.’

‘Now you’re speaking the truth, you bastard.’