He pauses, waiting for her to rise to the bait. She is silent.

'What I don't understand,' he goes on – he was not angry when he began this tirade, he is not angry now, but there is certainly a pleasure in letting himself go – 'what I don't understand is, seeing that I am so dull, so unresponsive to your schemes, why you persist with me. Drop me, I beseech you, let me get on with my life. Write about this blind Marianna of yours instead. She has more potential than I will ever have. I am not a hero, Mrs Costello. Losing a leg does not qualify one for a dramatic role. Losing a leg is neither tragic nor comic, just unfortunate.'

'Don't be bitter, Paul. Drop you, take up Marianna: maybe I won't, maybe I will. Who knows what one may not be driven to.'

'I am not bitter.'

'Of course you are. I can hear it in your voice. You are bitter, and who can blame you, after all that has happened to you.'

He gathers his crutches. 'I can do without your sympathy,' he says curtly. 'I am going out now. I don't know when I will be back. When you leave, lock the door behind you.'

'If I do leave I will certainly lock the door. But I don't think that is what I will be doing. I can't tell you how much I have been longing for a hot bath. So that is what I will treat myself to, if you don't mind. Such a luxury these days.'

It is not the first time the Costello woman has refused to explain herself. But her latest evasion both irritates and disturbs him. Maybe I won't, maybe I will. Is it as provisional as that, her interest in him? May Marianna, rather than he, turn out to be the chosen one? Setting aside the shadowy portrait session, of which he can truly remember nothing, were their two encounters, the first in the lift, the second on the sofa, episodes in the life-story not of Paul Rayment but of Marianna Popova? Of course there is a sense in which he is a passing character in the life of this Marianna or of anyone else whose path he crosses, just as Marianna and everyone else are passing characters in his. But is he a passing character in a more fundamental sense too: someone on whom the light falls all too briefly before it passes on? Will what passed between himself and Marianna turn out to be simply one passage among many in Marianna's quest for love? Or might the Costello woman be writing two stories at once, stories about characters who suffer a loss (sight in the one case, ambulation in the other) which they must learn to live with; and, as an experiment or even as a kind of professional joke, might she have arranged for their two life-lines to intersect? He has no experience of novelists and how they go about their business, but it sounds not implausible.

In the public library, under A823.914, he finds a whole row of books by Elizabeth Costello: The Fiery Furnace, The House on Eccles Street in several well-thumbed copies, To the Friendly Isles, Tango with Mr Dunbar, The Roots of Time, Mannerly; also a rather severe dark-blue volume with the title A Constant Flame: Intent and Design in the Novels of Elizabeth Costello. He scans the index. No mention of a Marianna or a Marijana; no entry for blindness.

He pages through The House on Eccles Street. Leopold Bloom. Hugh Boylan. Marion Bloom. What is wrong with her? Can she not make up characters of her own?

He replaces the book, takes up The Fiery Furnace, reads at random.

He rolls the plasticine between his palms until it is warm and supple, then pinches it into little animal figures: birds, toads, cats, dogs with pricked-up ears. On the table top he sets the figures in a half-circle, bending their necks back as if howling at the moon, or baying, or croaking.

It is old plasticine, from his last Christmas stocking. The pristine cakes of brick red, leaf green, sky blue have bled into each other by now and become a leaden purple. Why, he wonders – why does the bright grow dull and the dull never bright? What would it need to make the purple fade away and the red and blue and green emerge again, like chicks from a shell?

Why, why? Why does she ask a question and then not give the answer? The answer is simple: the red and the blue and the green will never return because of entropy, which is irreversible and irrevocable and rules the universe. Even a literary person ought to know that, even a lady novelist. From the multifarious to the uniform and never back again. From the perky chick to the old hen dead in the dust.

He flips to the middle of the book. She could not stay with a man who was tired all the time. It was hard enough to hold her own tiredness at bay. She had only to stretch out beside him in the too familiar bed to feel the weariness begin to seep out of him and wash over her in a colourless, odourless, inert tide. She had to escape! Now!

A Marion but no Marianna. No blind folk, as far as he can see, no amputees. He snaps The Fiery Furnace shut. He is not going to expose himself to any more of the colourless, odourless, inert, and depressive gas given off by its pages. How on earth did Elizabeth Costello get to be a popular author, if popular is what she is?

There is a photograph on the jacket: a younger Elizabeth Costello wearing a windbreaker, standing against what appears to be the rigging of a yacht. Her eyes are screwed up against the light, her skin is deeply tanned. A seawoman? Is there such a word, or must a seawoman be a mermaid, as a seahorse, cheval marin, is a fish? Not exactly handsome, but probably better looking in middle age than in youth. Nonetheless, a certain plainness, even blankness, to her. Not his type. Not any man's type, maybe.

Contemporary World Authors, in the reference section of the library, has a brief biography together with the same nautical photograph. Born Melbourne, Australia, 1928. Lengthy residence in Europe. First book 1957. List of awards, prizes. Bibliography but no plot summaries. Twice married. A son and a daughter.

Seventy-two! As old as that! What is she doing, sleeping on park benches? Has her mind begun to ramble? Is she dotty? Might that explain everything? Ought the son and daughter to be brought into the picture? Is it his duty to track them down? Please come at once. Your mother has taken up residence with me, a complete stranger, and refuses to leave. I am at my wits' end. Remove her, commit her, do whatever is called for as long as I am liberated.

He returns to the flat. Costello is not there, but on the coffee table lies her notebook. Quite possibly she has left it out intentionally. If he takes a peek it will be another victory for her. Nevertheless.

She writes in fat black ink, in large free-flowing script, just a few words to a line. He pages to the most recent entry. Dark dark dark, he reads. They all go into the dark, the vacant interlunar spaces.

He leafs back.

Keening over the body, he reads. Davening, the word underlined. Rocking stiffly back and forth at the bedside, her hands over her ears, her eyes wide open, unblinking, as though afraid she might miss the moment when, like a spurt of gas, the soul will leave the body and rise through the layers of air, one after another, to the stratosphere and beyond. Outside the window, sunshine, birdsong, the usual. She is locked into the rhythm of her grief like a long-distance runner. A marathon of grief If no one comes to coax her away she will go on thus all day. Yet not once does she touch him ('him', his body). Why not? The horror of cold flesh? Is horror after all stronger than love? Or perhaps, in among the welter of grief, she has steeled herself not to try to hold him back. She has said her goodbyes, goodbyes are over with. Goodbye: God be with you. And then, over the page: Dark dark dark…

If he reads back far enough, it will no doubt become clearer who the grieving woman is, whose the corpse. But the imp of curiosity seems to be deserting him. He is not sure he wants to know more. Something unseemly about this writing, the fat ink sprawling carelessly over the tramlines; something impious, provocative, uncovering what does not belong in the light of day.