'OK, now relax,' says Marijana. 'Good. Now on front side.'

She hitches up her dress and straddles him. On the radio, which sent him to sleep in the first place and which has not been switched off, a man is talking about the Korean car industry. Figures are up, figures are down. Marijana's hands slip under his shirt, her thumbs find a knot of pain high in the buttock and begin to caress it away. Thank you, God, he thinks. And thank God the Costello woman is not here to observe and comment.

'Sto to radis, mama?'

He opens his eyes with a start. From an arm's length away Ljuba is staring straight at him. There is no mistaking the severity of that gaze. Here he is, old and ugly and hairy and half naked and no doubt to her angelic nostrils smelly, wrestling with her mother, the two of them trapped in a posture that does not even have the repulsive majesty of intercourse.

For a moment, when the child spoke, he could feel Marijana freeze. Now she picks up the rhythm of the massage again. 'Mr Rayment has pain,' she says. 'Mama is nurse, remember?'

'That will be enough for today, Marijana,' he says, hastening to cover himself. 'Thank you.'

Marijana clambers off the bed, slips on her sandals, takes Ljuba by the hand. 'Don't suck thumb,' she says. 'Is ugly. OK, Mr Rayment. Maybe pain go away now.'

IT IS SATURDAY. Marijana has closeted herself in the study with Drago; the two are having what sounds very much like a row. Her voice, rapid and insistent, rises every now and again above her son's, beating it down.

Ljuba is on the stairway, hopping up and down the stairs, making a clatter.

'Ljuba!' he calls. 'Come and have some yoghurt!' The child ignores him.

Marijana emerges from the study. 'Is OK I leave Ljuba here? She stay with Drago. No trouble. I come back later and fetch her.'

He had been hoping to receive from Marijana a little more of what he pays her to provide, perhaps even another session of body-care; but evidently that will not be forthcoming. Twice a month, like clockwork, a little mechanism at the bank switches money from the Rayment account to the Jokic account. In return for his money, in return for the home from home that he provides for Drago, he receives – what? A shopping service, more and more irregular; infrequent ministrations of a health-professional kind. A not unadvantageous bargain, from Marijana's point of view. But then, as the Costello woman keeps telling him, if he wants to be a father he had better find out about fatherhood as it really is, fatherhood of the non-mystical kind.

Marijana has barely gone off when there are voices from the stairwell and Ljuba reappears with the Costello woman and Drago's friend Shaun in tow, Shaun clad today in a slack T-shirt and shorts down to his calves.

'Hello, Paul,' says the Costello woman. 'I hope you don't mind us breezing in. Ljuba darling, tell Drago that Shaun is here.'

He and she are alone for a moment, the two seniors.

'Not quite in Drago's class, is he, our friend Shaun,' says Costello. 'But that is how gods and angels seem to be: they choose the most distressingly ordinary mortals to consort with.'

He is silent.

'There is a story I keep meaning to tell, that I think will amuse you,' she continues. 'It comes from the distant past, from the time of my youth. One of the boys on our street was very much like Drago. Same dark eyes, same long eyelashes, same not quite human good looks. I was smitten with him. I must have been fourteen at the time, he a little older. I still used to pray in those days. "God," I would say, "let him bestow on me just one of his smiles and I will be yours forever."'

'And?'

'God paid no attention. Nor did the boy. My maiden longings were never requited. So, alas, I never became a child of God. The last I heard of Mr Eyelashes, he was married and had moved to the Gold Coast, where he was making a killing in real estate.'

'So is it all a lie then: Whom the gods love die young?'

'I fear so. I fear the gods no longer have time for us, whether to love us on the one hand or to punish us on the other. They have troubles enough in their own gated community.'

'No time even for Drago Jokic? Is that the moral of your story?'

'No time even for Drago Jokic. Drago is on his own.'

'Like the rest of us.'

'Like the rest of us. He can relax. No spectacular doom hangs over his head. He can be sailor or soldier or tinker or tailor, as he chooses. He can even go into real estate.'

It is the first exchange that he and the Costello woman have had that he would call cordial, even amiable. For once they are on the same side: two old folk ganging up on youth.

Might that be the real explanation for why the woman has descended on him out of nowhere: not to write him into a book but to induct him into the company of the aged? Might the whole Jokic affair, with his ill-considered and to this point fruitless passion for Mrs Jokic at its centre, be nothing in the end but a complicated rite of passage through which Elizabeth Costello has been sent to guide him? He had thought Wayne Blight was the angel assigned to his case; but perhaps they all work together, she and Wayne and Drago.

Drago pokes his head around the door. 'Can Shaun and me look at your cameras, Mr Rayment?'

'Yes. But take care, and put them back in their cases when you have finished.'

'Drago is interested in photography?' murmurs Elizabeth Costello.

'In cameras. He has never seen anything like mine. He knows only the new, electronic kind. A Hasselblad is like a sailing-ship to him, or a trireme. An antiquity. He also spends hours going through my photographs, the nineteenth-century ones. I thought it odd at first, but perhaps it is not so odd after all. He must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past, an Australian descent, Australian forebears of the mystical variety. Instead of being just a refugee kid with a joke name.'

'That is what he tells you?'

'No, he would not dream of telling me. But I can guess. I can sympathise. I am not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience.'

'Yes, of course. I keep forgetting. Such a proper Anglo-Adelaidean gentleman that I forget you are not English at all. Mr Rayment, rhyming with payment.'

'Rhyming with vraiment. I had three doses of the immigrant experience, not just one, so it imprinted itself quite deeply. First when I was uprooted as a child and brought to Australia; then when I declared my independence and returned to France; then when I gave up on France and came back to Australia. Is this where I belong? I asked with each move. Is this my true home?'

'You went back to France – I forgot about that. One day you must tell me more about that period of your life. But what is the answer to your question? Is this your true home?' She waves a hand in a gesture that encompasses not just the room in which they are sitting but also the city and, beyond that, the hills and mountains and deserts of the continent.

He shrugs. 'I have always found it a very English concept, home. Hearth and home, say the English. To them, home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here.' He waves a hand in a gesture that imitates hers, parodies it. 'I seem to be cold wherever I go. Is that not what you said of me: You cold man?'

The woman is silent.

'Among the French, as you know, there is no home. Among the French to be at home is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at home in France. Transparently not. I am not the we of anyone.'

It is the closest he has come, with the Costello woman, to lamenting his lot, and it sickens him faintly. I am not the we of anyone: how does she manage to extort such words from him? A hint dropped here, a suggestion dropped there, and he follows like a lamb.