her lips separate, and the gentlest of snores.
It is morning. Bev Shaw serves him a breakfast of cornflakes and tea, then disappears into Lucy's room.
'How is she?' he asks when she comes back.
Bev Shaw responds only with a terse shake of the head. Not your business, she seems to be saying. Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood-matters; a woman's burden, women's preserve. Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose. Perhaps he is wrong to think of Lucy as homosexual. Perhaps she simply prefers female company. Or perhaps that is all that lesbians are: women who have no need of men.
No wonder they are so vehement against rape, she and Helen. Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. Raping a lesbian worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow. Did they know what they were up to, those men? Had the word got around?
At nine o'clock, after Bill Shaw has gone off to work, he taps on Lucy's door. She is lying with her face turned to the wall. He sits down beside her, touches her cheek. It is wet with tears.
'This is not an easy thing to talk about,' he says, 'but have you seen a doctor?'
She sits up and blows her nose. 'I saw my GP last night.'
'And is he taking care of all eventualities?'
'She,' she says. 'She, not he. No' - and now there is a crack of anger in her voice - 'how can she? How can a doctor take care of all eventualities? Have some sense!'
He gets up. If she chooses to be irritable, then he can be irritable too. 'I'm sorry I asked,' he says. 'What are our plans for today?'
'Our plans? To go back to the farm and clean up.'
'And then?'
'Then to go on as before.'
'On the farm?'
'Of course. On the farm.'
'Be sensible, Lucy. Things have changed. We can't just pick up where we left off.'
`Why not?'
'Because it's not a good idea. Because it's not safe.'
It was never safe, and it's not an idea, good or bad. I'm not going back for the sake of an idea. I'm just going back.'
Sitting up in her borrowed nightdress, she confronts him, neck stiff, eyes glittering. Not her father's little girl, not any longer.
THIRTEEN
BEFORE THEY SET off he needs to have his dressings changed. In the cramped little bathroom Bev Shaw unwinds the bandages. The eyelid is still closed and blisters have risen on his scalp, but the damage is not as bad as it could have been. The most painful part is the flange of his right ear: it is, as the young doctor put it, the only part of him that actually caught fire.
With a sterile solution Bev washes the exposed pink underskin of the scalp, then, using tweezers, lays the oily yellow dressing over it. Delicately she anoints the folds of his eyelid and his ear. She does not speak while she works. He recalls the goat in the clinic, wonders whether, submitting to her hands, it felt the same peacefulness.
'There,' she says at last, standing back.
He inspects the image in the mirror, with its neat white cap and blanked-out eye. 'Shipshape,' he remarks, but thinks: Like a mummy.
He tries again to raise the subject of the rape. 'Lucy says she saw her GP last night.'
'Yes.'
'There's the risk of pregnancy,' he presses on. 'There's the risk of venereal infection. There's the risk of HIV. Shouldn't she see a gynaecologist as well?'
Bev Shaw shifts uncomfortably. 'You must ask Lucy yourself '
'I have asked. I can't get sense from her.'
'Ask again.'
It is past eleven, but Lucy shows no sign of emerging. Aimlessly he roams about the garden. A grey mood is settling on him. It is not just that he does not know what to do with himself. The events of yesterday have shocked him to the depths. The trembling, the weakness are only the first and most superficial signs of that shock. He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused - perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future. Slumped on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in the world draining from him drop by drop. It may take weeks, it may take months before he is bled dry, but he is bleeding. When that is finished, he will be like a fly-casing in a spiderweb, brittle to the touch, lighter than rice- chaff, ready to float away. He cannot expect help from Lucy. Patiently, silently, Lucy must work her own way back from the darkness to the light. Until she is herself again, the onus is on him to manage their daily life. But it has come too suddenly. It is a burden he is not ready for: the farm, the garden, the kennels. Lucy's future, his future, the future of the land as a whole - it is all a matter of indifference, he wants to say; let it all go to the dogs, I do not care. As for the men who visited them, he wishes them harm, wherever they may be, but otherwise does not want to think about them.
Just an after-effect, he tells himself, an after-effect of the invasion. In a while the organism will repair itself,
