The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford

do you think she blames me for – you, or Tilly?”

      “Nobody blames you for Tilly. If ever there was a girl who went her own way …”

      “I was in Nagpur. Five hundred miles away.”

      “And I was here. What does it matter where you were, or I was? What’s come over you? You don’t blame yourself, do you?”

      “I don’t. I wondered if Nora …”

      “One thing about Nora. She’ll let you know. If Nora blamed you for Tilly’s death, you’d have been told twenty years ago. What does she tell you? She wanted a father. She tells you you abandoned her here, and you abandoned me here. If Nora had been anything like Tilly, she’d have gone looking for you. But Nora is a homebody. She’s straight as a die. Things to her are black, or they’re white. Now you, and I, see all shades of charcoal and grey, but that young woman, who has never known a moment’s doubt …”

      “A moment’s doubt would help,” said Philip, reflecting that his second daughter was not all that young a woman.

      That autumn afternoon, about the time Nora was expected, Jenny lingered in the yard for warmth. I’ll soon be replacing the plum tree. No, Philip can replace it. There was no real garden, except for the fernery down one side, and the nasturtiums round the drain; but two trees, an apple and a plum, had stood without change, bare of fruit, lopped every year, since the boy Philip climbed in his climbing breeches. The trees put out leaves. Eternity. Let the tree stand. Why replace things? No change in the appointments for Master Philip. He’d told her of Mrs Conrick’s Jacko. When she ventured to water the ferns, she seemed to glimpse Jacko the clipped-wing magpie, stalking like a demon on the other side of the paling fence. He pecked through the fence. “Couldn’t fly,” Philip had explained, in exoneration of the malice of that long-dead creature.

      Not only the yard but the entire nation was consecrated these days to the absence of change, to the ‘as before’. Its leader, John Howard, seemed resolved to push it back even further, to an era when change was undreamt of. But was there such an era? Jenny believed this was the first such era. The nation itself, the white nation, what people meant by the nation, was a hundred years old this year, 2001. Add the hundred years’ colonial rule before that. At the time Australia was ‘discovered’, as they liked to put it, Tipu Sultan, in South India, was incorporating the French Revolution into the colours of his turban. The Bengal Renaissance was under way, and the Mughal Empire, whose capital at Delhi was the seventh in a long line of dynastic capitals, all on adjacent sites, each grander than the other, was perceived to be moribund. The Marathas were at the gates, while on the faraway Kaveri the Prince of Renouncers was a child, declaiming his anthems to Lord Rama in his father’s village.

      Diagonally across the mowed lawn in this backyard ran a cement path which ended at the door of his grandfather’s workshop. Along that strip cricket had been played sixty years before – with the door as backstop – and behind that door were a bench and a wood-turning lathe, which Jenny had left as they were. Sixty-year-old woodshavings: perhaps not, but there lingered the carpenter’s odour and ambience of planks and glue. Jenny kept gardening tools, a tarpaulin and an old wardrobe in that shed. Philip had poked his head in there – once – had seen things were much ‘as before’, and had emerged content, but he had no plans for it.