"Down here," she said. "Up here."

Phoebe stroked her mother's arms and dabbed at the beads of perspiration that appeared on her upper lip. She tried to loosen the wires which were cutting off circulation. She despatched me to ask directions. But no one knew of any Dr Grigson. They shook their heads before I had finished my question. They turned their backs. They walked away.

We circled the streets. The Crystal Palace Hotel had vanished. Nothing was the same. People came from their houses to watch the Hispano Suiza go by. They shouted and grinned and sometimes jeered. Annette found none of this reassuring. As a sympathetic student of the Bolsheviks she considered the working class of Ballarat with some trepidation.

"All gone," Molly said, "all gone."

But Dr Grigson's building in Lydiard Street was precisely where it had always been. It was one of those buildings that disappear from the eyes of a city's inhabitants. It no longer had any part in their lives and they did not trouble to spell out the bleached and peeling letters on the rotting fascia of the veranda. We passed it four times before Molly located it in the wrecked map of her memory and experienced, in that drop from memory to reality, the chronological equivalent of an exceedingly large air pocket.

"Oh dear," she said as she confronted this desolation. "Oh dearie, dearie me."

Annette was ready to pee on the footpath.

"The good Dr Grigson", she said dryly, "appears to be no more."

"Herbert will knock," Phoebe said and Annette sighed in irritation and held her hands between her knees. Oh God, she prayed, find me somewhere to pee.

I did as I was bidden and gained Annette's best cynical smile for my attempts at kindness.

The windows facing the street were painted cream like a dentist's surgery. I knocked on them. I hammered on the door from which the ancient paint, unused to such agitation, fell in a flurry of green flakes and adhered stubbornly to the sleeves of my dark suit. I stooped to look through the generous keyhole and when I shouted I could hear my voice echo through the empty passage.

I had no idea why Molly wished to see Dr Grigson. It would be another year or two before I became privy to such delicate secrets. For the moment, all I knew was that it was a pressing matter. I did not need to be instructed to go round to the back of the building. I signalled this intention to my passengers.

I scaled the high wooden gate in Dr Grigson's back fence, although the padlock was so rusted I might have snapped it with my bare hands. A pale light glowed in the upstairs window. I picked up a piece of coal and threw it at the window. I fancied I heard a cough. I threw another, larger lump and knew, before it hit the glass, that the throw had been too hard. I sucked in my breath as the window broke.

"Beg your pardon," I yelled.

"Go away," a voice came quavering back.

"Dr Grigson?"

"I have the telephone," Dr Grigson said fearfully. "I shall call the police."

"Mrs McGrath wishes to see you, Dr Grigson. She motored all the way from Geelong to see you."

"Go away."

"Out the front," I pleaded. "Look out the front. In the Hispano Suiza."

"Hispano Suiza?" asked Dr Grigson (whose Daimler Benz sat quietly rusting in the shed beside which I stood). "Did you say Hispano Suiza?" A shard of glass fell to the courtyard and shattered at my feet.

"I did, sir."

The figure disappeared from the window and I went to stand at the back door. I heard footsteps descending the stairs at quite astonishing speed. Minutes later I heard high heels and the voice of my beloved echoing through the house.

I waited. No one came for me. Only after Annette Davidson, unprotected by cardboard, had released a loud cascade of urine into what had once been Ballarat's only upstairs water closet, was I able to make my presence known.

Dr Grigson was two days past his seventy-fifth birthday which he had celebrated alone. His hair was almost gone and his neck and spine had stiffened to such an extent that, in order to alter his point of view, it was necessary that he change the position of his tiny feet, which he did with small shuffling movements.

He had been washing his dishes and his rolled sleeves revealed skin of an almost unbearable limpidity, like a fish who has lived at such a remove from the sun that its internal organs are displayed beneath its transparent skin, a spectacle to make the sensitive squirm and turn away at such a display of the squishy vulnerability of life.

It was Annette (her bladder bursting) who had kept him from the motor car. She had taken him by his narrow shoulders and turned him in his tracks.

"I am sorry to be so blunt, Dr Grigson," she said, "but I need your toilet as a matter of some urgency."

Dr Grigson found himself incapable of arguing with such firm resolve and, under the impression that his visitors had driven in an Hispano Suiza simply to make use of his water closet, led them to it without complaint.

"There is no hurry," he told Annette as she closed the door, "we will look at the car in a moment."

By the time Annette had relieved herself and admitted me through the back door, Molly had made the nature of her business clear and was already locked away with Dr Grigson in the consulting room.

Very little had changed in the waiting room in thirty years. The roses and delphiniums still entwined on the carpet which, if threadbare in places, and faded everywhere, was spotlessly clean. The telephones and Remington typewriters and Graphaphone dictating machines lay ready for the use of secretaries who were now grandmothers, their generous bosoms soft pillows for the bumping heads of their daughters' children.

Phoebe was giggling.

"My God," she whispered as Annette and I came up the stairs, "what an extraordinary place. It's a museum."

"What sort of doctor is he?"

Phoebe shrugged. We stood in the middle of the room. The ancient chairs had the appearance of valuable exhibits easily damaged by the simple demands of everyday life. We hesitated to sit on them.

The consulting room door opened. We had a brief view of the widow in her underwear. She scuttled behind the door as Dr Grigson emerged and shuffled mechanically, jointlessly, amiably across the roses and delphiniums.

He began to fuss at a large wooden filing cabinet whose small drawers were packed with musty filing cards. Long-bottled odours flooded gratefully into the room.

"Ah," he said to me, "the driver!" He nodded to me as a kindred spirit. "Rourke," he called out to Molly who was now safely tucked away behind the door. "There were Rourkes at Creswick. Were you a Creswick Rourke?"

"Ballarat East," said Molly in a wobbly falsetto that betrayed her state of undress. "Mrs Ester's niece."

"Ah, Mrs Ester, yes. Yes, yes." He took out a grey card. "Please help yourself to sweetmeats." He offered the bowl of confections to me. I obliged by offering it to the two ladies while Dr Grigson shuffled back into his consultation.

The sweets had faded wrappers whose substance had long ago melted with what they were intended to contain. We chewed and made faces. I was spitting mine into my handkerchief when I was nearly discovered by the doctor as he scurried out again, turning head and body this way and that, but whether from curiosity or fear of attack was not exactly clear. He flung open a high glass-fronted cupboard and began sorting through cardboard boxes. The odours of perished rubber and elastic joined the must from the index cards in our wrinkled noses.

"I had the first automobile in Ballarat," he said over his shoulder, "a Daimler Benz. They thought I was crazy. When I recommended sewerage at a town meeting Harry Wall said he would throw me into it."

He held up an astonishing elastic and metal contraption for the benefit of his audience.