"There," he said, "she's lucky. Or should I say, fortunate." The distinction was obviously important in Dr Grigson's mind and he did not lower the contraption until I had smiled and nodded my head in agreement. Grigson, satisfied, returned to Molly who burst into tears the minute the door was closed.

"He's a quack," Annette said. "It's obvious. We should take her out of here."

I was inclined to agree with her but one glance at Phoebe showed that she would have none of it. Annette quickly took the place beside her and left me to find less attractive accommodation.

Grigson placed Molly's hand on the velvet cushion and stroked it with his parchment-dry hands.

"There," he said, "does that feel better?"

"Yes, doctor," she smiled through her tears. "Oh yes, thank you."

"We are only electricity," the doctor said, and she did not doubt him. She gave herself to the belt and to the soothing strokes of the old hands which became inseparable in her mind. She closed her eyes. She multiplied some numbers, slowly at first.

"Of course," Grigson said, "it offends people to acknowledge it. It offends their primitive idea of themselves. It offends their religious principles. But if there is a god, perhaps", he smiled, "he is an electric charge. And why not? The Ark of the Covenant was an electric generator, although I have been physically threatened for saying such a thing."

Molly silently worshipped the electric god and begged its forgiveness.

"You are fortunate to find me still here," he said, not for a moment stopping the stroking. "I have been considering moving to Dubbo."

Molly shuddered at the thought.

"The town has gone backwards. I blame it on the gold," he said. "A marvellous conductor. The best conductor of electricity known to man and they waste it on decoration. This was a city of great potential, built on gold, and the fools squandered it. There has been no progress, nothing. They would rather go to spiritualists, herbalists. There is no belief in science," said Dr Grigson who had, just the same, borrowed the idea of the velvet cushion from a Chinese herbalist of my acquaintance.

"Rhinoceros horn, monkey foetus, snake livers," he sighed. "It is quite extraordinary. Which is why", he said, "it is an especial pleasure to help someone in an Hispano Suiza."

Molly was weak with relief and gratitude. She smiled at him dreamily. She would have offered him the car as payment.

"Would you like…"

"… a drive?" Grigson smiled. "Would you offer?"

"Of course," Molly said, arranging her stole. She could have sung. "It would give me pleasure."

"I can ask no other fee", the doctor said, "than to drive around the streets of Ballarat in an Hispano Suiza."

"No," Annette said as we trooped down the stairs. "Please, Mr Badgery," she whispered in my ear. "Stop him. He'll kill us."

I had no intention of stopping it. I opened the car doors politely and sat beside the tiny doctor in the front seat while I explained the machine's controls.

I have had worse drives, although possibly not quicker ones, for Dr Grigson took to the Hispano Suiza like a demon. He displayed a sensitivity towards the controls that was surprising in such a stiff-necked man and although his frail legs were barely strong enough for the clutch he certainly had no trouble with the accelerator.

He drove recklessly up Lydiard Street and screeched around into Sturt Street where people, queuing for the cinema, turned to stare.

"Barbarians," said Grigson, puffing as he swung the wheel into Battery Hill Road, running down a fox terrier that was too slow to appreciate the danger.

Annette shut her eyes, but Phoebe, unaware of the dead dog behind her, only giggled.

They travelled up the highway and killed nothing more except a Rhode Island Red cockerel outside the Buninyong Post Office.

He drove back into town at a more leisurely pace. "That will teach them," he said, and I was never sure whether it was the display of the automobile, the demonstration of skill or the execution of two animals that was intended to have such an instructive effect on the people of Ballarat who remained stubbornly indoors, leaving Dr Grigson and his passengers to pursue their pagan rites in solitude.

Molly disowned the electric radiator. She was irritated, she said, by the amount of space the silly thing took up. She kicked at it with her tiny patent shoes. On the way from Grigson's to Craig's Hotel she made me stop and put it in the boot. There was not sufficient room and I was reduced to tying it on to the spare wheel with its cord – it bumped and rattled over the neglected streets, breaking all four elements and leaving sharp fragments of ceramic to find their way into the hooves of the dunnyman's horses.

Molly held her daughter's hand and kissed her. She fussed over the pale hand where it emerged from the fraying cast. She spat on her handkerchief and cleaned the skin beneath the ledge of plaster. She retied the sling. She pinned up loose wisps of hair that had straggled down from underneath her hat.

The hotel kitchen was closed when we arrived and it was Molly who persuaded them to open it again. When we sat at table in the big high-ceilinged dining room (famous for its pendulum clock and its original oil painting of Alfred Deakin) she ate heartily, demolishing two helpings of very grey roast lamb and only announcing herself stonkered after scraping clean the large monogrammed plate of steamed pudding.

Annette, as usual, was disgusted by the Australian habit of consuming large quantities of lamb, great slabs of dead dark meat smothered in near-black gravy. She scorned her knife and picked moodily at her shepherd's pie with fork alone and wondered what drug the quack doctor had prescribed for the widow's grief. If it had been the gonads of monkeys she would hardly have been surprised. The widow was all fluffed up like a hotel cat. Her plump cheeks were smooth as a china doll's and her fine nose, which had seemed so pinched, now flared its nostrils as if greedy for air and life. She held her knife and fork with a graceless enthusiasm more suitable for cricket bats.

Under the influence of a number of shandies, Molly began to reminisce about her life.

Annette had no curiosity about the subject. The blend of sentimentality and naivete that Molly brought to her tales of the late Mrs Ester offended her, but not nearly so much as the happy smile on Phoebe's face as she decorated her mother's colonial ramblings with "Dear Mummy"'s.

Annette, the faint-hearted, had no confidence in anyone. A few "Dear Mummy"s and she imagined Phoebe's character changed immediately. She saw her back-sliding into sentimentality and provinciality. Sloth and mediocrity, she thought, would come to claim her.

Annette, as usual, leaped to embrace the thing she feared the most.

She sipped what Craig's Hotel was pleased to call sherry and, although she nodded her head politely, her eyes sparkled with indignation.

Phoebe, she saw, was touching my leg beneath the table and the activity was being noted with disapproval by a silent group of Creswick matrons (who sat stiffly at the next white-clothed table) and with lewd amusement by the young boys who waited on us.

It was typical of her luck in life, or so she thought. She had invented Phoebe (another misconception) only to have her treasure plundered by the barbarian opportunist who sat opposite nodding his head, bringing nasal charm to bear on the widow whom Annette judged to be helpless in the face of such dishonest flattery.

Annette, Annette, for Christ's sake. You do me a disservice, an injustice. My heart, at that table, was as light as Molly's. I felt myself, not incorrectly, a kind man. The terrible whimpering journey up through the Brisbane Ranges from Geelong would have been worth it if it had lasted four days not four hours. It had been worth climbing gates, breaking windows and running over both dog and cockerel. I would have run my wheels over cats and goldfish to achieve this end: that Molly, after all, would not go mad with grief. I wished only, as Phoebe's leg pressed gently against mine, that Jack could be alive to witness, if not his daughter's leg, at least the kindness I had shown his widow. I was not a bad man after all. I was capable of kindness, and the kindness, or at least the anticipation of more kindness, built up in me until my ears were humming with the delicious pressure of it. I vowed, there and then in Craig's Hotel, to do everything in my power to make these two women happy. I would nurture them, protect them, be son to one, husband to the other. If it occurred to me that I had stolen a family from Jack, I must have wrapped the ugly thought in blankets, trussed it up with twine, dispensed it quickly down a laundry chute, slammed the lid behind it.