Ron looks a more appropriate husband for me than Tim."
"Don't let it worry you, Mary. We're here to support you, and support you we will. I like your Old Girl next door, by the way. I must sit next to her at dinner, she has the richest vocabulary I've encountered in many a long day. Look at her and Tricia there, magging away like old cronies!"
Mary glanced at him gratefully. "Thanks, Archie. I'm sorry I won't be able to attend my own wedding dinner, but I want to get this hospital business over and done with as soon as I can, and if I delay until after dinner my doctor won't put me on his operating list for tomorrow, which means a wait of a week, since he only operates there Saturdays."
"That's all right, love, we'll drink your share of the champagne and eat your share of the Chateaubriand."
Because there were sufficient witnesses in the wedding party, only one pair of fascinated eyes beheld the queer couple, those belonging to the officiating representative of Her Majesty's Law. It was quickly over, disappointingly shorn of ceremony or solemnity. Tim made his responses eagerly, a credit to his father's coaching; Mary was the one who stumbled. They signed the required documents and left without realizing that the elderly man who married them had no idea Tim was mentally retarded. He did not think the match odd at all in that way; many handsome young men married women old enough to be their mothers. What he found odd was that no kisses were exchanged.
Mary left them on the same corner where she had joined them, plucking Tim's coat sleeve anxiously.
"Now you'll wait for me patiently and you won't worry about me, promise? I'll be all right."
He was so happy that Tricia Johnson and Emily Parker felt like crying just to see his face; the only shadow to mar his day was Mary's abrupt departure, but even that could not depress him for long. He had signed the little bit of paper and so had Mary, they belonged together now and he could wait for a long time if necessary before coming to live with her.
The operation made Mary sore and uncomfortable for a few days, but she weathered it well; better, in fact, than her gynecologist had expected.
"You're a sturdy old girl," he informed her as he took the stitches out. "I ought to have known you'd take it,in your stride. Old girls like you have to be killed with an ax. As far as I'm concerned you can go home tomorrow, but stay in as long as you like. This isn't a hospital, you know, it's a bloody palace. I'll sign your discharge papers on the way out today and then you can leave whenever you want, this week or next week or the week after that. I'll keep stopping in just in case you're here."
Twenty-six
In the end Mary stayed five weeks, rather enjoying the quiet privacy of the old house on the Rose Bay waterfront, and rather dreading the thought of seeing Tim. She had not told anyone where she was going for her surgery except the dry little man who took care of her legal affairs, and the laboriously written postcards she got from Tim every day were all forwarded through the dry little man's office. Ron must have helped him a great deal, but the handwriting was Tim's and so was the phraseology. She tucked them away in a small briefcase carefully as she received them. During the last two weeks of her stay she swam in the hospital pool and played tennis on the hospital courts, deliberately accustoming herself to movement and exertion. When at length she left she felt as if nothing had ever happened, and the drive home was not at all taxing.
The house in Artarmon was ablaze with lights when she put the car in the garage and let herself in through the front door. Emily Parker was as good as her word, Mary thought, pleased; the Old Girl had promised to make the house look as though it was occupied. She put her suitcase down and stripped off her gloves, throwing them on the hall table along with her bag, then she walked into the living room. The phone loomed large as a monster in front of her, but she did not call Ron to tell him she was home; plenty of time for that, tomorrow or the day after or the day after that.
The living room was still predominantly gray, but many pictures hung on the walls now and splotches of rich ruby red glowered like the embers of a scattered fire throughout the room. A ruby glass vase from Sweden stood on the chaste mantel and a ruby-dyed fur rug lay sprawled across the pearl-gray carpet like a lake of blood. But it was pleasant to be home, she thought, looking around at that inanimate testament to her wealth and taste. Soon she would be sharing it with Tim, who had had a hand in its generation; soon, soon. . . . Yet do I want to share it with him? she asked herself, pacing up and down restlessly. How odd it was; the closer she came to his advent the more reluctant she was to have it occur.
The sun had set an hour before and the western sky was as dark as the rest of the world, pulsing redly from the city lights under a layer of low, sodden clouds. But the rain had fallen farther west, and left Artarmon to the summer dust. What a pity, she thought; we could really do with the rain here, my garden is so very thirsty. She went into the unlit kitchen and stood peering out the back window without switching the kitchen or patio lights on, trying to see if Emily Parker's house was lit. But the camphor laurels hid it; she would have to go out onto the patio to see it properly.
Her eyes were quite accustomed to the darkness as she let herself noiselessly out of the back door, softly cat-footed as always, and she stood for a moment inhaling the perfume of the early summer flowers and the far-off earthy smell of rain, filled with delight. It was so nice to be home, or it would have been had the back of her mind not been consumed with the specter of Tim.
Almost as if she could consciously form his image out of her thoughts, the silhouette of his head and body shaped itself against the distant, weeping sky. He was sitting along the railing of her balustrade, still naked and dewed with the water of his nightly shower, his face raised to the starless night as if he were listening raptly to the lilt of music beyond the limitations of her earthbound ears. What light there was had fused itself into his bright hair and clung in faint, pearly lines along the contours of his face and trunk, where the glistening skin was stretched tautly over the still, dormant muscles. Even the curve of his eyelids was visible, fully down to shield his thoughts from the night.
A month and more than a month, she thought; it's been over a month since I last saw him, and here he is like a figment of my imagination, Narcissus leaning over his pool wrapped in dreams. Why does his beauty always strike me so forcibly when I see him again the first time in a long while?
She crossed the sandstone flags silently and stood behind him, watching the column of sinew in the side of his throat gleam like a pillar of ice until the temptation to touch him could not be gainsaid a moment longer. Her fingers closed softly over his bare shoulder and she leaned forward to rest her face against his damp hair, her lips brushing his ear.
"Oh, Tim, it's so good to find you here waiting," she whispered.
Her coming did not startle him and he did not move; it was almost as if he had felt her presence in the stillness, sensed her behind him in the night.
After a while he leaned back against her a little; the hand which had rested on his shoulder slid across his chest to the other shoulder, imprisoning his head within the circle of her arm. Her free hand slipped beneath his elbow to his side, its palm pressing down against his belly and pushing him back harder against her. The muscles of his abdomen twitched as her hand passed across them caressingly, then became utterly still, as if he had ceased to breathe; he moved his head until he could look into her face. There was a remote calmness about him and the eyes searching hers so seriously had the veiled, silvery sheen to them that always shut her out while it locked her in, as if he saw her but did not see Mary Horton. As his mouth touched her own he put two hands up to grip the arm she had linked across his chest, and they closed over it. The kiss was different from their first, it had a languorous sensuality about it that Mary found fey and witching, as if the creature she had surprised dreaming was not Tim at all, but a manifestation of the soft summer night. Rising from the balcony railing without fear or hesitation, he pulled her into his arms and picked her up.
&
nbsp; He carried her down the steps and into the garden, the short grass hushing under his bare feet. Half inclined to protest and make him return to the house, Mary buried her face in his neck and stilled her tongue, yielding up her reason to his strange, silent purpose. He made her sit on the grass in the deep shadow of the camphor laurels and knelt beside her, his fingertips delicately touching her face. She was so filled with love for him that she could not seem to see or hear, and she leaned forward like a rag doll toppled by a careless flick of the finger, her hands splayed far apart and her head down against his chest. He held it there, pulling at her hair until it fell loose about her and her hands lay curled helplessly on his thighs. From her hair he passed to her clothes, peeling them away as slowly and surely as a small child undressing a doll, folding each item neatly and laying it on a growing pile to one side of them. Mary crouched there timidly, her eyes closed. Their roles had somehow become reversed; he had inexplicably gained the ascendancy.
Finished, he took her arms and propped them on his shoulders, gathering her against him. Mary gasped, her eyes opening; for the first time in her life she felt a bare body all along the length of her own, and somehow there was nothing to be done save abandon herself to the feel of it, warm and alien and living. Her dreamlike trance merged into a dream sharper and more real than the entire world outside the darkness under the camphor laurels; all at once the silky skin under her hands took on form and substance: Tim's skin sheathing Tim's body. There was no more than that under the sun, nothing more to be offered her on life's plate that the feel of Tim within her arms, pinning her against the ground. It was Tim's chin driving ribbons of pain from the side of her neck, Tim's hands clawed into her shoulders, Tim's sweat running down her sides. She became aware that he was trembling, that the mindless delight which filled him was because of her, that it mattered not whether hers was the skin of a young girl or a middle-aged woman as long as it was Tim there, within her arms and within her body, as long as it was she, Mary, to give him this, so pure and mindless a pleasure that he came to it unfettered, free of the chains which would always bind her, the thinking one.
When the night was old and the dim western rain was gone over the mountains she pushed herself away from him and gathered the little pile of clothes against her chest, kneeling above him.
"We must go inside, dear heart," she whispered, her hair falling across his extended arm where her head had been. "It's the dark before light, we must go in now."
He picked her up and carried her inside immediately. The lights were still on in the living room; trailing her hand over his shoulder, she extinguished them one by one as he crossed to the bedroom. He put her down on the bed and would have left her alone had she not reached out to pull him back.
"Where are you going, Tim?" she asked, and moved over to make room for him. "This is your bed now."
He stretched out beside her, pushing his arm under her back. She put her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest, caressing it drowsily. Suddenly the small, tender movement ceased, and she lay stiffening against him, her eyes wide and filled with fear. It was too much to be borne; she lifted herself on one elbow and reached across him to get at the lamp on the bedside table.
Since the silent meeting on the patio he had not spoken one word; all at once his voice was the only thing she wanted to hear, if he did not speak she would know that somehow Tim was not with her at all.
He was lying with his eyes wide open, looking up at her without even wincing in the sudden, drenching light. The face was sad and a little stern, and it wore an expression she had never seen before, it had a maturity she had never noticed. Was it her eyes that had been blind, or was it his face that had changed? The body was no longer strange or forbidden to her, and she could look upon it freely, with love and respect, for it housed a creature as live and entire as she was herself. How blue his eyes were, how exquisitely shaped his mouth was, how tragic the tiny crease to the left side of his lips. And how young he was, how young!
He blinked and shifted the focus of his gaze from some private infinity to the nearness of her face; his eyes swelled on the tired, worried lines in it, then on the straight, strong mouth so sated with his kisses that its lips were swollen. He lifted one leaden hand and brushed his fingers against her firm, rounded breast gently.
She said, "Tim, why won't you speak to me? What have I done? Have I disappointed you?"
His eyes filled with tears; they ran down his face and fell onto the pillow, but his sweet, loving smile dawned and the hand cupped her breast harder.
"You told me that one day I'd be so happy I'd cry, and look! Oh, Mary, I'm crying! I'm so happy I'm crying!"
She collapsed on his chest, weak with relief. "I thought you were angry with me!"
"With you?" His hand cradled the back of her head, her hair slipping through his fingers. "I could never be angry with you, Mary. I wasn't even angry with you when I thought you didn't like me."
"Why wouldn't you speak to me tonight?"
He was surprised. "Did I have to speak to you? I didn't think I had to speak to you. When you came I couldn't think of anything to say. All I wanted was to do the things Pop told me about while you were away in hospital, and then I had to do them, I couldn't stop to talk."
"Your Pop told you?"
"Yes. I asked him if it was still a sin to kiss you if we were married, and he said it wasn't a sin at all when we were married. He told me about lots of other things I could do, too. He said I ought to know what to do because if I didn't I'd hurt you and you'd cry. I don't want to hurt you or make you cry, Mary. I didn't hurt you or make you cry, did I?"
She laughed, holding him hard. "No, Tim, you didn't hurt me and I didn't cry. There I was, petrified because I thought it was all up to me and I didn't know whether I was going to be able to deal with it."
"I really didn't hurt you, Mary? I forgot Pop told me not to hurt you."
"You did magnificently, Tim. We were in good hands, your green hands. I love you so much!"
"That's a better word than like, isn't it?"
"When it's used properly it is."
"I'm going to save it just for you, Mary. I'll tell everyone else I like them."
"That's exactly how it should be, Tim."
By the time dawn crept into the room and lit it with the clear, tender newness of day, Mary was fast asleep. It was Tim who lay staring wakefully at the window, careful not to move and disturb her. She was so small and soft, so sweet-smelling and cuddly. Once he used to hold his Teddy bear against his chest the same way, but Mary was alive and could hold him back; it was much nicer. When they took his Teddy bear away, saying he was all grown up and must not sleep with Teddy any more, he had wept for weeks with empty arms hugging his aching chest, mourning the passing of a friend. Somehow he had known Mum didn't want to take Teddy away, but after he came home from work in tears and told her how Mick and Bill had laughed at him for sleeping with a Teddy bear, she had steeled herself to do it, and Teddy had gone into the garbage can that very night. Oh, the night was so big, so dark and full of shadows which moved mysteriously, coiling themselves into claws and beaks and long, sharp teeth. While Teddy had been there to hide his face against they had not dared to come any closer than the opposite wall, but it took a long time to get used to them all around him, pressing down on his defenseless face and snapping at his very nose. After Mum had given him a bigger night light it was better, but he loathed the dark to this very day; it was deadly with menace, full of lurking enemies.
Forgetting he was not going to move in case he wakened her, he turned his head until he could look down on her, then slid up the pillow until he was much higher than she. Fascinated, he stared at her for a long time in the growing light, assimilating her alien appearance. Her breasts devastated him; he could not tear his eyes away from them. Just thinking about them filled him with excitement, and what he felt when they were crushed against him was indescribable. It was as though her differences had been invented just for him, he
had no conscious awareness that she was exactly like any other female. She was Mary, and her body belonged to him as utterly as his Teddy had; it was his and his alone to hold against the inroads of the night, warding off terror and loneliness.
Pop had told him no one had ever touched her, that what he brought to her was foreign and strange, and he had understood the magnitude of his responsibility better than a reasoning man, for he had owned so little and been respected by so few. In the savage heat of his body's blind drive he had not managed to remember all Pop told him, but he thought, looking back on it, that he would remember more next time. His devotion to her was purely selfless; it seemed to come from somewhere outside him, compounded of gratitude and love and a deep, restful security. With her he never felt that he was weighed in the balance and found lacking. How beautiful she was, he thought, seeing the lines and the sagging skin but not finding them ugly or undesirable. He saw her through the eyes of total, unbounded love and so assumed that all of her was beautiful.
At first when Pop had told him he must go to the house at Artarmon and wait there alone for Mary to come home, he had not wanted to come. But Pop had made him, and would not let him return to Surf Street. A whole week he had waited, cutting the grass and seeding the flower beds and trimming the shrubs all day, then wandering the empty house at night until he was tired enough to sleep, with every light on to banish the demons of the formless darkness. He did not belong in Surf Street any more, Pop had said, and when he had begged Pop to come with him he had met with an adamant refusal. Thinking about it now as the sun rose, he decided Pop had known exactly what would happen; Pop always did.
That night the thunder had growled in the west and there was a stinging, earthy smell of rain in the air. Storms used to frighten him badly when he was a little boy, until Pop had shown him how quickly the fear went away if he went outside and watched how lovely it was, with the lightning streaking down the inky sky and the thunder bellowing like a mammoth, invisible bull. So he had taken his nightly shower and wandered naked onto the patio to watch the storm, disturbed and restless. In the house the bogies would have rushed gibbering at him from every cranny, but on the patio with the damp wind stroking his bare skin they had no dominion over him. And gradually the melting night had melted him; he had slipped into a senseless oneness with the unthinking creatures of the earth. It was as though he could see every petal on every dim flower, as though all the bird songs in the world flooded his being with a soundless music.
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