A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Adrian thought about the glance she had given him. She was utterly indifferent to him. If he had somehow reminded her that a few minutes earlier their legs had brushed together, she would have slapped his face. And if she could have seen the filthy state of his soul she would have got up and moved to another seat.

  Adrian looked at the girl again. Her face was angelic. She had the kind of beauty that could inspire a man to do the impossible. He turned towards the altar and put his head in his hands. Slowly and dramatically he whispered a vow that would change his life: ‘For her sake I will leave America forever.’

  Adrian had often knelt outside a confessional and prayed the words from the Act of Contrition, ‘And I firmly resolve, by the help of Thy grace, never to offend Thee again.’ He had always known (and God had known too) that before a week was over he would be back in America again with his film stars. But in the back seat of his parish church, within a few feet of the girl in the severely beautiful uniform of the Academy of Mount Carmel, he felt strong enough to keep his promise.

  He conducted an experiment to prove it. He looked the girl over, from her ankles to her bowed head. Then he closed his eyes and summoned Jayne and Marilyn. He ordered them to dance naked in front of him and to shake their hips as suggestively as they knew how.

  The experiment was a complete success. With his beige-clad angel beside him, the naked film stars looked obscene and revolting. Their hold over him was broken at last.

  He tried one more experiment. It was an unpleasant one, but he had to do it—the fate of his soul for all eternity might depend on it. He stared at the girl’s jacket and tried to imagine himself taking it off. It would not budge. He looked at her skirt and thought of the white underwear just beneath it. His arms and hands were suddenly paralysed. The lust that had ruled over him night and day for more than a year, his mighty lust, had met its match.

  Riding home on his bike after mass, Adrian sang a current hit song. It was called ‘Earth Angel’. He sang the words slowly and mournfully like a man pleading with a woman to end his long years of misery.

  He made his plans for the future. That very night, and every night after that, he would fall asleep thinking of a girl in a beige school uniform with a pale haughty face and dark eyelashes. He would shelter in the aura of purity that surrounded her like an enormous halo. In that zone of sanctity no thought of sin would trouble him.

  On the following Saturday he would go to confession and rid himself for the last time of the sin that had threatened to enslave him. Every afternoon until school broke up, he would catch a different train from Swindon to Accrington and try to meet up with his Earth Angel on her way home. When school started again in February he would catch her train and see her every day.

  On the last Monday morning of the school year, the boys in Adrian’s form were all talking about the holidays. Stan Seskis explained to his friends a competition he had worked out in case they got bored in the long weeks away from school. All of them, Seskis, Cornthwaite, O’Mullane and Sherd, would keep a careful count of how many times they did it. They would be on their honour not to cheat, since they all lived in different suburbs and had no way of checking on each other. When they came back to school in February they would compare totals.

  No one could think of a suitable prize for the winner, but they agreed the competition was a good idea. Adrian said nothing. Seskis asked him to rule up cards for them to mark their scores on.

  Adrian had no intention of telling the others how his life had changed. He ruled up the scorecards during a free period in school. There were fifty blank squares on his own scorecard. When he returned to school there would still be no mark on them. He was sure of this. The women who had tempted him to sin in the past were only images in photographs. The woman who was going to save him now was a real flesh-and-blood creature. She lived in his own suburb. He had sat only a few feet from her in his parish church.

  For too long he had been led astray by dreams of America. He was about to begin a new life in the real world of Australia.

  Every afternoon in the last weeks of 1953, Adrian Sherd caught a different train home. At each station between Swindon and Accrington he changed from one carriage to another. He looked in every compartment for the girl in the Mount Carmel uniform but he could not find her.

  Adrian realised he had to endure the seven weeks of the summer holidays with only the memory of their one meeting in Our Lady of Good Counsel’s Church to sustain him. But he swore to look for her each Sunday at mass and to go on searching the trains in 1954.

  He spent the first day of the holidays tearing all the unused pages out of his school exercise books. He planned to use them for working out statistics of Sheffield Shield cricket matches and drawing maps of foreign countries or sketches of model-railway layouts or pedigrees of the white mice that his young brother was breeding in the old meat safe in the shed. It would all help to bring February closer.

  Adrian’s soul was in the state of grace and he meant to keep it that way. He was ready for his passions if they tried to regain their old power over him. He was sitting alone in the shed with a pencil and paper in front of him when he found himself drawing the torso of a naked woman. As soon as he saw his danger he whispered the words ‘Earth Angel’. Then he calmly turned the breasts of his sketch into eyes and the whole torso into a funny face, and crumpled the paper.

  In bed that night he joined his hands on his chest and thought of himself kneeling in church beside the girl he loved, and fell asleep with his hands still clasped together.

  On the second day of the holidays, Adrian’s mother announced that none of the family would be going to her brother-in-law’s farm at Orford in January because her sister had just brought home a new baby and the Sherd kids would only be in the way.

  Adrian’s brothers rolled around on the kitchen lino, howling and complaining, but Adrian took the news calmly. All year he had been looking forward to the bare paddocks and enormous sky of the Western District. But now he was secretly pleased to be spending January in the suburb where his Earth Angel lived.

  That night Adrian thought of himself sitting beside the girl and listening to a sermon on purity. He felt so strong and pure himself that he let his hands rest far down in the bed, knowing they would not get into trouble.

  He looked for his Earth Angel every Sunday at mass and rode his bike for hours around unfamiliar streets hoping to meet her. After Christmas when he still hadn’t seen her, he decided she had gone away for the holidays. He wondered where a respectable Catholic family would take their daughter for the summer.

  The wealthier boys at St Carthage’s went to the Mornington Peninsula. Adrian had never been there, but every day in summer the Argus had pictures of holiday-makers at Rye or Rosebud or Sorrento. Mothers cooked dinner outside their tents and young women splashed water at the photographer and showed off their low necklines. Adrian began to worry about the dangers his Earth Angel would meet on the Peninsula. He hoped she didn’t care for swimming and spent her days reading in the cool of her tent. But if she did go swimming he hoped the changing sheds were solid brick and not weatherboard. He lay awake for hours one night thinking of all the rotted nail holes in wooden changing sheds where lustful teenage boys could peer through at her while she undressed.

  All round her in the shed the non-Catholic girls were putting on their twopiece costumes. But what did she wear? Adrian couldn’t go to sleep until he had reassured himself that she chose her beachwear from the range of styles approved by the National Catholic Girls’ Movement. (Sometimes the Advocate, the Catholic paper, showed pictures of NCGM girls modelling evening wear suitable for Catholic girls. The necklines showed only an inch or so of bare skin below the throat. There were never any pictures of bathers suitable for Catholics but girls were advised to inspect the approved range at NCGM headquarters.)

  One morning the front-page headline in the Argus was HEAT WAVE. In the middle of the page was a picture of a young woman on a boat at Safety Beach. Her
breasts were so close to the camera that Adrian could have counted the beads of water clinging to the places she had rubbed with suntan oil. All that afternoon he lay on the lino in the bathroom trying to keep cool and hoping his Earth Angel kept out of the way of men with cameras. He thought of some prowling photographer catching her as she stepped from the water with a strap of her bathers slipping down over her shoulder.

  At night he had so many worries that he never thought of his old sin. On New Year’s Eve he remembered the boys of Eastern Hill Grammar School. That was the night when they all went to parties in their fathers’ cars and looked for girls to take home afterwards. One of the Eastern Hill fellows might have seen Adrian’s Earth Angel on the beach and tried to persuade her to go with him to a wild party. Adrian tried to remember some incident from the lives of saints when God had blinded a lustful fellow to the beauty of an innocent young woman to protect her virtue.

  One day in January Adrian went to a barber’s shop in Accrington. One of the magazines lying around for customers to read was a copy of Man. Adrian studied the pictures quite calmly. The naked women were trying to look attractive, but their faces were strained and hard and their breasts were flabby from being handled by all the photographers who worked for Man—and probably all the cartoonists and short-short story writers and the editor as well. One glimpse of his Earth Angel’s hands and wrists stripped of the beige Mount Carmel gloves had more power over him than the sight of all the nude women in magazines.

  Late in January Adrian felt strong enough to take out his model railway. He sent passenger trains round and round the main line and the loop, but he was careful to snatch up the engine each time it slowed down. He still remembered clearly all the landscapes around the track where the train used to stop in the old days. So long as the train ran express through the scenes of his impure adventures he felt no urge to enjoy America again.

  But one hot afternoon he was staring through the shed door at the listless branches of the wattle scrub over the side fence when he realised the train had stopped. He stood very still. The only sounds around him were the clicking of insects and the crackling of seed pods on the vacant block next door. He was almost afraid to turn and see what part of America he had come to.

  He was far out on the plains of Nebraska. The long hot summer had ripened the miles of wheat and corn. For just one moment Adrian thought of grabbing the first American woman he could find and wandering off with her into the hazy distance to find some shady cottonwood tree beside a quiet stream.

  The thought that saved him was a simple one, although it had never occurred to him in all the weeks since his Earth Angel had changed his life. It was this: the temptation that came to him on the prairies of Nebraska proved he could never do without romantic adventures in picturesque landscapes. The way to keep his adventures pure and sinless was to take his Earth Angel with him.

  That night Adrian proposed marriage to the beautiful young woman who had been educated at the Academy of Mount Carmel. After they had set a date for the wedding they sat down over a huge map of Australia to decide which scenic spots they would visit on their honeymoon.

  On the hottest night of January, Adrian lay in bed with only his pyjama trousers on. He fell asleep thinking of the cool valleys of Tasmania where he and his wife would probably spend the first weeks of their marriage.

  Later that night he was struggling through a crowd of men and women. In the middle of the crowd someone was gloating over an indecent magazine. Somewhere else in the crowd the girl from Mount Carmel was pushing her way towards the magazine. Adrian had to get to it before she did. If she saw the filthy pictures he would die of shame. People started wrestling with Adrian. Their damp bathing costumes rubbed against his belly. The girl from Mount Carmel was laughing softly, but Adrian couldn’t see why. Everyone suddenly knelt down because a priest was saying mass nearby. Adrian was the only one who couldn’t kneel. He was flapping like a fish in the aisle of a church while the girl he loved was tearing pictures out of her Argus and wafting them towards him. They were pictures of naked boys lying on their backs rubbing suntan oil all over their bellies. The girl put up her hand to tell the priest what Adrian had done on the floor of the church.

  Adrian woke up and lay very still. It was daylight outside—a cloudless Sunday morning. He remembered vague bits of advice that Brother Cyprian had given the boys of Form Four, and something that Cornthwaite had once said about wet dreams. In those days he had been so busy doing the real thing that he never once had an impure dream. He mopped up the mess inside his pyjamas. He was ashamed to realise he hadn’t experienced all the facts of life in Form Four after all. But he went back to sleep pleased that nothing he had thought or done that night was sinful.

  That same Sunday morning Adrian went to seven o’clock mass and walked boldly up to communion. He hoped his Earth Angel was somewhere in the church watching him. At the altar rails he knelt between two men—married men with their wives at their elbows. Adrian was proud to be with them. He belonged among them. He was a man at the peak of his sexual power whose seed burst out of him at night but whose soul was sinless because he was true to the woman he loved.

  For days before he went back to school, Adrian wondered what he could say to his friends when they asked him his score in their competition. He couldn’t simply hand in a blank scorecard. The others would never believe he had gone for seven weeks without doing it. They would pester him all day to tell them his true score. Even if he made up a low score they would still be suspicious and ask him what went wrong.

  Adrian’s worst fear was that Cornthwaite or O’Mullane or Seskis would guess he had met a girl and fallen in love. They would think it a great joke to blackmail him. Either he paid some preposterous penalty or they would find out the girl’s name and address and send her a list of all the film stars he had had affairs with.

  In the end he decided to fill in his card as though he had taken the competition seriously and tried his best to win. He marked crosses in the blank squares for all the days he might have sinned if he had never met his Earth Angel. He was scrupulously honest. He left blank spaces around Christmas Day, when he would have been to confession. But he added extra crosses for the days of the heat wave, when he would have found it hard to get to sleep at night.

  On the first morning of the new school year the cards were handed round. The scores were O’Mullane, 53; Seskis, 50; Cornthwaite, 48; Sherd, 37.

  The others all wanted to know what had happened to Adrian to make him score so poorly. He made up a weak story about getting sunburnt and not being able to lie properly in bed for a fortnight. He promised himself he would find some new friends. But he could not do it too suddenly. He was still frightened of blackmail.

  That night Adrian went on searching through the Coroke trains for his Earth Angel. Two nights later he walked into a second-class non-smoking compartment of the 4.22 p.m. from Swindon and saw her. The face he had worshipped for nearly two months was half-hidden under a dome-shaped beige hat—his Earth Angel was absorbed in a book. If she loved literature they had something in common already. And it fitted in perfectly with the plan he had worked out for making himself known to her.

  He stood a few feet from her. (Luckily there were no empty seats in the compartment.) Then he took out of his bag an anthology called The Poet’s Highway. He had bought it only that morning. It was the set text for his English Literature course that year and it contained the most beautiful poem he had ever read—‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, by John Keats.

  When the train swung round a bend Adrian pretended to overbalance. With one hand on the luggage rack, he leaned over until the page with the poem was no more than a foot from his Earth Angel’s face. He saw her look up as he swung towards her. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes, but he hoped she read the title of the poem.

  For the next few minutes he stared at the poem and moved his lips to show that he was learning it by heart. Each time he practised reciting a stanza he stared out of
the window, past the backyards and clothes lines, as though he really could see a lake where no birds sang. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her watching him with some interest.

  At the last station before Accrington he put his anthology away. He knew it was unusual for a boy to like poetry and he dreaded her thinking he was queer or unmanly. He pulled the Sporting Globe out of his bag and studied the tables of averages for the visiting South African cricketers. He twisted himself around and leaned back a little so she could see what he was reading and know he was well balanced.

  For two weeks Adrian travelled in the girl’s compartment. Every night he feasted his eyes on her. Sometimes she caught him at it, but usually he looked away just in time. His worst moment each night came when he opened the train door and looked for her in her usual corner. If she wasn’t there it would have meant she had rejected his advances and moved to another compartment.

  Some nights he was so frightened of not finding her that his bowels filled up with air. Then he had to stand in the open doorway for a few miles and break wind into the train’s slipstream. His Earth Angel might have thought he was showing off—so many schoolboys hung out of doorways on moving trains to impress their girlfriends. But it was better than fouling the air that she breathed. In any case, she was still in the same compartment after two weeks, and he decided she must have been interested in him.

  A wonderful change came over Adrian’s life. For years he had searched for some great project or scheme to beat the boredom that he felt all day at school. In Form Four his journeys across America had helped a little. But it hadn’t always been easy to keep the map of America in front of him—sometimes he had traced it with a wet finger on his desktop or kept a small sketch of it hidden under his textbook. In Form Five his Earth Angel promised to do away with boredom forever. All day at school she watched him. Her pale, serene face stared down at him from a point two or three feet above his right shoulder.