A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  It puzzled Adrian that their only aim seemed to be to know as many Padua girls as possible. Sometimes they held frantic conversations that meant almost nothing but gave them the opportunity to blurt out dozens of Padua names.

  ‘Helen told me Deidre couldn’t play on Saturday because Carmel and Felicity called round with Felicity’s mother to take them out in the car.’

  ‘Yes, but Deidre told me she was upset to miss the doubles comp and Barbara had to forfeit. She couldn’t have Maureen or Clare for a partner.’

  Adrian listened to them impatiently. He wished he could have told them he didn’t have to babble to a tramload of giggling Padua girls because he had already chosen the pick of the Catholic girls on the Coroke line for his own.

  Sometimes a fellow said, ‘Tell us about your social life, Adrian.’

  Adrian always parried the question. His friends would never have understood that he and Denise had no need for tennis and dances.

  Sometimes Adrian’s new friends seemed so innocent that he wondered if they had ever experienced an impure temptation. But one morning Barry Kellaway rolled his eyes and pretended to stagger and said, ‘It’s all right for you lazy baskets. You were snoring your heads off last night while Mother Nature was torturing me.’

  Martin Dillon made eyes at Kellaway and sidled up to him and said, ‘Did Mummy’s little Barry mess his pyjamas in his sleep, eh?’

  Damian Laity grabbed Kellaway from behind and twisted his arms and said, ‘Tell us everything, Kaggs. Who were you holding in your arms when you woke up this morning?’

  Adrian listened quietly. He knew Kellaway had had a wet dream. Over the next few weeks, every boy in the group had one and talked about it next day.

  Their talk was very different from the stories that Cornthwaite and his friends used to bring to school. Adrian’s former friends were reticent and modest about their adventures. Seskis would say simply, ‘Rhonda Fleming nearly killed me last night.’ Or O’Mullane would say, ‘I saw a colossal tart on the train and when I got home I went into the woodshed and rubbed myself nearly raw.’ The others would nod quietly as if to say, ‘It could happen to anyone.’

  Kellaway and Dillon and Laity were proud of their dreams and recounted them like adventure stories with themselves as heroes. It was all the more fun because nothing they did in dreams was sinful. (Adrian had his own wet dreams now, but he didn’t enjoy them. They were confused struggles in landscapes suspiciously like America.)

  Adrian’s new friends looked forward to their dreams. Laity marked his in his pocket diary. He had calculated that he had a wet dream every twenty days or so. On the eighteenth or nineteenth day he would tell the others it was due any day. Kellaway and Dillon would say, ‘Better not stand too close to Catherine or Beth in the tram this afternoon or you might end up married to them in bed tonight.’ Adrian thought of himself and Denise in the Coroke train and was disgusted by the loose talk about the Padua girls.

  If a fellow described a dream that was too unseemly he usually apologised at the end of his story. Kellaway said one morning, ‘The tram was somewhere in East Camberwell. I kept praying, “Please, God, make the Padua girls get off before it’s too late.” But they kept crowding round me. The conductor asked me what was the matter and I told him to stand between me and the girls to hide what I was going to do. But then it happened. Some of the girls screamed. The conductor started wrestling with me. And I know you’ll never forgive me for this, Dillon, but I reached out and tried to grab you-know-who. Yes, it was your one and only Marlene with the adorable legs. I just couldn’t help myself.’

  Some of the stories were lost on Adrian because the people or the places in them were known only to the Camberwell boys. But one morning he heard a story as sensational as any that Cornthwaite or his dirty friends had told.

  It was the time of the Royal Tour of Australia. Every morning the Argus had full-colour pictures of the Royal couple, showing Her Majesty’s frocks and hats in all their gorgeous detail. One Saturday the Royal car was due to pass only a few miles from Swindon. St Carthage’s and every other school for miles around had a space reserved along the route. Nearly every boy from St Carthage’s turned up early and waited for hours in the sun for the Queen and the Duke to drive past.

  On the following Monday, Damian Laity gathered his friends together and told them solemnly that his dream had come a few days early and it was nothing to laugh about this time.

  He said, ‘It must have been all those hours I sat in the sun. I must have gone mad with sunstroke. I couldn’t eat anything for tea except half a family brick of ice cream just before bed. All I can remember after that is waiting and waiting for Her car. When I saw it coming I turned into a raving lunatic. I ran out onto the road with only my singlet on and jumped up to the running board of the car. The kids from the public schools were all roaring and screaming at me. I think the Padua girls saw me too. I couldn’t stop myself. I jumped into the back seat beside Her. She was wearing that beautiful lime-green shantung frock and the hat with white feathers. I tried to put my arms around Her. As soon as I touched Her elbow-length gloves it ended. Thank God I didn’t do anything worse to Her with all those people watching. I lay awake for hours after it was over. I kept seeing the headlines in all the papers on Monday: MONSTER FROM CATHOLIC COLLEGE DISGRACES AUSTRALIA.’

  Mr and Mrs Adrian Sherd arrived at Triabunna in the early afternoon. They had been married exactly twenty-four hours. They unpacked their suitcases in a sunlit room on an upper floor of a hotel with every modern convenience. Then they strolled hand in hand along the beachfront.

  The place was deserted. Sherd was glad there was no one around to overhear them when they stopped every few yards and he whispered, ‘I love you, Denise,’ and his wife answered, ‘I love you too, Adrian.’ He remembered a fellow at school named Cornthwaite who used to change his seat in a train to get a better view of a couple smoushing (as he called it) and to watch where the fellow put his hands.

  On the way back to the hotel for tea, Sherd seriously considered waiting for another night to consummate the marriage. He could see his wife was in no hurry for it—she was quite content just to hold hands and hear her husband say he loved her.

  Sherd felt the same way himself. He was experiencing the truth of something he had first discovered years before (when he lay awake at night thinking of a girl in a beige school uniform to save himself from a habit of sin)—that the joy of hearing a beautiful chaste woman say, ‘I love you’ was far more wonderful than rolling around naked with all the stars of Hollywood.

  Later that night, when they were sitting together reading, Sherd reminded himself that his wife had grown up in the same pagan world as himself, that she must have learned from films and magazines what people expected newlyweds to get up to on their honeymoon, and that if he didn’t introduce her to the physical side of marriage soon, she might start brooding over it or even suspect that he was not quite normal in mind or body.

  When she was ready to undress for bed, he decided after all that now was the time to reveal the mysteries of the marriage bed. But he was determined that what he was about to do should be as different as possible from the purely animal things he had once dreamed of doing to American women. Denise must not have the least suspicion that he had ever been attracted to her purely for the physical gratification he might get from her.

  He knelt down and closed his eyes to pray while she got into her nightdress. When she had said her own prayers and climbed into bed, he turned out the light and undressed himself. He did not want her to glimpse his organ before he had prepared her for it by a long speech.

  Sherd lay down beside his wife and spoke. ‘Denise, darling, no matter how carefully you were protected by your parents and the nuns at the academy, you probably still stumbled on some of the secrets of human reproduction.

  ‘Perhaps you had to go into a public lavatory once, and your eyes strayed up to the wall and you saw a drawing of a huge, thick, hideous monster of a thing and lay a
wake for weeks afterwards wondering whether men really had organs like that on their bodies and whether, if ever you were married, your husband would threaten you with one on your wedding night.

  ‘Perhaps you borrowed a novel from a non-Catholic library without realising what it was about, and read a few pages about some American gangster with the morals of an alley cat. You shut the book in disgust and returned it to the library, but you wondered for a long time afterwards how many men treated women as pretty playthings to be used for their pleasure.

  ‘Perhaps you innocently looked into the practical notebook of a schoolfellow who was doing biology and saw her drawings of a dissected rabbit and noticed the little lump with the label ERECTILE PENIS AND SHEATH and went away alarmed to think that male rabbits and therefore men, and your own future husband too, had something on them that could actually stretch and grow bigger.

  ‘Perhaps you once spent a holiday on a farm and your parents were careless enough to let you see the bull running like a madman to climb on top of a cow. Or perhaps you were just shopping in Accrington one Saturday morning and there, right in front of your eyes, were two dogs in the gutter and one of them suddenly poked this long red sticky thing at the other one and forced it to submit.’

  Adrian paused and sighed. He hoped Denise realised it was not his fault that she had had these rude shocks. If only it had been possible, he would have shielded her from all sight of male animals and broad-minded books and films. Then she could have learned the whole story from her husband.

  He waited for her to speak. He was anxious to find out just how much she knew. Then she answered him, and he treasured for the rest of his life the words she said.

  ‘Adrian, I understand how concerned you are for me, and I don’t blame you for imagining that some of those dreadful things might have happened to me. But you needn’t have been all that anxious.

  ‘Oh, of course I was puzzled sometimes about things I read in the papers or heard non-Catholics whispering about. But don’t forget I was a Child of Mary. (Didn’t you ever go to eight o’clock mass on the third Sunday of the month and see the rows and rows of Children of Mary in our blue-and-white regalia and hope that your future wife was somewhere among them?) And whenever I did wonder a little about those things, I told myself they were none of my business. I knew if I ever got married I could learn all I had to know from the Pre-Cana Conferences for engaged couples. And if my vocation was to remain single, it was better for me to know as little as possible about that side of life anyway.’

  When Sherd heard this he was so overjoyed that he kissed his wife and told her again and again what a rare treasure she was. He would almost have been content to lie there looking at her lovely face until he fell asleep. But he owed it to his wife to finish what he had begun explaining to her.

  He said, ‘Denise, my innocent angel Denise, now that I know how carefully you’ve guarded yourself all these years, it makes my task tonight so much easier.

  ‘If you had in fact seen a dog or a bull chasing the female, or a foul drawing on a toilet wall, you probably would have thought people were no different from animals when they mated. I’m sorry to say there are plenty of men who do treat the whole thing as a kind of game for their own pleasure. But thank God you’ll never come into contact with them. God Himself saw to it that your beauty and virtue attracted the sort of Catholic husband who understands the true purpose of sexual relations in marriage.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush, Denise darling. In one sense, what I’m going to do to you tonight may seem no different from what a bull does to his cows or a Hollywood film director does to one of his starlets.’ (Denise looked startled and puzzled. He would have to explain this point to her later.) ‘It’s not a pretty thing to watch, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way our poor fallen human natures can reproduce themselves. If it seems dirty or even ridiculous to you, I can only ask you to pray that you’ll understand it better as time goes by.

  ‘The trouble is that a man is cursed with a very powerful instinct to reproduce himself. One day when we’ve been married long enough to trust each other with our deepest secrets, I’ll tell you a little about 1953. That was a year when I plumbed the depths of despair because’—Sherd chose his words carefully—‘I could hardly find the strength to resist the male instinct to reproduce my species. And when you hear my story you’ll realise what a mighty urge it is and why you’ll have to excuse me for giving in to it about twice a week—at least until you find you’re expecting a child.’

  Sherd wanted to say much more, but he was anxious not to confuse his bride with too much information all at once. The moment he had waited for all his life had arrived.

  He switched on the bedlamp, kissed his wife to calm her fears and rolled back the bedclothes. She was still in her nightdress, but fortunately she had closed her eyes and gone limp. He removed the nightdress as gently as he could and admired her nude body.

  Her eyes were still closed. He wondered if she had swooned. But he said in any case the words he had memorised years before for just this occasion. (They came from a book that his mother had borrowed from the sixpenny lending library in Accrington. When his parents were out of the house he used to look through their library books. Most were respectable detective stories, but in one historical novel he had found a scene where a man surprised a young woman bathing nude in the village stream. Young Sherd had been so impressed by the man’s words that he learned them to use on his honeymoon.)

  Sherd said over his wife’s body, ‘Denise, it’s almost a crime that such charms should ever be concealed beneath the garments that our society decrees as conventional. Let me feast on your treasures and praise them as they deserve.’

  Before Sherd could praise his wife’s charms separately, she opened her eyes briefly and looked shyly up at him and said, ‘Please, darling, don’t keep me in suspense too long.’

  As gently and considerately as he could, Sherd lowered his body into position and engaged in sexual congress with her.

  Afterwards he lay beside her with the blankets covering them both. He was ready to say, ‘I’m sorry, Denise, but I did my best to warn you beforehand,’ when she looked at him and said, ‘Why, Adrian, I think it was somehow rather beautiful. Not that I don’t appreciate all you said to prepare me for the worst, but really, I can’t help being amazed at the wonderful way God designed our bodies so they complement each other in the act of generation.’

  While she pulled on her nightdress in the darkness she said, ‘And Adrian, if you feel a need for my body again in the next few days, please don’t hesitate to ask me. After all, I did promise to honour and obey you. So if this act gives you all the pleasure I think it does, you’re welcome to do it whenever you wish—within reason, of course.’

  The Tasmanian honeymoon of Mr and Mrs Adrian Sherd lasted for twelve days of a year in the early 1960s, but the thought of it sustained Adrian Sherd all through the autumn months of 1954. In all that time he never once confessed a sin of impurity in thought or deed.

  Sometimes, while he knelt outside the confessional, Adrian arranged a debate between two of the many voices that started arguing whenever he tried to hear what his conscience had to say.

  FIRST VOICE: Sherd is about to tell the priest that the worst sins he has committed in the past month are disobeying his parents and losing his temper with his young brothers. But in fact he lies awake every night dreaming of coition with a naked woman in a hotel room in Tasmania. I submit that these thoughts are mortal sins against the Ninth Commandment.

  SECOND VOICE: In denying the claims of the previous speaker, I rest my case on three points.

  1. When Sherd thinks about his marriage to Mrs Denise Sherd, née McNamara, he does not enjoy any sexual pleasure. True, he experiences a sort of exalted joy, but this is purely the result of his finding himself married at last to the young woman he has loved since his schooldays. We can see the truth of this, my first point, if we examine Sherd’s penis while he contemplates the happiness o
f his honeymoon. At no time does it seem aware of what is going on in his mind.

  2. When, some time ago now, Sherd was unfortunately in the habit of thinking at night about the American outdoors and of lewd orgies with film personalities, he was enjoying something he knew to be quite imaginary. On the other hand, his thoughts of his marriage to Miss McNamara are thoughts of a future that he has every intention of bringing to pass. Far from indulging in idle dreams, when he thinks of his honeymoon in Tasmania he is making a serious effort to plan his life for the good of his immortal soul.

  3. It goes without saying that in all his visits to America, Sherd never once married or proposed marriage to the women he consorted with. Mrs Sherd, however, is his wife. All the endearments he offers her are proper expressions of his conjugal love and, as such, are perfectly lawful.

  Adrian Sherd as adjudicator awarded the debate to the Second Voice and was sure that any reasonable theologian would have done the same.

  •

  So long as Adrian was in love with a Catholic girl and in the state of grace, he wasn’t ashamed to visit his Aunt Kathleen and talk about Catholic devotions.

  One day when she said she had enrolled him as a Spiritual Associate of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, he was genuinely interested to know what benefits this would bring him. In the days of his lust, the things his aunt did for him had been wasted, but now they earned valuable additions to his store of sanctifying grace.

  Aunt Kathleen said, ‘The names of all Associates are kept permanently in a casket beside the altar in the Mother House of the Sisters at Wollongong. Each day after their Divine Office, the Sisters recite a special prayer for all Associates. And best of all, they keep a lamp burning perpetually in their chapel for the intentions of you and me and all the other names in the casket.’