“Mother,” said Anne.
“We did. She likes them pudgy, though. The last one was, too. Type is a sort of kismet, I often think.” She hummed for a moment and continued: “Ray had dark-blue shoes made of alternate strips of suede and kid with elastic insets and stilt heels of kid, which made her look very dainty and shortened her feet. It doesn’t pay to have a small last, as I have, size three, when the makers with all kinds of nifty tricks can make even girls with English feet look like thistledown. She was very dainty in every detail. It was truly pathetic the care the poor motherless girl had put into her toilette.”
“Another motherless girl?”
“Yes, isn’t that funny? They were well-matched, the attraction of opposites. He’s blond, like a perambulating door-mat, and she’s a lovely brunette. She carried a bouquet of dark red roses—”
“Really?” cried Teresa.
“Yes, original, wasn’t it, and sweet for a bride, dark red for love. I thought it such a nice notion and a frank sentiment, you know. That’s the advantage of a girl without a family, she can do what she likes. Of course, I want Anne to have white on her wedding day, a girl looks so dazzling in white and I expect when the happy man sees this vision at his side, at the altar, he must wonder how he got her. I don’t even like rouge, for there is generally a natural flush which is most becoming, though a little lipstick against the ivory or dead white does no harm, but as little as possible, a mere touch. Ray’s bridesmaids had nasturtium, powder-blue—that was Anne, I made it myself—and fuchsia robes of the same material and the skirts were cut the same, though longer, which gave her a youthful look, and she has nice legs. The sleeves were shorter and summery, which lent her dignity you see, in the centre of the tableau. I was worried that Anne’s were too short, I love to show off Anne’s soft rounded arms, but it passed unobserved. I should be so happy to see Anne established in her own home, with her precious Mummy near her, looking after the material wants, while the young couple billed and cooed, as is only right, for the responsibilities come later.”
Aunt Bea sighed. The fierce moonlight had now retired from the bed where she lay, and spotlighted the gathered ribbon garters which Anne had left lying on the window-sill. Anne herself was sitting on the other side of the window, her dim face looking towards the street. Mosquitoes buzzed, a gate clicked down the road, and someone called “Good night”.
“It must be getting late,” said Teresa.
“Oh, stay, idle-a-while,” Aunt Bea urged her; and looking at the ceiling, she continued her miraculous descriptions of weddings and feasts long past. She did not notice when her daughter stole from the room.
“Do you want to get married, Terry darling?” asked Aunt Bea.
“Oh, yes, who doesn’t?”
Aunt Bea sighed again. “Heigh-ho! Oh, Mother! It’s hard to get married nowadays. But you will, I know, Teresa, you always did know how to look out for yourself.”
“I certainly will,” said Teresa.
“Sugar lump, where are you? Where’s Annette?” said Aunt Bea.
“She went out a minute ago. To the bathroom, I think.”
“Oh, yes, the stockings. Poor child, she too dreams of her wedding day and standing up at the altar with her own true knight, I expect, just as we all do or did. And there is the pleasure, the excitement, the pride of flashing a sparkler at your girl friends at the office.” She sighed, “I thought it would come before this, but there is time enough for the greatest event in a girl’s life. Malfi had such lovely presents, did you see them?”
Aunt Bea then went on to a marvellously detailed description of Malfi’s presents whether in silver, china, ivory or linen. Of each she knew the origin and the cost and she knew the intentions of each giver. In the middle of it, Teresa saw the small figure of Mrs Percy trundling up and turning into the side gate.
“She came back.”
“I’m glad of that. Nights of moon she worries, because lunatics get lively then and she thinks he will escape. She has probably been now to look down the street.”
“Does she want to see him?”
“It’s hard to say, but she is afraid for her daughter, though personally, I think, she frets without cause. Rose is quite normal, just a bit flighty. I should say Rose is a clever girl. You would notice nothing and I know you’re observant, as I am myself.”
The back door slammed. “She always slams it so,” said Bea.
Another door creaked. “That is the kitchen door, I know its song,” Bea remarked. “Oh, I tore that hangnail! Why doesn’t it shut? She must have wedged it, to make a draught I suppose. No wonder. Yes, there, she switched the lights on. What is she opening and shutting the drawers for? Did you girls wash up? No? What a pity! We are supposed to do it, but I forgot time was passing. Well, no use crying over spilt milk. I’ll put on my slippers and run out and do them. There, she’s closed the door again. Now I’ll run out. You go and get things ready, Terry dear, while Nana gets her slippers on. Put a towel round your pretty dress.”
Terry went out and on her way down the short hall, looked into the bathroom, where the door was ajar and the light on. She heard a scuttling sound there. For a fleet second she saw nothing, then perceived that Anne had got on to the floor and was after something, stretching after something with her hands out cramped, but her head was sideways, resting on one ear on the tessellated floor. A fat tear dripped out of her closed eyelid. The steady bright light shone on her fair tendrilly hair and flushed plump face. Teresa went in and shut the door behind her. She whispered: “Anne!”
“Go away,” said Anne.
“Anne?”
“Go away, go away,” said Anne, in a sob.
Teresa stood looking at her, and as she did so, the girl’s body began to writhe, a powerful slow rhythm beginning with the pelvis and twisting the shoulders and the head; the body moved strongly and the head was tossed up and sideways alternately. Anne brought her head down and beat it on the floor. Teresa bent down and grasped her cousin’s left arm near the shoulder. Anne slowly brought her face close to the hand and bit it. “Let me go, go away and leave me.” She took her little teeth away. Teresa rose, looked at her forefinger, wiped it on her dress, and moved out of the bathroom, closing the door after her. She went into the kitchen and began scraping the plates. The door to the laundry opened and Mrs Percy entered with a disordered expression, her large eyes wide open and anxious. She came close up to Teresa and brusquely drew a small black book out of a fold of her skirt. It was the bible of a mumbo-jumbo religion widespread among women in small houses, but Teresa had never heard of it.
“If you read this,” said the woman earnestly, “you will be happier, you will find life worth living, you will not be so restless.”
“I am not restless,” said Teresa, wiping her hands on the towel pinned round her waist and looking the woman full in the face.
“Don’t leave home,” said Mrs Percy in an intimate tone. “Be careful of what you do, don’t leave home. I did. It is a great mistake.”
“All right,” the girl said, and politely opened the book and looked over a few pages.
“Read it at home,” said the woman. “And now I will leave you. If I had known you were going to do it, I should not have left my plate and cup, but of course, I thought Mrs Broderick would do it. That is part of our covenant, you know.” She seemed cross.
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“Yes, otherwise—” the woman paused carelessly, and then finished: “Good-bye, I won’t see you again before you go.”
“Good-bye. Thank you for the book.”
“Yes, yes. Good-bye. Read it, read it, that is all.”
The creaking door opened and shut. Did she sit in the laundry or go into the garden? The moon flooded the garden, everything could be seen in it, but there was no sign of the woman.
When Aunt Bea came, Teresa showed her the book and then remembered her cousin. “Anne is in there, on the bathroom floor.”
“On the floor? What doing?”
<
br /> “Crying.”
“Oh, my poor child—”
Teresa put her hand on Aunt Bea’s thin arm. “Don’t go in.” “You mean—” Bea’s eyes flew back. She said: “Anne?”
Teresa laughed. “No, it’s because she’s not married. A woman who is ready to marry must marry.”
“No, no, she must have a pain, poor baby, she often has,” and Aunt Bea flew in. Teresa heard their voices, Anne’s sobbing, Aunt Bea’s consoling. She felt annoyed, because she had given the wrong advice. She put away the things, hung up the towel, and trailed gracefully up the hall to get her hat. When she was dressed, hat, gloves, bag, she looked in at the bathroom door and said: “Good night!”
“Are you going, Terry?”
She went after Bea had brought Anne into the bedroom; and when she went past, in the street, she saw their dim forms at the open window. She waved. They waved back. She walked home, along the unpaved roads, her long gown gathering dust and prickles.
5
It Was High Tide at Nine-thirty
It was high tide at nine-thirty that night in February and even after ten o’clock the black tide was glassy, too full for lapping in the gullies. Up on the cliffs, Teresa could see the ocean flooding the reefs outside, choking the headlands and swimming to the landing platforms of jetties in the bays. It was long after ten when Teresa got to the highest point of the seaward cliffs and turning there, dropped down to the pine-grown bay by narrow paths and tree-grown boulders, trailing her long skirt, holding her hat by a ribbon. From every moon-red shadow came the voices of men and women; and in every bush and in the clumps of pine, upon unseen wooden seats and behind rocks, in the grass and even on open ledges, men and women groaned and gave shuddering cries as if they were being beaten. She passed slowly, timidly, but fascinated by the strange battlefield, the bodies stretched out, contorted, with sounds of the dying under the fierce high moon. She did not know what the sounds were, but she knew children would be conceived this night, and some time later women would marry hurriedly, if they could, like one of her cousins, who had slept the night with a man in one of these very grottoes; and perhaps one or two would jump into the sea. There were often bodies fished up round here, that had leapt when the heart still beat, from these high ledges into waters washed round these rocks by the moon.
Some fishermen came slowly up through the rocks to the edge of the curved lipped platform over which they began casually to drop down by the iron footholds to the lowest ledges, wet by the unusual tides, and from these they waded out smoothly to their fishing posts on the edge of the square-cleaving shale. The bay, the ocean, were full of moonstruck fish, restless, swarming, so thick in places that the water looked oily; their presence, the men thought, with other signs, meant storms at hand.
Terry, who knew them all and to whom they said: “‘Lo”, in their meditative voices, watched them go over, some by the front cliff, shining blue, some by a small funnel where volcanic rock had crumbled in the sandstone. She went up to watch the latter and stood against a giant boulder staring out to sea. Nothing was between her and a two-hundred-foot plunge from the pale rock but a hand’s breadth. She knew the funnel too. She had climbed in it as a child, but now she was even less sure-footed than then, a powerful, full-blooded young woman whose head turned easily. If she could only go to the bottom of the dike now, with the men, and spend the night with them, thigh-deep in the sweet water, catching fish, saying nothing, looking out to sea!
In the quiet harbours of the coast, the unfrequented estuaries, full of beaches of white sand and tangled scrub, she had often seen the lucky women, fishers’ women, picnic women, holiday women, the wives of workers and loafers and misanthropes, who lived on boats and beaches, in shacks by the shoaling sand, with their men moving about them, free by the campfire and burning hearth, easy-going, tattered, ugly, very likely starved, beaten, but embraced by men and endowed with men’s children. She had seen, the last summer, a dark-haired woman, at the bottom of a huge cliff, near Barrenjoey, at dawn. There were two boatloads of fishermen with her, Australians of Italian and English blood. They put in to shore about six in the morning, after the night’s fishing. Some of them had already got there and lighted a fire, on which was a large iron pot. The woman, in black clothes, with high cheek-bones, and thin, was helped on shore by the men, from the stern of the boat where she sat and she went calmly to the pot in which they were throwing fish which they brought from the boat. She said something, a man brought a piece of wood; she said something else, they laughed all about her.
Teresa came down to the foot of the cliff. Below the cliff was a lane unknown to most of the inhabitants of the Bay, although lovers walked through it, the lane where Mr Manoel lived. The wooden cottages in it faced the steep cutting where hardy trees grew twisted out of split rocks and rough grass had spun over the bores of the dynamite charges. The dirt lane was flooded with light. The blinds were not drawn and weak lamps shone out. In a room stood a double bed with a honeycomb quilt thrown back over its foot. A foxy yellow, bloated little woman stood on the far side in an old-fashioned camisole and bloomers. A high chest of drawers with a crocheted cover was behind her. In another part of the cottage, men were talking. A window on the veranda with a single bulb behind it showed sticks of chocolate, bunches of carrots and cans of milk. There was worn oilcloth in the hall inside the netted door, a mop and bucket stood on the wooden veranda. A woman with grey hair moved round the kitchen table at the end of the passage. The woman was Queenie, a one-time schoolmate of Teresa, who had disappeared from school and married a man twice her age, in her fifteenth year. Now she had a long married life already behind her. The dirty back yard with the Datura tree, the broken flooring, a rag on the window and even the strange old clothing the girl wore, filled Terry with languor. She regretted now that, like them all, she had despised this miserable, plain child. She went on along the row of houses with their sway-backed roof-trees. All the time, the moon, rising higher, reduced her shadow until it was at her feet; shadows began to move out of the cottages and at the sound of her footfalls, a blind was drawn somewhere along the lane.
In this hot night, not only the rocks above her, half-naked among twisted, tooth-leaved trees and spiney bushes, but the little open park she was now approaching, the grass above the dripping rocks of the military reserve, and the tram-shelters, were full of semitones and broken whispers. The roots, the trees, the timbers of the houses, strained by storms, the back yards full of plasterers’ rubbish, the niches in the stony undercliff were refuges of love.
She came out from the lane, crossed the road and skirted the park. Near the seesaw, on the short grass, lay a black shape, unmoving. When she passed it, she saw it was a man over a woman, the woman’s white gloves and bag lay on the grass beside them. They caught pickpockets in the Bay. Near the Old Hotel two more, the woman on her back and the man on his elbow, lay looking into each other’s eyeballs, reflecting the moon. There were none of them on the beach tonight, drowned under the high tide; none in the boats drawn up across the footpath. People sat in their moist warm gardens, talking and hitting out at the mosquitoes; the smell of eucalyptus oil and pipe-smoke reached out. Across the harbour, on the oyster-coloured water, a large Manly ferry full of lights moved southwards toward the city. She felt the swarm of lovers thick as locusts behind her when she turned into the beach path. Tied up to the fourth pile of the wharf was a rowing-boat covered with a tarpaulin. Under the tarpaulin was a woman’s body; she had been fished out of the sea just outside of the cliffs that afternoon; it did not cause much comment. They lived there, among the gardens of the sea, and knew their fruits; fish, storms, corpses, moontides, miracles.
In between Teresa and her house, on the beach path, lay the old park which she had skirted on the far side, the wharf, and a few cottages. The young girl walked gravely, with a balanced stride, her back and neck straight, pretending she had a basin of water on her head. She was so intent on this as she came down by the park that at first she did no
t hear the people splashing in the Old Baths, now dismantled and which were no more than three strips of narrow boardwalk, awash in the present high water. But the shouts and splashes stopped as she came abreast of them, under the light of the lamp on the promenade, and in surprise she looked. She saw her brother, Leo, a seventeen-year-old, with three girls standing about or sitting in the water in careless attitudes. She did not know the girls, some girls from the Bay, in school after her time.
Leo grinned in his endearing, shamefaced way: “Hullo, Tess.” “Hullo,” said a girl’s voice, satirically.
The others said nothing. One of the girls, dragging her legs through the water, was absorbed in looking down at them; the other, standing up in a wrestling attitude, cast back her tousled dark-red hair. A second lamp shone on the beach path between the Old Baths and the Old Hotel. The Old Hotel had ceased to be a hotel, but stood in the park without fence or outbuildings, a white-painted two-storey building with trees topping it, as old as the Hawkins house, but dating from the military settlement of the Bay. Someone lived there in the Old Hotel. There were no lights there nor anywhere in the Bay, except the street lights. From the open back windows came voices. In a bush near at hand in the park a boy’s voice said: “I seen your sister; black man kissed her.”
The girls laughed.
“Lady Vah de Vah!” said the voice.
Leo laughed in a troubled way. Teresa had not stopped walking. Glancing quickly behind her, she saw Leo take a step towards the red-haired girl, who was standing in an arc, shaking the water out of her curls. She sprang upwards and wrestled with him in a beautiful bold way, the two of them winding in each other’s arms, conscious of Teresa who had just gone by, excited by the boy hidden in the bush. Something hurled them at each other.
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