For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  Coolly, Teresa walked on till she passed the wharf, glanced at the water and came to the first of the fishermen’s cottages, Joe Martin’s, it was. There the light falling through a few inches to the submerged sand showed three sting-rays swimming in a row. Some man was sitting on a boat near, stuffing his pipe.

  “Sting-rays,” she said. “And I was just going to paddle.”

  “I seen three caught round in the Cove,” said the man. “This morning when the tide was out. I suppose it’s the same three.”

  “They give you a nasty wound.”

  “We got one in the boat with us yesterday,” said the man. “It was dashing round like a mad cat. Your brother Lance picked it up and threw it out. I thought it would get us all.”

  She went on. She thought: “Tomorrow, the night after and the next will be the three nights of full moon, the time I dream of blood, too.” The tide would be higher still. A man’s voice called out. She muttered: “Hullo,” and went past. She wished she had stepped into the bay back there; it would have been queer to feel the long wet skirt round her, like sea-weed. But the sting-rays, the possible sharks which could come in close at such a time? She did not care if the dress were spoiled, she now had no use for it; but the hat? And of course they would think her a freak. Already, there was the Green Dress. The green dress was an old wool dress she had embroidered with all kinds of things, pagodas, butterflies, geraniums. She wore it only at home on Sundays, in the mornings, because it was thick and she need wear nothing under it; but Leo’s friends, the Bay children, had seen it, touched it, asked her about it. She did not know herself why she kept this dress and wore it. She did not want to be eccentric, but on the contrary, to be noble, loved, glorious, admired; perfection as far as she could be perfect.

  The tide still washed the kerb in front of the Hawkins house at the end of the beach path. She could bathe there still. She rushed breathlessly up into the garden, holding up her dress, and through the wire-netted door, up the uncarpeted staircase to her room, which was at the back of the house. In the front were her father’s two rooms, his bedroom and his study in which he studied nothing, but which contained the out-of-date text-books, grammars, and botanies which he had once used, Wood’s Natural History, the prizes of his poor youth. The south-eastern room was Kitty’s, the northeastern, Teresa’s. In between was a long corridor in which a small flight of stairs led to one of the turreted attics. This corridor was also a kind of dais. One stepped down from it to reach the stairhead. All about, there were wooden passages, open windows and light and air streaming in. It was a spacious stone building, which had once been a military stables. The floors were always gritty with sand and stone-dust, as well as dirt from the hill which rose just behind them. At night, on this dust, lay the moonlight and starlight; in rains, streaks and pools of water lay about. It was rarely that Teresa put on her light to go to bed or to dress, only on dark nights of smother and storm; but Kitty was usually there, the “woman of the house”, under a lamp lingering over some sewing, visible through the halfopen door, bowed close, looking like an old mother, except for her short dark hair. Kitty’s room tonight for the first time was dark. Teresa leaned out of one of the back openings and called to the yard: “Where’s Kit?”

  Her father’s voice answered her from the shed: “Is that you, Terry? Isn’t Kit with you?” She heard him cross the flagged yard and enter the kitchen. She came across to the stairhead and shouted: “Kit went somewhere with Sylvia.”

  “Sylvia who?”

  “Sylvia Hawkins. You know.”

  “By herself ?”

  He reproved her for leaving Kitty, standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking up. Then seeing her long dress in the luminous shadow, he began to laugh. “You two girls were figures of fun today running for the boat.”

  “I’m going for a swim,” she said, retiring.

  “Don’t swim alone,” said he.

  “Just in front.”

  She shed her clothes hastily and ran downstairs, barefooted, dragging on a black bathing-suit she had grown out of, too small to wear in the daytime, but sleek and fishy to swim in. A tall, dark form slouched through the mosquito-door, grumbling.

  “Come for a swim?” she asked her brother Lance.

  “Too tired,” he said. “Don’t swim alone, and look out, there are rays and Portuguese man-of-wars about.”

  “I’ll stay in the light. You come and be look-out.”

  “Not on your tintype.”

  Her father, sitting on a stone bench in the garden, slapping mosquitoes, said: “Have you got a look-out?”

  “You come and watch,” she said.

  “Nuh,” said he. “Too tired. Been making Kitty’s hope chest all the afternoon. More hope than chest.”

  Lance from behind the door said: “Hmff,” disgustedly.

  “Lance doesn’t care for women,” laughed the father in his soft voice.

  “Really?” cried Teresa. “Really! Doesn’t he? Oh, no!”

  The father laughed. Teresa dropped her towel on the steps and splashed into the water; it was so still that the splash could be heard all over the bay.

  “Not out of the light,” called her father. “I saw a large basking shark up Parsley Bay yesterday.” The basking shark was pale, changing colour with the bottom and all but invisible.

  She was floating about under a street lamp where the beach path ended. Swimming here, she could see anyone coming either from the wharf or from the little end village of several streets arranged in a square of green called the Lawny. She floated in the water and thought she would not be afraid to go down at sea. To burn at sea—yes! But to go down! People had floated for thirty-six hours on a smooth ocean. You just let yourself go—you can even sleep floating, but the ocean she dreamed about under her lids was a wide smooth expanse under the moon, a halcyon sea. A man approached from the wharf way. She turned on her front and began to crawl about aimlessly, like a young prawn, over the sand. The water was only a foot or so deep. It was Georgie Martin going home. They exchanged hellos.

  “See what Leo caught on the reef?” asked the big young man shyly.

  “Kelpfish. We ate them,” she said, wishing him to go. As soon as he mounted the grass slope towards the street where he lived with his fat, timid wife, she turned back and began floating. It was impossible to swim in the shallows. The sky above was blond and delicate and the water far and wide was pale; she could see the bottom sand to a certain distance and it was too shallow for a shark in there.

  “I’d like to sleep out tonight,” thought she. The moon gave her ghastly dreams which she enjoyed. She remembered school-yard tales: “You will go mad, if you sleep with the moon on your face.” She had a cousin who took fits at full moon; she turned blood-red also at full moon. That was some story she had heard. Likewise, this cousin had a great charm, men ran after her; she was not precisely “no good”, but she was fly.

  Voices came from the baths, saying good-bye. She even heard Leo’s voice faintly calling: “So long, so long.” Then she heard him nearer, his young baritone talking to the men, his whistling as he approached. She floated feet first to the edge of the path under the lamp and looked at him over her feet. His voice was full of delighted surprise. “I say, why didn’t you come in with us?”

  She did not reply, only grinned at him. Leo flung his towel on the path and sat down with his toes in the water.

  “That was Marion Josephs,” he said in a low voice.

  “Which one?”

  “The one with red hair.”

  There was a silence in which Leo wordlessly implored Teresa not to mention his romping with girls in the Old Baths; and in which Teresa, by suddenly turning over in the water and swimming a few strokes out and back again, answered that she would not.

  “Come in, come in,” said Teresa, pulling at his leg. He went in, but came right out again, because he had been playing football, fishing, and swimming all day.

  “Moon’s nearly full,” said he.

 
; “Next day too,” answered Teresa.

  “It’s a pity you can’t go swimming in trunks like I can,” he said, considerately. Teresa swam a few strokes.

  “You look nice in that bathing suit,” Leo continued with an eager, timid smile, looking into her face. She lay on her back looking up dreamily at the Milky Way: “I’d like to swim all night.”

  Leo ducked his head and murmured: “Do they hurt really?”

  “What?” said Teresa, looking round for jelly-fish. Then his tone recalled her. She stared at him. He flushed but said mildly: “Your—those,” he pointed at her breasts.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I thought perhaps.”

  “How?” She plunged into the dark.

  “I say, Tess,” he pursued in a clear voice, “I say, what’s your feller like?” he laughed. “Your boy?”

  “I haven’t got one.”

  “You must have.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Yes, you have,” he persuaded her, laughing gaily. “What does he say to you, uh?” He was very eager. “What sort of things, huh?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t one.”

  He laughed, knowing better.

  “I say, can I take you to the Maroubra Motordrome on Saturday?” he asked. It was a long trip, but she knew he had a girl down there, an Italian, black-eyed, pasty-faced, with a long English jaw and thick eyelashes; he had shown Teresa the photomaton picture, begging for her opinion; her name was Eunice. She despised Eunice, the latest of Leo’s succession of black-eyed girls, and she disdained Leo, this loving, handsome seventeen-year-old who already wanted to get married.

  “I’m out,” she suddenly cried, bending upwards and getting to her feet. The sky behind the high attics of the old house was bubbling with radiant air. The water was receding fast. A curious flattening of the light had been coming in quick pulsations for minutes from the east and now a faint, very wide ring appeared round the moon, but the disk sailed free, without a cloud. She ran up the steps.

  The bay, the headlands for miles, and all the districts of suburbs with their deep-etched gardens, the pallid streets, the couples walking, the parked cars, every buoy and rowboat, even flotsam and crabs stiffly promenading on rocks were intensely visible, and yet had dulled since half an hour ago. In the garden the trees were black against the flown moon-scarves. Leo followed her in.

  “Where’ve you been?” inquired his father.

  “Swimming,” said Leo.

  “Alone?”

  “No, someone was watching.” Leo sprinted for the house.

  6

  Lance with His Head in His Hand

  Lance with his head in his hand, was at the dining-room table poring over his engineering books. She stood in the doorway and asked: “Did you get your dinner off the stove? If you stay out with the fishermen, you can’t get it fresh.”

  He turned slowly towards her, flashed a look at her bathing-suit, and then spoke to one side of her, his eyes downcast. “Of course.”

  “Was it all right? It was kept from lunch.”

  “Of course.”

  With misgiving and a real touch of pity for him, she looked over his lemon-coloured face, its hollows and long lines from nose to mouth. His pale-red lips were slightly apart and showed the two gaps where his front teeth had fallen out. He was still dirty after his afternoon. His long ash-blond hair, slicked back, dark-green with water, was coming down over his forehead again. His skin was very fair, his neck and all his features long and soft; his neck and face drooped easily under trouble and fatigue. He had docile brown eyes, so that however despising or sarcastic he looked, he seemed gentle too. He had a changeable face that he could never control—just when he was trying to be harsh, superior, cold, a sheepish or reluctant look upset the expression. He was estranged from them all, a young man of twenty-two, who had already spent several years on the treadmill of working boys, college at night. He worked in the daytime as a chemist in a factory where the men were always nauseated at lunch-time with the smells. He did not eat his lunches. In the week-ends, Lance lighted out early with a friend, cycling furiously for long distances, practising for reliability trials on his motor-bike, or exercising for marathons. He was an intolerant faddist. Tess searched his dusty face until he withdrew his sidelong glance and went back to his books. She knew why he careered all over the country that way in the weekends, wearing himself out.

  “You ought to go to bed,” she ventured.

  “Shut up,” he said softly, working at his figures.

  “You’ll be all in.”

  He turned slowly and looked at her with eyes great and unfocused.

  “You’d better go and get that off, there’s a split on the side, anyhow,” he said with quiet dignity. She giggled.

  “You get out of here,” he shrieked, leaping out of his chair, starting towards her. She vanished. He fell back on his books. Going up the stairs, slowly lifting each bare foot and putting it down voluptuously on the dusty wood, she thought vaguely of Leo’s shouts of wrath in the mornings, when Kitty packed his lunch and blacked his boots, Kitty, in tears, rarely answering back, the father quietly letting it pass over him, drinking his black tea off the hob. Lance also mistreated the young woman who did everything for him.

  “She oughtn’t to clean their boots,” said Tess to herself, lifting her fingers one by one out of the dust of the balustrade. Why did Dad let the boys rave and never intervene? “Least said, soonest mended?”

  Lance even hit Kitty, knocked her roughly out of his way as he plunged in to breakfast, a desperate look in his eyes. Leo, flaming with anger, red-cheeked, bright-eyed, leaped into the kitchen, his shirt half on, shouting complaints. Tess did nothing for them except some housework, but she did, of course, earn money, while poor Kitty seemed a burden to them, a mouth to fill. Thinking of this, Teresa remembered that she had not paid her money to Kitty this week. She went into her room and took it out of her drawer, all in silver. At this moment she heard Kitty come in and waited with some curiosity till Kitty had explained herself to her father and gone up to her room. Then she went in, still in her bathing-suit, which had now dried on her.

  Kitty was sitting by the lamp, her hat still on, her short-sighted eyes looking off vaguely, a faint silly smile on her face. Teresa put down the money on Kitty’s work-table. Kitty looked up with a smile of gratitude that had nothing to do with the regularly paid money. She had been a very pretty little girl, slightly cross-eyed with large black pupils; she had become a stocky adolescent with pleasant little cries and laughs when playing with the village children she was fond of, then a dull, clumsy, and slow housekeeper for the family. Teresa looked at her in her new mood with curiosity, thinking:

  “I don’t know what goes on in her head!”

  Kitty said: “It was a nice wedding, wasn’t it?”

  “Not bad.”

  “I thought you’d forgotten,” said Kitty, pointing. “You get paid on Thursdays.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, I forgot. What’s that?”

  Kitty showed her a crocheted cap, emerald green.

  “It’s for Joycie Baker. Her mother provides the wool, I only get two shillings for that. If I provide the wool, I make them for three and six. I made them for a few of the mothers. It’s the style now.”

  “You can’t make anything on them?”

  “Two shillings, but of course I don’t get many and it’s only a fad.”

  “I’ll give you some money,” said Teresa, in shame.

  Kitty laughed eagerly, but said: “No, no. I ought to earn some. You pay enough.”

  “We ought to pool some pocket-money for you.”

  The younger girl’s lip curled as she looked at her sister’s dress. That brown! If she had real money, she’d make her wear different things, but Kitty was obstinate; she wanted to be safe, respectable. Teresa sighed and went back to her room, and had forgotten her sister before she was half-way along the passage.

  The room!
She literally jumped across the threshold and stood panting with pleasure near the middle of the room. Then with a silent, shivering, childish laugh, she closed the door, quickly and softly. She stripped off the bathing-suit, which she hung out the window to get completely dry and felt her flesh, cold as marble in the warm air. She shivered again with excitement and went to kneel at the uncurtained window looking out on the back road, the road into the camp and the hill. This hill was half a hill. On the other side it fell straight into the sea, part of South Head; the open sea was not more than two or three hundred feet away from where she stood. She envisioned it tonight, a water floor out to the horizon, with a passage strewn with moonrushes and barely breaking at the base of the cliffs.

  “Oh, God, how wonderful, how wonderful!” she muttered half-intelligible exclamations which were little more than cries of ecstasy as she stood in the window. If someone was crouching among the rocks on the hill, he could see her, but otherwise she was safe here. She leaned over the sill, her round arms and full breasts resting on the woodwork. Her flesh was a strange shade in that light, like the underside of water beasts. Or like—She began to think like what. She did not care if she never went to bed; the night stretched before her. “I know every hour of the night,” she said joyfully and repeated it. It seemed to her that she knew more of the night and of life than they all did down there; hunched Kitty, cheesy Lance, girl-mad Leo, slow Andrew Hawkins, entombed in their lives. She heard footfalls in the Bay, far off—people going home—voices, a pair of lovers perhaps, climbing higher up on the cliffs. The footsteps of anyone going home late to the camp, the permanent staff, going by the paved road, could be heard long before he came in sight and so too in the blind road underneath the house.

  She was free till sunrise. She was there, night after night, dreaming hotly and without thinking of any human beings. Her long walks at night through the Bay, in which she had discovered all the lost alleys, vacant lots and lonely cottages, her meditation over the poor lovers from the city, her voluptuous swimming and rolling by herself in the deep grass of the garden and her long waking nights were part of the life of profound pleasure she had made for herself, unknown to them. She was able to feel active creation going on around her in the rocks and hills, where the mystery of lust took place; and in herself, where all was yet only the night of the senses and wild dreams, the work of passion was going on.