by Thea Astley
Gerald said unexpectedly, “I’ve been thinking over what you said this morning. Maybe it would be for the best now the boy’s an adult.”
“Why have you got to be so selfish, so self-concerned?”
“Hey! It was you who brought it up.”
“I’m not talking about that. About that old man, I mean. Can’t you ever give the tiniest attention to the feelings of anyone except yourself?”
Gerald’s mouth went tight and behind his compressed lips was a store of bitter replies he preferred for the moment to keep to himself as he remembered the horrible straight marriage road of domesticity punctuated by his sugared eruptions and the marital rite. The communion feasts all round were a crumbling farce of stale gesture and promise, unmoistened by the tears of his wife or even of the other women he had used and forgotten. Brutally he concentrated on recalling, in physical detail, the woman he had seen that morning at the store, tracking in memory a curve of the mouth that preluded in her perhaps an abandonment of conscience he knew he would find pleasing for a change. Thus aided, he strode along two miles of private sins—or so he thought, but from the withdrawn expression of his plump face and blue eyes, Kathleen was wearily aware of some likely erotic preoccupation. It was possible for him to sulk enormous distances away, and he did so now, all the hot sweating way to the port and the dinghy that he hailed to take them back to the Malekula.
The ship was swinging wildly as the afternoon became alive with wind and at some time past five Captain Brinkman tapped on their cabin door to warn them he was shifting the boat to the lee of the small island they could see from their cabin port. It would be their last chance to go ashore that evening, he assured them with a kind of dampness about his words and mouth. His radio had tapped in a hurricane warning. They might be safer ashore.
Communication with others, even of the simplest kind, always revived Gerald, who tended to flag after an hour or more with the same companion. Somehow as if he needed a transfusion, thought Kathleen sourly. Not normally given to uncharity, she found a tendency to it developed by Gerald’s vengeful withdrawals.
We change our attitudes with our underwear, they were both reflecting in unexpected communion as they dressed, poking their awkward limbs through concealing and revealing garments that had long since lost the need to do either of these things. Sometimes Kathleen or Gerald would observe dispassionately, and, ah, the veins, the sag, the pallor. It was a hymn to despair. But with the clothes the bodies managed to put on a layer of insensitivity that took them, speaking once more, into the chucking dinghy, took them up to the wharf, up the main street again past the bougainvillea, the Bar des Sportifs, the huddling water-front pub.
Gerald kept looking about him with the eager eye of one who hopes to locate a face he has lost.
“I am going to get good and thoroughly shickered,” he said. “A farewell to the place. Do you know,” and he bent his pleasant bald head towards Kathleen and almost twinkled, “we’ll be back in another week. Back home, I mean.”
“Back to what?” Kathleen inquired bitterly. “The same old jazz?”
“Jesus!” he said. “You’re difficult.” His mouth tucked in like a wrapper over lumps of feeling. And that was that.
His wife fussed savagely, up-ending a small purse onto the windy grass while she hunted for a handkerchief into which she might blow her stuffed up rage; but she had forgotten as usual and in her handbag only a compact and the stubby bullet of a lipstick lay singularly useless beside some pins and airmail stickers that the damp climate had turned into a fancy collage. Tears racing from her eyes made her turn to the succour of the landscape that now offered its blotter-like expanse under a dramatic and bruised sunset. The sun was rushing down like a suicide and they watched it for a minute before taking their grievances to the Lantana.
The lobster and the dry red. The lobster and the white.
If you concentrate on these food portions, Kathleen swore to herself, you will not be distressed by the vision of Gerald munching with his eyes on the woman at the end of the room. That she too was aware became obvious round about the fourth glass, for she caught Gerald’s eye and held it for three heart-beats before turning away with a smile to the woman she was with! a privacy of exchange that excluded the wife victim—or the husband. Kathleen went red and poked about at the crayfish shell while Gerald, rather in the way of a dog, snapped and cracked at claws, worked them over vigorously with his fork, poking out titbits and exclaiming with pleasure. Her hatred was blossoming into giant florets. She could have handed him a great bouquet and he would merely have said, How lovely, darling, thank you.
There was rain now, hard cold nails of rain driving across the harbour and the windows of the dining-room. The wind raced it away before it had time to moisten, it seemed, and the louvres all along the veranda began to dance and bump at the one time. Gerald was maudlinly drunk, and with that, nostalgic, leaning across the table towards her, and denying the need for divorce, denying it with his eyes glued elsewhere. He even reached across to touch her wedding-finger, but the wells of Kathleen’s eyes had dried up. He could not drown in them. “If you look,” she said with that ambiguous irony of non sequitur that fascinated and infuriated him, “you will find old lobster claws and bits of broken bottle. Lots and lots.”
“Look at what, Kathleen?”
She began to hum. Her mood changes were inexplicable to him. And as she hummed, staring past with her chin propped on laced fingers, she found herself involved with two people who had been drinking in shadow to one side of the bar. A priest and a terrible painted lady she now saw to be Miss Paradise. Miss Paradise had risen from her table and wobbled across. “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus,” Gerald hissed at one stage, watching Miss Paradise lean towards the priest and fuss with circumstantial concern. And now he added as Fricotte moved across as well, “Simon of Cyrene draws near.”
“Don’t you ever . . .?” Kathleen began. And then chewed up the rag of some statement whose consequences she feared.
Gerald waited politely enough for her to finish, but she rose and went to the lavatory where the flapping screens on the windows cracked like drums. Watching herself in the lavatory mirror. The blue eyes. The pretty and tired face. The lines. The hair that wandered about. She was not reassured, even by the fresh lipstick and the insolence of her nose and the half-lit schoolgirl look. The wind broke in gusts between the louvres and their rhythm, irregular and harsh, jangled her into bravery that made her resolve.
“I shall leave Gerald,” she told herself, “for my humiliation is too constant and extended. And where once I plumped out on being loved, now I am wasting away from remembrances of row upon row with me whimpering and Gerald refusing to talk. Gerald smiling past me, opening and closing his hand in a funny wave to a child, while beside him I cry and cry.
“Please,” she would beg. “Please what?” he would snap, snap. And then the smile or the wave beyond beyond. As she combed her hair away from her face, she recalled evenings as a girl when the party dressing was the ritual of love rather than the accepted accustomed grabbing formulae she had come to perfect in the occasional embraces of lovers who after all never saw. But should two martyrs meet for this act? she pondered, applying pre-ritual paint to the hurt mouth. I will have done all this, she knew, mainly enduring, and have made no ripple at all on the surface of existence and none on him. Victim. All the time victim. As she tasted this juice of discovery she saw again the priest outside wrapped in some envelope of distance that removed him and then, trembling with dissatisfaction and discovery above the handbasin, she put her mouth down suddenly to gulp from her cupped hand water that tasted surprisingly clean and good after wine.
When she came back to the dining-room, the other women had gone. There were only the priest and Miss Paradise locked in secrets. Gerald had moved away from the terrible remains of their lobster dinner to talk with the last of the diners, self-protecting in bar jokes through which the wind rolled and bore their mounting concern as shutt
ers along the front of the building tore off like gull wings. About this time, too, the first of the large waves smashed into the sea wall and sent spray across the room.
Kathleen, ignoring her husband, went to the street door, but the road between the shops was glittering with sharp quills of water and litter piled in small rubbishing islands, seen now in the last illumination of the evening. Not quite the last illumination for the lights of an approaching truck were pinning her against the doorway and their brightness drove her back at last to Gerald who was huddled cravenly below the table, cuddling his double scotch.
10 p.m., 10th December
No door seemed more welcome.
Stevenson, disabled only physically, for his emotional energy was world without end, leant in his giddiness and exultation against the tottering doorpost of Marie’s flat in Erromango Street, and tapped the perturbation of his heart against the dripping panelling. He had left Miss Trumper at the Lantana where her friend and Lake had emerged from the little crowd of drinkers to take charge. He was too tired to question the wisdom of leaving her there and did not even notice the waves that were already breaking over the sea-wall and crossing the road. He thought at the back of his mind that it might blow itself out in an hour or two but he was beyond caring, with the enemy within gnawing at his nerves. Every time lately that he placed his hand against his side to still it, he was aware of a hardness under the skin, and although he had tried to ignore this, its presence grew physically and monstrously within his mind as well as his body.
From beneath the door came no suffusion of light, and after a moment he fought his way against the wind down the side of the building under the papaw-trees to the rear where a flywire door smashed backwards and forwards against the wall. He lived like a spider amidst webs of fear that she would not be there or that she would deny him or that he might apprehend her in some more disastrous expenditure; but so far there was only the expectation, the frenzy of suspicion, and the ultimate cathartic collapse that winded him, emptied his bowels, and left just so much less of the thinking man. Jesus, he prayed, Jesus. And hammered on the barrier, knowing that she could never hear him in the pitching dark.
He tried the handle and it opened.
Yet he was unwilling to discover and had to force himself in, into the rented flat with its grass mats, its horrible glass louvres, and the scattered personal objects that made it particularly hers. There were few enough of these, and they took the form not of softness of feminine device in cushion or drapery or trapped flower, but of prints of casual and supremely telling line, of books and typewriter, records. There was not much else. Her few clothes he knew as well as his own and if he had examined the wardrobe where they hung could have told by the omission noted in the eyes’ sweep just what she would be wearing.
He called and there was no reply, so he switched on the torch he had brought in from the truck and made his way to her bedroom, harsh as a man’s, with the battery radio still running faintly and a note for him propped beside the lamp. This he seized like food, but was frightened to eat.
“My dear,” it said, and he repeated the words with bitter and almost ironic savour and ran his tongue around the emotions the sound ejected into his tired mouth. “I have gone down to the Lantana after all, not knowing when you would be back. In at ten.”
Her signature was its usually highly strung scrawl, with no love between the message and it, yet he suffered this, too, and examining her clock-face found it now to be twenty minutes after that time. His heart then became a fish and leapt at slopes of water uselessly, while outside the drumming of the rain and the gale wind reached peaks of violence that made the whole building shudder under the pliant lashings of trees.
Anxiously he wandered to the front room and searched for her car’s headlamps in the impenetrable wind. Nothing. Nothing. He tried to read, but the decanter on the side table sang to him and he found himself involuntarily reaching, pouring and sipping, this time without a real pain to quench.
It was this way she found him.
He attempted to rise, but after she had pushed him back into the chair he sat with her head against his knees and threaded his fingers through her short crop to feel the shape of her skull, a geography whose curve, for some inexplicable reason, never ceased to excite him. He wondered whether it was because he cupped the thinking part of her that was free to bestow or withhold the body it controlled. And so held her now, pulling her head in closer until he was able to move his mouth along her neck and under the shelter of hair.
“Do you love me?” he asked. She did not have the answer he wanted and could give it only in the way flesh demanded, so that in a very short time he toppled with her through the rocking, crashing house to her bed where, with the nervous fury that seized him at such moments, he tried to impress himself on her in the futility of love-making, with a forever that melted away in the finality of the act.
Afterwards there was always the disappointment, the sense that fusion was temporary; and the relationship between them broke with the moving apart of their limbs, leaving him, at least, to wonder how any union more lasting than this might be achieved. With the rattle of cups? With boiled eggs or diapers? With shared tediums of childhood? With the mystique of the silly contract, the words that legally bound? He did not want to marry again, and although he felt no oneness of the body with the woman who had borne his children there was a congruence of needs imposed by others that made him feel the relationship shared.
“You are my wife,” he would whisper to Marie at moments of self-exposure. But it was unconvincing. Neither of them believed it.
Lying there in the dark they listened to the unbelievable frenzy outside. Stevenson tried the radio again, but through the static could hear only a sex-crazed trumpet taking off into ether.
She said, “I don’t know how you managed the drive back.”
“It wasn’t so bad then.”
“The radio warning came at dinner. Simply emptied the bar. You should have seen Daph Woodsall shoot off back to the house in her mini as if she were going to protect it single-handed.”
“What will we do? Do you think I should go out and see if there’s anything to be done?”
She regarded him like the remnants of dinner.
“Perhaps.”
“Now?”
“Well, it’s up to you.”
He kept remembering the old lady in the Lantana and her painted hideous friend.
“It won’t reach its peak for a while yet. The tracking station radioed the hospital. It might be best to sit tight.”
She sat up and reached for a cigarette across him.
“Lie back,” he said, talking to his conscience rather than her. “Lie back and be still beside me.” He pulled her down.
The pain was beginning to stir like the crab it was, moving its pincers about his belly, seeking, tapping. With a groan he pulled her to him and she thought wearily that it was love until a lightning flash illuminated his face washed with sweat and the flesh pinched back from the bony structure of his nose. They lay like that for a quarter of an hour until, unable to subdue his guilt, he rose, pulled on his clothes and went back to his truck. Marie opened a new box of mints and lay sucking at two of them in the dark.
XI
3 a.m., 11th December
THE lull came at three.
Fricotte had towed the swimming Lake into a room on the street side, so that even after the first of the big waves had plunged through the hotel, ripping away the sea veranda and the dining-room with its arrangement of mating chairs, he slept in his Scotch blanket to awake in the deepest dark during a pause in the wind.
His tentative feet paddled over the side where they dipped immediately into water and floating junk from which they jerked back in fright. Then as the darkness became granulated, he could see across the room and a few feet away on another bed a humped sleeper. This hump was motionless and its shape, somehow helpless, filled him with reluctance to move until, his curiosity slapped awake by the
outside bashing of the huge waves on the sea-wall, he gave a tweak to the grey blanket and opened up his guilt as well.
It was an old lady, and she was dead he saw at once.
For the first unbreathing minute, although he had been used to death in his profession, he was shocked, not only by the twist of sudden utterance cut off that her open mouth gave, but by the tenderness with which her hair had escaped from its shallow bun and trickled like grey streaks of unloving down the soft sad cheeks. Her hands had relinquished their last frenzied clutch and the dentures had dropped onto the blanket and grinned up at him from her stomach. Oh my God! he accused himself. It’s her. It’s that one. Automatically, even as he wondered what his prayers could evoke, he raised his hungover hand and pronounced the words that would absolve. Why had he finally refused last night? he wondered. It’s bloody useless, his heart kept insisting. Bloody stupid, but I have to try. He put out his hand and drew a strand of hair away from the eyes that looked at and through, and very carefully shuttered the lids. He went back to his own bed and sat there, listening to the crash of water whacking and whacking at the land, remembering a park in a town he could not identify for the moment, the swollen shadows, the prone unmoving forms of the metho drinkers washed up under the oaks in the blue light of trees. Remembering his first Mass and his parents waiting for his blessing. Remembering his first temptation and the unhappy face of the boy and his sudden withdrawn arm; remembering the second, and the arm hovering; and on and on, and then his yielding. All those things, the country parishes, the deserts of spiritual retreat with two hundred of them packed into seminaries for footie and soul-searching, the renunciation of the mainland—these he saw through screens purpled by sea currents and the flashy bracts of bougainvillea and the mercy of brown bodies, of infinitely sweet singing skin and undulating voices. All these things. He wanted to howl aloud. He was weak enough these days for easy tears, but it was less for self-pity than for loss.