For Love Alone (12 page)

“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.

L
ance 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.

She had a vague picture of her future in her mind. Along the cliffs on a starlit night, very dark, strolled two figures enlaced, the girl's hair, curled as snail-shells, falling back over the man's shoulders, but alive of itself, as she leaned against him walking and all was alive, the revolute leaves, the binding roots. This she conceived happened in passion, a strange walking in harmony, blood in the trees. The playful taps and squeezes, wrestling and shrieking which Leo had with the girls was not what she expected and she did not think of this as love. She thought, dimly, that even Leo when he sat on the beach at Maroubra with his girl, made some such picture; a turbulent, maddening, but almost silent passion, a sensual understanding without end.

She abandoned herself and began to think, leaning on the window-sill. In a fissure in a cliff left by a crumbled dike, a spout of air blew up in new foam and spray, blue and white diamonds in the moon, and in between the surges the ashy sky filled the crack with invisible little stars. Hundreds of feet beneath, the sea bursting its skin began to gush up against the receding tide; with trumpet sounds, wild elephants rose in a herd from the surf and charged the cliffs; the ground trembled, water hissed in the cracks.

The full moon shone fiercely on the full-bellied sea. A woman who had known everything, men's love and been deserted, who had the vision of a life of endless work and who felt seedy, despairing, felt a bud growing on its stalk in her body, was thirsty; in her great thirst she drank up the ocean and was drowned. She floated on it now in a wooden shell, over her a white cloth and over all the blazing funeral of the sky, the moon turning its back, sullen, calloused.

What the moon saw. The beaches, the shrubbery on the hills, the tongues of fire, the white and dark of bodies rolling together in snaky unions. Anne—Malfi, “Don't think too badly of me!”—herself! She sighed, shivered and drew in. All the girls dimly knew that the hole-in-a-corner marriages and frantic petting parties of the suburbs were not love and therefore they had these ashamed looks; they lost their girlish laughter the day they became engaged, but those who did not get a man were worse off. There was a glass pane in the breast of each girl; there every other girl could see the rat gnawing at her, the fear of being on the shelf. Beside the solitary girl, three hooded madmen walk, desire, fear, ridicule. “I won't suffer,” she said aloud, turning to the room to witness. “They won't put it upon me.” She thought, a girl who's twenty-seven is lost. Who marries a woman of thirty-five to get children? She's slightly ridiculous to marry at that age. Look at Aunt Maggie, everyone laughed. Take Queenie, few marry at fifteen. Say eighteen, eighteen to thirty; twelve years, whereas men have eighteen to—any time at all, fifty at least, well, forty-eight, they can have children at forty-eight. They can marry then; thirty years. A woman is a hunter without a forest. There is a short open season and a long closed season, then she must have a gun-licence, signed and sealed by the state. There are game laws, she is a poacher, and in the closed season she must poach to live. A poor man, a serf say, clears himself a bit of land, but it's the lord's land. As soon as it's cleared, he grows a crop on it, but it isn't his crop, only partly, or perhaps not at all, it isn't in his name; and then there must be documents, legalities, he must swear eternal fealty to someone. A woman is obliged to produce her full quota
on a little frontage of time; a man goes at it leisurely and he has allotments in other counties too. Yes, we're pressed for time. We haven't time to get educated, have a career, for the crop must be produced before it's autumn. There are northern countries where the whole budding, leafing, and fruiting take place in three months. A farmer said: “What do they bother to put out leaves for, when they must go in so soon?” We put out leaves and flowers in such a brief summer and if it is a bad summer? We must do it all ourselves, too, just like wild animals in the bush. Australian savages arrange all that for their women, they don't have women going wanting, but we do. Girls are northern summers, three months long; men are tropical summers. But then there are the savage women, and the Italian, Spanish women—do they have as short a time? The women of ancient Greece, the Romans, so corrupt and so libertine, but happy no doubt—there might be other women. It isn't necessary—Malfi, Anne, Ray, Ellie, Kitty—me! But they won't even rebel, they're afraid to squander their few years. The long night of spinsterhood will come down. What's to be done? But one thing is sure, I won't do it, they won't get me.