Authors: Christina Stead
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 not 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.
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 seaâyes! But to go down! People had floated for thirty-six hours on a smooth ocean. You just let yourself goâyou 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: “Yourâthose,” he pointed at her breasts.