Girl with a Monkey (10 page)

“I'm eclectic if nothing,” replied Elsie, shakily attempting flippancy. “I like to draw my friends from as varied a circle as possible.”

Laura shrugged this unbelievable behaviour to one side. In the circle in which she moved the greatest problems that confronted her were whether or not one should have sweet or dry before dinner, whether to admit one had read anything apart from the
Reader's Digest
or to dissimulate.

“He looks familiar to me,” she mused. Beer had
returned the familiar sense of the rightness of things and woven a higher colour across the cheek-bones. “Wasn't he at the Golf Club Ball with you?”

Elsie's mind divided nostalgically into two polished floors across one of which staggered Jon, drunk as a lord, and on the other trod Harry searching the walls for a corner to sit and talk. Like partners in some grotesque measure the two figures advanced retrospectively through their paces, reliving again the comparison that had caused her finally to choose the one and reject the other. Jon and she had barely entered the hall where half the city's permanent Air Force were gathered for mutual snobberies and inanities, when, awkward upon the highly polished floor, he lost his footing and fell flat on his face during a pause between dances. Moustaches and permanent waves turned amusedly in their direction, and, filled with almost orgiastic hatred, she stood there in silence while the other man in the party raised him to his feet. His legs appeared to melt under him as he struggled to the side door.

“Sorry, chick,” he whispered, hardly having time for these words before stumbling into the dark to retch in the privacy of the car park.

“I like picking them out,” said Harry squeezing her tightly to him in the hall corner. “The ones that do it. See. Her. That one over there. Yes'm. I can tell by their figures. Faces, too. There's another. Geez, you're a baby, Else. A lovely, silly baby. I tell you you look
gorgeous in that get-up. It fits you like a glove.” He nuzzled her cheek with his nose, then was distracted. “She does, too! And how!” He pointed to a tall girl in white with artificial red roses at bosom and hemline.

Elsie laughed.

“That's Laura Marten. She's on our staff. A teacher is above suspicion.”

“I don't care whose staff she's on. That one has been around since the year one.”

He turned, struck by a sudden thought her smiling face gave him.

“You haven't, have you? Or have you?”

“No. Never.”

“Not even when you were a kid, not from seven on?”

“It may seem incredible to you, Harry, but I'm still a virgin.”

“Well. Well, we'll see about that. We'll see.”

Elsie watched him moistening his lips and a ghastly excitement ran through her as he turned to her and pulled her waist hard in towards him.

“Never, eh?” He licked his lower lip ever so slightly. “You'll be delicious.”

Next day she had told Jon what most he dreaded to hear and so at last put an end to those furtive evenings when, rather than run the risk of being seen by him as she went to meet Harry, she had walked in darkness along the bushy roads to the Rising
Sun bus, fighting her fear of shadow under the star-brilliant night.

How many times, seated in the deep canvas chairs at the Dixy, had she seen Jon come almost blindly into the stalls and had sat there clutching Harry and giggling guiltily until the danger was over. Once they went dancing together in some tawdry streamer-ravished hall, when, to her horror, Jon had come up the stairs, looked all round, and then gone onto the rostrum where the tinny four-piece band was squeezing the very guts of a wartime tune.

“Missed the Saturdee dahns,” crooned Harry maliciously into her ear, pivoting her in a series of vulgar whirls. He nodded up at the stage where Jon, lit by the fires of loneliness and inebriation, was beating out the drums with a fine frenzy. At this he had much ability and was in great demand among all the small jazz groups in the town.

“Come on. Let's go or we'll be seen,” Elsie urged. She pulled ineffectively at Harry's arm.

“Let him see. Do him good! It's about time he knew about me, anyway, Elsie. I'm not going on with this double game much longer. You'll have to choose.”

She had explained the dishonesty of her own behaviour quite satisfactorily to herself, yet when it became a question of substantiating her reasons to one of the persons concerned, it was as if she were trying to write on water. So often she had been the one wanting,
and at the same time the one unwanted, that she now achieved a keen, unexplored pleasure in this new-found indifference, this resolution not to become emotionally involved. Lashed on like all members of her sex by the warnings of cosmeticians, the couturiers, the milliners, the retail stores, all of which sold the idea that not to achieve marriage was the greatest misfortune that could overtake a woman, she knew with the desperateness of one now entering her twenties that at all costs she must keep one man. Which one?

“Couldn't bear it wivout you,” insinuated Harry into the whorls of her ear. “Don't get around much any more.” Oh, the grief, the unquestionable grief of the saxophone urging her decision.

“Yes,” replied Elsie not daring to catch Laura's eye. “Yes, he was. You mustn't blame me,” suddenly she protested with a new urgency creeping into her voice. “You know yourself the way it is in these God forsaken holes. No music, no books, the upper crust some small-time shopkeepers comparing cheque-butts and reading the papers avidly each day hoping to see their friends' downfall. I think Harry's type stands up to the comparison fairly well. He's only a little more illiterate than the average primary school headmaster,” she added, thinking of Duffecy, “and with a great deal more humour and simplicity and anxiety to please.”

“Oh, don't give me that! You know you probably felt
la grande patronne
. You were slumming, Elsie,
mentally slumming and getting a kick out of playing the intellectual bigwig to that poor ruddy drain-digger. I bet he feels like slicing you up, and serves you right.”

She crushed out the butt of her cigarette and lit another.

“Now take Joe. At least he's presentable. He might only be ground staff but he's got the looks, the poise and plenty of . . . well, if not intelligence, then know-how.”

“And a wife,” put in Elsie tartly, wearying of this one-sided criticism.

“Drink up,” said Laura indifferently, “and don't be a bitch. And be nice to him when he calls after dinner, or I'll let you find your own way to the station tonight.”

“My remark was quite in order. I have my own warped moral sense still, foundering perhaps, but beating along its course as far as it's able. At least Harry hasn't a wife and child. I'm only making one person unhappy.”

“You sure needle a girl, don't you?” queried Laura, with a still good-tempered smile. “What Joe and I do is surely the business of Joe and me. Not for one minute am I going to explain or justify the situation. It exists.
Satis est
. But not sated, mark you, not sated. Nothing libidinous so far.”

Like Elsie, she knew it was basically due to boredom in a small town. She rose with her innate
grace and went to the door where she turned her acquisitive profile north and then south. The street, save for the line of parked cars and bicycles propped up against the kerb and three small girls playing skipping on the far side, lay emptily along the quiet afternoon that almost floated in pale pinks and washed-out blues over the coast.

She turned back into the darkening interior and, spreading her hands in a gesture of ignorance, conveyed much to Elsie through that and the raising of her fussy shoulders.

May

I
T MUST
have been the longest jetty she had ever seen. It reached out brazenly into the swelling water to the point where it became deep enough to take the launches plying between the island and the town. Watching Daggoombah as they swung towards it over the bay metamorphosed from a big grey-green hump against the sky to a volcanic outcrop with dazzling new-moon beaches and lush green littoral, she had hardly realized that the mainland was fading to a flattened line with pointilliste houses and a pasteboard backdrop of hill.

The launch, having taken fifteen minutes' quiet smacking against pier stumps while the deckhands unloaded the grocery crates and packs of fresh meat onto the jetty, eventually pulled off and put out into the darkening afternoon water, once more taking tourists and supplies to the settlement on the other side of the island. The crowd fanned out from a jostling shapelessness to visiting extroverts in city beachwear, blowsy girls who had seen their best days during the war years back to worry their nostalgia, local fishermen in torn
khaki and hotel employees trundling supplies and bags. Right down the centre of the jetty ran a set of rails and a trolley that carried all the heavier freight back to shore. As the line of trailers went by stacked up, the driver rang a bell and shouted and the people still on the jetty stepped precariously to the edge and balanced uneasily until it had gone by. It was a good seven minutes before they reached the loose sand of the beach and, ploughing up through it, saw the only road practicable for vehicles with its cabbage- and coconut-palms and behind that the groves of tamarind-trees and the tourist cabins.

There was a point jutting out to the south composed of massive granite boulders and slabs, but near the jetty was built a shark-proof bathing enclosure in which a late swimmer was still plashing mournfully in the growing twilight. One sail oblique off shore and cirrus clouds tattered above sky roadways. Land breeze and isolated laughter from the cabins and then the hotel with its open-shuttered walls and cool cement floor.

Laura knew the island, the permanent families and the hotel as well as she knew the palm of her hand, for she had taught for three years at one of the island's two tiny schools. She had not been actually marooned, however, for each week-end had seen the island crowded with servicemen over to hike or swim. It was with a certain searching for lost time that she had
come for these two days, a desire to bathe in an ocean of sentiment rather than to entertain Elsie.

After dinner they strolled through the narrower bosky paths crossed by stream and bridges at charming intersections, and when at last they came out upon the beach by a ragged plantation of banana-trees the sea was a plum-purple barred with phosphorescent parallels that melted finally into an equally plum-blue night. Dipping across it like a lighted wedding-cake ploughed the launch on its return trip, one minute the whole of its starboard side visible, the next it was as if the ship had vanished while the stiff evening wind flung it like a walnut shell into a furrow.

The sand was hard and damp below the dunes and they looked down with pleasure at the sharp imprint of their sandals just visible in the glow from the surf. They said little, preferring to taste the salt air on their mouths and to feel the crack of sea berries under foot; and so stood unspeaking for fifteen minutes or more on the point, watching the lights of the mainland string out and the lava-like swell of the sea as it broke in immensely long parabolas of white. When they turned back to the hotel the lights were on along the roadway throwing up in brilliant electric greens the smooth-leafed fig- and orange-trees, while the shuttered light from the dining-room threw bars of black and yellow across the street. A Conrad setting.

There floated out clearly into the night air the resonant
tone of a piano nostalgically repatterning a tune that was popular during the thirties, but with a twang caused by the erosion of salt air upon the strings that gave it a plangent sadness of old guitars. Looking in the wide doors of the lounge-room on their way upstairs, they saw a group of four or five men, all of whom were in uniform except the one at the piano. He was wearing a vivid red shirt outside a pair of old shorts. He seemed, too, quite unselfconscious, for although his technique was not good he picked out strangely pleasing harmonies with his big blunt fingers, and as he played he sang occasionally a phrase in a nasal baritone.

With legs outspread and cigarettes glowing, the others passed a bottle between their glasses and drummed out the rhythm on the leather arms of the chairs or tapped it heel-toe on the floor. The pianist who was half turned to them grinned as he sang, “On the golf course I'm under par”, and then executed a slow “blues” break with one hand. One of the soldiers caught sight of the girls and waved.

“Join us,” he suggested with expansive hospitality. “Bring a little life into our decorum. You're out-numbered. Everything's in your favour.”

But Laura merely laughed, waved, and hurried Elsie, who would have longed to go in, away to the kitchen premises.

“Not tonight,” she whispered to Elsie. “We're going
to kill a bottle of sherry before bedtime. You said you wanted to experience inebriation, so now you're going to have it. Tommy put a sweet by in the kitchen for us. He loves me like a daughter.”

Their room opened on the wide veranda that ran along the entire front of the hotel's first floor and gave an unsurpassed view of the bay frond-framed by palm-trees. Laura opened the double doors and walked out flexing her arms. The tropic night was so brilliant with stars it seemed alive and very close. On the roadway the lounge light shifted as a figure in the room moved round and flung a shadow across the street. The piano came to her muted pleasantly. She went back inside, rinsed two tooth glasses into the enamel basin, and, having removed the cork from the bottle of wine with a practised dexterity, poured half-tumblers.

“Well, honey, this is it!”

Their glasses clinked and, seated each on one of the narrow stretchers against the wall, they drank to the month of June. After the first glassful things seemed much more pleasant and relaxed, conversation flowed in pauseless amiability round a score of topics; they touched briefly on trade unionism, birth control, and the royal family, and then Laura refilled the glasses. Outside their island of content the wind creaked among the palm-trees and rattled the bamboo groves beside the water tanks, ramparting their warmth, their very sociability with a fortress of sound that in itself spelt
outsideness and shutoutness and made by contrast their own security seem the stronger. The light burned weakly in its bare bulb, and, as the wind blew in, sent waves of shadow rioting round the walls. Shivering suddenly, Laura got up and shut the double glass doors.