Girl with a Monkey (12 page)

“Not asthenic,” she said, showing off,

“What's that? What do you mean?”

“It doesn't matter. I was just trying to classify you. How would you place me?”

She sketched the outline of a cat on the boards with a finger dipped in the sea. He watched her actions in puzzlement, asking himself if she were trying to be cute or if she really were.

“You got me beat,” he said. “Do you always talk to strange men on diving platforms?”

“Always. But you aren't so strange.”

“And do you always get sick at two in the morning?”

Elsie's laughter stopped in a little silence that heard the water smacking unevenly at the piles. A gull went over crying. She did not know what to reply, uncertain whether there was disapproval in his face or not, and caring, for she cared about everyone's opinion really, as do most people who consciously flout the conventions of conversation. Impassively he returned her gaze.

“How do you know I was sick? Were you awake or did I wake you? I'm very sorry.”

And she was. Her whole existence seemed to be
composed of foolish errors that she regretted as soon as they were committed, but she was driven by ungovernable impulses to their commission. Not that here she was guilty, but the habit of so feeling and of apology were second nature to her.

“I was still awake. The boys stayed downstairs playing cards till one or maybe one thirty, and I was jus' getting into bed when I heard a noise on the veranda, and there you was all pale in your little jarmies near the rail. Don't worry. I'm sure it was what you had for tea.” He laughed, not believing himself.

The sun had run a quadrant of its course across the frail dome of winter blue. Already the sea, syncopated, white-barred, land-turning eternally, sought beaches on another side of the world. Tide on the turn. Elsie picked up her cap from the boards and scrambled to her feet.

“I have to go back now,” she said. “I promised Laura I'd hike across the other side with her to see some people she knew when she taught here. See you again.”

The man lost his aplomb momentarily.

“No, don't go. Geez, I've hurt your feelings! Will I see you again? I have to get the midday launch.”

Elsie looked at him in all gravity, and the edges of her mouth twisted strangely between laughter and tears, without reason. Unquiet before a kindness,
troubled as sea-currents before a moon; one's personal tides moving into the light of human kindness.

“Of course. Ask Des.” She turned quickly and dived soundlessly between the shelves of surf, and only when half-way to the shore did she turn to wave.

August

T
HE FLAT
was really half a bungalow in one of the northern bayside suburbs, nearly three-quarters of a mile from the tram that Laura and Elsie had caught home, and a little less from the bay itself; tin-roofed, wide-veranda'd, paint-peeling and set in mean grounds prickled with a rash of bushes. Five shallow wooden steps sagged upwards to the veranda and, beyond, a hall in twilight led to large dark sitting-rooms and bedrooms. This was the result of a two-month search for a flat by both of them, wearing down the heels of their shoes and their politeness in fruitless pilgrimages to narrow-faced landlords who wanted overmuch for what they offered, or thought two girls should be most willing to share the one bedroom. Then, after all, at the last moment, Elsie, terrified by the proximity of her examinations, had decided that the privacy of a hotel would be even more of a guarantee for study and had withdrawn from the search. Only to begin it again, of course, for the permanent resident in small-town hotels is anathema to rapacious landlords who
prefer the quick gain afforded by the temporary traveller.

Although Laura had expected the house to be empty, on showing Elsie through to the long strip of backyard with its scrubby loquat-trees, garbage bin, and lean-to laundry, she was greatly surprised and somewhat put out to find one of her co-tenants already home and gloomily peeling potatoes over a tub brimming with muddy water. She was a tall, majestic figure with something of a suggestion that her legs were too long for her body, but indeed this only seemed an additive factor to the smartness of her hair pulled back into a bun that gave her a perennial chic and neatened what would otherwise have been a rugged disposition of feature. Despite a dustcoat with sleeves rolled well up and a pair of man-style golf-shoes, she gave the impression of being well-dressed, poised, and incredibly bored. Turning large, weary and cynical eyes upon them she yawned and the brilliant lipstick ovately revealed even white teeth.

“Working back?”

“You should know! Aren't my eyes malt-coloured? This is Elsie Ford, Moira. She's stopping over for tea before the eight-o'clock train leaves tonight. Try to be charming for her sake, won't you?”

“I'm at my most brilliant in front of strangers. I lay out one little foible after another like a tray of
hors d'oeuvres
. How are you, anyway? Happy to be going?”

She smiled quite kindly upon Elsie, who sat down on the bench alongside the tub.

“I keep telling myself that in three hours it will be as if I never were here. For all practical purposes the town will have ceased to exist, everyone in it, places I've been to, shops, streets, snotty-nosed children.”

Moira laughed.

“She loves it, doesn't she, Laura? Oh, what an intellectual feast you teachers must have expounding the area of grass paddocks or guiding the tiny paws as they fill in diagonal lines on cut-out wombats! You should wait until at least four monsoon seasons have drummed across your brain, four summers have slowly dried you out. You weren't here by any chance during the invasion?”

“You mean the Americans? Down south we used to call it the Battle of Brisbane.”

Moira smothered another yawn and brushed back a straying wisp of hair with an olive-skinned hand on the second finger of which a huge gold signet ring caught the sun for a moment. Then she sighed.

“Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Those drably brilliant days of plenty and nothing. Fights in the streets every night between our own brave boys and our easygoing visitors. Causeway queues stretching back to Flinders Street and the town so full of pregnant
women it was like a nation-wide motherhood convention. She missed the town at its best, surely, Laura.”

“Don't disillusion her,” protested Laura. “Let her take away some idyllic memories of coconut-palms and tropic moons. Little one, don't believe everything Moira says. She was done wrong by a colonel with a Walt Disney decoration.”

“Done wrong nothing! Remember the whole town under martial law and that delicious curfew that made reaching a cocktail party seem like crossing into Axis country. I seem to remember Joe didn't do too badly then either. Even when the place was so razed you actually saw Yanks without girls, never Joe! Always one or even two.”

“He's coming before eight tonight to drive us to the station, so try to work off your anti-Seaniger spleen before dinner. He'd like you if you gave him a chance.”

“I'm sure,” remarked Moira cryptically. She finished slicing the last potato into long white wedges, wrapped up the peelings in a double sheet of newspaper and threw the tub of water across the lawn.

The date-palms along the street were turning yellow, their leaves torn and split above their tangerine crops and the dusty dryness of the winter streets. Elsie sat on after the other two went inside to start the meal, actually savouring the finality of this last mild sunset sharpening the slopes and ridges of Castle Hill. Scene
after scene from her brief eight months in the town passed cinematically through her mind, swinging her once more into the saddle along bush tracks near the cape; horses cropping noisily at the turf while they sat on cafe verandas over tea; the jazzing in cheap dance halls and hand-holding in the front stalls; boat moving up-river beyond the weir with the rowlocks creaking in the dusk and no sound save the oars dripping under the willows. She felt as if she had come half a lifetime in half a year, matured in an independence that assured her, a practicality, an ability to be solitary and to enjoy it, a self-containment that caused her not only to derive pleasure from the processes of her ego but to prefer them to the point of an almost unbalanced self-preoccupation. No longer that trembling analysis of conscience, that unsureness of what was wrong and what was right. Now she chose what she wanted, indifferent to ethics.

As an adolescent she had suffered the tortures of the damned about sex, chastity desired being ever-present with such swollen-to-larger-than-life proportions she thought of nothing else. Should she have happened to bump into men in crowded trams she would rush home to plead forgiveness of the Almighty and literally scrub herself all over, fearful of sins of the flesh, of a vague thing known as impregnation but more starkly to her as “having babies”. Her eyes she kept permanently averted from humans and posters,
her cars closed to the more insidious lyrics of popular tunes. And every fortnight she would kneel, nearly vomiting, in the stuffy little cathedral confessional with the dark curtains pulled across making it impossible for priest or penitent to see each other's face except as a pallid disc behind the wire-netting partition.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”

“How long since your last confession?” Wearily. On they went. Over and over.

“I—I had an impure thought.” Hesitating. “Many times.” It was out now. “I read a book and took pleasure in parts of it that were indecent.”

The priest not-turning, looking down from the crest of this treadmill of the penitent's shame. Nodding. Merely nodding. You could have wept with relief at this appearance of indifference, this non-shockability. You plunged on into the more serious things. Overscrupulous you overstated the occasion of sin. You said “ten” or “fifteen”, anxious to clear yourself, and from the other side of the grating an infinitely grave voice pronounced, “You are suffering from scrupulosity, my child.” Voicing your own diagnosis. “You must try to distinguish between what is temptation and what is actually sin. Do not overexamine your conscience or you will never be freed from this trouble.”

And as the partition closed behind you, almost fainting from the bad air and the nervous exhaustion,
reeling you went towards the sanctuary lamp, temporarily succoured until Saturday week.

But it was different now. Was it sheer good sense or hardness that made these visits less frequent and less torturing? She could not say. The feeling of actual nausea came rarely, the feeling of genuine guilt hardly ever.

Through the kitchen window the tone-poem of food preparation played itself out in crockery rattling against crockery, tin-opener jerking through tin, gas hissing then lighting with a mild explosion, taps turning on taps off, footsteps moving quickly, pausing, moving. The smell of trash burning came acridly over the backyards, and blue smoke three houses away spiralled, feathered and lost itself in smoke-coloured sky. Elsie rose, straightening her right leg with difficulty, and painfully walked inside.

While Moira and she stacked soup and sweet dishes and the blue-rimmed dinner plates after the meal was over, Laura went into her bedroom, a section of screened-off veranda, to change, and emerged after fifteen minutes in a skin-tight black suit. The two in the kitchen, who had by now almost completed the litany of plate-stacking and table-wiping, paused in their household prayers as Laura swayed towards them delicately dabbing Cologne behind each ear and in the hollow of her neck.

“Noctes cloaca maxima,”
she murmured. “Where
do you get this incredibly cheap perfume?” She swung her head so that two isosceles triangles suspended from each ear flung a silver lightning outwards. “Like my ear-rings!”

“I adore them, darling,” effused Moira with gargantuan insincerity. “What theorem are they?”

“Thirty-three,” replied Laura modestly. “You don't think they're
de trop
, do you?”

“Nonsense, darling. Of course not. Why, when I was in Sydney in June the city was packed with girls wearing the binomial statement made in necklets of functional steel. How about getting the proof run up as a fob brooch?”

She moved to the sideboard, upstage, and, taking a decanter of claret, half filled a glass to which she added almost as much water again.

“Have one.” She indicated the decanter to Elsie. “You'll need it to brace yourself for Joe. Dear Joe! He'll be here in fifteen minutes, all R.A.A.F. twin-engined Dakota! Do you know him?”

“Somewhat,” answered Elsie, not wishing to commit herself, and recalled her first introduction to him at a party at Croziers' and one or two subsequent meetings when he had proposed most baldly that they should become lovers. A misused word!

“You've got vitality, Elsie,” he had said. “If you change your mind you know where to get in touch
with me. Think it over.” Teeth bared in detestable charm.

She had laughed with Lesbia often after that at the
naïveté
of the fellow, the brashness of his looks, the amoeba-like quality of his mind.

Laura glanced at her, surprised, but made no comment, and they took their glasses with all the outward appearances of sociability, and moved across to the small red coffee table in front of the lounge. Moira sorted petulantly through the record pile on the piano and Laura lit cigarettes for the three of them. Elegantly, oh so gracefully, Laura composed the pattern of her nylon legs to the first movement of the Wanderer Fantasia and did not hear one note, Elsie glanced at the watch she always wore on the inside of her wrist. It was merely an affectation. The hands pointed to seven thirty. The day was almost complete. Laura leant back and blew near-perfect smoke-rings towards the ceiling. And Moira said venemously, seeing the deafness in Laura's eyes, “It's one of the two things you do quite well.”