For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

  “It is a shame, Mother’s cherub,” said Aunt Bea to Anne, as she handed her daughter a pink rosebud, “sweets to the sweet, but I know Malfi meant it for you, well, all’s well that ends well. What a sly one you are,” she continued to Teresa, who had now crossed over to Anne’s side, “kicking it under your skirt.”

  “But I didn’t know,” protested the girl.

  “How’s the bunfight getting on?” said a male voice, near, teasing. “Does this mean you girls have to share the same man? How about me?”

  Teresa’s face became sullen and she thrust back the fern spray which Aunt Bea was handing her. “I don’t want it. Here, take it,” she said, pushing the spray at Anne. “Put it with that!”

  “Teresa,” remonstrated Aunt Bea, “can’t you take a joke?”

  “Not that kind of joke,” shouted Teresa, in a sudden blow of voice that made the crowd, now disbanding and streaming off to coats and hats, turn and stare at her. People began to smile, laughs broke out, the men guffawed and some of the women looked hurt, severe.

  “You can’t take part,” said Aunt Bea. “Look how you’ve hurt Aunt Eliza.”

  “You ought to be ashamed, Terry,” said Kitty, rather loudly. Teresa looked at them proudly; she felt immortal. The world was like a giant egg of golden glass, she could crush it. She floated; she looked at them, gleaming. “You’re cruel to us, making fun of us, this is cruel,” said Teresa. She swept aside, she looked down her nose, she felt her immense strength.

  “Terry!” said her sister.

  “Jumping, jumping—” replied Teresa contemptuously. Bouquets! She felt she had only to command and men would kneel at her feet.

  “Oh, Teresa,” said the kind and always gracious Aunt Eliza, as if broken-hearted. Teresa grew pale, looked at her piteously, and looked from eye to eye of the relatives and strangers, again drawing off and giving her curious cool stares. A suspicion came over her. Why did she suddenly feel so strong and fine? Deserted by all, the girl went to get her hat. When she came back, she pushed her way to the front rank of all those waiting to farewell the bride. Malfi came down in a short time, dressed for the honeymoon journey in a short dove-grey silk suit and as she went slowly past, tapping her neat little shoes, shaking hands, kissing, “Good-bye, good-bye, thank you for coming, good-bye, thank you, good-bye”, Teresa pushed up to her and said: “Malfi, good luck, I’m sorry for my rudeness, I beg pardon.” Malfi stopped and looked straight up at her for a moment. The two cousins had avoided each other all their lives because they were said to be alike in temperament and brain. They were the two “clever ones”. Now Malfi was small and neat and Teresa had outgrown her. Malfi reached up for a kiss, said: “Don’t think too badly of me”, and passed on. Teresa stared after her. What could have prompted this reply?

  At the door, Malfi turned round and flung herself on her mother, weeping. “There, my poor child,” said her mother, “it’s all right, Malfi.” The young husband came up to her, kissed her and wiped her eyes with his handkerchief. The door slammed. The long car drove off.

  Those who were left in the thick twilight closing in, in the splendid intoxication of the burning air, reeking with food and body smells and cheap perfume and faded flowers and all the pleasant riot of a party’s end, stood about for a while talking. Soon the girls had got together and the whispers began, while Aunt Bea again rushed from hand to hand and ear to ear and kiss to kiss, saying this time that they weren’t going off on the train at all, but to a hotel for the first night. No one but Aunt Eliza knew where it was, not even the bridegroom’s mother—and it was better so.

  “I can’t help thinking,” she said, “how strange it is, the first night, the very first. I can’t help thinking of those innocent young babes starting out on life’s journey together hand in hand and of them there together, alone at last, you know, for the first night of a lifetime. And then, you know—when you think—they were never allowed to be together till tonight, and now, tonight, it is right and proper, but it must be—” She stopped with a high giggle. Anne was silent. One of the girls said, sotto voce: “There’ll be a hot time in the—” She was hushed. Some of the girls laughed. “I just can’t help it,” said Bea, “and it’s only natural, isn’t it? It’s natural for them to be together now!”

  “Mother,” said Anne, in a low voice.

  “What is it, darling ?”

  “Let’s ask Terry home.”

  “Why, darling, I think that Aunt Eliza and Uncle Don want me to go along with them and cheer them up. Of course, they’ll be feeling rather down in the mouth at spending the first night without their darling girlie, and I have such a natural gift for making people merry, that I think my first duty is with them, you see, and they want you too. They’re so fond of you.”

  The guests drifted out, saying good-bye again, to each other, to Bedloes they would never see again in their lives, to relations they would see perhaps in another year or two at another family wedding. There were good-byes between cousins who were intimate friends and between Teresa and Anne, who had once been together for several years in their childhood and were closer than sisters. This was the best of all, a warm, scarcely articulate conversation between friends who hoped to see each other again soon.

  But Donald and Eliza March went out to dinner with the bridegroom’s parents and left poor Bea stranded there among the very last departing. She turned eagerly to find Teresa left and Teresa went home with them. Teresa was bursting with marvellous news—Kitty, the mouse, the nun, had gone off by herself, at the invitation of Cousin Sylvia, to a moonlight picnic. What would Daddy say? They tried to guess and they laughed.

  “I am glad you girls are beginning to come out of your shells at last,” said Aunt Bea. “A little drop of wine didn’t hurt you, you see.” Teresa would not admit she had been wrong and so said nothing about it.

  Aunt Bea lived with Anne in Rose Bay. The three of them came home by tram. There was a glorious sunset, a sudden dusk, and the bays were twinkling as they came along in the tram. It was still very hot, human beings smelled like foxes, the thick new-washed hair of women gave off the scent of little woodland beasts; the paint and dust on the tram, the heated metals, the summer trees outside, the petrol in the air made a delicious, stimulating, heavy drink, taken in by the nose. At first Aunt Bea was inclined to grumble because she had turned down a ride in a Packard, to wait for Eliza and Don, but her easy good humour soon returned and she said how nice it was of Uncle and Auntie to think of the poor Bedloes, poor things, she was like a secondhand stuffed armchair and he was got up like a sore thumb, Uncle and Auntie had only met them once before today, but what did it matter, it was Harry she was marrying. Bea accompanied this with a great many other consoling reflections and in a short time was saying that they had never, never had such a lovely wedding, and that Malfi was such a tender, youthful little bride, that she had cried at the church, and dear Harry was such a young man to be taking up the burden of a household. At this moment they were on the rise of Darlinghurst and Aunt Bea broke off suddenly to giggle with them about the “juicy details of that den of iniquity”, just discovered thereabout, and now going through the newspapers. “A black man and three sailors, four to one, my dear, so they said—” and so forth; and to follow was the mystery of the hypodermic needle, which, it was said, strange men suddenly thrust into young girls passing by innocently, on their own business, even in broad daylight. “What do they do it for?” “So and so was just waiting for the traffic to stop when suddenly she felt a prick and a tingling sensation. …” The crowd in the tram, coming home from all the suburbs, was stretched out, relaxed but lively, women in bright-coloured short dresses and men in shirt-sleeves and sandals. Anne shook some confetti out of her upturned hat. It fell on the ribbed wooden floor of the tram and everyone looked at them and smiled.

  “You look as though you’ve been to a wedding,” said a fat red woman with a crocheted white hat.

  “Yes, my niece’s, a lovely girl, a tiny bride,” said Aunt Bea.
“When you see a little girl taking on the responsibility of a husband and home, it seems pathetic, doesn’t it? Pathetic is hardly the word.”

  “You mean she’s a small woman?” said the woman, interestedly.

  “It’s a little early to talk of it, I suppose,” said Aunt Bea, “but small women usually have small babies, it’s the fitness of things. Though I have seen fat women with mere wisps of infants.”

  “’Ot for a wedding,” said the woman, retreating.

  “We’re in the dog days,” said Aunt Bea. She looked hopefully at the woman, but she said no more.

  4

  She Had

  Beatrice Broderick and her daughter Anne lived in a single front room in a small brick bungalow at Rose Bay. Bea got the room at a very small rent, in consideration of doing most of the work of the bungalow for the tenants, named Percy, a mother with a grown daughter, going to work. The woman was small, pasty-faced, with pepper-and-salt hair curling naturally, and large, steady eyes, a plain, impressive and unsettling personage. The daughter resembled her father. She was blond, ruddy, oncoming, an attractive girl whose clothes were red, blue, white, yellow; she was slender and well-made, too tall, five feet nine, but overcame this defect with an interesting restiveness, a quick attention, impulsiveness, coquetry. She was boy-crazy and worried her mother, Bea explained as they neared the house, but Bea wanted Teresa to meet the girl, Rose, because she was such an interesting type, above all, kind-hearted. Whatever you might say about Rose, this she was, kind-hearted. As to the mother, she was a queer body, respectable, serious, of course. Bea believed she had been something as a girl, but she did not know quite what. She married late, poor thing, at thirty, and her husband kept leaving her, after the daughter was five years old. “In fact,” said Bea, “she said she was a widow, like me, but later she forgot what she had said, and came out with it. She is worried about Rose because she is so flighty, and she is afraid—of the taint, you know,” Bea continued in a lowered voice. “In the asylum he gets better, and he may come back any time. He comes back at night, they never know when, and the poor woman says she is half mad herself, with fright. As soon as he comes home, he is loving to them, sorry for what he has done.

  Then in a few days, he asks to go back to the asylum, because he feels it coming on!”

  “I wouldn’t live there,” said Teresa.

  “Well, she’s so nice and such a poor little thing! She likes to have a friend in the house, she says, and I’m so naturally gay, I cheer her up with my singing and my bright words, and then she likes to have another woman with a young daughter, a widow too, although she is not a widow, but she might as well be, although it’s worse, much worse, unless you could be the widow of a gibbering ghost—”

  “Mother,” shrieked Anne, “oh, don’t.”

  “My chookums,” said her mother, “don’t be so sensitive. Annette is a bit frightened to stay there, and so I don’t often leave her alone. But after all, we do get it nearly rent free and the woman is so sweet, though a little reserved at times, a bit fretful. Poor thing, she is worried all the time. She told me she doesn’t sleep at night, afraid he will come back and ring the bell, or even climb in at the window.”

  “My goodness,” said Teresa. They were coming down a winding dirt road towards a gully, still partly bushland. It was about a mile from there to Teresa’s own home. They passed suburban brick dwellings with white fences in front and well-grown gardens. The name-plates on their gates said, “Mon Repos”, “Idle-a-While”, “Just Home”, “The Raft”, “Banksia”.

  “She told me,” said Aunt Bea, very low with a slight laugh, “poor thing, that she did not believe in you-know between married people. After she had been married two years she refused to have anything more to do with men, and I suppose that is why he went mad. It might have helped anyway. ‘Telopea’ is the name, there it is, three houses down. It’s a blessing to me, a front room, airy, use of the kitchen and bathroom, and a quiet woman, the girl out all day. She lets me use the piano too, and says it brightens the house up to hear me warble all my old light operas.”

  Gay and confident, Aunt Bea, loaded with parcels, swung open the gate of “Telopea”, went up the neat brick path, put her latch-key in the fresh-painted green door. The first door on the right was hers. This was standing open. It was a small room, almost filled by a large double bed, the former marital bed of the Percys, a wardrobe, a wash-stand, and a kitchen table covered with a cloth at which the mother and daughter ate. The corners and free spaces were filled with sewing-baskets, trunks, knick-knacks, doilies, boxes in cretonne, all things brought in or made by Aunt Bea, to furnish her home. The girls took off their hats and sat on the bed while Aunt Bea went to see if the kitchen was free, “For if she is there, I don’t disturb her, she’s a little moody at times. No wonder, poor thing.” Mrs Percy was there, said Aunt Bea when she came back, and in one of her moods, a bit cranky. She had just looked at Aunt Bea over her shoulder and not even given her a how-do-you-do, but you could hardly blame her, her troubles had turned her queer. So they would just sit on their stomachs and wait.

  “Take off your dress, if you like, Terry,” said Aunt Bea, “or stretch out just as you are. It’s a very pretty dress, the colour’s just right. We’ll put it in a glass of water, the lovely rosebud, Anne, that you got from Malfi’s bouquet. It will bring you luck. I’m glad you weren’t Malfi’s bridesmaid, although I did think it a bit funny at the time, but always a bridesmaid, never a bride—it’s better not. What a day! My dears, I’ll never forget Malfi’s wedding day. My cherub, take off Mother darling’s number nines. I ache in the understandings. Wootch! Flow gently sweet Afton. Ouch! I’m like the man who wore tight boots, I am the woman who wore tight boots. Soon I’ll get a pair of those elastic-sided button-ups that Aunt Philly wears. Your old mother will hobble to work like Little Tich.”

  “Oh, Mother,” said Anne, laughing, and putting away the thin, cracked shoes under a faded curtain.

  “Well, my dears,” said Aunt Bea Broderick, falling backwards on the bed, “—move over, Terry—what a day! I was over at Aunt Eliza’s at eight. My consul was very nice and said I could have the entire day off. Perhaps that is why Mrs Percy seems resentful this evening. However—there she blows, just what I needed to make a perfect day, as old Aunt Philly said when their one and only Ming (or was it Sung?) vase fell to the floor. Your father, Terry, was there, and never can forget the philosophy of your great-aunt. ‘La-di-da!’ she said, ‘there she blows.’ We should all be like that,’ said your father, ‘see all that we cherish go from us without emotion.’ He thinks worlds of your great-aunt. I must say I’m of his way of thinking, we ought to be stoics. But who is? She certainly is a merry old soul and a merry old soul is she.

  May we all live to be half as young as Aunt Philly, your grandpa always said. He never subscribed to the Undertakers’ Gazette either. Your dear grandpa was quite a bird, a gay dog. Grandpa kept the ball rolling.”

  “Oh, Mother,” said Anne automatically, as her mother paused. Anne got up from the hot bed and went to the open window where she sat looking out into the street. A lamp stood two houses away. Opposite was a vacant lot.

  “I think it’s getting cooler,” said Anne. “The moon’s rising. The moon streams in here.”

  “This was where they slept all their married life,” Aunt Bea said. “With the moon on his face I don’t wonder he went off. I told Mrs Percy that. She said she didn’t believe it but you know in lunatic asylums on nights of full moon they have to have extra strait waistcoats.”

  “It’ll be sticky all night,” said Terry. “I wouldn’t mind being in swimming. What a day! I loved it, though. I steamed. It was pawky, the church, wasn’t it? Could you understand all those dead flowers? Did they wilt or were they half-dead in the first place? The whole thing was so queer.”

  “Did she fall or was she pushed?” mused Aunt Bea. “My lumpkins, sweet cherubs, my lumps of love, I’m glad it’s all over, the weary round, or merry, the gift teas
, the linen shower, the presents, the dresses. O Mother Ida hearken ere I die! I did expect to be invited to dinner tonight and I frankly avow, my chicks, that I was a bit glum at being left out in the cold but your Aunt Eliza was right, I suppose. I suppose Liza knew what she was doing. And of course, the gown was lovely. Very choice, Malfi darling.”

  “Tell her about ‘very choice, Malfi darling’,” said Anne.

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you that? I did! No? Well, I told so many people and they all simply rolled in the aisles. I hate to repeat myself, as the onion said.”

  “Oh, Mother,” said Anne.

  Teresa lay back on the bed and looked out through the window at the dark-blue sky. “It’s late, isn’t it? I’d better go home.”

  “Oh, I heard the back door slam a minute ago,” said Aunt Bea. “Just wait till I tell you this and I’ll run and cook our tea.”

  “Dad said he couldn’t understand Uncle Don allowing Malfi to have a church wedding,” said Teresa. “Uncle Don never goes to church.”

  Bea seemed flustered. “I don’t say we’re great church-goers, but a girl feels happier if she can have her little pageant when she turns from girl to woman, and you can’t go to a registry office in a veil. To continue, Terry, I went over to Miss Smith-Wetherby’s—where she got the Wetherby from I don’t know, but anything is better than to be mere Smith I presume—you know, don’t you, oh, you know, Malfi’s new husband’s, so very new, aunt by marriage, maiden aunt, of course. Don’t you think we ought to have words for all that? I don’t think we have half words enough! Well, it seems poor Miss Smith-Wetherby took rather a fancy to Malfi. She saw her first at Dot Hancock’s wedding, a mutual acquaintance, and being herself without chick or child, of course it would be rather queer otherwise—”