A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  “You’ve been feeling that for years and it never has. You don’t happen to feel something awful like sunstroke will happen to both of us, do you?”

  “Please. Don’t make fun.”

  “I’m not making fun.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re always doing it. I wish we hadn’t come.”

  “Well, you go back to the boat. I’m going exploring.”

  Kathleen groped almost physically for some argument that might convince, but with a flutter of her hands gave it up.

  “I suppose you’re right,” she agreed finally. “It’s just a silly feeling. Maybe it’s the heat. I don’t think I can bear it. It’s making me feel as if the sky or something will burst.”

  Gerald was swabbing away at his round pink face. His chicken-down hair was damply adhering to the dome of his head.

  “It’s all you can do—a place like this,” he said. “Drink. I bet the public servants are pickled by the time they become Grade Seven. All that sweat dropping over the requisitions and the pay forms and the official reports.”

  He decided to be loving, and inspecting her there in the candid eleven o’clock light, observing the lines about her chin and eyes, the fading prettiness, he said, “They’d need someone like you to keep them going.”

  He wanted to believe in his own gallantry as he tucked a hand through her arm. Two native girls waddled towards them and he was diverted but went on speaking while no longer looking at her.

  “Come on,” he said. “We must have a look right along the town, stores and all, before the heat gets us.”

  He dragged at her and she leant away. Because he sensed her reluctance, he became annoyed all at once. The girls had arrived and passed. “Go back to the boat, then. You can lie down for half an hour before lunch. I’ll see you back there after I’ve nosed out an eating-house.” He was trying not to snap, but his face had grown tight with repression.

  Her desperation that she should have become accustomed to over the years grew out of every pore of her aching skin. She said without even pausing to think, “Gerald, I want a divorce.”

  His eyes grew wide as her own surprise.

  “I think you’re sick,” he said.

  She became stubborn at that. “No. I’m not sick. I’ve been trying to say this for years. Ever since. . . .”

  “Ever since what?”

  “Ever since Iris.”

  “Her? What’s she got to do with it?”

  “Oh, nothing now. I just began to observe then. She gave me the flick I needed.”

  “You are sick.”

  “No. But I am going back to the boat as you suggest. While you’re hunting a luncheon spot, think it over. I feel better for saying it.”

  “There’s your bloody premonition all right. Jesus, I’ve had women!”

  “If I could only believe that,” Kathleen said with an acidness unnatural to her. She turned her back on him and began the walk back along the front. As she moved away from him she felt like falling.

  Once their son had grown up, Gerald became Kathleen’s baby. It was a role that suited them both. Not only did it allow Gerald a maximum of peccadilloes for which later he could plead boyish whim, but it gave Kathleen as well an opportunity to practise the masochism of the wronged wife who could swing the stage round to voluptuous scenes of accusation and forgiveness. Sometimes in her more clear-eyed moments she would realize that it was the only voluptuousness they practised.

  And, as they grew older and the interdependence more stringent, there were fewer physical chords to be plucked from this particular marital harp. The real hate was beginning to grow—though they needed each other for that, too.

  Gerald discovered Art after his wife did, in the sixteenth year of marriage. The openings to which he was invited extended girl-pastures of suitable agistment to which he brought a speedily conned line of patter that gave a temporary impression of artistic pace. Sandwiched between smoked oysters and pickles on sticks were Seabrook gambits of fulsome intention. Kathleen would occasionally pray for deafness as she loitered between long-haired cookies of all sexes. Yet it was not only to be cocktail parties; it was to be Sunday painting as well.

  After he had spent too much money on canvases and paints, some malicious impulse caused Kathleen to buy her husband a false beard and a beret to go with it. He was not amused. Her punishment was painting trips—destination unknown—from which Gerald would return with squares of bright colour and immature design and a purged quality that made his wife certain his journeys into art were not unaccompanied. It was only in the last month, driven into a wild madness by jealousy, that she decided to have him followed.

  The private investigator had been sharp as big business with a barely concealed coarse illiteracy. He kept referring to Gerald as “the said party”.

  “We want to clear things up for you,” he would say, “and make you happy.”

  Inspecting his still pretty but distraught client and trying to assess with archer’s accuracy the moment to release the arrow, Mr Whybrow would put his head doggily to one side and grumble effectively. “Tired, Mrs S.? How about a quick one?”

  And her own desperation had taken her twice at least into lower city bars of infernal lighting where old boys and girls rejuvenated by shadow took illicit drinks together. It was one thing to apprehend Gerald in misdemeanour, but to be caught with the third-rate personality who would establish that was yet another. She quailed.

  “My dear,” he would assure her, looking out from the cave of his baggy tweeds and crumbling his big fingers about a pipe, “you must not upset yourself. I’ve seen hundreds, I might say thousands, of these unfortunate moments. Believe me, I do understand and things will get better.” And he would light her cigarette at that point with such attention she would be distracted.

  She resisted him until the last moment.

  They had pursued Gerald from the banalities of a late supper with an artless hair-tossing girleen to a near south-coast cabin smooching behind hillside trees. Mr Whybrow had made tedious gossip as they drove and urged her constantly to duck at the head lamps of approaching cars. It was absurdly difficult at that hour of night to give off an appearance of non-interest in the vehicle ahead with both of them doing sixty and keeping so close together. Yet they achieved it somehow and, after skirtings and cigarette stops while the said party got under way in the dank double-fronted fibro behind the oleanders, Kathleen was so close to hysteria Mr Whybrow had to snap her out of it with a hip flask he carried for the colder weather.

  “Have a nip, my dear. Keep very calm now. You’ll be glad when it’s all over.”

  Will I? Kathleen would ask in the shaking dark, running her tongue round the cheap whisky. Mr Whybrow had put a strong manly paw on her arm.

  “About now, I think,” he suggested, hideously able to assess the moves in copulation. He stumbled out his side of the car into the sandy road with his black flashlight held like a gun that would destroy the peace of three minds at a single blaze. As a small boy he had always wanted to be a cowboy, six feet lean and quick on the draw, with his steely grey eyes issuing challenges—“I’ve got y’ covered, Lupes. Keep talkin’!”—and his hair bleached by the badlands sun. He wanted to be safe, too. So here he was now with his liverish orbs straining into the night and one puddy hand pressing Mrs Seabrook to her moment of truth.

  The little cabin was darkened and still. Its human contents made so little sound Kathleen might have believed that they were not there at all except for the erratic morse tapped out by her own heart.

  “Now,” Mr Whybrow hissed and lunged clumsily at the shaky front door. It was locked to his bull-like rush and he mucked this raid up, for lights flashed into the window squares and Gerald’s voice, thickened by rage and some other ingredient Kathleen could not bear to identify, was hurling angry questions at the unidentified pair of them.

  “Open up now. Open up!” commanded Mr Whybrow, leaning his body against the door which gave in unexpectedly to pressure. He rolled stra
ight through in a heap at Gerald’s feet. Girleen uttered teeny shrieks from the bunk where she was sitting up clasping fragments of nylon and tossing hair from her eyes. Gerald had dragged on his underpants, but they were split straight up the back and when he turned round for his trousers he looked so grotesque Kathleen began to laugh. His bandiness for the moment bracketed his shame. Blustering, he began to dress while the woman on the bed, deciding on brazenness as a solution, lit up a quick fag snappy as jet set advertising, and blew a smoke screen round her nudity.

  Kathleen heard her own far voice say, “I’m sorry about this, Gerald.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss, is there?” Gerald said.

  “There could be,” Mr Whybrow interposed, thinking of legalities and fees. The wife’s apology had set him right back. “There could be all sorts of matters now.” Even as he spoke he was adjusting a pocket camera and had taken a flash before Gerald could make a move.

  Gerald and Kathleen faced each other across an ever-outgoing tide.

  “I never suspected you of such vulgarity,” he said at last.

  Examining the beginnings of his pink paunch, measuring his adulterous length against the shadow he threw on the wall, Kathleen, perhaps unbalanced by shock, could think of nothing but his torn underwear and the rather sad extrusion of wrinkled buttock that must have presented itself to Mr Whybrow.

  “I was tired of wondering,” she explained, almost too softly for him to hear, although it was the softest remarks that ultimately hooked that fish. “And you never would tell the truth. It would have saved us both so much bother.”

  “Truth!” Gerald snapped. “Truth! How can anyone who can play a lousy deal like this even use the word?”

  “You’re so oblique, Gerald,” Kathleen said sadly. She had turned and was walking out the door. Mr Whybrow had pocketed his evidence and was following.

  “Oblique!” He followed her annoyedly. “Oblique for Christ’s sake! You seem to think marriage is a question of owning another person body and soul. I’ve felt chained for bloody years. If it weren’t for the presence of this little shit—” (he meant Whybrow!) “I’d explain that this—this sort of thing—has nothing to do with the fundamental relationship. Nothing at all. Nothing.”

  A note of pleading, of self-excuse had crept into his voice. Kathleen, who could now have eaten her heart for the humiliation she had inflicted, went straight back to the darkened car in some imagined rain; and Mr Whybrow, fussing her under a rug, ruminated as he drove back towards town, and rightly, that she was right for plucking.

  His client, of course, never proceeded with divorce but instead was driven by a quirk of shame into a spectacular purchase of new underwear for Gerald.

  9.30 a.m., 10th December

  ALWAYS, after his wife left him, if only for the first minute or so, Gerald was afflicted with instant regret and was tempted to run after her vowing—well, anything at all, but a comfort of sorts. He resisted this. He had resisted most temptation to rectitude over the last few years, except for unexplainable urgencies of conscience that jipped him into kindness beyond his analysing.

  Gerald blinked for some seconds, then with resolution moved along the foreshore towards the shipping stores, the white low building he had seen from the café veranda. The windows were a mass of camera equipment, small farming implements, bales of cheap cotton, stacks of discarded factory china, canned foods. The doorways were slung back on an interior of shipping clerks and typists under whirling fans. Buyers wandered between desks and stacks of goods.

  Gazing in on this he stood, cocky in the bright light with his camera dripping from its strap, his panama pushed back now on the pinking dome with its fair fluff. His face bore an absent-minded smile as he wondered whether he could pick Kathleen up some sort of sop—a scarf, a dress-length, exotic junk: he was mentally labelling it without the wish to be unkind. Behind one of the tables was a heap of shiny Chinese silk one of the buyers had brought down from the north, displayed lushly for a month until sun-spots appeared on the rolls near the shutters, and finally was bundled, the whole unsold mass, at the back of a junior clerk’s desk. The colours were remarkably clean and flowed like green and blue and scarlet water even in shadow. He was a man not aware of quality, only of colour or shape, and he went into the long room and picked his way past a counter loaded with patent medicines until he was standing next to the silk with its soft mouldings.

  Someone was observing from the doorway of an inner room.

  “It’s not very good,” she said. “There’s better stuff inside.”

  Gerald had instant preparations of gratitude that came with urbane movements of his mouth and crinklings about the eyes. He smiled and said, “It was nothing.” It really wasn’t! “It was just a little present for my wife.”

  Miss Latimer’s eyes clasped his with easy sympathy and an interest that had trapped others before. She was adept at quick friendships and had an intimate manner that involved her hand before her heart, could bring it to rest like a bird on a sympathetic arm, could smile quickly or warmly or remain sufficiently cool. He was conscious at that moment of someone in the inner room passing the door for an instant, of recognition so brief as almost not to be there. In the smothering heat still present in the inner cave of the co-operative stores, Gerald was swooner-like involved with premonitions he did not normally feel. Now he put it down to indigestion or the fight with Kathleen or perhaps even the frightful languishing remains of breakfast that came at him in little short pitches. This other woman was sending for someone and he had agreed already on what to take.

  He heard himself say fatuously, “But it would suit you marvellously,” and her ripe answering smile was sufficient for a man so cheaply paid off. In a few minutes he was aware of hiatus in the small talk; it was punching air. The inner room? He tried to peek round the door but saw only legs stretched out that looked familiar but were giving nothing away. In any case Mr Seabrook prided himself on never becoming too involved with anything at all, so automatically rejected what appeared inessential. The by-products of his interest had over the years produced from his victims a few fruity lyrics, some dampened hankies, and a mistrust in men. But what he never knew about never worried him. And even what he did.

  There was more in this transaction than cloth and money and the third person who involved them, for there was some mutation in the atoms that flickered in the air. The world was confettied or peppered with light. Subtract what you like from situations, Gerald Seabrook was with it, swingingly with nuance, and so self-assured and in control of the bowels of emotion he began to laugh remembering the last fight with Kathleen and his suave “But I never hit her till the guests have gone.” This was certainly true. For on the only occasion his arm had been raised, by some freak (he was inclined to believe in divinities) he wrenched a muscle so badly it tore and his arm dropped agonizedly back into a more familiar role.

  Outside again with his parcel and his anticipatory senses snapping like mandibles, he took in visually whole strips of waterfront—saw some hundreds of yards away the two old ladies talking together outside a store, saw some link break between them as one came back and one went on. Dear God, Gerald breathed aloud as Miss Paradise wavered towards him along the front, where can I hide? There was nothing but to turn his back and feign interest in the sea or the hill with its house-cluster; and although his prayers were direct and forcefully simple, nothing could save him ultimately from Miss Paradise who, palpitating in the heat simmer, found him trapped by the last flamboyant near the jetty. He was picking his nose. Not quite hidden by the tree bole, he had seated himself on a council bench that ate its way into his plump rump, and even though he held himself as thinly as possible like some sort of hard biscuit, she descended still. When her voice finally flung a net he submitted with a smile and tried to pretend he had been scratching the tip of his nose after all.

  “Do sit,” he begged, moving along a little into the shadier part. The cracking of her knees as she planted herself down was
quite amazing.

  “I’m very angry,” she began.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Kitty’s the matter. She’s so annoying. I’ve let her go.”

  “She won’t go far in this heat.”

  “I don’t suppose so.” Miss Paradise closed her umbrella very deliberately. “Why do you fight so much?”

  “Why does who fight?”

  “You. You and your nice wife.”

  “Don’t you think that rather impertinent?” Gerald asked.

  “Nothing’s impertinent in places like this and at our age,” Miss Paradise said. “At our age.” She repeated the pronoun with intense satisfaction.

  “You mean your age,” Gerald replied.

  “I mean ours. You are not nearly as young as you would like others to believe.” Thirty years of spleen were emerging in one convulsion. “I am only fifty-six. You cannot be much less.”

  Gerald was redder and angrier than heat required.

  “The answer, of course, is mind your own business,” he said.

  “Then you should not make your squabbles so public.”

  “Oh for God’s sake!”

  Miss Paradise was wrestling with a cigarette and holder but the end result was a pitiful fracture that she lit nevertheless.

  “Wave for the dinghy,” she commanded. “We’ll go back and get out of the heat. You are going back, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Gerald was beginning to sulk.

  If it was merely the heat that had been rising from the rank grass they would have been bonded by the sticky sympathy created, but there was a fine scent of dislike. Gerald lit a cigarette, too. He began to wonder if Kathleen could be watching from the Malekula through the spyglass of a port.

  “Actually,” he said, “we’re very fond of each other.” He squeezed his parcel to convince himself and instantly thought of the other woman, while Miss Paradise cackled five chook notes of disbelief. She prodded with her parasol a vicious little hole between the kikuyu roots and dug up a mound of sand and dirt. After a minute she looked back along the road for Kitty but there was no sign, and in an unlikely way she began to worry. She knew herself to be naturally cruel, and only she understood how hard it had been to fight her inner impulses for all those years, to practise a kindness based on the need to retain a companion. Oh, the self-denial of it!