A Boat Load of Home Folk

by Thea Astley

  Greely watched and waited. There was more to come, he knew.

  “I want to go, you see. It’s not just what I did, what you’re here for. I don’t mean simply ‘from here’. It’s just that I feel the whole reason for my being here is lost. It’s the reason. I like this place in a queer sort of way, the way one gets to love one’s disease, the eating enemy-friend to whom one is host. The cancer you inspect and feel with dread and a certain wild respect. What I mean is that I have written asking for dispensation of my vows.”

  “It can’t be done.”

  “It can, you know.”

  “Not just like that.”

  “But I am doing it just like that. I shall fly out of here tonight with my shiny back-the-front collar and you will see me in Martin Place forty-eight hours from now with a narrow silk pin stripe job tied in a clumsy knot because I’m out of practice.”

  Greely took back his flask and screwed the top in position.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “if you’re going to be difficult you won’t even get on the plane. I don’t want to impede you in any way, but you’ll simply have to act in a civilized fashion. The bishop expects you to stay on at least a week or two until the new man arrives and when you do return to Sydney, at least to spend some time in—er—meditating. Perhaps I should say spiritual thinking. This transfer the way you propose is most unseemly.”

  Holding out his empty hands with his fingers spread in the what-to-do gesture, Lake held his head stiffly to one side as if deflecting a blow.

  “No,” he said. “No. In this matter I choose for myself.”

  V

  November

  BEING a man of direct eye and unused by nature to practising duplicity, Stevenson was unskilled in his negotiations with extra-marital love. His ineffectuality encased him and from his cage of flesh he snarled at the day’s frustrations and threatened to escape. During the seven years he had been working around the islands, his wife made trips back to the mainland each summer taking the daughter when she was due to return to school and then the much younger son. She stayed with friends there for eight weeks while his timber bungalow on the side of the lagoon grew calm and winds seemed to blow through the wooden shutters as he devoured his freedom like a starving man. It could not be said that he had never loved her, although he would excuse himself now by asking what would any young man know of love in his twenties, and other married men would agree over their drinks and they would form a kind of club for mutual outpourings of regret.

  He had endured for fifteen years.

  Then suddenly, as if there were some sexual re-growth, he found himself absorbed in a woman he had observed with interest discard at least two of his friends and batter down the last shreds of reserve the community wanted to impose.

  She was poised throughout. This was her fascination. He was not sure if it were love although he did call it that to himself and repeat her name quietly in the darkness at night or pretend on the few occasions he took his wife that it was this other until finally it was.

  And then he discovered how unpractised at deception he was. He made everyone unhappy including his ravenous self. And his love, who was intelligent and probably harder than his wife but could conceal so much better, grappled with his initial devices, discarded his avowals as ploys, and filled in her time. She did not need men except when the singing of the body became so high and clear it could not be ignored. Taking a lover was no more to her than the after work gin, some kind of definite stimulus that served also as anodyne at the end of a day. She had known Stevenson for three years and used him for half of that time.

  She would wear white in deliberate antithesis to her browned skin and dangle op art ear-rings to stagger the locals. She could talk forcefully and intelligently about the economic concentrations of her government even in this remote place with far more interest than she applied to feminine wile.

  She read Vogue international in secret.

  They met in the course of work, for she was acting as accountant for an inter-island trading company. Stevenson could stare out his first anguish across her desk or his, but other arrangements were more difficult to make. The first time he had visited her flat in Erromango Street he had been stunned by her aplomb, her pleasure, her participation. As they shuddered apart, the knot within him dissolved and he had the imaginings of love that thrust him unshod for pilgrimage into the beginnings of emotional journeys. Dear God, he would whisper as each train was about to pull out. Dear, dear God. He could have returned to prayer.

  His wife did not observe for weeks that some obsession held his eyes apart from hers, though he played more assiduously than ever with his small boy, taking him out for swims and truck excursions to the other side of the island and creeping in at night to pore over the closed face lost in that other world he could never enter. If he had been asked were he happy when he was with Marie he would have felt obliged to say yes, though his continuing sadness puzzled him.

  He used to write poetry. It was his secret vice, more secret than his love for her, though it recorded that, too, in a series of blazes and burns.

  It was a vice he had stumbled upon by accident, the accumulated impulses and resentments of twenty years of marriage spilling over into verbal protest that he concealed like dirty postcards in a little note-book. He had begun it a year before, the explosion shocking him. He had never been the arty type. And after the first shame of experiment, after the re-readings in calm, after all that, he became alert, proud and chained.

  He would scribble at odd hours between bouts of correspondence or on sleepless evenings in his study. Some poems were so extracted from the spirit of him he cried as he wrote and was forced to say “I am sick” to excuse the weakness of drained eyes. This is an outlet of excess. He would touch his pen to th paper like a loving finger about to describe on flesh what was most urgent. The paper received his thoughts with a kind of tender acceptance.

  One evening at a flamboyant-shaded table in the rear garden he was seated with this note-book riffling back through the entries that recorded his new pilgrimage. Some sort of slow dream dropped about him as he heard from the bungalow his son singing and his wife crashing the crockery. The electric lights were especially brave. It was still grey enough to see. He wrote

  After all this I don’t like you much, my dear,

  Neither your face nor your mind.

  Heat and years have melted what was there.

  There’s nothing to find.

  I could support such absence from the day

  If you had not so melted me

  And tried remoulding in your own rough hands

  My privacy.

  He read this over to himself quickened and delighted by his rhyme and by the truth he had at last squeezed out. Then the veranda light was switched off suddenly; he could see only marks on paper and their shape eluded him though the sense remained singing about his head. Calling “Timmy, Timmy” he went back across the grass and up the steps to find the switch and had his first heart attack on the veranda.

  His wife who was called Holly and had many things in common with that plant later discovered his note-book with soul exposed lying on the table under the whisky decanter. Her fascinated eyes devoured the contents but she had to contain herself until he was past the critical stage.

  Then she leapt on him.

  If she had thought he would be embarrassed she was wrong, and her rantings only played round him like chain lightning or the sort that flickers ominous and misty as storm prelude, while he lay with the delicate skin of eyelids shuttered down and his bony face projecting against the pillowed roundness about him. Everything was white. The sedatives he had been given inured him to blasts of such magnitude and finally to the hysterics she felt it was safe for her to indulge. He went, after the doctor had allowed him up, to a tiny bay near Ebouli and, lying between the rocks, smiled with warmth into the sand and thought of the other woman and mentally inscribed, between hesitancies:

  This eating sea has mun
ched away

  at the sand like crumbly bread.

  The spat out shell crusts litter.

  The blue is corrosive.

  Out of the shore you came naked into the water.

  Everything white: sand, flesh, sky-cloud and the

  blaze

  of my mind.

  When he got home in the half-somnolent state that emotional rather than physical satiety commands, his wife had gone into one of her silence bouts which lasted until next day, when her natural garrulousness overcame her. She would be going back to Sydney, she said. Or even Melbourne to mother. For an indefinite time. Then she hurled herself into the flurried nonsense of histrionic packing. Stevenson made brilliant recovery in the bar of the Lantana and on the morning of his wife’s departure went early into his son’s bedroom and stood for a while looking down at the sleeping, unbetraying, withdrawn face. Sun slid across shutter and half palm, and all the familiar objects of the room—the cars sprawling loose from boxes, the bat slung into a corner, the tramped-down-heel slippers—touched him sharply. He went away and, later, after he had bought them tea and buns at the Glare Bar and watched his son’s thin straight back walking steadily after the implacability of his wife, he sat in his car until the plane had vanished and opened his note-book at the last entry. It was for his wife.

  In the morning when it was light

  I thought of you.

  Only our boy bounding in disturbed

  The delicacy of the morning image.

  Fragile breast, face. My stupor

  Examined all of you for the first time

  Dispassionate.

  I found you empty like the last dinghy

  Isolated by tide.

  It was really the first. At least if he had been able to measure his defection by the rhythms of his first tentative poetics then that would have been the point, he decided, reading now, when his soul had revolted. He slid down in the sweating leather of the car seat, easing his back, and with closed eyes waited for the spasm of tiny pain to pass. Another plane was droning in. He knew without opening his eyes that it would be the mail from the mainland; and he knew too that if he went over to the Glare Bar in the next half-hour there would be the same jokes and the same bonhomie and it all seemed futile because of the two things that were obsessing him—the woman and the stranger within.

  He wanted at that moment to drive back to the port with his eyes closed.

  8 a.m., 10th December

  That was a month ago. He moved now through the thickness of the morning, his eyes slitting against glare, walking fifty paces behind the others because he couldn’t bear to talk any more. They turned left and hesitated, whereupon he swung quickly away from them and went north along the harbour road to the galvanized offices of the Barrier Trading Co-operative. Natives sprawled against the awning posts grinned sideways at him as he went by and a native police boy stepping it out like the chorus from The Chocolate Soldier saluted him with a geometric precision that spelled something else beside respect. He was unsure then, and thrust out his rather narrow head with its questing chin and said good morning in his dried-out Irish voice and went round the back of the company buildings past the garage where the native boy seemed to be stretched permanently under an old Bedford.

  She was visible through the window of the rear office and he stood for a moment in the sun, martyring his thin cap of hair to the bite of it while he watched her absorbed face. She was not beautiful, he had to admit, and there was a ruthlessness in the set of her jaw that he tried to ignore. Yet the total effect was pleasing, a combination of shallow curves and brown skin, of intelligence and cool humour. Even her mouth which he would have liked to find full or soft held only the hunger of sex. He sighed. He was obedient to doom and tapped once on the window as he went past to the door.

  A catalogue was spread out along the desk and a pile of ledgers stacked up on the floor were testaments of profit. When she glanced at him her smile was brief and he found nothing to do but creep round the desk like a beggar, put his thin, tired, unhappy arms around her and rest his face for a moment in the hollow of her shoulder. Once he had practised a clumsy type of flirtatiousness that appalled her as she listened to his unaccustomed tongue coping with amorous clichés. But then the falsity of his own tones must have sounded in his ear for he said little now and wrote more and wondered if she, too, were turning into a wife.

  “Hullo,” he said. He paused. “I don’t know when I’ve been so tired.”

  She patted him. That was all his reward and he turned away from her, angry with himself, to slump into a chair by the window so that he could look uphill at the waking green of the government paddock around which the office buildings stood among trees. “That bloody Brinkman fought me all the way this time. Not openly, you know. Just a sort of armed truce. Like marriage, I suppose. He managed by some marvellous arrangement with nature to hit every port in the dark, too late to cope. Except this one of course. And he overloaded the passengers as well. We had an extra fellow for the last day. He had to sleep on deck with the boys under a trap. I think I’ll get him put off the run.”

  “Brinkman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you?”

  “I’ll have a damn good try. He’s under government contract. But something ought to be done. After every trip I come back with my ulcer like a beacon flare. Perhaps they ought to put me off.”

  She smiled. He did not really mean it.

  Outside by the houses under a gluttonous growth of allamanda, the Tucker-Browns’ dog was worrying a bird that still flapped feebly.

  “God! Look at that!” he cried, and half rose. “Shoo! Shoo, you brute!” He flapped his arms and clapped.

  “Of course, I shouldn’t tolerate it. His quiet insolence. There’ll have to be a written report.” As his voice rose, he wondered if it were true or if he were imagining the lot. Everyone was beginning to think him neurotic. He talked too much of his persecutors. People were starting to laugh. A line ran through his mind—

  Every face seems to have lost its features.

  Some inner quake has flattened out the maps.

  He had to pull himself to with a jerk of his sandy skull and found Marie had put her pen down to regard him with some concern. He heard his voice continuing to say, “But I don’t have the time. Simply don’t have the time. The map is flattened—” He paused. He was thinking out loud the wrong things that should be kept private. He was sure he must be ill in some way.

  Marie’s luminous brown eyes took every bit of his uncertain mouth in.

  “I have to go to Dravuni,” he fumbled on. “Young Woodsall has to be taken up. There’s been petty theft at the asbestos plant. They think it’s one of the packers who comes down here. Oh God! It’s all so petty and pointless and I’m so tired I hardly know what I’m doing. I don’t know what the hell we colonize for, do you?”

  The noise of someone knocking around near the inner door distracted Miss Latimer who left abruptly, the fragments of their talk scattered about in air. Stevenson could hear her just beyond the room, but could not see. His irritability threatened him with pain again and when she returned he was bent over in his chair, holding his enduring belly.

  Unmoved, she went straight past him to the corner locker where the fan staggered round above the table and chair. She opened the locker door and watched herself in the mirror, not pleased, not unpleased. Her confidence overtook her in waves as she ran a comb through her short hair. Even the way in which she cold-bloodedly applied paint to her mouth and barely stayed to check the end result was alarming, Stevenson felt suddenly as he watched.

  “What’s up?” she asked, sensing his misery but not looking at him.

  “I’ve told you. I’m sick.”

  “Very?”

  “Jesus!”

  “Well, I just asked. How about having a small drink?” She pulled a brandy flask from the top shelf and a couple of glasses. “P.R. they call this. I keep it for the paying customers.”

  He wa
s trying to smile.

  “Lake’s off,” she said. “I’m keeping you posted.”

  He tapped his fingers in some protective rhythm. “Poor buggar,” he said. “Don’t let’s dissect.”

  “He was weak.”

  “So are we all. Let’s leave him alone now. He’s had enough. I brought back a great fat prelate to roast him.”

  “They’ve been saying he was going for days. It was only that you’ve been away for a fortnight.”

  Stevenson felt too tired at that moment to relate the outside world with this haphazard word-design; too tired even to move out of his puddle of self-pity that he could feel pulsing into a wave crescendo. He began to nibble his thumb, then the wet end of his cigarette, and regard with the anxiety that was natural to him what he imagined to be the vanishing shape of love. A tired vagueness, he supposed, in the most penumbral of lilacs and blues that waited constantly at the end of hot colonnades or tree aisles or beyond blinding dune curves, so that infuriatingly, amid stereotyped landscapes with predictable figures, it might vanish into some arrangement of shadow or curve.

  “You’re too soft,” she was saying.

  “I? I’m hard as nails.” He offered for inspection the bitten down jagged end of one finger. “And d-dangerous.” He stuttered on the word and made her laugh.

  “You sympathize with everyone. Anyone at all. It doesn’t matter who. You have this soft-mouthed approach that forgives all the time. There are times when it’s a weakness to forgive. You have to learn not to.”