A Boat Load of Home Folk (17 page)

Anxiously he wandered to the front room and searched for her car's headlamps in the impenetrable wind. Nothing. Nothing. He tried to read, but the decanter on the side table sang to him and he found himself involuntarily reaching, pouring and sipping, this time without a real pain to quench.

It was this way she found him.

He attempted to rise, but after she had pushed him back into the chair he sat with her head against his knees and threaded his fingers through her short crop to feel the shape of her skull, a geography whose curve, for some inexplicable reason, never ceased to excite him. He wondered whether it was because he cupped the thinking part of her that was free to bestow or withhold the body it controlled. And so held her now, pulling her head in closer until he was able to move his mouth along her neck and under the shelter of hair.

“Do you love me?” he asked. She did not have the answer he wanted and could give it only in the way flesh demanded, so that in a very short time he toppled with her through the rocking, crashing house to her bed where, with the nervous fury that seized him at such moments, he tried to impress himself on her in the futility of love-making, with a forever that melted away in the finality of the act.

Afterwards there was always the disappointment, the sense that fusion was temporary; and the relationship between them broke with the moving apart of their limbs, leaving him, at least, to wonder how any union more lasting than this might be achieved. With the rattle of cups? With boiled eggs or diapers? With shared tediums of childhood? With the mystique of the silly contract, the words that legally bound? He did not want to marry again, and although he felt no oneness of the body with the woman who had borne his
children there was a congruence of needs imposed by others that made him feel the relationship shared.

“You are my wife,” he would whisper to Marie at moments of self-exposure. But it was unconvincing. Neither of them believed it.

Lying there in the dark they listened to the unbelievable frenzy outside. Stevenson tried the radio again, but through the static could hear only a sex-crazed trumpet taking off into ether.

She said, “I don't know how you managed the drive back.”

“It wasn't so bad then.”

“The radio warning came at dinner. Simply emptied the bar. You should have seen Daph Woodsall shoot off back to the house in her mini as if she were going to protect it single-handed.”

“What will we do? Do you think I should go out and see if there's anything to be done?”

She regarded him like the remnants of dinner.

“Perhaps.”

“Now?”

“Well, it's up to you.”

He kept remembering the old lady in the Lantana and her painted hideous friend.

“It won't reach its peak for a while yet. The tracking station radioed the hospital. It might be best to sit tight.”

She sat up and reached for a cigarette across him.

“Lie back,” he said, talking to his conscience rather
than her. “Lie back and be still beside me.” He pulled her down.

The pain was beginning to stir like the crab it was, moving its pincers about his belly, seeking, tapping. With a groan he pulled her to him and she thought wearily that it was love until a lightning flash illuminated his face washed with sweat and the flesh pinched back from the bony structure of his nose. They lay like that for a quarter of an hour until, unable to subdue his guilt, he rose, pulled on his clothes and went back to his truck. Marie opened a new box of mints and lay sucking at two of them in the dark.

T
HE
lull came at three.

Fricotte had towed the swimming Lake into a room on the street side, so that even after the first of the big waves had plunged through the hotel, ripping away the sea veranda and the dining-room with its arrangement of mating chairs, he slept in his Scotch blanket to awake in the deepest dark during a pause in the wind.

His tentative feet paddled over the side where they dipped immediately into water and floating junk from which they jerked back in fright. Then as the darkness became granulated, he could see across the room and a few feet away on another bed a humped sleeper. This hump was motionless and its shape, somehow helpless, filled him with reluctance to move until, his curiosity slapped awake by the outside bashing of the huge waves on the sea-wall, he gave a tweak to the grey blanket and opened up his guilt as well.

It was an old lady, and she was dead he saw at once.

For the first unbreathing minute, although he had been used to death in his profession, he was shocked, not only by the twist of sudden utterance cut off that her open mouth gave, but by the tenderness with which her hair had escaped from its shallow bun and trickled like grey streaks of unloving down the soft sad cheeks. Her hands had relinquished their last frenzied clutch and the dentures had dropped onto the blanket and grinned up at him from her stomach. Oh my God! he accused himself. It's her. It's that one. Automatically, even as he wondered what his prayers could evoke, he raised his hungover hand and pronounced the words that would absolve. Why had he finally refused last night? he wondered. It's bloody useless, his heart kept insisting. Bloody stupid, but I have to try. He put out his hand and drew a strand of hair away from the eyes that looked at and through, and very carefully shuttered the lids. He went back to his own bed and sat there, listening to the crash of water whacking and whacking at the land, remembering a park in a town he could not identify for the moment, the swollen shadows, the prone unmoving forms of the metho drinkers washed up under the oaks in the blue light of trees. Remembering his first Mass and his parents waiting for his blessing. Remembering his first temptation and the unhappy face of the boy and his sudden withdrawn arm; remembering the second, and the arm hovering; and on and on, and then his yielding. All
those things, the country parishes, the deserts of spiritual retreat with two hundred of them packed into seminaries for footie and soul-searching, the renunciation of the mainland—these he saw through screens purpled by sea currents and the flashy bracts of bougainvillea and the mercy of brown bodies, of infinitely sweet singing skin and undulating voices. All these things. He wanted to howl aloud. He was weak enough these days for easy tears, but it was less for self-pity than for loss.

He went back to the other bed again and very delicately drew away the blanket and then, as an afterthought and recalling the girl in the blue dress years away, kissed the cold forehead of the old woman.

“It should have happened oftener,” he said aloud. “Perhaps then you would not be here.”

“Or me,” he added honestly. “I should have kissed that girl in blue and resolved my celibate squeamishness and hoped for cure.” Ah, he wondered. Ah.

The air moved again into wind outside. He fought his way back to the corridor as the sea began munching at the last retaining wall. Roof-beams hung like stiff foliage over what was left of the bar-room and its repudiated furniture, and even as he went through this perturbed landscape the second enormous wave struck while he ran like something insane up the hill towards the church. Behind him water pushed the last of the timber across the road and later sucked the whole building terrifyingly back to sea.

In the morning, only the bar-rail was left.

After Lake reached what should have been structure, he found an aching gap. There were chunks, of course, of wall and roof and immense spaces filled with thrown trees. A statue of Our Lady of Sion lay face down among the grasses. The whiteness of it was like light. It all seemed amusingly symbolic though he had not the heart to see it thus while custom nudged him past towards the presbytery, now only a flattened jumble of timber walls and passion-vine streamers torn out in the high wind. They flew steadily and crazily over the rubble, over the banana-trees that had once stood in a grove near the front door. As Lake went by he picked at a frond of these whose suave leaves lay in his hand without emotion and added to his sense of aloneness. The rain was cutting his skin like bullets, pasting his hair across his eyes. But he opened his mouth to the rain the way he used to do as a boy and felt the tearing of it across his tongue. Automatically he groped in his pocket for a handkerchief and felt behind that for his rosary beads which he remembered with a start had gone, flung into a disposal bin at the Glare Bar. He trod on subsiding timbers where his room used to be, and called “Terry, Terry” through the toothy house. Somewhere in the direction of the kitchen he heard scraping and grating even through the wind and the rain and, leaning against them, lurching into pits and tripping over crushed furniture that had once borne the prelatical bottoms at poker, he
made discovery of Father Greely cramped under a larder and, by strange juxtaposition, a low-down suite. He was conscious, unhurt and immovable.

“Who's that?” he hissed.

Lake held streaming arms above his skull.

“Lake.”

The pause pulsed.

“Can you shift whatever this is?”

“What is it?”

“I'm not sure.”

Lake bent closer and peered at him. “Actually it's a kitchen cupboard and the lav.” This he patted. Then he pushed at it rather stupidly. “I can't seem to shift it,” he confessed. “You can always chuck up in it.”

He squatted beside Greely and leant over close, observing the eyeball glister in the dark. There was no compassion in either man and Lake, still drunken, began to hum softly,
“Where have all the flowers gone?”

“It was terrible,” he said after a while. “Wasn't it?”

Father Greely controlled himself but his throat was swelling.

“I am not in pain,” he stated, “and that might disconcert you. But I am in great discomfort. If your lack of charity extends to this sort of petty nonsense, I'd be obliged if you'd go away.”

“But I was going to try again in a moment. When I'd got my strength back.” He wanted badly to giggle.
“When it rains above it rains
 . . .” he started to carol and stopped and said sorry and smeared the water
across his face and shivered in his soaking clothes. “Here we go,” he said. “Who is the patron saint of wedged johns? St Didimus?”

“Why don't you get a stick or pole or something and lever the bloody thing?”

“That's why I'm a failure. I've never had resourcefulness. Not ever,” Lake said. He foraged around in the perimeter and dragged up a length of joist. “Where's Mulgrave, anyhow?”

“He drove up to the hill mission this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“Can't you hurry, father?”

“I could,” Lake agreed. “I could. But I might make it worse. You'll have to be patient.”

Wedging the pole beneath the larder and leaning heavily on it he managed to raise it an inch or two but Greely missed his first opportunity and the bulky cupboard swung back heavily onto his legs. There was a thin scream at which Lake was tempted to say “Offer it up.” Instead he levered again and Greely managed to pull his legs aside before the lot crashed back into place. Blood began to run down both shins.

“That ought to be worth a plenary,” Father Lake remarked as he sat back on his skinny haunches. He rubbed a finger under his nose.

“Don't you ever stop?” snarled the other, gripping his wounded legs in agony.

“Stop what?”

“The flippancy.”

“I'd die if I wasn't flippant. I'd want to howl like an animal. You'd hate that with your stoicism and your endurance.”

“Yes. I'd hate it all right.” He held out his hands. “Help me up, will you? Yes. I'd hate that indeed. But I don't know what I'm to do with you, you're so bloody frank.”

“I find it hard to lie.”

He was confessing thus through the groans of the older priest who had propped against a resisting up-right of the rinsed-out house. They leant together.

“I don't know what we can do now,” Lake admitted. “There's nothing we can do until it's light.” He saw his watch's face utter an unemotional three forty, greenly omniscient and creeping toward the revelation of the morning. The old lady came into his mind and he jumped at the clarity of conscience announcing that he had sent her unshriven to the next world.

“Cock!” he cried aloud. “Utter cock and nonsense!”

Nevertheless his conscience persisted, and in the fighting dark as they staggered to what should have been the hospital he could not obliterate the plea and the face. Everything else was nothing, he knew, the drunken consecration of the bread, the failed seduction, those seductions he had achieved. But he had refused kindness and it was too late to repay.

“Oh my God,” he cried involuntarily. And he knew it was how murderers feel. “Look,” he pleaded in the shaking air which was beginning to streak open with
early light. “I want to tell you something.”

“Can't it wait,” Greely said unsympathetically, “until we reach the hospital or whatever we reach?”