For Love Alone (33 page)

The moon was a bonfire just below the horizon when he got to the tram stop. A narrow strip of dunes stood between the tram stop and the ocean; beyond some meadows was the harbour. They could roam the dunes, cross to the ocean beach or walk the long walk to Teresa's home. Above, from where he came, rose the dark lights and the brightly lighted night tennis courts; above, in front, were bluffs crowned with the stout walls and the old trees of a convent.

She was there, her thick fair hair bound in a loop, in a sweater and skirt. They had the whole night before them. They set off to walk at once, almost without a word, and he did not ask where they were going. In these suburbs lived some of his wealthy classmates; he had never been asked to their homes by “the toffs”. They climbed the long hill, passed down the road by the convent, off the high-road, down among the deep gardens in the sunken states of three following
bays. He said nothing, obedient, gentle. She talked of the water, the moon, and the gardens and he listened, full of his own thoughts, and worried by doubt and fear, tingling with anticipation when she made some sudden movement, and eagerly agreeing to all she said.

As for the girl, she had written her letter under the inspiration of the moment and she had only a feeble idea of what she would say if he really asked for guidance as she promised. She read only one sentence in his return letter, and at these words, “I will go with you, any time, anywhere”, she had thought of nothing more but the wonderful night walk, their first outing together. When she came home would she be a changed woman, would she have been kissed by her lover? Certainly it would not be nothing that came out of a walk with the man....

But a silence had fallen between them and Jonathan, shaking himself, croaked some old stand-by of theirs, that he was going abroad living on velvet while she was going to have to work for years to do the same thing; and he went on heavily, about “the man abroad”. Was he waiting for her?

“Yes, he will be,” she said, smiling.

Jonathan drew closer to her. When they reached the natural park on the shore, she pushed aside the branches to show the way into a bower of shrubs and trees from which they could scale down to the waters. He walked a few steps into the bushes and then the girl's attitude, casually unprovocative, innocent, her homely scrambling down among the stones to the still water, put him off. There was a seat in the centre of the clearing and there he sat watching her for a moment, waiting for her to look back. What was she doing, dabbling in the water? Fishing something out? He waited. She laughed inquiringly and started back. At that moment, they both heard two loud smacking kisses from the bushes on the right. She came up and sat beside him, close to him. A murmur came from the bushes. She looked closely at him and laughed. In his embarrassment and fright, he was repelled. He saw all the cheap couples before and after who had used this glade, the clumsy sitting side by side, the girl waiting
for a kiss, the fumbling, it was not for that that he had come out. He jumped up with a guttural cry, turned his back on the girl and broke out of the ring of shrubs with a fierce, forward thrust of the shoulder and stood, full of spleen and shame, in the smudged dark of the hillside, visible in the shade, silent and crouched as a night bird haunting the dust of a lonely road.

She came out, putting the branches aside and as he moved forward, followed him a pace or two behind, humbly. He was thinking that the pair in the bushes had seen the whole thing, laughed at him. He waited for her, putting out his hand, but not touching her when she came out. In a minute or two they would see the full water, the headland, the pines on the last cliffs where the continent plunged into the Pacific.

He now turned against himself. If she had made a kind of promise to him, she must still expect some kind of initiative in him, women were bred to it, taught to be recessive. He thought miserably about all he knew of women; it danced in his head, the textbook maxims and the gay knowledge of his wealthier friends. He was sorry for the opportunity missed. What for? For two rough kisses in the dark! He was half in despair, and tempted to run up a side road he saw branching back into the quiet roads they had left. He could run round the corner, disappear, and keep running, far out of sight and call, never see her again, reach the tram, get home, without any more thought about the wretched business. “What does she think I am doing?”

When they came round the headland and saw before them the wide double bay with its thick wooded slopes to the tide, she said: “Isn't it cold, Johnny?”

He said, in muffled tones: “Yes, feel how cold my hand is,” and suddenly grasped her hand, so that he felt her start and draw in her breath. His hands were capacious, smooth and fleshy, hers were thin and restless. In his firm pressure, her left hand fluttered and ducked, as a small animal, and after forcing it to lie still for a moment, she dragged it back and drew a step away from him.
He smacked his hand against his trousers seam and scarcely repressed a “damn” of embarrassment. He thought angrily she was after all a gawky, inexperienced girl who had just meant to go spooning with him on a moonlight night, and he was angry with himself at being taken in by a few glowing words. He ought to have known that there was no such thing as he expected. She was a lonely girl, lovehungry; dynamite, not for the likes of him. He got back his wits, and was inclined to laugh. Coming along in the tram he had been worrying about the little bit of money he had on him, not to be in her debt too much when she made love to him and everything fair and square. Now he saw he needed nothing, nothing was expected from him, except the love-making and “that's not in my line”, he said to himself, “that's not my lay”.

Now the girl regretted her mistake and timidly took his hand, but he moodily pushed her away and said:

“Know what place this is? It's a regular palace.”

“That's an Indian princess's.” She was offended and drew ahead.

“Go on, you have princesses here!” His tone distinctly said: “Then you don't need me, do you?”

“But we live a couple of miles farther on,” she said hastily, ashamed of the princess.

“Oh, not with the nobs, then?” He stuck his hands carelessly in his pockets, turned to the bay and looked around him. He sighed, “Well, you were right. Q.E.D. It's not half bad. Glad I came. Is it much farther?”

“There are two wharves nearer, you can catch a boat at either. You must be tired.”

“And the last wharf, yours?”

“To reach the end you go by that bay and that bridge, it's just scrub, you miss the cliffs but it's quicker, while at this time of moon—” she stopped, struck by her own vision of the heaving, brilliant sea, a winter moonlit sea—“but you're tired, we'll stop at the next.”

“Let's go through with it,” he said. “I'll try anything once, that's my motto, and I stick to it. Lead on, Macduff.”

“It's late. It isn't so fine. The lights are going out, there are just the buoy-lights and the lighthouse, the moon's rather grey tonight.”

“Yes,” he said, stopping, looking at her askance. “Then you see it for what it is, naked, in the rough, beastly—” he threw out a hand with a fascinating gesture. The ferries were infrequent in the harbour now. They had consumed hours in their futile walk. Under the ghastly high light, the land was limp and slaty as a dead fish; the unliving light which had blasted the centuries, the light of the great dead eye, was sucking out the marrow of this night. The tide was rising still. What she said was true, thought Jonathan, become keener in the access of distress; he heard the strange sounds on the rocks, like little pickaxes, like endless elfin boats, grounding, the walnut-shell of the Willow Pattern, grounding on shingle. He heard the faint rustle in the trees, a soot-winged night bird flying, a dog yawning. He heard a deck hand speaking a long way off, on a ferry. He heard insects, harsh grass brushing its way upwards against a bit of newspaper.

“Yeah,” he said, turning his head to her, “I am a brute, I've lived on a tram line, near the railways with the engines whistling in my ears since I was a youngster. I had to stop my ears by will power or I'd never have got where I am—” he ground his teeth at this—“never have passed their beastly exams. Nothing but noise and dust in my face—and then apart from that, what do you think was my ambition, when I was a kid?”

“To study?”

He burst out into a rough laugh.

“Not on your tintype. I did that because it was a way to eat. That's what I am. I wanted to play footer, that's what I wanted to do. I never had a sweater, the colours of my school, and you couldn't play without. That jersey used to hover about in front of my eyes.”

She said: “Leo—my brother—was in your school. I made him one, primrose and violet.” He said: “Primrose and violet, dainty colour-combination, eh? I liked it. One of the greatest days of my life was when my uncle gave me twopence and I could buy two sheets of transfers, because all the kids had them. I stuck them all over
everywhere and then I couldn't see anything to it. That's what I'm like anyway. That was my kind of art, transfers on fences.”

They were passing behind the princess's house, an immense white, slate-roofed house with a small garden going down to the water. He looked at her doleful back and said more kindly: “I don't say you're wrong and I'm right. Let's say I'm wrong and you're right. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Live and learn. You can hear those sounds. I would have sworn you couldn't. But I don't see life like you do, it has no promise for me.”

She said softly: “If you think I believe in fairy godmothers, you're wrong.”

He hung his head. “No, you're darn right. This is just trick lighting and the whole thing's a sideshow to get us in. Cheap melodrama, you're right there.”

She tried to explain that he would see more, tell more, if he tried to get out of himself. He listened under the influence of the grisly moonlight. She was like a nerveless spectre that had entered his soul, and was vapidly uttering some girlish story that interested him not at all.

“Ulalume, Ulalume,” he moaned, “by the light of the silvery moon.” She was silent, thinking this a stroke of devilish wit; she had never heard of Ulalume.

He came close, putting his arm round her waist, his bold cleft chin above her shoulder, spitefully. They walked on for a few steps, embraced and then broke apart. The walk went on like a nightmare, mile after mile.

Each was glad when the ferry came round the point. It was nearly one in the morning. The lights were out all over the Bay. They ran down the wharf and stood at the top of the steps. When the gangplank was put out, there came off two silent huddled men who had been sleeping through the cold journey, and he waved his hand gaily and ran down the steps. She turned and began her walk home before the boat cast off.

Jonathan sat in a mournful stupor, unwilling to review the lost evening. Teresa, going home, was the prey of the voices. One said: “If you had made a move, you would have done better”; the other said: “Men despise women who make the moves.” By the time he reached the Quay, Jonathan thought: “I should have done better, but she was coy to bring me on and I won't be the first victim of my own atavism, led by the nose in that degrading mimicry of the chase simulated by woman to enhance her own value in men's eyes.” Teresa, by the time she had got to bed, had altered her ideas to, “It's my fault. If I'd been bolder, both would have been happy by this time.” She thought: “None but the brave deserve the fair.”

T
hey needed each other. Two weeks later, on a Saturday morning, after two letters, they went out again. Again, Teresa had made the proposal and Jonathan accepted it. He thought to himself that by now she must have made up her mind to go farther with him. He still had nothing of his own, she was still his only affair. He visited elsewhere, was admitted to the homes of girl friends, but one after another they were beginning to walk out with boys who thought of marrying. He was like a sailor; his ship was waiting in the harbour.

Teresa, meanwhile, taking upon herself all the blame of the previous failure, had prepared for this morning for nearly two weeks, and in a strange way. It was early morning, long before six o'clock, when Teresa and Jonathan, setting out from their suburbs, took the workmen's trams in to the centre of town, where they met at the gate of the Public Gardens, which open at six. They had got up long before breakfast and had brought nothing to eat, but it was a fairly fine morning heavy with dew, the scent of the plants and flowers so
strong that neither of them felt hungry. They waited outside the tall gates, both without coats, in their mended shoes, and they talked in low voices, almost fearfully, on the coming day. They had come here to see the sunrise. She said: “An open hearth, flaring out at intervals, today is the very kind of day, a burning fury which rouses up life as lust rouses up love.”

“Is it really?” he said. “A burning fury? You have to make good on that.”

“And on the rest too, I can. On all. Haven't you seen it, a cauldron tipping over and pouring rust on the new-built steel-grey world on its stocks?”

“On the world in the morning! Can I see such a thing in my back yard?”

It was a warm day, a threatening, oppressive day, sea-fog hung about the coast and had not rolled in upon them but lay upon the still ocean. As soon as the guardian came, clinking his keys, and undid the high bronze-piked gates, they walked in, along the paths so well known to them, past the familiar lawns, down the steps and towards the far end of the garden. The sun was rising but hidden. It rose furiously, with purple and sulphur colours. The grass was bowed down with dew and was hoary. A gunboat came in, saluted the harbour as it rounded the point and the slight echo came to them. They went through the gates at the other end of the gardens and out on to the Public Domain, where they might have gone an hour ago or all night, since it was open all night, and sat down to face the east. They were on a grassy slope facing the harbour. Men were still sleeping huddled close to tree trunks. Some were burning damp papers with much smoke. The dew weighed down their clothes and the smoke was in their eyes.