Girl with a Monkey (4 page)

“We played cribbage last Thursday night. Sitting there in his tight green pants! Oh, I hate a man to have a fat behind!” She became momentarily angry. “It must have been eleven when he went, and there I was with my eyes not seeing the matches after sewing all day, and him not thinking except of ringing you at seven. He seemed funny all night.”

“Perhaps he was angry. I told him then that I would be going away, though he didn't seem to hear me across all those latitudes. It was just like a conversation made of primitive sounds. Oh there was no mistaking the meaning at all. He pleading and angry and I unloving and angry. Only the words were missing.”

“You'd be like my mother. Disgusted for life. If you had gone on with it I mean. Poor mum! He's always asking for what she doesn't want to give, and they're both sixty. A woman has a right to feel sick.”

“Only if the intial mistake were hers.”

“I don't know what you mean, Elsie.”

“But of course. That's right. To be wrong at the end you must be wrong somewhere at the start. Feel some—some nausea of spirit.”

The two other women watched her piecing her own anguish. The ideas lay jigsaw and fitted only for a minute because the images shifted as she placed them into pattern. To reconcile the positives and negatives of her behaviour was a problem of infinite difficulty, although she could recall with equal clarity her passionate denial of the one man and her cold acceptance of the other.

“I would not hurt you if I could,” she whispered to Jon. “You are handsome and strong but you don't—” The truth could not be beaten into that blank, bland gaze. “I could not, not ever, need you.” Not so that there was an aching of hand for hand or eye exploring eye. This was an ineluctable fact. So they had separated, she warmly unwanting, moving into Harry's bright physical orbit, only to be repelled by tiny grossnesses, unconscious coarseness. So inexplicably was he composite of the delicate and the crude, it took many weeks for the unpleasantness of the one aspect to befog the brilliance of the other. When late at night, returning from the weekly pleasure search through cinema house or dance hall, certain mild tendernesses were exchanged as they sat beside the diggings opposite the house, she would only laugh when he said boldly,
“What would people say? Sitting on the boy friend's pipes!”

But balanced against that swung a scorching Sunday afternoon along the side roads leading from the weir. Their bicycles lurched in and out drunkenly, the dust rose in choking spurts into the willow-trees and Harry, riding ahead, turned once to wave and then say with annoyance, “Pull your skirt down, won't you! I can see everything you've got!” Was it his possessiveness or his half-baked prudery that made her wince? Inwardly she knew it was neither. It was his crude euphemism.

With equanimity, with laughter even, she received his open advances. The sun would never burn more acidly and she would never burn less kindly than on the day they lay in a short bay of the island. Rocks cradled the sky; there was not even a gull. Up the volcanic slopes behind them the cabbage-palms and eucalyptus-trees bent back from the sea. Under her skimpy bathing suit, still soaking from the Pacific, the sand grew wet and dried almost immediately. Harry lay on his stomach looking up at her with impudent eyes.

“And direckly tomorrow, direckly we get back, we'd go up to the church.”

“No.”

“But what's the difference? Seven hours before
or seven after? You're like any other dame. You've got to get the man tied up before you give.”

But his face was still good-humoured.

“It's not the sin I mind. It's missing the ferry. And then the cold and the mosquitoes, and, oh, a dozen things. Harry, you really are too impractical.”

She rolled over on her back and stared amusedly up into his face.

“You look so funny upside down.”

“Then we'll stay?”

“No.”

“Till half past nine? Just till half past nine? There's a late ferry then.”

She flung back one arm to catch and tousle his hair, and his eyes met hers more brazenly than ever. They both knew she was deliberately flaunting herself.

“You'll change your mind, I think, and then tomorrow—”

“No.”

And after all they caught the early launch back to the mainland, and on the way home through the tired streets Harry noticed bitterly that the moon that night appeared rounder and yellower than he had seen it for some time.

Elsie and her landlady gazed solemnly into each other's ordinary eyes. It was time for the more demanding rules of the relationship to come into play; the incredible distance between the first and last good-bye
had to be navigated through shoals of well-wishings and urbanites on which the careless tongue might founder. She picked up her cake-tin and suitcase. It wanted a few minutes to the quarter-hour. She shook hands with Jean, murmuring a cautious pleasantry, and then together with Mrs Buttling moved finally through the stuffy dining-room to the front door. The sunlight rushed in like a wind. Their arms touching, they walked slowly to the bus stop.

“I won't wait,” said Mrs Buttling. “But I'll write.”

Her spelling was atrocious and she dreaded the promise even as she made it. “And I won't forget you in a long time either.”

Half a mile down the road the bus came into view. There was really nothing further to say, and after the other woman had gone back into the house Elsie took the telegram from her pocket and tore it into tiny pieces.

August

A
T TWENTY
minutes past eleven Mrs Crozier moved in from the festooning silks on the veranda. Heaped in great mounds the white material curved to hills across the backs of chairs and melted into rivers down towards the floor. The bougainvillea which now jungled the outer trellis made of this veranda such a furtive quicksand of lights and shades that after an hour's sewing she felt her eyes unable to focus; she could not even will their accurate concentration. She knew, too, that her own way of seizing nervously upon ideas merely to crumble and nibble at the edges made prolonged effort more of an impossibility than a happy martyrdom.

She wandered rather than walked, spastic-fashion you might almost say, into the tenebrous living-room and, having searched the air with unsatisfied eyes, found herself seated on impulse at the upright piano near the door. Its lid, permanently raised—perhaps to impress on herself the semblance of culture, the elevation that musical taste fostered for you among your
friends—seduced her butterfly attention. Culture should surround the home.

Whenever she sat thus, hands resting withered and nervous upon the keys, her mind filled with an unbearable longing to translate those mental fugues into satisfying counterpoint. But it was always the same. Unsatisfactorily she pecked at the first movement of a Haydn sonata and fumbled her way through the simpler sections of a Chopin nocturne. Oh, she was the essential romantic! She adored Grieg and Schubert and once had played “Carnaval” reasonably well. It was now as she plunged disastrously into “Florestan” that there sounded footsteps across the front path, the veranda.

Between curtain and door she glimpsed a thin figure in dull red. She continued playing, emoting in gargantuan fashion,
fortissimo, allegro con moto
, describing gigantic arabesques with her arms. At soirees she frequently dazzled with science—brachial geometry. “Why don't you emote tidily, darling?” her family pleaded in agony. Like some well-trained domestic animal? Always on the rare occasions that the State String Quartet visited the town, or the local repertory group put on a ragged performance of O'Neill or Sartre, she went, a very fountain of anticipation, and came away a spring tide of euphoria. Discussion groups, women's movements, charity concerts,
art openings—all found her busy as a gad-fly, imbibing disseminating.

As the doorbell rang for the second time she lifted her hands from the keys as if only at that moment aware—as well, for she could not remember the culminating phrases anyway.

“Elsie, my dear! But now? Today? What ever can be the matter? Lesbia returned south Friday last. Barely a week.”

“I've come to say good-bye, Mrs Crozier. I'm going away tonight on transfer.”

“Oh, those wretched officials! Do they never appreciate the cost of uprooting and transplanting? Come through, my dear, to the sewing-room and tell me how and why.”

Among the breakers of silk Mrs Crozier floundered picturesquely and finally perched high and dry upon a cleared chair.

“It's a ball dress for Lesbia,” she explained, waving at the chaos around. Parenthetic, this.

“No. Throw no blame on departmental whimsy,” said Elsie. “No one can be the scapegoat here, unless it is myself. I seem to have demanded everything from a heaven only too willing to comply the transfer as well. These hot places. Life becomes too complicated for a southerner. I haven't your capacity for taking things easily.”

“And where are you going? Somewhere near home?”

“God forbid!” They looked at each other surprised. “I do beg your pardon, Mrs Crozier. No. It's only a tiny farming centre somewhere near Gympie.”

“Surely Lesbia will not wish to teach when she has finished her degree. Oh, those tiny green hells of cows and peasants! My dear, do you willingly sacrifice yourself to such an educational system?”

“Now I do.” Elsie searched inwardly and seemed reassured. “Yes, now I do most willingly, but there have been other times.”

In her mind's eye she saw an aching procession of tiny hotel rooms, rooms without locks, drab meals, importunate drunkards, worn-out commercial travellers with the patent leather of their self-confidence wrinkled, and furniture piled by doors.

Mrs Crozier picked up a section of her daughter's dress and commenced stitching. Her methods, haphazard, resulted in nebulous concoctions not without their effect; she herself appeared always to be drifting. If analysed, the reason would no doubt appear, cruel though it be, that practically never did her clothes or the clothes she made for others fit with any degree of accuracy. On one occasion she had even attended Sunday worship—bring your foibles home to the orthodox—wearing a dress that was entirely held together by pins. She wore it three or four times
like that, and then abandoned it through sheer lack of interest.

“I know it's dreadful,” murmured Mrs Crozier. “And how you young girls can bear that shocking isolation . . . The scissors—thank you—and the lack of people with conversation. Or adequate libraries. But, above all, no young men—no suitable young men.”

She gave Elsie what she fully intended to be an arch look but which was the very essence of innocence and
naïveté
, causing the girl to wonder at the brilliant dissimulation Joe Seaniger must have practised at Lesbia's parties; those dull evening musicales during term vacations when the hostess, frayed but determined, announced the titles of the next record or the next song with a smile of utmost sweetness as if propounding a telling philosophy, while Joe simmered and sweated it out until he could get Lesbia on her own.

“How is that nice boy? Arthur, is it? Or Alan?”

Elsie winced at the ghost thus summoned.

“Shall I tell you? Dare trouble such an idealist? I've been kissed by five young men since then, four of whom mattered not at all.”

“And the fifth? Oh, tell me about the fifth, wicked promiscuous girl! Thank heavens Lesbia is away from you.”

“The fifth is the cause of my going. Oh, he does not matter to me,” she protested quickly as she saw the question surface in the other's bright eyes. “But in the
relationship he matters greatly to himself, and I, perhaps not as greatly, matter to him also.”

She added as if the fact were beside the point, “He is a road worker.”

“I see. Or do I see? Perhaps . . .”

“There is nothing to see. He is digging the drains five blocks away. Don't be astonished. The whole affair has a peculiar simplicity. And now I have quite consciously created a narrow spiritual pit for him to dig desperately until he has sweated out all feeling for me. I did it cruelly, I suppose, and coldly certainly. And therefore I'm going.”

“Was he angry with you? Aren't you afraid to build these emotional robots? You must be afraid.”

Elsie leant forward and touched the older woman's arm lightly.

“Terribly afraid, Mrs Crozier. So frightened of his anger maturing throughout this day that I feel I must on no account see him. Even an attempt at explanation seems pointless, for how can I explain what I don't really understand but merely feel? We scarcely saw each other last night after I got in from the plane, and, cowardly, I'd like to slip away without seeing him or discussing it at all.”

Mrs Crozier's kind eyes looked startled.

“Could you do that? Would you want to?”

“It would all come to the same thing,” replied the girl somewhat wearily. “This town is so small I feel I
can hardly avoid seeing him, and his temper and frustration are something not to be seen, I assure you.”

“You know best, my dear.”

Mrs Crozier resumed pricking her daughter's outline in white silk. The sun sifted uneasily through the gluttonous bougainvillea which held the entire northern side of the bungalow in its embrace. Half a mile away the Hermit Park school rang the end of recess, and the distant roar of twelve hundred young taking nourishment and expending their vigour ceased suddenly to leave a fragile silence quivering in the air. It was now eleven thirty and taking that from eight o'clock left eight and a half more hours to be filled in. Or was it “worn away”? A species of moral detrition. The unworthy consideration that perhaps there was something of excitement to be wrung from the situation she had to confess she found entertaining, for although her fear was real the fact that she was the centre of one man's wrath flattered. Even as she toyed with the sentiment she also despised her own nature. But there were excuses to be found, too, for who, stranded like some gasping sea-creature on one of these lonely beaches, would not take succour wherever it was offered? No one could possibly know the way loneliness ate into the mind so that any alleviation was clutched at almost unthinkingly. It was hard to believe that for seven weeks there had been the rain, the drudgery of the job, the crying child and Mrs Buttling's
machine singing like a locust the entire week-end. Was it some excuse that the child snored asthmatically in the double bed three feet away and that the conversation of the landlady reached screaming point in banality? Or would it be the radio programmes, endlessly loud, endlessly commercial and endlessly tawdry? And Sundays at twelve, the father-in-law, atoning in part for his son's defection, coming to mow and trim the rank little allotment, then sit down to baked midday dinners, stinking from his exertion and the grey flannel singlet wet with sweat. There was some vanishing point for all of these things, a point where they actually met with a dagger-like acuteness and drove the mind further than it dared.