A Boat Load of Home Folk (5 page)

“That's better,” he said. “I thought it was going to be one of those moods.”

“One of what moods?”

His face creased in annoyance then. He was easily upset.

“You know perfectly well.”

“No, I don't.”

“I like that ship over there,” he said. “It must be a trader.”

“What mood?”

“Oh for God's sake!”

They were both angry now. The beer was ruined. Each was reflecting bitterly on the increased frequency, the spatial diminution between engagements that left them tense and often dejected. Despite that, the woman at least was ready to rush sobbing into the animal comfort of his familiar coat. Their love-making soothed for a while, though marriage had eaten away at that too. But they believed it found solutions, and across their rested faces would come momentary trust and conviction of rightness and their hands would lie together in the dark, touching, each believed, more than flesh, touching companionship and love that was of the mind.

“Please?” she said.

He snapped, “Please what?”

Her mouth felt its length grow to enclose every wound for miles.

“Nothing.” That was it. She always seemed to be saying it. Nothing nothing nothing nothing. And after a while, “Finished?” he would ask as if nothing at all had happened. As he asked oftener and oftener. What ever happened, Kathleen wondered, to that delightful couple the Seabrooks? Let's ask Gerald and Kathleen, they're always so nice. Except with each other, she wanted to add. Oh, she could have expounded on this at some acid length many years ago, but now their domestic selves escaped and made scratch marks in living-rooms and on patios around barbecue pits. People were becoming aware.

I should leave, if I had pride, she advised herself. (I have none, she would admit comically.) But the caution of age, of lack, of need, these intervened always at this point and she would smile somehow at him and pretend that nothing had taken place although her armour was shot through with holes.

She rose and left him, walking down the veranda steps to the grass strip along the harbour wall where wasted masonry chunks were the relics of a private wharf. Two dinghies flopped against the oyster crust of concrete. The heat dropped like weighted blankets onto the trees and the trees hung heavily along the shuttered walls of the buildings to her right. Watching these things, she sensed the indicator of crisis about to quiver onto zero and an apprehension of nothing at all
pulled her stomach muscles into a hard knot of ganglia. She could easily have been sick, so that when Gerald came up behind her and rested his eyes, too, on the long white building beside the shipping stores she had an impulse to pull him back, back into the room or along the harbour front to where the
Malekula,
white and sharp as fever, was pulling in towards the wharf for unloading. In the richness of the tropic light the red and blue barrels leapt forward. A native boy, his head pitched at an angle to the sun, lounged for that moment beside them. Ropes dangled.

“Gerald,” she said anxiously, “I want to go back.”

“You're crazy,” he said.

“No. Really. I feel something awful is going to happen.”

“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 straight 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.