Australian Love Stories (6 page)

She'd tried once to talk to this man at a party and he said so little she imagined he was bored; and yet, like many others, she admired him, for three reasons.

He was the director of an organisation that helped the needy.

He was very tall.

His opinion was precious and not easily given.

She and Emily spread the picnic rug under a shady tree.

‘Where's Rick?' asked Emily.

‘Oh—he and the guys have gone to some car race.'

‘A speed-freak. I would never have picked him for you.'

‘Yeah, sometimes I wonder at it myself,' replied Mallory, lifting Daphne from her pram to feed her. ‘He's a good person.'

‘Bit young. Is it nine years, the gap between you?'

Karl and his wife were singing ‘Scarborough Fair,' laying out impossible courtship tasks for each other. Mallory had heard of the cambric shirt without any stitch or needlework but not about ploughing a field with a ram's horn, or shearing the field— presumably the same one—with a sickle of leather. Poor baby Daphne was hot. She pressed the baby's silken mouth onto her cracked nipple, feeding her baby with milk and the tiniest bit of blood.

‘Let's buy Daphne a hand woven Moses basket,' said Emily.

‘You've done a great job organizing all this, Em.'

‘Thanks. There's even a lace-maker stall. You could get a bit for your wedding dress.'

Two tall children were threading their way through the crowd to sit at the front. Emily said they were Karl's and Mallory saw they shared the pale hair and severe features of their parents, overlaid with the softening loveliness of childhood.

‘Poor things,' remarked Emily, getting to her feet.

‘Why? Is he strict?'

‘I doubt it—excuse me darl, the town crier's beckoning me.'

The dance took place toward evening. Daphne was asleep in her pram and Mallory wanted to walk home before she got too tired, but Emily, again, insisted.

‘I'll watch her,' she said. ‘The first one's a Scottish folk dance. Very easy.'

Mallory lined up with the others on the expanse of frayed yellow grass, under a sombre smoke haze drifting from distant bushfires. The heat wave had been intolerable. She saw Karl; beside him stood his wife with a fiddle, along with two cellists. Karl gave Mallory a nod. She nodded back, making herself smile. She saw he was about to show how the dance was done, and wanted to flee. She was too hot and grumpy and lumpy to
dance
.

And then Karl stepped toward her, and took her hand, and she was twirling, and he was spinning her toward him with conviction. Everything he did was definite and with purpose. Without being asked, she was to help him demonstrate. She understood, and let his will direct her. She could do nothing else.
Her body followed his, her feet followed his, three steps forward, three steps back and waltz…

She laughed. To waltz, on this day, in this field, at this moment in history, was so unlikely! The laugh bubbled up from some sweet cauldron between her heart and belly, spontaneous and sudden. Karl looked into her eyes, a sharp look, filled with curiosity. Wonder, perhaps tinged with disdain. And it seemed to her that they should know each other better than they did.

It was not this look of Karl's that started the madness— though she was surprised by its candour—it was the firm pressure of his hand just above her hip, guiding her away from him and toward him as the dance demanded.

Forward two three, back two three. The other couples followed suit. Over Karl's shoulder, Mallory watched his wife playing, smiling, concentrating, tapping her foot. How competent she was, and how like Karl himself. A perfect couple.

Rick called by to see Mallory later that evening, smelling of petrol, and telling her about some car he was thinking of buying. He kissed her hand. They didn't live together yet. When Daphne cried, he picked her up gingerly and handed her over, and Mallory noticed that he'd chewed his fingernails to stubs. Rick went on talking, and fetched her a glass of water while she fed the baby, and when he realized that sex wasn't on offer, he went home. She lay on the couch, and the madness began. She was dancing with Karl. She was leading him out of the field, to the place where the grass was long…

No. Think about your fiancé. Rick. Handsome and funny and also very tall. Perhaps she had some pathological interest in
height? And young. She was thirty-six and Rick was twenty-seven and the baby was an accident. He was doing the right thing. She loved him for it.

Oh no, here was Karl again, as powerful in her mind as he was in person, and she was pushing Karl down into the straw, his long, strong body falling willingly to the ground. The chief executive like a youth, limp and biddable beneath her, and she took his hands and placed them on the yielding flesh above her hips. ‘Hold me there,' she whispered. ‘Don't let go.'

And so it was, for weeks. When she tracked down Karl's address and parked her car a little way up the street to watch him leave for work, she knew things were getting out of control. Yet there was this urgent need to see him.

‘I'm like a stalker,' she said aloud, and shook her head. ‘This can't go on.'

But it did go on. She watched him, in his crisp navy suit, his thinning hair catching the early light, getting into—of all vehicles—a ute. Or she'd walk past with the pram at night, and look through the windows into happy domestic scenes of him reading to his children, or chatting to his wife. On Sundays he tended his vegetable patch with his children, orderly rows of green bordered with sunflowers.

‘What is it? It can't be
only
lust. Or is it?'

This was a shocking thought. She turned it over in herself, carefully, considering it from every angle. First, there was desire, the weird and unexpected yen for this handsome-ugly man. Why? Really, he was almost dour. Like Sam the Eagle from the television show,
The Muppets.
He wore eccentric side whiskers,
practically mutton-chops! As powerful and physical as it was, her craving was also ludicrous—the man's Freudian resemblance to her old high school principal was frightening. She tried hard to laugh at it, to belittle it, and perhaps she would have succeeded if it weren't for something else.

She wanted to befriend him, talk to him, tell him things and have his opinion. She wanted to present herself to him, lay herself bare, and know that she was to his liking in every way possible.

In the antique shop she found some Victorian Valentine's Day cards, replete with their mood of innocence, and their docile colours of aqua, gold, pink and parchment. A few had fine, almost illegible scrolls of inky handwriting on the reverse side, addressed to people like ‘Roland,' and ‘Walter,' and ‘Nett'. One had Cupid running along gold telephone wires, holding up a sign saying
To My Sweetheart
, in lettering that still gleamed after a century. This cupid looked cheekily over his shoulder at the viewer. In Shakespeare's time he'd be wearing a blindfold. How did it go again?
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

‘Look what I bought for Rick,' Mallory said to Emily, spreading out the postcards on the kitchen table.

‘Not sure about this disembodied hand,' said Emily, referring to a card which depicted a hand holding roses. She brushed her thumb over the red velvet heart cut into the bouquet. ‘Bit corny, really.'

‘They were made by different people to us. The Victorians were sweeter people. Purer.'

‘More hypocritical. Put skirts on pianos so you couldn't see their legs.'

Emily was nostalgic for folk crafts, not sentimental love tokens. Mallory poured her friend a cool drink. Emily placed the hand woven Moses basket on the table beside the cards, and together they admired it.

‘Thanks for bringing over the basket. It's really something special. What do I owe you?'

‘Nothing, darl. It's a gift for Daphne. So. How are things?'

‘I have discovered that the skin above my hips is an erogenous zone,' she announced. ‘Touch me there, and I'll fall in love with you.'

‘Right,' said Emily.

She watched Karl on his evening run. In minutes he had sped out of sight, the faint glow of his legs vanishing into the shadows. With the baby asleep in her arms she strolled in his wake, passing through the wet forest scent he left behind, and entered the park where he was doing chin ups on the climbing frame across the oval. She slipped behind a tree. Pressing her lips to Daphne's soft head, she slid to the ground and waited for the ineffable solace of darkness.