For Love Alone (16 page)

Lunch. First, the big kitchen ready, robust, steaming, with the oven, cupboards, dishes full of the food they had earned, a food grove that was their own; inside, the long table with Andrew Hawkins sitting sideways so that he could look out at the bay, Kitty at the bottom near the kitchen to serve, Teresa next to her, the boys on each side.

Today, Kitty was happy but flustered and the father kept making remarks about “her boy”. Her two brothers eyed her with less than their usual disdain. Teresa saw them all only in a dream. Why couldn't she cover the bare walls of the dining-room with designs? Andrew Hawkins never disapproved of handwork itself, only of bought painting. The entire wall and ceiling could be covered with leaves and flowers on vines, for instance, and in each wall a painted window or vignette, through which a painted scene would show. On the ceiling—

It was time to change the plates. “The two girls are fast asleep,” said their father indulgently. Leo grunted. “They burned the potatoes in their sleep,” Lance remarked after some reflection. He had not spoken to his father for a year, for no particular reason; but to avoid scandal, he dropped remarks into the room when others were present. Leo added: “I'll bet Terry is thinking of some teacher at school.” Teresa put the plates at her sister's place and went out for the lemon sauce.

“Aren't you, Terry?”

“Do you think I'd marry a schoolteacher?”

The men laughed. Kitty said, with a laugh:

“Nobody asked you, sir, she said, sir, she said.

If he should ask me to marry him
,

What shall I, what shall I say?”

“Say yes, Tess,” said the father.

“I'll ask him if I like,” said Teresa.

Lance enquired: “Who'd marry you?”

“Who'd marry you?” asked Teresa.

Kitty laughed as she sat down.

“You're sickening,” Lance flung at her. “Going on a moonlight excursion and”—he was unable to bring himself to say the word “kissing” so he growled instead, “Look at you, with paint and powder on you now. As soon as they see a man, they put on cold cream.”

They all looked at her keenly; she had blotted the lipstick clumsily.

“Well, Kit!” said her father.

Smiling with embarrassment, but without an apology, she got up and went into the kitchen where she scrubbed her lips with a duster.

“You're all the same,” said Lance. “As soon as a man comes within half a mile, it's giggling and flirting and lipstick, spending your money on clothes, fussing yourselves up, brazeers to look beautiful—”

“Lance,” cried Teresa, leaping from her chair.

He paused disdainfully; the father smiled slightly.

“That's all you think about the whole morning,” he said evilly.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind. I know what I know. You lie on your bed reading, your eyes are all red, you don't do your schoolwork.” He snickered. “When they go to a wedding, the girls go boy-crazy. There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Kitty came in with the steamed pudding and put it in her place, to cut it up.

“It's like wet flannel,” said Lance. “Why can't you learn to cook? You've been at it long enough. Why don't you go to cooking school?”

Kitty cast down her eyes and began to divide the pudding.

“Your Malfi now,” said Lance.

“What's the matter with Malfi?” enquired Leo with lazy interest. “She's all right.”

“She runs around with her dress cut down to the small of her back, with her bones sticking out and salt-cellars in her neck. She thinks the boys are sick over her.”

Leo laughed shortly. “She's got enough boys.”

Lance nagged: “She'd better look out, she'd better not try anything on now.” Kitty was looking into her plate. Teresa gulped down the sweet wet pudding. There was a pause until she finished and she then said to Lance: “What a pity you're so jealous!”

“Jealous! Of that flirt!”

“Yes. Of that flirt!”

Lance folded his napkin and got up from the table, turning away to hide the irresistible grin stealing over his face. Kitty, unnoticed, messed with her pudding and said stormily: “Do you want a second helping?”

“Not of that rubber,” said Lance.

“Well, now, we can live without the critic,” said Kitty.

The father remarked: “You shouldn't torment him. Pass my plate, Terry. You know poor Lance is overworking and probably has his private worries.”

“Why is he so mean?” asked Kitty.

“Born mean,” remarked Leo, getting up without ceremony and stretching himself. “Going down to the men.”

“You're always with the fishermen,” said his father. “I don't mind you being with your mates, but I'd like to see you stay at home and try to read a bit, improve your mind. Lance does that, that you've got to say for your brother.”

Leo's face darkened. Teresa said: “Leo's the fastest workman in the shop, they had to tell him not to go so fast, he was speeding up. All the men like him and when they walked out the other day, it was Leo made them walk out. He got up on a stone at the gate, the stone that holds the gate back. He got up on it and made them a speech and they walked out afterwards.”

Leo came back into the room. “I told them to down tools till the boss got rid of the foreman, the foreman's his son-in-law. They
just started to stroll out the gate, nothing wrong, it looked like. Then they locked us out.”

Kitty, incredulous, said: “You, a boy of seventeen, told men what to do?”

“A man of seventeen,” said Teresa.

The father, balancing between admiration and disapproval, said: “Leo's a hothead, he ought to have looked before he leaped. Now they're all out of work.”

“He talks big,” said Kitty. “I can't understand grown men listening to a boy like that.”

Teresa, playing with a spoon, bursting with pride, imagined Leo, with tossed dark hair, his eyes lively, on the stone. She said aloud: “Leo could get married now, he's a grown man himself.” Kitty lifted her head and gave her a puzzled look; then she said: “Leo has nothing in his head but girls. He runs around with all the tomboys in the Bay, even that Gladys.” She put down her table napkin and got up to clear the plates. Teresa got up to help her and their father sat at the table looking dreamily over the bay until the cloth was taken off, when he got out a huge book of orchid prints and started going through them. He called the girls in from washing the dishes, to look at various species.

“I've seen that one over behind Stoney Creek. I found that one twenty years ago in a gully up the Lane Cover River that's just a suburban development now.”

When Teresa hung up the towels to dry and came out of the kitchen to go upstairs, she found Leo hanging about the stairfoot. He threw himself at her, whispering resonantly.

“Teresa, come here a minute. I heard what you said just now, that I ought to get married, I mean. Do you think so? You see,” he began explaining in his low warm voice that he was earning the basic wage. “Lots of men live on the basic wage and—” He flushed hotly and he rumbled in the bass, something about
a girl he wanted to marry, he wanted her to meet, not Eunice out at Maroubra at all, that was all over, a mistake—”you can't tell a book by its cover”—but a girl named Esther, a beautiful, smart girl, not one of those fly-by-nights, the kind of a girl to settle down and make a home for a man. “Do you think I could get married?” he pressed her.

“Oh, get married, get married,” she begged.

His eyes shone. He threw his shoulders back, pulled his arms taut. His powerful head braced on the thick neck towered above her. He said softly: “I bet you'd like to get married too, wouldn't you, Tess?”

“Of course.”

“I knew it, I knew it,” he said. He padded off, velvety and ungainly, not yet fully grown.

“Donkey,” said Teresa to herself, grinning.

She went upstairs. There was a real breeze; the afternoon was cooler but vaporous. The corners, the landing, and the rooms were burning with a faint rose colour. Her room, the door ajar, invited her, blazing to her with the gem-like colours of past saturnalia, the heavy air thickened with fables of lust, beckoning without beckoning, self-content, streaming with sylphs of ancient style and Priapic hosts, shaken from floor to ceiling with the presence of monsters, no heavier than smoke. The door and window open, inviting them, made her stand still on the landing for a few moments as she looked into her room, trembling with expectancy, as certain of joy as if it were a grotto of the satyr-woods, breeding the miracles of incarnated desire, waiting for a rustle, a voice, unheard by them downstairs but heard by her. She deceived herself with joy, hoping for a powerful hallucination; if she could hear or see them only once! It was the hot, intolerable hour, the hour when in hot countries the sun begins to embrace the earth and crush it with his weight; when he changes everything in it. At this time, there is no more love, conscience, remorse, or sin. In that room, in the furnace, she understood herself and knew what was wrong with the world of men. She felt like a giantess, immense, somehow growing like an incommensurable flower from a root in the earth, pouring upwards into the brazen sky, “the woman clothed with the sun”. At this hour each day, the
sun, reckless, mad with ardour, created her newly. This was the hour when she lived as a heart lives inside a beast, she was the blood and the convulsion; outside was a living envelope, the world.

After a long pause, savouring it, foreseeing the mad fervour of the visions to come, but hearing nothing, not a single note from another world, seeing not the hair of a haunch, she went in languidly and stretched herself out on the square of grass matting her father had bought for her, saying: “A young girl should have some luxuries.” It was too hot to lie on the bed. The ceiling was of the palest nile green and to her obscured eyes, swimming in the maddening heat, it was curtained already; as she looked up, her head resting on her arms, the dark of the heat closed in round it. It was not sleep, but the swift dropping curtains of the play. The play was about to begin. There was no music, though there was a faint rustling; there were no feet though there were forms all about that she never quite caught in the tail of the eye; and she was not asleep. At this time of day, it was no longer the polite conventional romances built on Rome's bric-a-brac authors, but the stories of the shameless Greeks which first rushed onto the stage like a whirlwind and were thrust into thin air by the oncoming wind of the next. Now her mind cleared and she began to think.

Of course, we must change things. A man goes to the Judgment Seat and when God threatens him with hell, he says: “Thou canst not send me there, I came from earth just now.” In Oscar Wilde it is. Everything can be changed, for this is not hell, just the same; it is only earth. Below every cathedral is a tangle of fancy-named streets where harlots live; there are follies in every large town where naked women dance and even in country towns and in suburbs there are smoke concerts where some woman writhes before them, with smoke in the air and smoky spirals of gauze, and flounces in embroidered tatters; they pass around their books of nakedness. We should have had male brothels. But who wants a bought male? One wants love. Men are corrupted by power and want submissive women, but we—the corruption of weakness fortunately is a mere surface, like
house-dirt; the human being sleeps underneath and can be roused. I am certain that as I lie here now, frenzied with desire and want, all women have lain for centuries, since innocent times and never an ounce of bravado to throw off the servitude of timidity. If ever I have money, I'll build hostels where youth can go free, no watchman, no fee. Is this a life? And calmly we live it. They want to educate youth. Let them send us to school, university, good, but during that time let us be hidden in some green town, away from everyone and live together. Old age and youth cannot live together. But everyone would have to be rich for that. And who would pay for our pleasure? Could we young people with money get up some community of our own? This is just a question of the village of youth. There would be a council of themselves, a ruler, like myself, elected of course, all the people of one age and absolutely no penalties; only it would be necessary to study all the time. There would be a thousand Romeo and Juliets, Paolo and Francescas. Why did these couples so famous die unhappy? Because there was no village of youth. Then when men fell in love with women, they could go away too—another community with people coming and going at will, no questions, no fees, only work between them, and each would have to work and no lover-snatching. Anyone who left his or her own lover would have to go. Another could follow them. Would this leave the house and larder bare? In this house we work for the house and we don't love each other; but then, if Lance and Leo brought their women and we our lovers—

She trailed off, Leo and Lance, and Kitty and I, we could all go away to this palace of youth, this phalanstery of learning and suffer no more. But that's fantasy. Who is going to build it, who lead it?

There should be places, bureaux, where we could go and register when we wanted a mate, a stranger's place away from all those who know too much about us. We could get the names of boys and girls and when they needed someone, when life in the world as it is became unbearable, they could disappear, go there and find a mate.

What a waste of our time! Then we could work—study—not always be mulling over the same anxieties. I put up with it because I belong to the bloodless rout of women. If only I have the will I needn't suffer as I do.

But she was suffering now and she turned away from those painful thoughts and began to go over, word by word, with intense preoccupation, the
Lysistrata.
She had never learned it; it had burned itself into her head, the words as if printed on the blue and burning sky of Greece, or else of her own country as hot, as naive, as open.