Tim (27 page)

Inside the box lay a small brooch, with a magnificent black opal center and a diamond surrounding, fashioned like a flower.

"It reminded me of your garden at the cottage, Mary, all the colors of the flowers and the sun shining on everything."

Off came the tea roses, down they fell to the searing asphalt pavement and lay unnoticed; Mary took the brooch out of its velvet bed and held it out to Tim, smiling at him through a haze of tears. "It isn't my garden any more, Tim, it's our garden now. That's one of the things marrying does, it makes everything each of us owns belong to the other, so my house and my car and my cottage and my garden belong to you just as much as they do to me after we're married. Will you pin it on for me?"

He was always quick and deft with his hands, as if they had escaped his psychic halter; he took the edge of her coat lapel between his fingers and slipped the sharp pin through the fabric easily, did up the safety catch and then the safety chain.

"Do you like it, Mary?" he asked anxiously.

"Oh, Tim, I love it so much! I've never had anything so pretty in all my life, and no one has ever given me a brooch before. I'll treasure it all my life. I have a gift for you, too."

It was a very expensive, heavy gold watch, and he was delighted with it.

"Oh, Mary, I promise I'll try not to lose it, I really will! Now that I can tell the time it's beaut to have my very own watch. And it's so lovely!"

"If you lose it we'll just get you another one. You mustn't worry about losing it, Tim."

"I won't lose it, Mary. Every time I look at it I'll remember that you gave it to me."

"Let's go now, Tim, it's time."

Archie took her elbow to guide her across the street. "Mary, you didn't tell me that Tim was such a spectacular young man."

"I know I didn't. It's embarrassing. I feel like one of those raddled old women you see gallivanting round the tourist resorts in the hope of acquiring an expensive but stunning young man." The arm above his hand was trembling. "This is a terrible ordeal for me, Archie. It's the first time I've exposed myself to the curious gaze of the public. Can you imagine what they'll all think in there when they realize who is marrying whom?

Ron looks a more appropriate husband for me than Tim."

"Don't let it worry you, Mary. We're here to support you, and support you we will. I like your Old Girl next door, by the way. I must sit next to her at dinner, she has the richest vocabulary I've encountered in many a long day. Look at her and Tricia there, magging away like old cronies!"

Mary glanced at him gratefully. "Thanks, Archie. I'm sorry I won't be able to attend my own wedding dinner, but I want to get this hospital business over and done with as soon as I can, and if I delay until after dinner my doctor won't put me on his operating list for tomorrow, which means a wait of a week, since he only operates there Saturdays."

"That's all right, love, we'll drink your share of the champagne and eat your share of the
Chateau
briand."

Because there were sufficient witnesses in the wedding party, only one pair of fascinated eyes beheld the queer couple, those belonging to the officiating representative of Her Majesty's Law. It was quickly over, disappointingly shorn of ceremony or solemnity. Tim made his responses eagerly, a credit to his father's coaching; Mary was the one who stumbled. They signed the required documents and left without realizing that the elderly man who married them had no idea Tim was mentally retarded. He did not think the match odd at all in that way; many handsome young men married women old enough to be their mothers. What he found odd was that no kisses were exchanged.

Mary left them on the same corner where she had joined them, plucking Tim's coat sleeve anxiously.

"Now you'll wait for me patiently and you won't worry about me, promise? I'll be all right."

He was so happy that Tricia Johnson and Emily Parker felt like crying just to see his face; the only shadow to mar his day was Mary's abrupt departure, but even that could not depress him for long. He had signed the little bit of paper and so had Mary, they belonged together now and he could wait for a long time if necessary before coming to live with her.

The operation made Mary sore and uncomfortable for a few days, but she weathered it well; better, in fact, than her gynecologist had expected.

"You're a sturdy old girl," he informed her as he took the stitches out. "I ought to have known you'd take it,in your stride. Old girls like you have to be killed with an ax. As far as I'm concerned you can go home tomorrow, but stay in as long as you like. This isn't a hospital, you know, it's a bloody palace. I'll sign your discharge papers on the way out today and then you can leave whenever you want, this week or next week or the week after that. I'll keep stopping in just in case you're here."

Twenty-six

In the end Mary stayed five weeks, rather enjoying the quiet privacy of the old house on the Rose Bay waterfront, and rather dreading the thought of seeing Tim. She had not told anyone where she was going for her surgery except the dry little man who took care of her legal affairs, and the laboriously written postcards she got from Tim every day were all forwarded through the dry little man's office. Ron must have helped him a great deal, but the handwriting was Tim's and so was the phraseology. She tucked them away in a small briefcase carefully as she received them. During the last two weeks of her stay she swam in the hospital pool and played tennis on the hospital courts, deliberately accustoming herself to movement and exertion. When at length she left she felt as if nothing had ever happened, and the drive home was not at all taxing.

The house in Artarmon was ablaze with lights when she put the car in the garage and let herself in through the front door. Emily Parker was as good as her word, Mary thought, pleased; the Old Girl had promised to make the house look as though it was occupied. She put her suitcase down and stripped off her gloves, throwing them on the hall table along with her bag, then she walked into the living room. The phone loomed large as a monster in front of her, but she did not call Ron to tell him she was home; plenty of time for that, tomorrow or the day after or the day after that.

The living room was still predominantly gray, but many pictures hung on the walls now and splotches of rich ruby red glowered like the embers of a scattered fire throughout the room. A ruby glass vase from Sweden stood on the chaste mantel and a ruby-dyed fur rug lay sprawled across the pearl-gray carpet like a lake of blood. But it was pleasant to be home, she thought, looking around at that inanimate testament to her wealth and taste. Soon she would be sharing it with Tim, who had had a hand in its generation; soon, soon. . . . Yet do I want to share it with him? she asked herself, pacing up and down restlessly. How odd it was; the closer she came to his advent the more reluctant she was to have it occur.

The sun had set an hour before and the western sky was as dark as the rest of the world, pulsing redly from the city lights under a layer of low, sodden clouds. But the rain had fallen farther west, and left Artarmon to the summer dust. What a pity, she thought; we could really do with the rain here, my garden is so very thirsty. She went into the unlit kitchen and stood peering out the back window without switching the kitchen or patio lights on, trying to see if Emily Parker's house was lit. But the camphor laurels hid it; she would have to go out onto the patio to see it properly.

Her eyes were quite accustomed to the darkness as she let herself noiselessly out of the back door, softly cat-footed as always, and she stood for a moment inhaling the perfume of the early summer flowers and the far-off earthy smell of rain, filled with delight. It was so nice to be home, or it would have been had the back of her mind not been consumed with the specter of Tim.

Almost as if she could consciously form his image out of her thoughts, the silhouette of his head and body shaped itself against the distant, weeping sky. He was sitting along the railing of her balustrade, still naked and dewed with the water of his nightly shower, his face raised to the starless night as if he were listening raptly to the lilt of music beyond the limitations of her earthbound ears. What light there was had fused itself into his bright hair and clung in faint, pearly lines along the contours of his face and trunk, where the glistening skin was stretched tautly over the still, dormant muscles. Even the curve of his eyelids was visible, fully down to shield his thoughts from the night.

A month and more than a month, she thought; it's been over a month since I last saw him, and here he is like a figment of my imagination, Narcissus leaning over his pool wrapped in dreams. Why does his beauty always strike me so forcibly when I see him again the first time in a long while?

She crossed the sandstone flags silently and stood behind him, watching the column of sinew in the side of his throat gleam like a pillar of ice until the temptation to touch him could not be gainsaid a moment longer. Her fingers closed softly over his bare shoulder and she leaned forward to rest her face against his damp hair, her lips brushing his ear.

"Oh, Tim, it's so good to find you here waiting," she whispered.

Her coming did not startle him and he did not move; it was almost as if he had felt her presence in the stillness, sensed her behind him in the night.

After a while he leaned back against her a little; the hand which had rested on his shoulder slid across his chest to the other shoulder, imprisoning his head within the circle of her arm. Her free hand slipped beneath his elbow to his side, its palm pressing down against his belly and pushing him back harder against her. The muscles of his abdomen twitched as her hand passed across them caressingly, then became utterly still, as if he had ceased to breathe; he moved his head until he could look into her face. There was a remote calmness about him and the eyes searching hers so seriously had the veiled, silvery sheen to them that always shut her out while it locked her in, as if he saw her but did not see Mary Horton. As his mouth touched her own he put two hands up to grip the arm she had linked across his chest, and they closed over it. The kiss was different from their first, it had a languorous sensuality about it that Mary found fey and witching, as if the creature she had surprised dreaming was not Tim at all, but a manifestation of the soft summer night. Rising from the balcony railing without fear or hesitation, he pulled her into his arms and picked her up.

He carried her down the steps and into the garden, the short grass hushing under his bare feet. Half inclined to protest and make him return to the house, Mary buried her face in his neck and stilled her tongue, yielding up her reason to his strange, silent purpose. He made her sit on the grass in the deep shadow of the camphor laurels and knelt beside her, his fingertips delicately touching her face. She was so filled with love for him that she could not seem to see or hear, and she leaned forward like a rag doll toppled by a careless flick of the finger, her hands splayed far apart and her head down against his chest. He held it there, pulling at her hair until it fell loose about her and her hands lay curled helplessly on his thighs. From her hair he passed to her clothes, peeling them away as slowly and surely as a small child undressing a doll, folding each item neatly and laying it on a growing pile to one side of them. Mary crouched there timidly, her eyes closed. Their roles had somehow become reversed; he had inexplicably gained the ascendancy.

Finished, he took her arms and propped them on his shoulders, gathering her against him. Mary gasped, her eyes opening; for the first time in her life she felt a bare body all along the length of her own, and somehow there was nothing to be done save abandon herself to the feel of it, warm and alien and living. Her dreamlike trance merged into a dream sharper and more real than the entire world outside the darkness under the camphor laurels; all at once the silky skin under her hands took on form and substance: Tim's skin sheathing Tim's body. There was no more than that under the sun, nothing more to be offered her on life's plate that the feel of Tim within her arms, pinning her against the ground. It was Tim's chin driving ribbons of pain from the side of her neck, Tim's hands clawed into her shoulders, Tim's sweat running down her sides. She became aware that he was trembling, that the mindless delight which filled him was because of her, that it mattered not whether hers was the skin of a young girl or a middle-aged woman as long as it was Tim there, within her arms and within her body, as long as it was she, Mary, to give him this, so pure and mindless a pleasure that he came to it unfettered, free of the chains which would always bind her, the thinking one.

When the night was old and the dim western rain was gone over the mountains she pushed herself away from him and gathered the little pile of clothes against her chest, kneeling above him.

"We must go inside, dear heart," she whispered, her hair falling across his extended arm where her head had been. "It's the dark before light, we must go in now."

He picked her up and carried her inside immediately. The lights were still on in the living room; trailing her hand over his shoulder, she extinguished them one by one as he crossed to the bedroom. He put her down on the bed and would have left her alone had she not reached out to pull him back.

"Where are you going, Tim?" she asked, and moved over to make room for him. "This is your bed now."

He stretched out beside her, pushing his arm under her back. She put her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest, caressing it drowsily. Suddenly the small, tender movement ceased, and she lay stiffening against him, her eyes wide and filled with fear. It was too much to be borne; she lifted herself on one elbow and reached across him to get at the lamp on the bedside table.

Since the silent meeting on the patio he had not spoken one word; all at once his voice was the only thing she wanted to hear, if he did not speak she would know that somehow Tim was not with her at all.