Tim (28 page)

He was lying with his eyes wide open, looking up at her without even wincing in the sudden, drenching light. The face was sad and a little stern, and it wore an expression she had never seen before, it had a maturity she had never noticed. Was it her eyes that had been blind, or was it his face that had changed? The body was no longer strange or forbidden to her, and she could look upon it freely, with love and respect, for it housed a creature as live and entire as she was herself. How blue his eyes were, how exquisitely shaped his mouth was, how tragic the tiny crease to the left side of his lips. And how young he was, how young!

He blinked and shifted the focus of his gaze from some private infinity to the nearness of her face; his eyes swelled on the tired, worried lines in it, then on the straight, strong mouth so sated with his kisses that its lips were swollen. He lifted one leaden hand and brushed his fingers against her firm, rounded breast gently.

She said, "Tim, why won't you speak to me? What have I done? Have I disappointed you?"

His eyes filled with tears; they ran down his face and fell onto the pillow, but his sweet, loving smile dawned and the hand cupped her breast harder.

"You told me that one day I'd be so happy I'd cry, and look! Oh, Mary, I'm crying! I'm so happy I'm crying!"

She collapsed on his chest, weak with relief. "I thought you were angry with me!"

"With
you?"
His hand cradled the back of her head, her hair slipping through his fingers. "I could never be angry with you, Mary. I wasn't even angry with you when I thought you didn't like me."

"Why wouldn't you speak to me tonight?"

He was surprised. "Did I have to speak to you? I didn't think I had to speak to you. When you came I couldn't think of anything to say. All I wanted was to do the things Pop told me about while you were away in hospital, and then I had to do them, I couldn't stop to talk."

"Your Pop told you?"

"Yes. I asked him if it was still a sin to kiss you if we were married, and he said it wasn't a sin at all when we were married. He told me about lots of other things I could do, too. He said I ought to know what to do because if I didn't I'd hurt you and you'd cry. I don't want to hurt you or make you cry, Mary. I didn't hurt you or make you cry, did I?"

She laughed, holding him hard. "No, Tim, you didn't hurt me and I didn't cry. There I was, petrified because I thought it was all up to me and I didn't know whether I was going to be able to deal with it."

"I really didn't hurt you, Mary? I forgot Pop told me not to hurt you."

"You did magnificently, Tim. We were in good hands, your green hands. I love you so much!"

"That's a better word than like, isn't it?"

"When it's used properly it is."

"I'm going to save it just for you, Mary. I'll tell everyone else I like them."

"That's exactly how it should be, Tim."

By the time dawn crept into the room and lit it with the clear, tender newness of day, Mary was fast asleep. It was Tim who lay staring wakefully at the window, careful not to move and disturb her. She was so small and soft, so sweet-smelling and cuddly. Once he used to hold his Teddy bear against his chest the same way, but Mary was alive and could hold him back; it was much nicer. When they took his Teddy bear away, saying he was all grown up and must not sleep with Teddy any more, he had wept for weeks with empty arms hugging his aching chest, mourning the passing of a friend. Somehow he had known Mum didn't want to take Teddy away, but after he came home from work in tears and told her how Mick and Bill had laughed at him for sleeping with a Teddy bear, she had steeled herself to do it, and Teddy had gone into the garbage can that very night. Oh, the night was so big, so dark and full of shadows which moved mysteriously, coiling themselves into claws and beaks and long, sharp teeth. While Teddy had been there to hide his face against they had not dared to come any closer than the opposite wall, but it took a long time to get used to them all around him, pressing down on his defenseless face and snapping at his very nose. After Mum had given him a bigger night light it was better, but he loathed the dark to this very day; it was deadly with menace, full of lurking enemies.

Forgetting he was not going to move in case he wakened her, he turned his head until he could look down on her, then slid up the pillow until he was much higher than she. Fascinated, he stared at her for a long time in the growing light, assimilating her alien appearance. Her breasts devastated him; he could not tear his eyes away from them. Just thinking about them filled him with excitement, and what he felt when they were crushed against him was indescribable. It was as though her differences had been invented just for him, he had no conscious awareness that she was exactly like any other female. She was Mary, and her body belonged to him as utterly as his Teddy had; it was his and his alone to hold against the inroads of the night, warding off terror and loneliness.

Pop had told him no one had ever touched her, that what he brought to her was foreign and strange, and he had understood the magnitude of his responsibility better than a reasoning man, for he had owned so little and been respected by so few. In the savage heat of his body's blind drive he had not managed to remember all Pop told him, but he thought, looking back on it, that he would remember more next time. His devotion to her was purely selfless; it seemed to come from somewhere outside him, compounded of gratitude and love and a deep, restful security. With her he never felt that he was weighed in the balance and found lacking. How beautiful she was, he thought, seeing the lines and the sagging skin but not finding them ugly or undesirable. He saw her through the eyes of total, unbounded love and so assumed that all of her was beautiful.

At first when Pop had told him he must go to the house at Artarmon and wait there alone for Mary to come home, he had not wanted to come. But Pop had made him, and would not let him return to Surf Street. A whole week he had waited, cutting the grass and seeding the flower beds and trimming the shrubs all day, then wandering the empty house at night until he was tired enough to sleep, with every light on to banish the demons of the formless darkness. He did not belong in Surf Street any more, Pop had said, and when he had begged Pop to come with him he had met with an adamant refusal. Thinking about it now as the sun rose, he decided Pop had known exactly what would happen; Pop always did.

That night the thunder had growled in the west and there was a stinging, earthy smell of rain in the air. Storms used to frighten him badly when he was a little boy, until Pop had shown him how quickly the fear went away if he went outside and watched how lovely it was, with the lightning streaking down the inky sky and the thunder bellowing like a mammoth, invisible bull. So he had taken his nightly shower and wandered naked onto the patio to watch the storm, disturbed and restless. In the house the bogies would have rushed gibbering at him from every cranny, but on the patio with the damp wind stroking his bare skin they had no dominion over him. And gradually the melting night had melted him; he had slipped into a senseless oneness with the unthinking creatures of the earth. It was as though he could see every petal on every dim flower, as though all the bird songs in the world flooded his being with a soundless music.

At first he was only dimly aware of her, until that beloved hand had seared his shoulder and filled him with a pain that yet was not a pain. He did not need to be able to reason to divine the change in her, the self-admission that she loved to touch him as much as he had yearned to touch her. He had leaned back to feel her breasts against him; her hand on his belly numbed and electrified him, he could not breathe for fear she would puff away. Their first kiss all those months ago had set him quivering with a hunger he had not known how to sate, but this second kiss filled him with a queer, triumphant power, armed as he was with what Pop had told him. He had wanted to feel her skin and could find only a part of it, frustrated by her clothes, but he had managed to command himself enough to do what had to be done, take them from her gently so as not to frighten her.

His steps had led him down into the garden because he hated the house at Artarmon; it was not his the way the cottage was, and he did not know where to take her. Only in the garden was he at home, so to the garden he went. And in the garden he felt her breasts at last, in the garden where he was simply another of its myriad creatures he could forget he was not the full quid, he could lose himself in the honeyed, piercing warmth of her body. And he had lost himself so for hours, alight with the unbearable pleasures of feeling her and knowing she was with him all the time in every part of her.

The sadness had come when she banished him to the house, and he realized they must part. He had clung to her as long as he could, carrying her small body within his arms and aching at the thought of having to let her go, wondering how long he must wait before it happened again. It had been dreadful, putting her into her bed and turning to go to his own; when she had drawn him back and made him lie beside her he had done so in numb astonishment, for it had not occurred to him to ask his Pop whether they would be exactly like his Mum and Pop and sleep together all through every night.

Then was the moment he knew he really belonged with her, that he could go down to the ground in the last, endless sleep safe and free from fear because she would be there beside him in the darkness forever. Nothing could ever frighten him again: he had conquered the final terror in discovering he would never be alone. For his life had been so very lonely, always shut out of the thinking world, always on some outer perimeter watching, longing to enter that world and never able to. He never could, never. Now it did not matter. Mary had allied herself to him in the last, most comforting way. And he loved her, loved her, loved her. . . .

Sliding down in the bed again he put his face between her breasts just to feel their softness, the fingertips of one hand tracing the outline of a hard, tantalizing nipple. She woke with a kind of purring noise, her arms slipping around him. He wanted to kiss her again, he wanted to kiss her badly, but he found himself laughing instead.

"What's so funny?" she asked drowsily, stretching as she wakened more fully.

"Oh, Mary, you're
much
nicer than my Teddy!" he giggled.

Twenty-seven

When Mary rang Ron to tell him that she was home and that Tim was well and safe, she thought he sounded tired.

"Why don't you come and stay with us for a few days?" she asked.

"No, thanks, love, I'd rather not. Youse'll be better off without me hanging around."

"That's not true, you know. We worry about you, we miss you and we want to see you. Please come out, Ron, or let me pick you up in the car."

"No, I don't want to." He sounded stubborn, determined to have his way.

"Then may we come and see you?"

"When you go back to work you can come over one night, but I don't want to see youse before then, all right?"

"No, it isn't all right, but if that's the way you want it there's nothing I can do. I understand you think you're doing the right thing, that we ought to be left alone, but you're wrong, you know. Tim and I would be very glad to see you."

"When youse go back to work, not before." There was a tiny pause, then his voice came again, fainter and farther away. "How's Tim, love? Is he all right? Is he really happy? Did we do the right thing and make him feel a bit more like the full quid? Was Mr. Martinson right?"

"Yes, Ron, he was right. Tim's very happy. He hasn't changed at all and yet he's changed enormously. He's rounded out and become more sure of himself, more content, less an outsider."

"That's all I wanted to hear." His voice sank to a whisper. "Thanks, Mary. I'll see youse."

Tim was in the garden, repotting maidenhair ferns from the rockery. With a swing and a lilt in her walk that was new, Mary crossed the grass toward him, smiling. He turned his head and gave her back the smile, then bent over the fragile leaves again, snapping off a fine, brittle black stem below the spot where the frond looked pale and sick. Sitting beside him on the grass, she put her cheek against his shoulder with a sigh.

"I just talked to Pop."

"Oh, goody! When is he coming out?"

"He says he won't come until after we've gone back to work. I tried to convince him he ought to make it sooner, but he won't. He thinks we ought to have this time to ourselves, and that's very kind of him."

"I suppose so, but he didn't need to do it, did he? We don't mind visitors. Mrs. Parker is always dropping in and we don't mind her, do we?"

"Oddly enough, Tim, we don't. She's a good old stick."

"I like her." He laid the fern down and slid an arm about her waist. "Why do you look so pretty these days, Mary?"

"Because I have you."

"I think it's because you don't always dress up as if you're going to town. I like you better with no shoes and stockings and your hair all undone."

"Tim, how would you like to go up to the cottage for a couple of weeks? It's nice here, but it's even nicer up at the cottage."

"Oh, yes, I'd like that! I didn't like this house much before, but it turned out to be real nice after you came home from the hospital. I feel as though I belong here now. But the cottage is my favorite house in all the world."

"Yes, I know it is. Let's go right now, Tim, there's nothing to hold us here. I only waited to see what Pop wanted to do, but he's left us to ourselves for the time being, so we can go."

It never occurred to either of them to look further than the cottage; Mary's grandiose schemes of taking Tim to the Great Barrier Reef and the desert evaporated into the distant future.

They moved into the cottage that night and had great fun deciding where they were going to sleep. In the end they moved Mary's big double bed into his room, and closed the door on her stark white cell until they felt like going into Gosford to buy paint for redecoration. There was very little to do in the blooming garden and less inside the house, so they walked in the bush for hours and hours, exploring its bewitching, untouched corridors, lying with heads together over a busy ant hill or sitting absolutely still while a male lyre bird danced the complicated measures of his ceremonious courtship. If they found themselves too far away to get back to the cottage before dark they stayed where they were, spreading a blanket over a bed of bracken fern and sleeping under the stars. Sometimes they slept the daylight hours away and rose with the setting of the sun, then went down to the beach after dark and lit a fire, revelling in the newfound freedom of having the world entirely to themselves and having no constraint between them. They would abandon their clothes, safe in the darkness from eyes out on the river, and swim naked in the still, black water while the fire died away to ash-coated coals. He would make her lie afterward on a blanket in the sand, the urge of his love too strong to resist a moment longer, and she would lift her arms to draw him down beside her, happier than she had ever thought was possible.