Read Online A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley - Free Book Online Page A

allow, so it felt, his eyes todrop into the geraniums and the melon creepers.
    Cups were clashed on saucers by the collapsed Mulgrave while Greely, overcome by himself, floundered across the veranda and almost gobbled the other man in his arms; so they stood rocking together in the horror and the heat and the shame until grief was shaken from one into the other.
    â€œHere,” Greely said unexpectedly. “Have a nip.” And he pulled from his trouser pocket a tiny silver flask. It had been a present from a bookie. “I use it for medicinal purposes. I am human too.”
    Lake walked away holding the flask as if its hard cold shape had not impressed itself on his hand nearly as thoroughly as the tones of understanding. Then he tipped the bottle to his lips.
    â€œPoor fellow. Poor fellow,” Greely murmured.
    â€œThat’s true.” Lake’s lips shone with the whisky. “But I don’t want to pity myself, don’t you see? Up at the hospital there’s a young man with tropical lupus. He’s a—a suppurating mess, you understand? Where there isn’t pus there’s about to be. All one side of his face and along a shoulder. About a week ago I was passing through a ward near by and I heard this laughter. When I went in, there he was, doubled up over a comic. You wouldn’t think. When he laughed his face contorted like the most terrible nightmare. The stench. And round him were a couple of his pals. They’d come to visit. Their clean brown faces were crinkled up with pleasure too. He’d explained what it was about. I hadto creep away. Us smooth old Christians aren’t used to such charity.”
    Greely watched and waited. There was more to come, he knew.
    â€œI want to go, you see. It’s not just what I did, what you’re here for. I don’t mean simply ‘from here’. It’s just that I feel the whole reason for my being here is lost. It’s the reason. I like this place in a queer sort of way, the way one gets to love one’s disease, the eating enemy-friend to whom one is host. The cancer you inspect and feel with dread and a certain wild respect. What I mean is that I have written asking for dispensation of my vows.”
    â€œIt can’t be done.”
    â€œIt can, you know.”
    â€œNot just like that.”
    â€œBut I am doing it just like that. I shall fly out of here tonight with my shiny back-the-front collar and you will see me in Martin Place forty-eight hours from now with a narrow silk pin stripe job tied in a clumsy knot because I’m out of practice.”
    Greely took back his flask and screwed the top in position.
    â€œMy dear fellow,” he said, “if you’re going to be difficult you won’t even get on the plane. I don’t want to impede you in any way, but you’ll simply have to act in a civilized fashion. The bishop expects you to stay on at least a week or two until the new man arrives and when you do return to Sydney, at least to spend sometime in—er—meditating. Perhaps I should say spiritual thinking. This transfer the way you propose is most unseemly.”
    Holding out his empty hands with his fingers spread in the what-to-do gesture, Lake held his head stiffly to one side as if deflecting a blow.
    â€œNo,” he said. “No. In this matter I choose for myself.”

  V

November
    B EING a man of direct eye and unused by nature to practising duplicity, Stevenson was unskilled in his negotiations with extra-marital love. His ineffectuality encased him and from his cage of flesh he snarled at the day’s frustrations and threatened to escape. During the seven years he had been working around the islands, his wife made trips back to the mainland each summer taking the daughter when she was due to return to school and then the much younger son. She stayed with friends there for eight weeks while his timber bungalow on the side of the lagoon grew calm