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Authors: Thea Astley
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and winds seemed to blow through the wooden shutters as he devoured his freedom like a starving man. It could not be said that he had never loved her, although he would excuse himself now by asking what would any young man know of love in his twenties, and other married men would agree over their drinks and they would form a kind of club for mutual outpourings of regret.
He had endured for fifteen years.
Then suddenly, as if there were some sexual re-growth, he found himself absorbed in a woman he had observed with interest discard at least two of his friends and batter down the last shreds of reserve the community wanted to impose.
She was poised throughout. This was her fascination. He was not sure if it were love although he did call it that to himself and repeat her name quietly in the darkness at night or pretend on the few occasions he took his wife that it was this other until finally it was.
And then he discovered how unpractised at deception he was. He made everyone unhappy including his ravenous self. And his love, who was intelligent and probably harder than his wife but could conceal so much better, grappled with his initial devices, discarded his avowals as ploys, and filled in her time. She did not need men except when the singing of the body became so high and clear it could not be ignored. Taking a lover was no more to her than the after work gin, some kind of definite stimulus that served also as anodyne at the end of a day. She had known Stevenson for three years and used him for half of that time.
She would wear white in deliberate antithesis to her browned skin and dangle op art ear-rings to stagger the locals. She could talk forcefully and intelligently about the economic concentrations of her government even in this remote place with far more interest than she applied to feminine wile.
She read
Vogue
international in secret.
They met in the course of work, for she was acting as accountant for an inter-island trading company. Stevenson could stare out his first anguish across her desk or his, but other arrangements were more difficult to make. The first time he had visited her flat in Erromango Street he had been stunned by her aplomb, her pleasure, her participation. As they shuddered apart, the knot within him dissolved and he had the imaginings of love that thrust him unshod for pilgrimage into the beginnings of emotional journeys. Dear God, he would whisper as each train was about to pull out. Dear, dear God. He could have returned to prayer.
His wife did not observe for weeks that some obsession held his eyes apart from hers, though he played more assiduously than ever with his small boy, taking him out for swims and truck excursions to the other side of the island and creeping in at night to pore over the closed face lost in that other world he could never enter. If he had been asked were he happy when he was with Marie he would have felt obliged to say yes, though his continuing sadness puzzled him.
He used to write poetry. It was his secret vice, more secret than his love for her, though it recorded that, too, in a series of blazes and burns.
It was a vice he had stumbled upon by accident, the accumulated impulses and resentments of twenty years of marriage spilling over into verbal protest that he concealed like dirty postcards in a little note-book. Hehad begun it a year before, the explosion shocking him. He had never been the arty type. And after the first shame of experiment, after the re-readings in calm, after all that, he became alert, proud and chained.
He would scribble at odd hours between bouts of correspondence or on sleepless evenings in his study. Some poems were so extracted from the spirit of him he cried as he wrote and was forced to say âI am sickâ to excuse the weakness of drained eyes. This is an outlet of excess. He would touch his pen to th paper like a loving finger about to describe on flesh what was most urgent. The paper received his thoughts with a
He had endured for fifteen years.
Then suddenly, as if there were some sexual re-growth, he found himself absorbed in a woman he had observed with interest discard at least two of his friends and batter down the last shreds of reserve the community wanted to impose.
She was poised throughout. This was her fascination. He was not sure if it were love although he did call it that to himself and repeat her name quietly in the darkness at night or pretend on the few occasions he took his wife that it was this other until finally it was.
And then he discovered how unpractised at deception he was. He made everyone unhappy including his ravenous self. And his love, who was intelligent and probably harder than his wife but could conceal so much better, grappled with his initial devices, discarded his avowals as ploys, and filled in her time. She did not need men except when the singing of the body became so high and clear it could not be ignored. Taking a lover was no more to her than the after work gin, some kind of definite stimulus that served also as anodyne at the end of a day. She had known Stevenson for three years and used him for half of that time.
She would wear white in deliberate antithesis to her browned skin and dangle op art ear-rings to stagger the locals. She could talk forcefully and intelligently about the economic concentrations of her government even in this remote place with far more interest than she applied to feminine wile.
She read
Vogue
international in secret.
They met in the course of work, for she was acting as accountant for an inter-island trading company. Stevenson could stare out his first anguish across her desk or his, but other arrangements were more difficult to make. The first time he had visited her flat in Erromango Street he had been stunned by her aplomb, her pleasure, her participation. As they shuddered apart, the knot within him dissolved and he had the imaginings of love that thrust him unshod for pilgrimage into the beginnings of emotional journeys. Dear God, he would whisper as each train was about to pull out. Dear, dear God. He could have returned to prayer.
His wife did not observe for weeks that some obsession held his eyes apart from hers, though he played more assiduously than ever with his small boy, taking him out for swims and truck excursions to the other side of the island and creeping in at night to pore over the closed face lost in that other world he could never enter. If he had been asked were he happy when he was with Marie he would have felt obliged to say yes, though his continuing sadness puzzled him.
He used to write poetry. It was his secret vice, more secret than his love for her, though it recorded that, too, in a series of blazes and burns.
It was a vice he had stumbled upon by accident, the accumulated impulses and resentments of twenty years of marriage spilling over into verbal protest that he concealed like dirty postcards in a little note-book. Hehad begun it a year before, the explosion shocking him. He had never been the arty type. And after the first shame of experiment, after the re-readings in calm, after all that, he became alert, proud and chained.
He would scribble at odd hours between bouts of correspondence or on sleepless evenings in his study. Some poems were so extracted from the spirit of him he cried as he wrote and was forced to say âI am sickâ to excuse the weakness of drained eyes. This is an outlet of excess. He would touch his pen to th paper like a loving finger about to describe on flesh what was most urgent. The paper received his thoughts with a
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