Read Online Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay - Free Book Online Page A

acquaintances. Doing things for people, little things that don’t matter, putting people under a sense of obligation … that’s life to a man like him. And Warwick … it’s a common name.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t say so.’
    â€˜ Women ,’ Washington said acidly, ‘must always be making situations. They can’t see two people having lunch together without packing them off to bed. They must always be clamped on to someone else like limpets.’
    Sylvia leaned forward and replenished his glass. She had worked, after she left school in Sydney, as an artist’s model and was used to exhibitions of temperament. The artistic nature was, she believed, strange, unaccountable, and unpredictable. And it was to be admired and respected - all who laid claim to it had told her so. She, knowing herself to be ordinary, had never tried to be otherwise. She had lived most of her life with those who loved, or professed to love, painting, music, poetry, but had failed to cultivate in herself any interest in these various obsessions. She knew all the jargon but had never contracted the fever. You were born with it, she believed, you came into the world with the print of Apollo’s lips on your forehead. To these artists, these men of imagination, all reverence was due, all aberrations of behaviour permissible, all forgiven. For the past seven years she had dedicated her life to looking after them. She had lived with three artists who had all seen in her the image of their loved, lost or treacherously remarried mothers. Finally, when the last one left her, she fled in despair to a land where men, she had been told, were made of more solid stuff, only to find her heart drifting back to the artistic temperament, back to Philip Washington.
    He was, it was true, hardly an artist in the correct sense of the word. His achievements in the creative line were confined to esoteric little poems, the distressing callowness of which, Sylvia – awed by an impressive profusion of Papuan place names – failed to recognise. There were, however, fresh ideas and fresh enthusiasms. Not ballet, but native dancing, not Picasso, but Sepik masks, not continental cooking, but strange, exotic, indigestible concoctions of taro and yam. The old familiar traits were there, rising like the ghosts of her former lovers through the bizarre vestments that twelve years of tropical living had imposed – the warm, but so transient affections, the sharp, lively, cruel tongue, the hysterical heights and depths of pleasure and despair.
    â€˜Here,’ she said gently, ‘have another drink.’ For he was calmer, and therefore, she supposed, must be happier, when half drunk. He patted her hand, relenting. ‘Dear little slut.’
    â€˜I think this place upsets you,’ she said kindly. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come here. It’s only lusty wenches like me that don’t mind lying down with dead men.’
    This pleased him. He was proud of his sensitivity, though of late it had troubled him. ‘Where else can I go?’ he said sulkily. ‘You are, in spite of being stupid, about the only sane human being in this incredible town.’
    Sylvia smiled and blinked. Constant wounding had never toughened her, and almost every word he spoke conjured some painful response. But no flicker of pain showed in her face. ‘You used to be happy enough to ask people home,’ she said.
    â€˜The place is falling to pieces,’ he said bitterly. ‘It’s infested with cockroaches. I can hardly sleep at night. They stamp about in the thatch like elephants. And Rei’s such a fool he can’t even make a cup of tea.’
    â€˜I told you that you’d regret sacking those two Kerema boys,’ Sylvia said. ‘At least that dirty old devil, the tall one, was a good cook.’
    â€˜I don’t regret it,’ he cried childishly. ‘Don’t present