Read Online Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville - Free Book Online

to understand that I had a destiny to uncover, although he understood that young men were what I was fancying.
    Something had to be said now to explain my absences, which were longer and longer, and at times of day that might have been suggestive, had any suspicions suggested themselves to him. It was one of my jobs to forestall the suggestion of any such suspicion, and my solution was the one that generations of deceivers have used.
    Necessity was the mother of the lie. I have been studying in the library, Father, I would tell him, or more cunningly: Elise Cunningham invited me home for tea, Father. Father nodded in a satisfied way, for he read the society pages like the Bible of this new land, and knew that Elise Cunningham came from money, and even better that her family was on the land in a big way, and best of all that Elise Cunningham had brothers of an appropriate age to be prospects for his daughter. He did not know, and I was not going to tell him, that Elise Cunningham thought Joan Redman might be a little on the grubby side, and most certainly that this outlandish girl with yellow skin and green hair and an outrageous scarf tied around her flat chest, was not anyone she would ever consider inviting home to tea.
    Lilian was the best lie of all, because she was the truth. Father could nod in approval, hearing of Lilian’s wealthy and respectablefamily, the position of the Singers in society, and the fact, and in this case it was a fact, that Lilian Singer, person of prospects and possessed of a brother, had invited his daughter Joan home to tea and to take a turn on the harbour in the boat. When Father’s skull gleamed in a suspicious way in his chair and his eyes became small in their intensity, and proof was needed, Lilian could be brought along as large and indubitable proof that I was not, in this instance, lying.
    Father did not know, and I was not going to tell him, that Lilian’s father, although so respectable when you described his position in the world, was a man of crazed tiny eyes and gigantic hoarse voice listing facts and figures, her mother was an imbecile with the vapours, who could barely gather enough grey matter to remember her daughter’s name, and Lilian’s brother was a poor spindly damp boy in glasses who seemed nervous of his own feet and hands.
    Father knew none of this, and could have wool put across his eyes, as he would have said. He was the innocent, and what I felt for him was pity, seeing him believe me, but also something like fear. There was a power in my lies that seemed larger than the words I was handing him, as if I was dealing with an explosive that might take my head off if I became too confident. But my own manifest destiny was too important, so each day I handed him a few new gaudy lies and spread myself wider afield. The invention of the lie proved to be one of the great labour-saving devices, and freed me to get on with my destiny.
    Joanie, Joanie, Duncan whispered in the dusk behind a bush of the Botanical Gardens. Your body is pleasing to me, and I had to laugh at his prissy way of saying that he was huge and greedy in his pants. It is late, Duncan, I must get home, I said, but this bushwas an old friend, and the grass beneath us was warm from an afternoon of our bodies against it, so it seemed too difficult to move. Everything was humorous now, with the bottle empty beside us, and the guardian of the gardens was a great joke, walking by swinging his lamp and never spotting us. Oh Duncan, you are a caution! I told his ear under its gingery hair, and felt him laughing, for he was teaching me how the country folk spoke, and enjoyed the way I did not believe what he told me about what it was like there. We get on like a bushfire, Duncan, and you make me as happy as a box of birds, I whispered, crushed against him, feeling his breath pant against my cheek.
    And you, Joanie, are a wonder, Duncan said, and slid his hand smoothly between my thighs. I slapped