A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley Page A

wistful haunches.
    She lay down in the water.
    It was warmer than she had expected and after a while her nervous shivering subsided, and she watched the sky across which large cumulus clouds were pushing. Their shadows drooped over the crater thatmumbled quietly like a sleeping animal beside her. Strangely its rumblings comforted so greatly she could easily have gone to sleep with her head resting on the shelving sand edge. The rain stopped as sharply as it had begun. Trees remained still, watching her, while she splashed her old toes and dug a little at the bottom to stir up funnels of dirt and ash. The sun’s hand was more than half way across the sky but when she stood up to dry herself she had no shadow at all.
    She moved back down the slope to the first trees and sat shaking on the matted grass. All round her were coconuts eaten away by the sand crabs, hollow and drum-empty when she tapped. Her eyes closed against the outward dark and the darkness moved a fraction away.
    â€œLaydee!” came the cry from below in the trees, the cry she had come all this way to hear. “Laydee!”

VII

1 p.m., 10th December
    T HE gloss of leaves outside the residency glass reflected a great deal of Sylvia Tucker-Brown’s lunch-time agitation when, girls together, Daph Woodsall and she sipped coffee with Marie Latimer. The chief difficulty about small places like the Port was that the social permutations were not infinite and, after a certain time, conversational device, scandal, even lies, had their limits. These three had absorbed each other for too long. Mrs Tucker-Brown all blonde, lean, cold-eyed and charged with the importance of her husband’s position, sat in her shift (the white woman’s Mother Hubbard) and waited with Mrs Woodsall in her shift for a spark from heaven to ignite a conversational barbecue.
    â€œIt’s sad about Father Lake,” Daph Woodsall said, and pursed her lips reflectively and critically and sadly. “But necessary of course. Bobby says.” And she quoted her husband whom she was for ever quoting, and bythis method gained a reputation for dutiful subservience that was not exactly true. Like her hostess, she wanted a man—a different one—and was prepared for anything.
    The Resident’s wife did little ahems. It had never needed to become a civil matter had not Johnny complained to her husband. That embarrassed everybody. Lake was not yet gone from the colony and the basic rule she had learnt in her first years on the island—in the Colonial Surface,
her
husband called it amid shrieks of applause—was never to calumniate while the victim was still with one.
    But Daph Woodsall was not actually content. “Holly Stevenson is due back next week,” she said, adding the sugar her intention lacked to her coffee. “It will do Jim good to have regular meals.”
    Marie was afflicted then with the image of him bent painfully over his boots, his skinny buttocks and flanks straining on the bed, herself wondering sadly at the beauty demanded by the male while offering so little in return, strutting, slightly bandy but cocky, across bedrooms and council rooms, ridiculous but unaware.
    â€œThat’s good,” she said smoothly. “He isn’t very well. I think he takes the job more seriously than it takes him.”
    Her fingers groped in the pocket of her dress and touched his last offering, a nebulous poem whose adorations wound through the brownly autumnal laments of all lovers, and along its creased passion herbright fingernail barely scratched the surface of what the words were trying to contain. There were recollections then of the jealousy that nagged him and his questionings about other lovers he could never know yet sought to examine under the polished lens of his despair. No answer could satisfy his gigantic lust for detail except for the briefest moment, and the clogging choking mania would absorb him in between-drink pauses until