A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley Page B

the aftermath of liquor left him open to the real pain that troubled his belly. They would wrestle with his perturbation and each other, and after bouts of genuine distress that left him, so she thought, incapable of further anguish, he would return to it like a dog. It made her hate him.
    â€œDo you think of him now?”
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œTruly?”
    â€œOh my God! Truly.”
    When he perceived her anger, she used to turn away on domestic pretext that involved glasses or food in jars or something requiring a physical effort.
    So now she could not touch the chocolate mints that Sylvia Tucker-Brown was handing around on a small bamboo plate, but she sipped more coffee and tasted through the ersatz flavouring the spuriousness of her own feelings.
    She heard Daph Woodsall saying something wildly improper to her hostess, but heard in the vaguest way, and then focused as the words of Daph’s next remarkemerged like magic painting. (Spread folks with liquor and all sorts of things show up!)
    â€œI think the only fun in it, of course, is because you’re doing something obscene with a stranger. Or a near-stranger. I mean otherwise it’s such a fag and a bore.”
    Her face was maliciously bright and fractured with frustration. She kept glancing at Marie for some confirmation of the thrusts.
    â€œI am fond of him,” Marie stated as if answering a challenge from one of the others, who had not spoken but now registered polite and fatuous surprise. Something delectable was being played on the radio through a trellis of static, sweeping serenade curves of string with Dvorakian folk-tone that could have, if she had allowed it, made her released breath-gasp like the love-cry that to her was physical but never spiritual. I deserve the pain. Not him. She admitted this. But selfishly looked away between the breakers of sound or surf to the passion-vine jungle of the Tucker-Browns’ that barricaded them in. Why, she wondered, were her eyes always dry and incapable of tears?
    â€œWe know that, my dear,” Mrs Tucker-Brown said somewhat plaintively, fiddling with standard phrases and unable to sort out the best. “We worry about it, you know. Wondering. I mean. When Holly. . . .”
    Lass of the Limberlost, thought Marie, hideously accurate. She wanders down ever-fading trails of non sequiturs and is nothing but a blue blur, the flap of arudimentary skirt against the verticals of too-definite trees.
    â€œYou must not be concerned on my account,” she suggested strongly. “You have enough to do yourselves.” Remembering the last cocktail party and Bobby Woodsall’s urgency in the kitchen.
    The heat and stillness were cloaking her like plastic beyond the translucency of whose envelope she could perceive more than mere sea, mere houses. The players, small, truncated by distance, were making gesture without meaning to each other but pertinent to self, and all about them, in a non-violent way, wind curved.
    These luncheon parties at the Tucker-Browns had become fortnightly ritual that were in turn obligation to those in senior positions. Marie wished to refuse but found the alternative of lunching with her office workmates tedious, as this had become. Mr Tucker-Brown arrived always as they were about to leave and, managing always to make his tropic whites seem a trifle flamboyant, would bounce in from the veranda trailed by a house boy. Today he was obviously burning to spit out some fact which he repressed on observing the two women in their easy-chairs. Daph Woodsall’s eyes had gone beady.
    â€œNo plane,” he said to Miss Latimer who was gathering a bag and hat. “And threats of a hurricane on the way. Off now? They work you to death at that place. You’ll have to capture a civil servant like Daphne’s and learn to fill in the long day with domestic blisses.”
    He poured himself a deadly Scotch. “And what’s more the mail is