Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley Page A

littoral, she had hardly realized that the mainland was fading to a flattened line with pointilliste houses and a pasteboard backdrop of hill.
    The launch, having taken fifteen minutes’ quiet smacking against pier stumps while the deckhands unloaded the grocery crates and packs of fresh meat onto the jetty, eventually pulled off and put out into the darkening afternoon water, once more taking tourists and supplies to the settlement on the other side of the island. The crowd fanned out from a jostling shapelessness to visiting extroverts in city beachwear, blowsy girls who had seen their best days during the war years back to worry their nostalgia, local fishermen in tornkhaki and hotel employees trundling supplies and bags. Right down the centre of the jetty ran a set of rails and a trolley that carried all the heavier freight back to shore. As the line of trailers went by stacked up, the driver rang a bell and shouted and the people still on the jetty stepped precariously to the edge and balanced uneasily until it had gone by. It was a good seven minutes before they reached the loose sand of the beach and, ploughing up through it, saw the only road practicable for vehicles with its cabbage- and coconut-palms and behind that the groves of tamarind-trees and the tourist cabins.
    There was a point jutting out to the south composed of massive granite boulders and slabs, but near the jetty was built a shark-proof bathing enclosure in which a late swimmer was still plashing mournfully in the growing twilight. One sail oblique off shore and cirrus clouds tattered above sky roadways. Land breeze and isolated laughter from the cabins and then the hotel with its open-shuttered walls and cool cement floor.
    Laura knew the island, the permanent families and the hotel as well as she knew the palm of her hand, for she had taught for three years at one of the island’s two tiny schools. She had not been actually marooned, however, for each week-end had seen the island crowded with servicemen over to hike or swim. It was with a certain searching for lost time that she hadcome for these two days, a desire to bathe in an ocean of sentiment rather than to entertain Elsie.
    After dinner they strolled through the narrower bosky paths crossed by stream and bridges at charming intersections, and when at last they came out upon the beach by a ragged plantation of banana-trees the sea was a plum-purple barred with phosphorescent parallels that melted finally into an equally plum-blue night. Dipping across it like a lighted wedding-cake ploughed the launch on its return trip, one minute the whole of its starboard side visible, the next it was as if the ship had vanished while the stiff evening wind flung it like a walnut shell into a furrow.
    The sand was hard and damp below the dunes and they looked down with pleasure at the sharp imprint of their sandals just visible in the glow from the surf. They said little, preferring to taste the salt air on their mouths and to feel the crack of sea berries under foot; and so stood unspeaking for fifteen minutes or more on the point, watching the lights of the mainland string out and the lava-like swell of the sea as it broke in immensely long parabolas of white. When they turned back to the hotel the lights were on along the roadway throwing up in brilliant electric greens the smooth-leafed fig- and orange-trees, while the shuttered light from the dining-room threw bars of black and yellow across the street. A Conrad setting.
    There floated out clearly into the night air the resonanttone of a piano nostalgically repatterning a tune that was popular during the thirties, but with a twang caused by the erosion of salt air upon the strings that gave it a plangent sadness of old guitars. Looking in the wide doors of the lounge-room on their way upstairs, they saw a group of four or five men, all of whom were in uniform except the one at the piano. He was wearing a vivid red shirt outside a pair of old