A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley Read Free Book Online

perhaps unbalanced by shock, could think of nothing but his torn underwear and the rather sad extrusion of wrinkled buttock that must have presented itself to Mr Whybrow.
    â€œI was tired of wondering,” she explained, almost too softly for him to hear, although it was the softest remarks that ultimately hooked that fish. “And you never would tell the truth. It would have saved us both so much bother.”
    â€œTruth!” Gerald snapped. “Truth! How can anyone who can play a lousy deal like this even use the word?”
    â€œYou’re so oblique, Gerald,” Kathleen said sadly. She had turned and was walking out the door. Mr Whybrow had pocketed his evidence and was following.
    â€œOblique!” He followed her annoyedly. “Oblique for Christ’s sake! You seem to think marriage is a question of owning another person body and soul. I’ve feltchained for bloody years. If it weren’t for the presence of this little shit—” (he meant Whybrow!) “I’d explain that this—this sort of thing—has nothing to do with the fundamental relationship. Nothing at all. Nothing.”
    A note of pleading, of self-excuse had crept into his voice. Kathleen, who could now have eaten her heart for the humiliation she had inflicted, went straight back to the darkened car in some imagined rain; and Mr Whybrow, fussing her under a rug, ruminated as he drove back towards town, and rightly, that she was right for plucking.
    His client, of course, never proceeded with divorce but instead was driven by a quirk of shame into a spectacular purchase of new underwear for Gerald.
    9.30 a.m., 10th December
    A LWAYS , after his wife left him, if only for the first minute or so, Gerald was afflicted with instant regret and was tempted to run after her vowing—well, anything at all, but a comfort of sorts. He resisted this. He had resisted most temptation to rectitude over the last few years, except for unexplainable urgencies of conscience that jipped him into kindness beyond his analysing.
    Gerald blinked for some seconds, then with resolution moved along the foreshore towards the shipping stores, the white low building he had seen from the café veranda. The windows were a mass of cameraequipment, small farming implements, bales of cheap cotton, stacks of discarded factory china, canned foods. The doorways were slung back on an interior of shipping clerks and typists under whirling fans. Buyers wandered between desks and stacks of goods.
    Gazing in on this he stood, cocky in the bright light with his camera dripping from its strap, his panama pushed back now on the pinking dome with its fair fluff. His face bore an absent-minded smile as he wondered whether he could pick Kathleen up some sort of sop—a scarf, a dress-length, exotic junk: he was mentally labelling it without the wish to be unkind. Behind one of the tables was a heap of shiny Chinese silk one of the buyers had brought down from the north, displayed lushly for a month until sun-spots appeared on the rolls near the shutters, and finally was bundled, the whole unsold mass, at the back of a junior clerk’s desk. The colours were remarkably clean and flowed like green and blue and scarlet water even in shadow. He was a man not aware of quality, only of colour or shape, and he went into the long room and picked his way past a counter loaded with patent medicines until he was standing next to the silk with its soft mouldings.
    Someone was observing from the doorway of an inner room.
    â€œIt’s not very good,” she said. “There’s better stuff inside.”
    Gerald had instant preparations of gratitude thatcame with urbane movements of his mouth and crinklings about the eyes. He smiled and said, “It was nothing.” It really wasn’t! “It was just a little present for my wife.”
    Miss Latimer’s eyes clasped his with easy sympathy and an interest that had trapped others before.