For Love Alone by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online Page A

should have a little flesh! I don’t want to look like a skinny old maid.”
    â€œWell, grandmothers look like young girls now, walk behind and you can’t tell the difference. A woman I know was hit on the head by a man and knocked down on the pavement. She walked nicely and dyed her hair. When he stooped down and looked at her he saw her wrinkles and he left her lying there. She got up and didn’t dare tell the policeman, he would have seen her face and laughed at her.”
    â€œNo one will give me a knockdown,” said Esmay. “I’m off! There’s that woman!”
    There was Aunt Di herself, the family’s only elderly spinster, a golden woman, a school-teacher, who loved her young nieces before their weddings. Aunt Di was gallant about her misfortune. “I amMiss Hawkins,” she roared at people, “my nieces are Miss Teresa Hawkins, and so forth, but I am the
only Miss Hawkins.”
    It did no good. They laughed at her in public and in private, to her face and behind her back. At the name of Di’s crusades, once the misery was over, one roar of laughter rocked the family. Say what you would, she was just a battling old maid and did not know what man was like, whether Mr Wrong or Mr Right. Meanwhile, her nieces, reaping their wild oats, knew, provoked new scandals which flung Aunt Di into new tempers. Aunt Di cut off each of her favourite nieces as they reached the age of sin and fell; but no matter whether babies came untimely, or girls were mysteriously ill, or babies came “beyond the pale”, no matter who was deserted and betrayed, her roaring was in a desert; the more she raved, the more the matrons, the virgins and the seduced laughed at her or hated her. She was utterly a brute or jollily ridiculous, it all meant nothing: she was an old maid.
    Each girl had made up her mind to risk anything to avoid being the next “Miss Hawkins”. Yet she sat in the front row at all the family weddings and gave bolts of silk, silver teapots, embroidered tray-cloths.
    Teresa shrank from her rather more than the others, because she resembled her. She had the same bright hair and keen grey eyes. What an omen! She pretended not to see Aunt Di coming near and turned away, but Aunt Di bounded up, and seized her by the arm.
    â€œTerry, don’t you want to see your Aunt Di? The lavender suits you, Terry, I used to wear shades like that when I was your age, but I can’t any more. I had a complexion like you too then.”
    â€œWhy can’t you any more?” Terry demanded.
    â€œIt doesn’t suit my weatherbeaten skin, my dear, and my age! I’m not young any more like you. I’d be ridiculous.”
    Terry said: “Why give up?”
    Aunt Di gave a kindly snort.
    Terry heard it vaguely. She was steaming. Another Aunt, Maggie, bored, had drawn close.
    â€œIf you give up, make the faintest compromise, it’s all over with you,” said Teresa. “I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise. It isn’t. I’ll never give in.”
    â€œWhat’s the trouble about?” asked Maggie.
    Di let out a hoot. “I used to be like that, just like that!”
    Maggie murmured: “Yes, you were, Di, you were a fine-looking girl, with that high colour.”
    Teresa turned away with bursting heart. It was intolerable because it was true. She was like “the only Miss Hawkins”. Aunt Di was saying: “… but I waited for Mr Right—” Teresa went over to an isolated bentwood chair and stood beside it, thinking: “What do I care if I am? The little world of aunts has changed. All rights, all liberties, all loves! Let the last shreds of my impotence fall away, they will be right to laugh at me if I remain Miss Hawkins!”
    The tables were set, the crowd was thirsty, the air was red and dust flew up. The important persons stood about exchanging well-worn confidences and courtesies and a new