Free Tim by Colleen McCullough Page B

the blurred darkness of a low branch that drooped over the path. Mary glanced at the bird without really seeing him, and the next moment ran into something soft and clinging. As it stuck to her face she gasped in fright, then realized it was a spider’s web. She felt all over herself cautiously, dreading the thought that the web’s owner might be roaming on her somewhere, but her hand encountered nothing more than her dress.
    The beach fringes were littered with dead branches; Mary gathered them in her arms until she had enough to build a fire, then she stacked them in the middle of the sand near a convenient rock and put a match to the twigs at their base. The cold sea breeze at night was the East Coast’s saving grace, but it was hard on the human body, sweltering all day and then chilling to the bone at night. She could have gone back to the house for a sweater, but there was something very friendly about a fire, and Mary needed comfort desperately. When the flames were spitting and spurting she sat herself on the rock and spread her hands out to warm.
    Rocking leisurely back and forth upside down by its tail from a nearby tree, a possum stared at her intently from wise round eyes, its sweet face apprehensive. What an odd creature she was, squatting before the glaring thing he knew only as a danger, with the light throwing bizarre shadows in ever-changing patterns across her. Then he yawned, plucked a loquat from the branch above him and munched it loudly. She was nothing to fear, just a hunched-up woman with a face drawn in pain, not young or pretty or enticing.
    It had been a long time since pain had been a part of her life, Mary reflected, chin in hand; she had to go all the way back to a little girl in an orphanage dormitory, sniffling herself to sleep. How lonely it had been then, so lonely there had been times when she had wished for the friendly ignorance of death. People said a child’s mind could not comprehend or long for death, but Mary Horton knew differently. There was no memory of a home, of loving arms, of being wanted; her desolation had been one of pure, unrecognized loss, for she could not hunger after something she did not know existed. She had thought her unhappiness was rooted in her unattractiveness, the hurt that came when her adored Sister Thomas passed her by, as usual, for a child who was prettier and more appealing.
    But if her genes had not endowed her with personal allure, they had carried the codes of strength; Mary had disciplined herself as she grew up, until by the time she was fourteen and the moment came to leave the orphanage, she had learned to subjugate and crush unhappiness. After that she had ceased to feel on a human, emotional level, contenting herself with the pleasure she got out of doing her job well and watching her savings grow. It had not been an empty pleasure exactly, but it had not softened or warmed her either. No, life had not been empty or lacking in stimuli, but it had been utterly devoid of love.
    Never experiencing the stirrings of a maternal drive or the urge to seek a mate, Mary was not capable of gauging the quality of her love for Tim. Indeed, she did not even know whether what she felt for Tim could rightly be called love. He had simply become the pivot of her life. In every waking moment she was conscious of Tim’s existence, he sprang to her mind a thousand times a day, and if she thought, ‘Tim’, she found herself smiling or she felt something that could only be called pain. It was almost as if he lived within her mind as an entity quite distinct from his real being.
    When she sat in her dimly lit living room listening to the haunting searching of some violin she mentally reached for an unknown, still withholding some reserves of feeling, but when she sat in her dimly lit living room looking at Tim there was nothing left to seek, everything she had ever yearned after was embodied in him. If she had expected anything of him in the few hours between