Free A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley

kind of tender acceptance.
    One evening at a flamboyant-shaded table in the rear garden he was seated with this note-book riffling back through the entries that recorded his new pilgrimage. Some sort of slow dream dropped about him as he heard from the bungalow his son singing and his wife crashing the crockery. The electric lights were especially brave. It was still grey enough to see. He wrote
    After all this I don’t like you much, my dear,
    Neither your face nor your mind.
    Heat and years have melted what was there.
    There’s nothing to find.
    I could support such absence from the day
    If you had not so melted me
    And tried remoulding in your own rough hands
    My privacy.
    He read this over to himself quickened and delighted by his rhyme and by the truth he had at last squeezed out. Then the veranda light was switched off suddenly; he could see only marks on paper and their shape eluded him though the sense remained singing about his head. Calling “Timmy, Timmy” he went back across the grass and up the steps to find the switch and had his first heart attack on the veranda.
    His wife who was called Holly and had many things in common with that plant later discovered his note-book with soul exposed lying on the table under the whisky decanter. Her fascinated eyes devoured the contents but she had to contain herself until he was past the critical stage.
    Then she leapt on him.
    If she had thought he would be embarrassed she was wrong, and her rantings only played round him like chain lightning or the sort that flickers ominous and misty as storm prelude, while he lay with the delicate skin of eyelids shuttered down and his bony face projecting against the pillowed roundness about him. Everything was white. The sedatives he had been given inured him to blasts of such magnitude and finally to the hysterics she felt it was safe for her to indulge. He went, after the doctor had allowed him up, to a tiny bay near Ebouli and, lying between the rocks, smiled with warmth into the sand and thought of the other woman and mentally inscribed, between hesitancies:
    This eating sea has munched away
    at the sand like crumbly bread.
    The spat out shell crusts litter.
    The blue is corrosive.
    Out of the shore you came naked into the water.
    Everything white: sand, flesh, sky-cloud and the
blaze
    of my mind.
    When he got home in the half-somnolent state that emotional rather than physical satiety commands, his wife had gone into one of her silence bouts which lasted until next day, when her natural garrulousness overcame her. She would be going back to Sydney, she said. Or even Melbourne to mother. For an indefinite time. Then she hurled herself into the flurried nonsense of histrionic packing. Stevenson made brilliant recovery in the bar of the Lantana and on the morning of his wife’s departure went early into his son’s bedroom and stood for a while looking down at the sleeping, unbetraying, withdrawn face. Sun slid across shutter and half palm, and all the familiar objects of the room—the cars sprawling loose from boxes, the bat slung into a corner, the tramped-down-heel slippers—touched him sharply. He went away and, later, after he had bought them tea and buns at the Glare Bar and watched his son’s thin straight back walking steadily after the implacability of his wife, hesat in his car until the plane had vanished and opened his note-book at the last entry. It was for his wife.
    In the morning when it was light
    I thought of you.
    Only our boy bounding in disturbed
    The delicacy of the morning image.
    Fragile breast, face. My stupor
    Examined all of you for the first time
    Dispassionate.
    I found you empty like the last dinghy
    Isolated by tide.
    It was really the first. At least if he had been able to measure his defection by the rhythms of his first tentative poetics then that would have been the point, he decided, reading now, when his soul had revolted. He slid down in the sweating leather of