Free The Survivor by Thomas Keneally

feel a great deal of affection for you, I can’t allow myself to take any responsibility for how your conscience might stand by four o’clock, say.”
    She looked at him with the sort of directness they tried to dissuade girls from in boarding-schools. Yet there was nothing that could be called specifically erotic about her. This was not only because she was dressed with bungalow decency and her face no more climatically disposed than if she were buying real-estate. It was that she too stood over in Cybele territory; or so Ramsey guessed. In Cybele territory there was no such extension of life as sexuality; sexuality was a European invention. Where she stood there was only the oneness of life; one trusted oneself all the time to the natural intuition, to the instinct informed by the phosphorus-flash of the click-exposure mind. In what he believed was such a flash, it seemed a perfectly decent thing to hug and be hugged by Mrs Leeming and rake her long hair with his hand.
    But the trouble was that Ramsey’s mind was a respectable, businesslike mind, governed by deduction and authority. He could not cease to respect marriage nor to suffer sexual guilt as ratified by the churches and the breathless details of genital hygiene given one by one’s hemming father.
    So, by taking Mrs Leeming in his arms, he was committing himself to fragmentation.
    â€œWait there, wait there!” she said and fought free of him, taking her dress off with dignity, as if not to provoke him. The dress was put across an easy-chair and lay there like a mere statement of fact.
    â€œI must get back to the dogs,” Alec said fraudulently. He sounded as if he had run three miles.
    She reproved him for a silly one. “It seems to me that concern on a summer’s day for something that can sleep through a blizzard is excessive.”
    â€œThe bulk of the travelling will be done with the dogs.”
    She laughed at him heartily, not at all like a vampire. Even to himself he’d sounded like a town-hall lecturer.
    A bare, beige-coloured shoulder presented itself. “There,” she said. It was not a moral being and to speak of it as aesthetic would have been cant. It was merely there for the kissing. He kissed it and felt the grotesqueness of his physical reaction. But she did not mock him. She respected him in the bowels of mercy.
    â€œDo you think,” she wondered, “it would be too disenchanting to go through into the other room, Alec? It’s very much like every other bedroom in this city.”
    He asserted that furniture would have no chance of infecting him with impotence; and, febrile, trailed behind her. In the hallway he leant and mouthed her upper breast. She became angry.
    â€œCome now, Alec.” But she had blinked as if touched by desire. “You are not to withdraw from me into lust. Lust is as good a middle-class plot as any to prevent us from self-discovery. People who fear self-discovery through sensual love retreat into this subhuman state called lust. If you intend to do that.…”
    He said how sorry he was. What he thought was that in the dreams of his puberty, of impossible encounters with ideal women, the dreamed-of woman never stood half-naked in a panelled hallway lecturing like an archdeacon.
    The bedroom was full of standard mock-Jacobean furniture, but, as he had said, he wanted no inspiration. Now, self-conscious over the disproportions of his body, he could not look her in the face. He kissed her furiously but with respect.
    â€œThat’s right,” she said. “Otherwise there’s no tenderness left for me when you’ve been satisfied.” But it became almost too much for his home-bred prurience when she drew a hand over his loins. Later, he could remember being overcome by an anxiety to satisfy Mrs Leeming at this point; and the anxiety was as bad for them as any middle-class plot. He suffered an inconspicuous climax. Mrs Leeming seemed, above all,