Free Down in the City by Elizabeth Harrower

the garage entrance of Romney Court.
    â€˜Aw, hell!’ Stan cursed dejectedly, sulky because he had fallen down like this after three months of perfection. ‘What d’you think, pet? D’you hate me or something? Mmm?’ He was not looking at her.
    Not answering, Esther sighed and closed her eyes with weariness, but there was, in her silence, nothing of hate. After a pause she said, ‘Let’s go up now.’
    And if this was not the reconciliation Stan had hoped for, he was aware that her forbearance was more than he deserved.
    He went into the flat with an air of angry defiance, directing his attitude not at Esther, but at the possible reminders of his late excess. As he switched on the lights his eyes darted, his head turned, as if he expected to be confronted by his drunken self. Amongst the inanimate, yet knowing, furniture, enclosed by the familiar walls and floor and ceiling, he was ill at ease. Alone with Esther he was miserable, wanting and not wanting to talk to her and touch her.
    For all his fears, the flat was quiet and tidy. The wireless was silent, the rugs straight. Esther’s newest purchase—a still life of fruit—glowed innocently on the wall. Stan was abashed by the peace around him.
    No amount of goodwill could force Esther to break the trance she moved in. She was in a climate, in a country, where some grievous natural calamity had just been enacted, and she was reduced to blankest fear, uncertainty, exhaustion.
    Long after she had fallen into a restless sleep Stan lay awake and thought of his childhood, and boyhood, and life before Esther. He remembered the paintless shack way out in the flat brown west; how there was never water, but always dust. Water was the thing, the only thing, he could connect with his mother: she was always saying, ‘If we had water…’ But then she had died. After that, his father stopped digging and planting and mending fences. He stayed in the house all day, wandering through the shabby rooms, fingering the faded cotton bedspreads, letting the well-polished linoleum dull and cake with dirt.
    Six years old, silent, watchful, padding barefoot over the dry, baked earth, Stan would gaze wide-eyed through the crack in the kitchen door at the man with his head on his arms—his father—who scarcely spoke to him now.
    Stan could see the small figure trailing around the yard, dragging a big stick behind him, standing on the sagging wire fence and gazing out along the bare dusty road. The sound of a solitary birdcall filled the brown and blue land.
    In the darkness his expression hardened; his eyes filled with a brooding hatred as he recalled the day when they came and took him away to the square, redbrick building on the outskirts of Sydney. It was there that he had spent the next nine years of his life. It was there that he first learned that he was a poor kid, an orphan who smelled of the institution. Exactly nobody. The memory of the indignities that he, Stan Peterson, had suffered, made him go rigid, made him glare into the darkness. He thought of the matrons and officials who had controlled their soap-shiny charges, and fed them, but had not liked them, had not even taught them.
    How came man on earth? Stan neither knew nor wondered. If he had been asked, he might have said that things were as they had always been. And how was the world governed? He would have found that even easier to answer. By politicians born of other politicians—a great racket, but a closed one.
    Once he had known a rule of grammar, a rule of geometry, the dates of some of the English kings, what were the main products of Australia, and when it was discovered.
    A fat lot of help that ever was to me, he thought. I just had to make my own chances. A man’s used his head and got on, made some cash. He’s somebody at last. There hasn’t been any trouble yet, either. Better not be, not now that there’s Est…
    Esther. Why had he acted