Free Tim by Colleen McCullough Page B

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 first seeing him and coming to realize that he was mentally undeveloped, once she had discovered the truth she had ceased to expect anything more from him than the mere fact of his existence. He enthralled her; that was the only word she could think of which halfway fitted.
    All the hungers and yearnings of her woman's years had been ruthlessly suppressed; they had never gained a hold on her, for she had always been careful to avoid any situation which might encourage them to flower. If she found a man attractive she studiously ignored him, if a child began to laugh its way into her heart she made sure she never saw the child again. She avoided the physical side of her nature as she would the plague, shut it up in some dark and sleeping corner of her mind and refused to admit it existed. Keep out of trouble, the orphanage nuns had told her, and Mary Horton had kept out of trouble.
    In the very beginning Tim's beauty and helplessness had disarmed her: Mary found herself impaled on the pin of twenty-nine solitary years. It was as if he genuinely needed her, as if he could see something in her to which even she herself was blinded. No one had ever preferred her above all others, until Tim. What was it about her dry, matter-of-fact personality that Tim found so fascinating? The responsibility was a terrible thing, so hard to deal with for one quite unversed in the emotions. He had a mother, so it was not that which he sought; and he- was too much the child and she too much an old maid for it to be a sexual thing. There must have been many, many people in his life who had been cruel to him, but there must also have been many, many people who were kind, even loving. No one with Tim's appearance and nature would ever go short of love. Why, then, did he prefer her?
    The fire was dying. Mary went to seek more wood, then decided not to build it up again. She sat awhile longer, staring at the twinkling lights among the coals, her eyes unfocused. A worm popped its head out of the sand and looked at her; the heat of the fire was seeping slowly through the ground and forcing hundreds of its minute denizens to flee or fry. Unaware of the havoc her source of warmth was causing, Mary doused the embers with sand instead of water; safe enough as a fire hazard precaution, but no cooler for the sand and its inhabitants.
     
     

Ten
     
    Mary continued to take Tim to Gosford with her all through the summer. By the time April was coming in and autumn with it, Tim's mother and father were well acquainted with her, but only over the phone.