The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Author:Shirley Hazzard [Hazzard, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Tad brought her to her door: 'This is where I kiss you.' Afterwards he had held her by the shoulders, as if to shake her, wake her. Amiable, exasperated. When he went away, she heard and pictured him loping uphill with his lean Taddish demeanour: musing, bemused. She did touch her lips with the side of her hand — not disgusted or derisive, but distant.

This, then, was the flourished reality: a brute fact, to which loving-kindness was simply, or not even, a preliminary. There had been a screen between her and this. Reality was a wet thick thing alive in her mouth.

It seemed to her something that dogs might do.

She came indoors. Ben slept. Now there would be unshared thoughts, more and more of them — divined, perhaps, but undefined.

Tad had looked at her with the expression of the man Matheson in the lift in Hong Kong: a secret that he was willing her to share, and which should now be disclosed.

Helen undressed, lay down, and slept.

In the night, she got out of her bed and, without lighting the lamp, fetched her new coat and went and sat on the low step, in the setting of the moon. There were planets and cold stars, and the cold quiet. She put the coat around her shoulders and sat, hands clasped over her knees and her chin resting there. She could smell the Pacific, churned up by the storm. Thought how in childhood she had watched the eight-metres and the smaller boats, even the Vee-Jays, sailing Sydney Harbour — whitely, soundlessly, as if unmanned. Only when the regatta veered near shore and the wind blew from that direction, there came, with swish of hull on water, the shouts and curses, the bellowing and bullying about the boom and the cleat and the sheet, and the billowing jib: all the hysteria of manliness. A rush of copper limbs, a thudding of bare feet; and the whipshot thwack of a slackened jib that should have been taut.

Because of the kiss, she might have liked to consider the evening a turning point, momentous. But, with the ill-timed precision of women in such matters, only felt what was lacking. Something that either of them could have put a name to.

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