Walk to the Paradise Gardens by Charmian Clift

Author:Charmian Clift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-09T03:15:20+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Soon after this the north-east wind changed to the west. It came searing across the mountains and the chicory hills, buffeting the scrub below Dooliba, scorching the crops and the grass and the bark-littered ant-beds and the neat front gardens of the bungalows in Lebanon Bay. Roads and footpaths bubbled liquid tar. The great Pacific rollers blew backwards and flattened out dully, like hammered pewter. Under a white sky the recesses of the ocean lost all colour save that of bones. Tons of sand were whipped from the tops of the dunes and driven in slicing sheets across the broad beaches in a spray as sharp as razors and as hot as the breath of inferno. It seemed hardly worth the agony of crossing these parched and painful stretches to get to the water, yet only in the icy deeps of the sea was there any relief, and from early morning until dusk the coast was fringed with the bright, round, bobbing globes of bathing-caps like a broken string of beads.

Out in these deep, cold places Julia floated, all the morning, all the afternoon, floated in ice under a pallid, scorching sky, floated and floated until her skin began to look plucked and her fingers and toes turned white and crumpled and soggy, like proudflesh.

‘You’ll excuse me for saying so,’ Mr Barbest offered worriedly, ‘but I don’t think your good lady is doing herself much good staying in the surf all day long like that. You remember that turn she took out at Paradise the other night. She doesn’t look up to the mark yet, Mr Cant, not by a long chalk, and this westerly takes it out of you.’

In the bedroom Charles said with irritable kindliness, ‘Come along now, Ju. Time to snap out of it. Your gallants are prostrate with anxiety. Mr Caley has even suggested you should join his wife on the porch behind the fuchsia bushes, and he’ll spend all day watering them down with the garden hose. Cools the air off like, if you follow me.’

But Julia, still all damp and drakes’ tails from the shower under which she had stood for the last half-hour, continued to sit in front of the mirror like a half-drowned rat, shivering in spite of the room’s confined heat, and with a bright, inattentive smile stretched on her face as if held there with a strong fixative.

‘Do you know where the boracic is, Charles? I’m splitting between the toes … rather horrible, like leprosy or something. Could you …?’ She stretched out a bare foot for his examination.

‘For heaven’s sake, Julia! Damn! Where the devil did I put that boracic? Here. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the chemist and we’ll paint your feet properly. But you must stop this nonsense! Really, Ju.’

He sat on the end of the bed, holding her foot awkwardly between his hands, as if he did not quite know what to do with it now. A slender foot, arched intelligently, with unevenly curled toes on which the curved shells of the nails gleamed dull rose through the powdering of boracic.

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