The Well Dressed Explorer by Thea Astley

Author:Thea Astley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-10T11:33:20+00:00

[VI]

Making whoopee, the party opened up its yellow screaming throat on the night.

It was unexpectedly raucous in the dumb dark where Brewster and Hilbery, staggering a little along the Darling Point Road, came on the hilarity and then the light carved into shapes as the bodies crossed and recrossed the jazz. They hesitated in the doorway of the flat waiting for the drunken cries of recognition, and there was the rush of familiar, unfamiliar, interested, uninterested faces turning towards, away, using the better profile, the lost islands of phrase and story. George, alone, as Hilbery, seized by a screeching blonde bonhomie, was rushed to the drink table, searched with sweet expectation about the room. That bright magnetic eye! Gantry, drunk and victorious with publication flush, was explaining to a circle of six the full measure of his talent and the worth of his new novel. Envious George saw behind him Marie Schell waving to catch his attention, but he deliberately looked away and she remarked softly to her companion,

“He doesn’t know me with my clothes on!”

At the end of the room, disposed with artistic foresight against a curtain of scarlet, there leaned a beautiful shingled creature who swirled the gin in the bottom of her glass dedicatedly. An ice sliver whisper-thin rocked in the storm. Waves of gin crashed in the glass and in her mind, obliterated sense as she heard the first idiotic cliché and looked up. Anticipatorily his tongue was licking his lips.

“Hello, honey!” he said. “Where have you been all my life?”

Her luscious mouth attempted a smile but liquor twisted it awry and her head shook pityingly at herself.

“Waiting for you, honey!” she said.

He was tone deaf to mundanity. Ravished.

“Allow me.” He took her glass with assurance of gesture that would have made refusal discourteous. “I’ll get you another drink.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Gin again?”

But she did not answer. Her smile was a rich and drunken affirmative. When he returned, two men had moved in, ogling her with their officers’ pips, leaning above her dark and beautiful head with a familiarity that George recognized immediately and resented. Waiter-straight, he held his two glasses. Between khaki her carmine smile reached out to stroke him lasciviously and draw him closer.

“Thank you, darling,” she said.

Flamboyancy of their conjunction sent a crescendo rush of excitement through his senses so that he regarded her with an open lust that would have moved an onlooker to pity. Across the room, sifting salted peanuts onto a newly engaged palm, Marie Schell watched him amusedly.

“Look!” she whispered to Larry Dickinson. “Wet flong!”

The glittering unconcealed desire, the recognition, strip one down to the soul. That argument was metaphysically spurious yet attractive enough to present itself instantly to George, leaning through the flirtatious webs of years as the other men drifted away. The unambiguous design they were about to create was perceived with shocking immediacy that should have taken each by the throat yet affected only the one who bent closer and inquired of her affirming eyelids,

“But isn’t this marvellous? Isn’t this absolutely and unutterably marvellous?”

“Are you married?” she asked starkly.

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