Nevertheless she wished her water would break. Anything to deliver her. If she scrambled up and puddled the floor in front of them, they would have to stop.
Afterwards Kent did not seem perturbed about the way the evening had gone. For one thing, he thought he had won. “They’re all pinkos, they have to talk that way,” he said. “It’s the only thing they can do.”
Kath was anxious not to talk anymore about politics so she changed the subject, telling him that the older couple had lived with Sonje and Cottar in the communal house. There was also another couple who had since moved away. And there had been an orderly exchange of sexual partners. The older man had an outside mistress and she was in on the exchange part of the time.
Kent said, “You mean young guys would go to bed with that old woman? She’s got to be fifty.”
Kath said, “Cottar’s thirty-eight.”
“Even so,” said Kent. “It’s disgusting.”
But Kath found the idea of those stipulated and obligatory copulations exciting as well as disgusting. To pass yourself around obediently and blamelessly, to whoever came up on the list-it was like temple prostitution. Lust served as your duty. It gave her a deep obscene thrill, to think of that.
It hadn’t thrilled Sonje. She had not experienced sexual release. Cottar would ask her if she had, when she came back to him, and she had to say no. He was disappointed and she was disappointed for his sake. He explained to her that she was too exclusive and too much tied up in the idea of sexual property and she knew he was right.
“I know he thinks that if I loved him enough I’d be better at it,” she said. “But I do love him, agonizingly.”
For all the tempting thoughts that came into her mind, Kath believed that she could only, ever, sleep with Kent. Sex was like something they had invented between them. Trying it with somebody else would mean a change of circuits-all of her life would blow up in her face. Yet she could not say she loved Kent agonizingly.
As she walked along the beach from Monica’s house to Sonje’s, she saw people waiting for the party. They stood around in small groups or sat on logs watching the last of the sunset. They drank beer. Cottar and another man were washing out a garbage tin in which they would make the punch. Miss Campo, the head librarian, was sitting alone on a log. Kath waved to her vivaciously but didn’t go over to join her. If you joined somebody at this stage, you were caught. Then there were two of you alone. The thing to do was to join a group of three or four, even if you found the conversation-that had looked lively from a distance-to be quite desperate. But she could hardly do that, after waving at Miss Campo. She had to be on her way somewhere. So she went on, past Kent talking to Monica’s husband about how long it took to saw up one of the logs on the beach, she went up the steps to Sonje’s house and into the kitchen.
Sonje was stirring a big pot of chili, and the older woman from the communal house was setting out slices of rye bread and salami and cheese on a platter. She was dressed just as she had been for the curry dinner-in a baggy skirt and a drab but clinging sweater, the breasts it clung to sloping down to her waist. This had something to do with Marxism, Kath thought-Cottar liked Sonje to go without a brassiere, as well as without stockings or lipstick. Also it had to do with unfettered unjealous sex, the generous uncor-rupted appetite that did not balk at a woman of fifty.
A girl from the library was there too, cutting up green peppers and tomatoes. And a woman Kath didn’t know was sitting on the kitchen stool, smoking a cigarette.
“Have we ever got a bone to pick with you,” the girl from the library said to Kath. “All of us at work. We hear you’ve got the darlingest baby and you haven’t brought her in to show us. Where is she now?”
Kath said, “Asleep I hope.”
This girl’s name was Lorraine, but Sonje and Kath, recalling their days at the library, had given her the name Debbie Reynolds. She was full of bounce.
“Aww,” she said.
The low-slung woman gave her, and Kath, a look of thoughtful distaste.
Kath opened a bottle of beer and handed it to Sonje, who said, “Oh, thanks, I was so concentrated on the chili I forgot I could have a drink.” She worried because her cooking wasn’t as good as Cottar’s.
“Good thing you weren’t going to drink that yourself,” the girl from the library said to Kath. “It’s a no-no if you’re nursing.”
“I guzzled beer all the time when I was nursing,” the woman on the stool said. “I think it was recommended. You piss most of it away anyhow.”
This woman’s eyes were lined with black pencil, extended at the corners, and her eyelids were painted a purplish blue right up to her sleek black brows. The rest of her face was very pale, or made up to look so, and her lips were so pale a pink that they seemed almost white. Kath had seen faces like this before, but only in magazines.
“This is Amy,” said Sonje. “Amy this is Kath. I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce you.”
“Sonje, you’re always sorry,” the older woman said.
Amy took up a piece of cheese that had just been cut, and ate it.
Amy was the name of the mistress. The older woman’s husband’s mistress. She was a person Kath suddenly wanted to know, to be friends with, just as she had once longed to be friends with Sonje.
The evening had changed into night, and the knots of people on the beach had become less distinct; they showed more disposition to flow together. Down at the edge of the water women had taken off their shoes, reached up and pulled off their stockings if they were wearing any, touched their toes to the water. Most people had given up drinking beer and were drinking punch, and the punch had already begun to change its character. At first it had been mostly rum and pineapple juice, but by now other kinds of fruit juice, and soda water, and vodka and wine had been added.
Those who were taking off their shoes were being encouraged to take off more. Some ran into the water with most of their clothes on, then stripped and tossed the clothes to catchers on shore. Others stripped where they were, encouraging each other by saying it was too dark to see anything. But actually you could see bare bodies splashing and running and falling into the dark water. Monica had brought a great pile of towels down from her house, and was calling out to everyone to wrap themselves up when they came out, so they wouldn’t catch their death of cold.
The moon came up through the black trees on top of the rocks, and looked so huge, so solemn and thrilling, that there were cries of amazement. What’s that? And even when it had climbed higher in the sky and shrunk to a more normal size people acknowledged it from time to time, saying “The harvest moon” or “Did you see it when it first came up?”
“I actually thought it was a great big balloon.”
“I couldn’t imagine what it was. I didn’t think the moon could be that size, ever.”
Kath was down by the water, talking to the man whose wife and mistress she had seen in Sonje’s kitchen earlier. His wife was swimming now, a little apart from the shriekers and splashers. In another life, the man said, he had been a minister.
“ ‘The sea of faith was once too at the full,’ ” he said humorously. “ ‘And round earth’s shore, lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled’-I was married to a completely different woman then.”
He sighed, and Kath thought he was searching for the rest of the verse.
“ ‘But now I only hear,’ ” she said, “ ‘its melancholy long withdrawing roar, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.’ ” Then she stopped, because it seemed too much to go on with “Oh love let us be true-”
His wife swam towards them, and heaved herself up where the water was only as deep as her knees. Her breasts swung sideways and flung drops of water round her as she waded in.