6

Anthea Scudamore fished, rowed, shot at a wallaby, drove with Val Tulloch in the elegant ancient rattly Railton to fetch supplies from cottages. Her arms became red and ugly. Pickled in brine. She was doing everything expected of her. She was becoming a Different Person.

And at night, usually at eight-thirty, Mummy telephoned from the mainland, on which life was led by positive rule.

Mrs Scudamore reminded: ‘The skin can dry up if you don’t attend to it, dear, leading that kind of life, and nobody admires a chapped skin. Nobody of any taste, that is, though today there are those who haven’t been educated in what is nice. Anthea, the young man, the Doctor Flegg, nobody has heard of. He must be a decent young fellow, though, or the Tullochs wouldn’t have invited him. Tomorrow I start my treatment. Dad only laughs. If I ever see him. He’s decided to take his holiday. His friend Hessell Mortlock is arriving unexpectedly. They knew each other in Brisbane. Mr Mortlock lives in Sydney now. Or nearby. At Sarsaparilla. Anthea? Oh dear, this line! Anyone would think you were trying to throw me off. Mr Mortlake is driving over in his Riley. I believe he’s wealthy. Cement tiles. But related to the Eardly Browns. Do you hear me, Anthea? I thought that woman was cutting us off.... There they sit, in those country post offices, and when they feel they’ve extracted the juice from the orange, they ...’

In the house on the point they would all sit round, after dinner, hands on their stomachs, waiting for Mummy. It had become their ritual.

Anthea would have liked to protect her mother from her friends, but was no longer capable, she suspected, of protecting even herself. She seemed to have gone with her smooth skin. Her skin which she couldn’t be bothered to do anything about.

The will slackened in the slack air, the conscious grew unconscious. Worst of all were the early afternoons, when people tended to disappear, and at such a time of suspended continuity Anthea Scudamore allowed the wind to carry her along the arc of beach, her feet eliciting slight felted protests from the quilted sand.

If she had been honest – but it did not matter being dishonest with oneself, only with others – she would have admitted watching him set off after lunch for an undisclosed point beyond the rocks. Now, in the circumstances, she only saw out of the corner of her mind’s eye the blurred image of his young man’s body, in trunks, carrying a book, and wearing the rag hat with the iron-mould on it. The mind itself had covered up her purpose, if she had ever had one, as the wind had covered his foot-prints with sand.

Barry Flegg was lying just the other side of the rocks. On his back. He had taken off his trunks. From the absence of a visible line dividing his public from his private skin, this must have been a habit with him, she realized in a flash of light, wind, sand.